‘None will live beyond the third night,’ they said. ‘There’ll never be a slave revolt again.’
And they returned to Rome and light and life and their years, and the darkness that covers them from our gaze.
[ii]
It was the fourth morning, and still Kleon lived.
When they stripped him to nail him on the cross, the legionaries had shouted in mirth to find the slave a eunuch. Then they had maimed him again so that he had lost consciousness, and did not awake till hung on his cross, and the Masters had passed on.
And then pain tore at him, and like the others he babbled curses and complaints, and bit at his lips with his teeth; and something like a wheel that was spiked with fire turned and turned in his brain; and he knew that it might not endure, that death any instant must come, because no agony like this could last. And he fainted again, and awoke to the odours of his own body and the snuffling mouth of a wolf at his feet – that, and the pain, and the growl of the beast as it fled at the shriek that came from his lips.
And the day passed, the sun swung its arc of brightness across the sky so slowly that he thought of it as many days, long stretches of darkness and long stretches of light; and his tongue swelled out between his teeth; and death would not come; and the spiked wheel in his brain grew and grew till it filled the sky, till it burst from his head and he saw it the earth in torment. And about him, in little spaces between his own agony, he heard the last cry of men who died, and saw their bodies bulge and shudder and pass to ease at last.
On the third night the insects left him and the beasts came. But they found him still living, and all that night he lived; and they came not near him, tearing at other flesh in the dark. And the last time he awoke he found the morning in the sky, and before his swimming gaze saw the world lighten, greater and strange.
‘O Spartacus!’
It was a cry of agony in his brain and heart, but he heard it only as a stifled grunt from his lips. Then that agony of mind went as well, in a sudden flow of memory, a glister and flash of imaged memories: the first Bithynian camp, the horreum on the road to the South, Papa in mist, the battle-games of Crixus, the defiles of Mutina, Rome shining at dawn, the snows of Rhegium, the passes of Petelia – he fought and marched and debated again, heard cry in his ears the myriad slave voices, heard the ghost of that Hope and Promise wail away as the morning came upon the Appian Way. And then again pain seized and tore at his heart and passed again; and wildly, a last wild moment, he raised his eyes.
And he saw before him, gigantic, filling the sky, a great Cross with a figure that was crowned with thorns; and behind it, sky-towering as well, gladius in hand, his hand on the edge of the morning behind that Cross, the figure of a Gladiator. And he saw that these Two were One, and the world yet theirs: and he went into unending night and left them that shining earth.
It was springtime in Italy, a hundred years before the crucifixion of Christ—
Spartacus Page 26
