—
The sun falls toward the nearby hills, and still no sighting of the fugitives. Not so much as a corpse identifiable as one of them. The only dead they came across were freed men or slaves. He wishes he had seen a few of the gladiators in death, just to verify their mortality. But they had surprise in their favor, along with their innate brutality.
They arrive at a villa surrounded by manicured rows of grapevines. The bailiff of the property welcomes them, since the owner is absent and cannot do so himself. He’s a thin man, somewhat twitchy, his black hair disheveled, as if he just rose from sleep. The gladiators fell on the place just hours earlier. They made off with amphoras of wine on their shoulders, casks of it driven in wagons. They overturned urns and kicked things about and made a general, though passing, destruction of the place. The bailiff thanks the gods that they moved on. He all but begs the corps to camp in the vineyards. He’s eager to have a company of armed men to guard against the coming night.
The captain orders the men to make camp. Nonus feels some of the tension ease out of him. Gauls and Thracians and Galatians: they don’t think as Romans do. They don’t plan. They have no discipline. They squabble among themselves constantly. And when drink is in them…Like as not, some of them will turn on others and so reduce their numbers. That’s a pleasant thought. Nonus goes at his camp tasks with an enthusiasm that almost makes him forget his fatigue.
Once he is free to relax, he sits at a table and scoops a barley-based soup into his mouth. His stomach is none too interested in it, but he tries. Toscan takes a seat opposite him. “A few of the slave girls here are worth a few moments wrestling. Did you notice?”
“I’m not here to screw field slaves.”
“Are you even a man?” Toscan asks. “One would think—” He stops talking abruptly.
Nonus pauses with his spoon halfway to his mouth. Hands clamp down on his shoulders, tight enough to hurt. Procolus says, “Nonus, I’ve been wondering something about the other night. I had no thought of it before, but today’s marching cleared my head. My thoughts ordered themselves, and I recalled things I had not earlier. But you’re not eating! Go ahead. Enjoy yourself.” He squeezes, making the kind words into an order.
Drops of gruel splash from Nonus’s spoon to the table. He tries to think of what’s coming, what to say, how to be calm through it. He searches for the lies he has yet to find, but he can’t get hold of them.
“You too, Toscan. Eat.”
Toscan manages what Nonus cannot. He slams spoonfuls into his mouth, eyes down.
“Nonus, where were you posted that night?” Procolus asks. “I’m hoping that I’m wrong in what I’m thinking. Tell me I am.”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Nonus manages.
“Then just tell me where you were posted.”
“I—I don’t recall,” Nonus says. “Was I posted? At that hour, I—”
“At that hour you were posted. Unless you were asleep, I would think you would remember it well. You weren’t asleep?”
Should he say yes? The word is on his tongue. An admission of negligence. He can do that. It happens sometimes. Men have been whipped for it, but a whipping is not a great thing. He opens his mouth to speak.
“No,” Procolus says, “I don’t believe you were asleep. You were on duty with Celus, and he wouldn’t allow that. Have I got that right? You were with Celus at the side gate. The gate through which the slaves escaped. The gate Celus died protecting. But you didn’t die as well. Why is that?”
“In all the confusion—” Nonus begins. His gaze meets Toscan’s. He looks frightened. One of his eyelids flickers. For a moment Nonus thinks he is sending him a message, blinking out what he should say, if only he understood the code.
Procolus plucks his fingers off Nonus’s shoulders. “Get up.”
Nonus sets down his spoon. He turns as he rises. As soon as he swings round, Procolus jabs him in the neck, a short, savage blow of his fist. The other men grapple him, twisting his arms behind his back, pressing him against the edge of the table, clamping his thighs down with the hard wedges of their knees. They treat him roughly, but he barely fights. The pain in his neck is tremendous. He’s not breathing. His throat has been smashed. He’s sure of it.
Face so close that Nonus feels and smells his breath, Procolus says, “I know you were on the side gate. What I don’t know is whether you’re alive because you’re a coward or because you conspired with the slaves. That’s what we’re going to find out. Do you know how we’re going to find out, Nonus?”
Nonus can’t breathe, much less talk. They don’t wait for an answer anyway. They pull him away. They show him how they are going to find out. Thick, charred needles, sooty and smoking from the fire. Shoved up under his fingernails one by one. That’s how.
—
Later, Nonus can’t believe the pain. Instead of fading, it gets worse with every rasping breath. He sits, chained at the wrists and ankles, tethered to a beam in a barn near where the others are camped. He holds his hands with the heels of his palms resting on his knees. His fingers fan out so that they don’t touch one another, twitching. He is unsure how long he can hold them like this. Each fingertip is a swollen ball, the skin black and red, taut, as if it will burst at any moment. The nails are tiny, misshapen things that curl at odd angles.
He hears a few others talking out in the field. Most sleep. Someone snores. Someone complains about it. He can tell the fires have died down. They’re so near, but those others—smiling Toscan among them—are in a different world than he is. His hands, he thinks, are ruined. They are so grotesque, he can’t imagine them ever being his hands again. He shuts his eyes, but tears find their way out. He can’t wipe them away, though he wishes he could, fears someone will come and see him and laugh. He tries to believe that he will be revenged for this. When he is back in Capua and can speak against them, he will. They’ll regret every atrocity done to him. Procolus has no proof against him to justify this.
Except he does. He heard him cry out his cowardice as he writhed, flesh beneath his fingertips bubbling as the hot metal sank into them. Nonus had barely been able to form complete, hoarse sentences, but he’d confessed his guilt. He told him what they wanted to hear: he was the cause of the escape, the single guard who could’ve stopped it all but didn’t.
Why hadn’t he deserted that very night? If he’d only been all and fully a coward, he’d not be suffering now.
He hears a noise through the barn wall. It is quiet now, the last talkers gone silent. The noise is of a man rising to urinate, he thinks. Himself, he cannot rise to pee. He has no pee in him anyway. That rushed out of him earlier. His undertunic—the only garment Procolus didn’t strip from him—is still moist with it. He can’t help but feel jealous of whoever has risen to pee. Because he can rise. Because he’s free to do so.
He listens harder. The sound was just on the other side of the barn wall. He should hear the man’s unsteady feet, hear the splash of urine on the ground. He doesn’t. Instead, he hears the soft sounds of stones being pressed under quiet feet, a muffled word, a clink of metal against metal. He hears stealth.
And then, all at once, noise. Screams. Roars. Feet pounding on the ground. Cries of agony. Metal clanging on metal. A voice he recognizes as Procolus’s, but it’s a higher-pitched version of him, wet with fear. It’s a dog’s bark beside a wolf’s booming calls—foreign words, blunt and animal—that drown him out. Nonus knows what’s happening. The gladiators. They’ve come.
He’s still marveling at that, but also feeling detached from it, as if it has nothing to do with him, when a man comes into the barn, torch in hand. He touches flame to the crossbeams. He kicks straw up next to a post and lights it. He’s at this work a few moments, not rushing it, before he notices Nonus.
Nonus recognizes him. A hulk of a man, muscled as only gladiators ever are, taller than a Roman, than a Greek. His longish hair and even his eyebrows shimmer like gold in the lamplight. The Thracian, Spa
rtacus. He studies Nonus through squinted eyes. He says something in the guttural assault that is his native language. Nonus can only stare. The Thracian tries again, speaking Latin this time. “Why are you chained?”
“I’m innocent,” Nonus whispers.
Spartacus leans closer. Flames well up into the rafters, rising into the thatch of the roof. He seems oblivious to them. When he sees the state of Nonus’s hands, he squints one eye. “Innocent of what?”
Of everything, Nonus almost says, but he doesn’t want to be vague. It feels important to say the right thing. Something that can’t be ignored or dismissed or disbelieved.
Another figure rushes in, speaking to Spartacus in rapid Thracian. He grabs him by the arm, alarmed by the spreading of the fire in a way that the larger man is not. Shrugging, Spartacus straightens. He moves to leave.
Before he can, Nonus’s mouth says something his mind didn’t know it planned to. “Weapons,” he says. “I know where there are weapons.”
Spartacus turns back toward him. “Do you?” he asks. He doesn’t make it sound like a question, though. It’s more of a statement of interest.
Mouse
Mouse knows it’s foolish, but she can’t help feeling as she does. The lamb is too small. His mother must have been sick the whole time he was inside her. She died just after he was born, leaving him tiny, spindly, and large-eyed, with a thin bleat that did nothing to convince the other sheep to suckle him. Mouse tried to find him a second mother, but none would have him. She’s carried the lamb around long enough to know the feel of his wool and to learn the placement of the bones beneath his dwindling flesh. She’s grown to care, which is foolish.
Her brother, Hustus, cares too, though he won’t admit it. The two of them lie with the lamb between them, resting at the edge of woodland that rises into the crags of the mountain behind them, Vesuvius, the one that sometimes smokes and grumbles. They came for the shade. The afternoon is the warmest it’s been this season, warm enough to put Hustus to sleep. Though that’s not hard because Hustus always finds it easy to sleep. He is either asleep or in motion, and when he’s in motion, he’s agitated and restless. Those are the only two ways of being for Hustus.
Mouse hoped that she would sleep as well. On waking, she would find the lamb had died. But she can’t sleep. She lies with her fingers caressing the soft curls of wool, watching the lamb breathe small, faint breaths. Every now and then she swipes away the flies when they settle on the lamb.
She bolts upright when she hears the voice. She listens, eyes jumping around. The things she sees: the grassy slope dotted with the sheep that they look after for their master; farther out the rolling hills of Campania, green and flowering with the spring; the sky blue with thin shreds of clouds. Nothing moves any faster than the feeding sheep. The things she hears: the rolling chorus of insect whirring that sweeps like a wave through the treetops; a birdcall from deeper in the woods; the tiny snaps of brittle pine needles beneath her palm; the almost snore of Hustus’s breathing. Nothing else. But she heard a noise. She waits to hear it again.
Before long it comes. A shout, which is answered a moment later by several voices. Even without hearing their words, she knows the voices aren’t from any of the local sheep herders. They’re not boys or youths. They’re men, and the way they’re careless with their voices shoots alarm through her.
She scrambles to her feet, startling the lamb. He tries to rise but has only enough strength to wish to, not to actually do it. She snatches him up and holds him pressed to her chest. She nudges Hustus with her toe, twice, harder the second time. He moans and blinks his eyes open. He tries to roll over. Mouse knows he’ll go right back to sleep. Once he slept unsheltered through a sudden storm. It had been funny, then. It’s not funny now.
“Hustus! Get up. Somebody’s coming!” She kicks him hard.
He wakes, glaring at her. “What? Why are you—”
“Men are coming.”
She dashes deeper into the woods, ducking beneath branches, breaking some of the dead ones with her shoulder as she goes. When she’s in far enough and the pitch of the slope starts to rise, she rounds a tree trunk and squats, half behind it.
Hustus arrives beside her. “What men?”
Mouse answers him by peering through the trees at the slope beyond the edge of the wood. Through the mesh of tree trunks, she can see the shape of the hill and the sheep there, slow-moving, munching the grass. One of them raises its head. Then several more. They stand still, until a human head crests the rise and the body beneath it climbs into view. First just one man, then a moment later, a whole host of them.
The sheep run, heads high, baaing their alarm. The lambs, terrified, move in fits and starts. The man in front pauses. He says something over his shoulder to the others, then darts at the herd. He waves his arms to scare them. Even over the distance, Mouse can hear his laughter.
Hustus says, “If they touch the sheep, they’ll regret it.” He unties the sling he wears as a necklace. He reaches into the pouch at his waist, stirring the river stones there with his fingers.
“Don’t,” Mouse says. It’s not a sling for taking down men. It’s for rabbits, sometimes birds. He rarely hits his targets, but rabbits and birds are small. Men aren’t. “You’ll just make them mad.”
“I will if they take a sheep. Or even a single lamb.”
Mouse knows that, fool that he is, he means it. She often wonders how he’s managed to live through thirteen years of reckless life. For that matter, she often wonders how she’s lived through that same span of years. “They don’t want the sheep.”
More and more of them come into view. On foot, loud, talking and joking, calling to one another. They are not working at any task. They’re not soldiers, though they are armed. Swords at waists, some carried in hand. Clubs. A few use spears like walking sticks. Some have shields slung over their backs. Here and there a helmet, a few breastplates. They’re not even Romans, she thinks. Some of them have golden hair, some red. A few are as tall as giants. There are women among them. Even they are tall, to Mouse’s eyes. No, they are not Italians.
“Don’t, Hustus,” Mouse says. A fly lands on her nose. She blows a puff of air up at it, dislodging it. “Don’t do anything.”
“If they take a sheep…”
Some of the strangers wear packs. A few carry wooden chests perched on their shoulders. Behind the main body, a man leads an ass, heavily laden. And last comes a wagon, pulled by a white bull. He bellows his displeasure, but he’s strong, and the wagon, piled high with crates and urns, bumps over the contours of the ground. Mouse can’t say how many of them there are, but whatever the number is, it’s too many. Surely more than the groupings of a hundred that Marcus Aburius, their owner, has them organize the sheep into for shearing.
The sheep in the field, being stupid, run before the strangers. The entire group moves across the slope, over the rise of the ridgeline, and out of sight. Once even the protests of the bull grow faint, she breaks the silence. “Who were they?”
Hustus grunts.
“No, don’t!” Mouse says. She knows what it means when he grunts like that. It’s his way of saying he knows the answer when he doesn’t know the answer. It means he’s going to find out. “I don’t care who they are. They’re gone.”
“I’m going to see who they are.”
“Why?” she asks. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll follow them,” he says. “Aburius will want to know about them.”
He strides away, fitting a stone into the sling’s cradle as he goes. Mouse calls after him as loudly as she dares; Hustus ignores her. He is good at that when he wants to. If he weren’t her brother, she is sure she would hate him. “You are foolish,” she says. She adjusts her grip on the lamb. “If they beat you senseless it’s your own fault.”
—
Sometime during the long night, the lamb dies. He does so quietly, without Mouse knowing when the moment comes. His body is still warm when she realizes he’
s gone from it, but that may be from the heat of her body.
She buries him the next morning. She knows it’s stupid to give an animal the same care she would to a person. And a waste—there’s not much meat on the lamb, but there isn’t much meat on her either. If she were a stronger person, she would skin and gut the tiny thing. She has a pot and water, and she could a make a stew. Marcus Aburius wouldn’t even punish them if he found out, not if she explained about the mother’s illness. But the thought of cutting into the lamb or peeling away his skin turns her stomach. Even just the way his tiny head flops when she moves the body makes her eyes need to blink. Because of this, at least, she’s glad Hustus left her to follow the strangers. If he were here, he would tease her. He would focus on ridiculing her and pretend that he wasn’t sad as well.
Also, though, she wishes Hustus were here. If he were, he would at least be alive and able to tease her. Better that than getting harmed. It’s hard not to wonder if the lamb’s death is a sign, if it somehow mirrors the fate her brother went to. Maybe a god has sent her a message. Which god, though, speaks with the bodies of dead lambs? She tries not to think about it.
Finding a crevice in the boulders, she tucks the small body into it. She folds his legs and positions his head just so, wanting him to look like he is sleeping. She collects stones and slowly builds a pile on top of him. She works until he’s hidden, and then she tries to think of words to say. She knows that animals have no afterlife to go to. They just cease when they die. She tries to imagine what that’s like but can’t. She hopes not existing is better, easier for the lamb. She thinks it probably is.
Back in the field, she walks the slope, seeing where the strangers passed. The wagon ruts, here and there the print of a foot or sandal pressed into moist sheep pellets. They were real, she thinks. And that means Hustus is in danger. She hates it that he does things like this. Hates that he’s cruel in not thinking of her. Only he knows the thing Mouse hides from their owner and from the other shepherds. He shouldn’t leave her and go and get beaten and maybe die and abandon her.
The Risen Page 7
