Before she can get into the camp, she passes others who have gathered outside the fortifications. A whole tent city and open-air market draped as the hills and ridges allow. They are slaves, she knows, but what a strange sight they are. Such good humor in the air. Laughter and voices raised in mirth. Roasting meat and flute music and a horn blown in humorous imitation of battle. Two men slug each other bloody as a crowd around them roars with the joy of it. A boy stands atop a horse and does tricks as a man sings his praises. Three girls, two blond and one dark-haired, walk right past her, chattering among themselves as if the world were not a pit of snakes to be navigated with every step. One of the golden-haired girls wears a crown woven from wildflowers.
Vectia walks through the Roman gate and into the fortified camp. Nobody stops her. Nobody even seems to notice her. Everywhere she sees things to prove that she is not dreaming this. Men seated at a small table, a line of new arrivals stretching out from them, being accounted for in some manner. A rope strung with armor, boys sorting through it and testing the pieces against their bodies. Men lounging, under the sun of midday. Men asleep on the grass, under the shade of Roman tents. A dog that sits on its haunches, watching the movement in the camp as attentively as she. Surely these are waking sights. The clarity of them sparkles under the spring sun, nowhere the blurred edges of dream.
She stands near a cauldron bubbling on a fire of red coals. She isn’t starving yet, but hunger twists her belly and washes her mouth with saliva. She would not be hungry like this in a dream. She wouldn’t smell the meat in the pot and see the oil roiling on the surface. She thinks, Believe it, Vectia. Believe it all.
“Mother, have you hunger?” a woman asks her. Reading Vectia’s hesitation, she adds, “You are welcome to food. We share here.”
“We”—Vectia hesitates, feeling foolish with the word about to leave her tongue, wondering if she misheard or if the woman is playing at some trick—“share?”
“That is the way of it here. Spartacus, he says if we fight together, we should share the rewards. And he says there are many ways to fight. Each to his own.” She smiles warmly, though she is missing enough teeth to make the expression disconcerting. “Me? I fight with a pot and a ladle.”
Vectia thinks about that for a moment. She nods, gestures that she would like to eat. “That’s a good way to fight. Each to her own.”
If the woman heard the way that Vectia changed the his to her, she doesn’t show it.
—
The woman says that anyone can attend the meeting of the clan leaders, so Vectia goes where the woman directs, the natural amphitheater created in a depression ringed by a rising terrace of boulders. The space is crowded, loud, pungent from so many bodies on a warming day. She gets close enough to listen, but that’s as near as she manages. Jammed shoulder to shoulder with others, she’s behind the place the leaders address each other from. She sees only the men who rise to speak from the back, in profile sometimes. Still, she learns a great deal.
The army is made up of three parts: Germani led by Oenomaus, Celts under Crixus, and Thracians who answer to Spartacus. Equal parties in that each leader has the ultimate say in the matters of those under them. But the rule is not truly equal. Crixus, when he rises, speaks as if the entire army were his to command. He’s powerful, especially in the legs. Gladiators, Vectia thinks, must be well fed. His hair is dark, and his nose, when Vectia catches it in profile, is prominent and hooked. A Celt. An Allobroges, that’s what he is. He praises the victory they just achieved and promises more is coming to them. Even now, more Romans are clamoring to come to them and be slaughtered. They will not have learned any lessons yet, he claims. Every now and then he breaks into what must be his native tongue. The words are music to Vectia, but a music she cannot yet comprehend. Little of it sounds like the few words she thinks she knows.
I will change that, she decides. She will become an Allobroges as well. She doesn’t know, in fact, what tribe she’s from, but Allobroges will do.
So Crixus is her leader. But even he is not the leader. That is the Thracian.
Spartacus has a voice that carries in way different from the others. It isn’t that he speaks louder, as Vectia thinks at first. Instead it’s that when he opens his mouth, others hush to listen. When he asks for affirmation, he’s answered quickly. When he wishes for the crowd to respond in the negative, groans and complaints drown him out until his voice rises again and the audience goes silent once more. If he raises an arm, eyes follow the gesture, and if he pauses, people stare expectantly.
He’s a fine speaker, Vectia thinks. She wonders if he is a prophet. Who but those who converse with the gods move the masses so?
But then, from the few glimpses she catches of him, she revises that. The prophets that she’s seen have been bent men, infirm men, petty or cowardly men, blind or lame or suffering from some other affliction that made it fortunate for them that they were conduits to the divine. Spartacus is none of these. He is a man, well formed. As he’s bare-chested, Vectia sees he’s blessed with a musculature that she would like to feel with her palms. He is not a normal man. He’s taller, stronger, the muscles of his back fan out and ripple beneath the skin. She is old, yes, but she is still a woman. She can still imagine what she could’ve done to him in her youth, and he to her. What she can’t figure out is why each gesture and word from him gets drunk in so completely, as if all around were parched with thirst and only he were the water they needed.
What has he said? She’s missed it. Something that must have been very reasonable, judging from the reaction of the others. Men shout their approval. Some smack their chests with their palms. Another voice breaks in. Not one of the men who has spoken before. This one sounds angry and aggrieved. He refutes whatever Spartacus has said, declaring that the Germani will not be bound. They had a pact for the night of the breakout, but that has long since expired. A new one must be made, or not. And if not the Germani may go their way, back to their homeland. He asks, “Why stay here any longer than we have to?”
“A new pact has already been made, brother,” another voice says, wry and confident and tinged with humor. “It just wasn’t made with your permission, Oenomaus, and that makes you cross. The Germani voted for it when they climbed down the rocks and fell on the Roman camp. You didn’t want to do that, did you? Perhaps you’re not fit to lead the Germani.”
Oenomaus begins an angry retort, though it’s clear he doesn’t have it fully formed and instead relies on the volume of his voice to give his words weight. He seems to know this and allows still another voice—higher pitched, sharp, female—to interrupt him.
“Kastor is right,” a woman whom Vectia can’t see says. “If it’s only hurt pride that makes you run your mouth, do it elsewhere, not here.”
And then another man, calm, grave, says, “We have been through this already. Put it behind you, Oenomaus, and go forward with us.”
Oenomaus doesn’t, and the counsel becomes a scrum of voices competing with one another. Vectia loses track of who is speaking and what they’re arguing. She doesn’t care. Another thing occupies her mind. A woman spoke. A woman raised her voice and cut through the one called Oenomaus. She can’t see Oenomaus, but she’s sure he’s big, just like the other gladiators. Of course he is. He’s a killer of men, and a woman’s voice cut him. That, to Vectia, is as deep a mystery as the source of Spartacus’s appeal.
Vectia stands. She slides through the people hemming her in. She makes herself thin, but she offers no apology to their protests. She needs to see better, to put faces to voices and read them more precisely for it.
—
It takes Vectia some time to find a place that suits her. She manages to only because Oenomaus and some of his Germani rise and march away. In the confusion after this, as others call for their return and the remaining Germani mill among one another, arguing, Vectia slips through the men. She sits. For a time she can see nothing but bodies in motion, legs and sandals and feet that very nearly step on
her. Arms raised, she pushes when they press against her. One of her knees touches a youth whose eyes bounce around the men, clearly worried lest he be squashed. He isn’t. Vectia isn’t either, though it’s a close thing.
The commotion dies down. A large man, tall and rangy, demands order. From his voice she knows him to be the one called Kastor. He gets the others seated and in so doing reveals himself for what he is. Not a leader or one who covets it. He’s an officer, one who carries out orders and helps others to do so as well. His face is like his voice; deep, confident, flushed with a wry humor. He looks as if he’s just heard a joke and is still enjoying it. He says that they shouldn’t mind Oenomaus’s absence. “His stomach is troubling him,” he shouts. “Likely, he needs to relieve himself. Better he does it up the hill than that he spills his stink here among us. Am I right?”
The council goes on.
Vectia listens. She watches, her eyes both on those speaking and on those listening. It’s as she thought. Spartacus owns this. This gathering is his. He is the seed, and the rest are the fruit that hides it. They don’t all like it, but that doesn’t stop it from being so. He is a rare man who is beautiful to both women and men alike. A man whom both women and men want to stand beside, one who is better than others and yet warm with the blessings he’s received. She sees it in the way he meets people’s gazes directly, how he speaks as if each one of them matters. She almost thinks he could speak nonsense and his audience would be just as rapt.
But he doesn’t speak nonsense. He builds upon what Crixus said before him. He asks them to see the proof again that they are loved by a goddess he calls Kotys. The escape. The free passage down the Via Annia. The store of weapons brought to them by a Roman, of all people! The night attack that Kotys herself made possible. Her face is in the moon, he claims, and she shined on them that night, asking only that they send many Roman souls to feed her, giving in return weapons and supplies. Fortune does not fall this way without godly hands involved.
He claims they can call her by whatever name they choose because Kotys knows when she is being worshipped, by whatever name is easiest to one’s tongue. More than that, they are stronger for the many gods they worship. It means more of the immortals hear them and see what they are doing. And what are they doing?
“I’ll tell you,” Spartacus says. “We are doing what the gods of our people demand of us. Do you think Kotys likes to see her people enslaved?” Gesturing toward the remaining Germani, he asks, “Does the All Father? Do Wodanaz and Frikko want to see the men who worship them enslaved and their women raped?” He points to a specific man, a Celt with a snake stigma writhing up his chest, its head coming to rest on his shoulder. “You, Nemetos.” The man, big as he is, looks as startled as a child to have his name called. “You were in the Roman camp before any other. Be honored for it. Your god, Ogmios, blew bravery into you. But tell me, would Ogmios love you running from here, leaving the Romans strong and your people enslaved?”
Nemetos hardly needs to answer. Many voices say, “No. No!”
Spartacus names still others, gods Vectia knows little about or hasn’t even heard of. Nerthus. Teutates. Tengri. Laran. Ba’al. He picks yet more warriors from the crowd, all men who seem stunned by it. He asks the same sort of questions, and they answer in the same way. A chorus going back and forth, building conviction. At first it’s frightening to hear the names of so many gods jostling together so. But fast behind that it’s intoxicating. If he is right…if different gods of different people can be called to a single cause…if those gods answer to more than name and speak more than one tongue…
“They want us to rise,” the Thracian continues. “All of us. They’ve been waiting for us to find the balls to do it. They waited so long that Kotys sent us a woman with bigger balls than any of us to shame us into action.” He grins, and Vectia is surprised by the quality of teeth. Who would think a gladiator would have no missing teeth? “So what are we doing here? The will of the gods, that’s what. We carry it forward like this. We don’t run from here as the Romans want and as even some among you propose. No. That way does not give us the future we seek. It gives a short reprieve. If we are running, we are not fighting. They’ll hound us from their country, and then how long until they find us and come against us? We’d barely have cast ourselves down to sleep on the other side of the mountains before the Romans would come calling, with blade and fire and chains. Am I wrong about this? Can any call me a liar?”
Spartacus scans the crowd, who are quiet. None can, apparently, though he holds the moment to give them time to find the courage to speak.
Vectia begins to wonder if Spartacus is the wolf she dreamed of. The thought of riding him has more meaning than one. She is thinking on this when she feels eyes on her. She has grown used to going unnoticed. So when she feels someone’s eyes on her, she stiffens. It’s like a physical touch that itches her face and makes her cheeks feel warm. It takes her a moment to find the person. A flame-haired, sharp-featured woman. She stares straight at Vectia, and Vectia knows who she is: the woman who spoke earlier. She failed to notice her only because she had been so fixed on Spartacus and the men. But there she is, and seeing her, Vectia knows in an instant that she is Spartacus’s chosen one. Now that she’s spotted her, Vectia realizes that Spartacus glances at her often. He looks at her, not for permission or guidance or out of lust. Or some of all of those things but not exactly any one of them exclusively. He looks at her as if each glance were a way to confirm himself.
What sort of woman, she wonders, makes a man like Spartacus do that?
She remembers that the Boii woman told her something that at the time she didn’t believe. She said that Celtic women were not passive like Roman women. They were not silent and disregarded. They were not hidden away like the Greek women. They were not without rights to think, to own, to want. She said that they had voices. They could argue with their men. They could say, “This one cannot give me a child. I want another.” Or, “This one prefers men to women. He is no good to me.” The Boii woman even claimed that if they had heart for it, women could train with weapons and fight. She leaned close and whispered into her twelve-year-old ears, “They can fuck. You understand? Not be fucked. But fuck when they want to, how they want to, with who they want to.” She even claimed that women, at times, ruled clans as warrior queens.
No Roman woman would do or think such things. Men ruled them completely. Father, brother, husband, son, it didn’t matter: any of them owned the women of their family. Nothing in Vectia’s life as a slave of Rome had led her to believe the things the Boii woman said could be true. Until now. She doesn’t know if this red-haired woman is Gallic or Thracian, but she knows power when she sees it.
Spartacus raises a hand. He flexes his fingers. “All of us. All our gods. Together.” He curls his fingers and makes a hard, big-knuckled fist. He says the words again, in Thracian this time. “I am saying all of us in my language. Learn the sounds so that you can say it well. There is power in them. These words are truth, and I know you feel them ring in you. Think on them, and you will come to be of one mind with me. We must stay in Italy and fight the war the Romans don’t expect and are not prepared for. That’s what we give them. The gods will love us for it. Believe me.”
Vectia does. She believes, and she is glad, so glad, that she came here and joined this. It is, she realizes, the moment her life has been building toward.
Two
ALL OF US
Nonus
“Nonus, you’re as dumb as a mule. Dumber than a mule, or a dog, or a pig. Not one of them has ever joined a legion by choice.”
So says Nonus Cincia about himself. Not for the first time, either. He says it out loud, with little concern about anyone hearing him, though he’s packed shoulder to shoulder, ass to cock in a moving mass of humanity. He doesn’t point out the absurdity that he’s still hunting a man, Spartacus, whom he’s looked in the face, or that he saw the gladiators escape Vatia’s ludus, or that he met them shortly af
terward and led them to a cache of arms while his fingers still burned with torment inflicted on him by fellow Romans. Some things should not be said out loud.
He’s marching near the end of Lucius Cossinius’s war column, a couple of cohorts dispatched by Publius Varinius to locate the rebel gladiators. It’s a foul, smelly, noisy place to be at the best of times but worse today. Midday in the roasting heat of the dying summer, sun glaring in an empty sky, and the earth a parched basin rippling with all the heat of a bread oven. The dust stirred up by the thousands of feet in front of him makes it impossible to see more than a few rows ahead. Dust coats his face, makes him cough. It clings to his nostril hairs. Sandals chafe his heels, his helmet swings annoyingly from his neck, his javelins jut toward the sky, his pack weighs him down: none of it suits him.
“What were you thinking?” Nonus asks the back of the man in front of him. “You weren’t thinking. That’s the problem. You let Volesus do that for you.”
“Would you shut your mouth?” The soldier beside him elbows him. “You’re turning me dumb as a mule with your babbling.”
Nonus doesn’t shut up. He lists the things he hates about military life, the very things he always knew he’d hate about military life if he was ever fool enough to enlist. Marching is one. That’s what he’s been at for enough hours now that he feels as if he’s always been marching. Other days it was sword training that he hated. Stabbing, stabbing, stabbing. Another day the torture was endless drills, parading around in formations, smacking shields and having his feet stepped on. Or throwing the training javelins over and over again. And perhaps the only thing worse than marching was being forced to run for hours carrying his full load of equipment, only to end up back exactly where he began. What was the use of that?
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