His brother, Volesus, swore the training would make a hardened soldier out of him in no time. He’d been through it himself before. He’d fought, he never tired of saying, with Sulla against Mithridates. He’d done the service Nonus had worked vigorously to avoid up till now. He pointed this out every chance he got. According to him, the training they were being put through was second rate, nothing like the discipline Sulla had demanded.
“Good thing Sulla’s dead, then,” Nonus had retorted.
Even little things chafe him. The woolen tunic he has to wear is shorter than the perfectly acceptable garment he had to toss away. His padded vest and leather cuirass fit snugly, trapping him like a prawn inside a cook pot. And while it is a boon to have a daily ration of grain, he is made to carry it himself, to grind it himself, to shape it and cook it himself. He’s yet to produce a loaf that isn’t burned, partially raw, covered in ash or dirt or pitted with stones. He half-suspects the stones are a prank pulled on him by his brother, but he’s never managed to catch him at it. And meat? Hadn’t he been promised meat? Not a sign of yet. Bread, bread, and more bread. Legionaries are walking loaves of bread.
The signalers blast some order on their trumpets. The column stutters to a halt. What now? He stands on his toes and tries to see above the soldiers in front of him. The dust is heavy in the air, though with them halted, it does shift, blown to one side by a faint breeze as hot as Vulcan’s breath. The air clears enough to reveal a landscape of rolling hills, dotted here and there with sun-baked villas. To the other side of the road are vineyards. The vines are heavy with ripe fruit, and slaves work among the rows. A few of them look up but most keep their heads down, fingers nimble at their work. Nonus envies them their lack of interest. Would that he was one of them, able to glance up and shrug at a passing army. None of them seem to be concerned about Spartacus.
Strangely enough, it’s that name that haunts Nonus’s mind. A few days earlier a boy ran up to the edge of camp and yelled, “Spartacus will eat your balls!” He ran away before anyone could give him the thrashing he deserved. It jolted Nonus, hearing that name again: Spartacus, shouted from a boy’s lips. How did he know it? The Thracian is alive, apparently, and successful enough that boys are running around touting his ball-eating prowess.
When he’d been saved by the very fugitives he’d been sent to massacre, Nonus’s tongue was quicker than his dignity. He offered up the store of gladiator weapons stashed in the farm shed so fast, he realized he’d done it only after the fact. He’d been quick to take Spartacus and the others right to them. Why not? Doing so saved his life. Yes, he gave arms to the runaways, but the weapons had been meant for them anyway. There was something ironic in that, enough so that Nonus was inclined to absolve himself.
For his efforts, Spartacus clapped him on the back. “Nonus, come join us,” the Thracian had said. “Will you? You have no love of the rich of your country. I can see in your face you don’t. A man like you. Not rich. You are not so far from a slave. I mean no insult, but look what they did to your fingers. I would not do that to you.”
Nonus, holding his brutalized hands like claws before him, had outwardly agreed. For that matter, he’d almost agreed inwardly as well. There was something about feeling the gladiator’s heavy arm over his shoulder that was most convincing. For a base, brute, barbarian butcher, he had a beguilingly easy manner about him. But later that night—still amazed at being alive and by how much his fingers throbbed and sent blisters of pain through him at the slightest touch—he’d tucked his tail between his legs and ran into the dark. He never expected he’d end up marching to meet them, or that Spartacus’s name would be flying around the hills of Campania and landing on children’s lips. Instead of word of the rebels’ demise, each day brought news of their successes, of growing numbers, of devious tactics, of them raping and pillaging with wanton abandon. Two cohorts under Lucius Furius had been ambushed just two weeks before. The rebels were hard to keep track of as they stayed largely in wild places, appearing here and there to do their damage. Volesus had argued that their tactics were a sign of their weakness. Maybe, but Volesus hadn’t felt the Thracian’s arm on his shoulder. There was no weakness in that.
A few minutes shuffling from foot to foot, and Nonus decides that the only thing worse than marching under a full military pack is standing still under one. He flexes his hands, rolling his fingers out and back. They are as healed as they are likely ever to be, though they’re no pretty sight. Three have no fingernails at all, and the ones he does have are ridged and ill-formed. The tip of one of his smallest fingers he’d had chopped off by a butcher. It had begun to rot. Often, he has phantom pains in them. He’ll catch himself cradling them protectively and realize they hurt him. But in realizing it, the pain vanishes, only to return later, to haunt.
The legate, Lucius Cossinius, rides into view atop a tall stallion. He isn’t a real legate, in Nonus’s opinion, since this isn’t a real legion, just a paltry couple of cohorts, some twelve hundred men. But from the look of him, Cossinius considers himself in command of Rome’s most decorated legion. The dust is on him as much as the men, but the attire it coats is something else entirely. Red cloak draped over his shoulder and trailing down his back. A scarlet band cinched in a pretty bow across the ornately molded abdomen of his leather armor. Above it all a helmet with a ridge of horsehair spewing toward the sky. He trails a mounted entourage behind him, with a band of five lictors, rod-sheathed axes propped on their shoulders. He holds forth on something to the nearest centurion. He gestures toward the rear rows of the column.
“Wonderful!” Nonus whispers. “What’s he found to complain about?”
The soldier in front of him quips, “You, most likely.”
When the trumpets sound the march again, the centurion singles out the last few rows of soldiers. He cuts them from the others with an arm and orders them to step out of the column. He’s right in front of Nonus, near enough to touch, but he shouts to be heard over the clatter of the moving army. “You lot, accompany the legate! Take orders from his lictors. Don’t screw up.”
“Accompany him where, sir?” Nonus asks.
The centurion looks down at him, mouth a pucker as he considers whether the question is a challenge to his authority. He holds the expression only for a moment, though. Apparently, one look at Nonus confirms that he’s not questioning anyone’s authority. He points toward the villas set up from the road. “There. Salinae.”
The others start off after the legate’s party, which is already climbing toward the villas. Nonus doesn’t like the look of the incline, or the way the heat waves ripple across the hills. As much as he’d hated marching with the others, watching the rest of the army move away fills him with dread. “What’s he want to go there for?” He’s mumbling to himself more than asking the centurion, but the officer hears him. He adds, “Sir.”
Again the centurion seems to consider an angry response, then drops it. He doesn’t seem to know how to shape anger at Nonus. “You know, they say that out of every ten men in any legion, there are two who will lead, seven who will follow, and one who just wants to get the fuck out of the army. I think I know which you are. Doesn’t matter why the legate wants to go to Salinae. He’s going, and he wants guards. You’re one of them. Go!”
Nonus hurries to catch up with the others, hating that he’s here, wondering why he let it happen.
—
The answer is easy enough. He’s here because of circumstance and his efforts to better his lot. After fleeing from the gladiators, he’d walked the hills of Campania toward the place of his birth. In a manner, Nonus considered himself fortunate. No man ruled him. Vatia was dead. Dead and never to trouble him again. Celus, that annoying Pompeian, he was dead too. As was Procolus, the bastard who had tortured him. Dead, thanks to the gladiators. It had all been the strangest series of turnabouts: escaping slaughter at the hands of gladiators in the ludus, being called a coward for it by his own people and facing a misery of torture becau
se of it, being liberated by the very slaves who began the violence, only to now be on his own again, heading, of all places, back to the landholding of the brother he so despises.
Nonus had stood for a time at the head of the track leading to the family farm, dread growing on him the longer he looked. So much had changed that for a time he was not even sure he was at the right place. So many worked the fields, but he didn’t recognize any of them. Slaves? Had Volesus prospered so much? And where were the cabbages? There had always been cabbages, so many he’d come to hate them. He’d eaten cabbage so often—raw, boiled, pickled in vinegar, floating limp in watery stews—that his urine stank of it. But now no cabbages. No asparagus, which, come to think of it, made his urine even more foul. No kale or broccoli. None of the crops his father had cultivated for their own consumption, and for sale in good years. Instead, intricate trellises supported young grapevines, and a sea of grass stretched out behind the farm cottage. Millet, he thought. The stuff of porridge. They’d grown some before but not so singularly. And the hilly outcropping that marked the northern boundary of their property was new planted with trees. Pears? Was Volesus mad?
It got no better when a man other than his brother was summoned to meet him. An overseer in an ill humor, he found mirth only when Nonus named his brother. “That one?” he asked, his scowl becoming a smile. “You’ll not find him here, citizen.”
“Where then?”
The man wasn’t sure, but he recommended a few places. The third of them proved true. A wine stall in the dank shade of a stone wall at the outskirts of Beneventum. The old woman who ran it sat undisturbed by the flies that buzzed around her. She pointed through an opening on the opposite side of the lane. He followed the finger and found a grassy area at the slope of a hill, with decrepit tables and stools scattered about, mostly unoccupied. At one of the tables sat a back he recognized, forlorn enough that he knew Volesus would have no good news for him. But the only thing that might draw him more than good news was a tale of woe. Certainly, the man with that forlorn back had one to tell. He couldn’t help wanting to hear it.
“What vintage are you drinking, brother?” Nonus meant to surprise him, but he spoke too softly. Volesus didn’t seem to notice him. He tried again, louder, and accompanied the words with a slap of his hand on the tabletop as he took a stool.
Volesus looked at him, bleary-eyed and belligerent. He wrapped one arm protectively around a carafe of wine; the other clenched a wooden wine cup. When he recognized his brother his eyes sparked with life, but then the rest of his face thought better of it. Looking back into his wine cup, he said, “Pompeiana.”
“Oh, but that causes headaches! The last time I drank it, I would rather have died than have woken as I did.”
“I only drink Campanian wines,” Volesus said. “Fermented in the open air, exposed to the sun, wind, and rain. Just like me.”
Nonus eyed the carafe. It was nearly full. The sight of the dark liquid stirred his thirst. The surest way not to wet his throat was to ask for it, though. “Help me understand this,” he began. “You drinking at a wine stall in the middle of the day? Unwatered wine, by the looks of it. Where’s Heia? What’s she have to say about this? And who’s that man at the farm? He has an attitude.”
Volesus filled his wooden cup, spilling a little onto the countertop. He tried to retrieve it with his thumb, but the rough grain of the wood drank it. “I thought you were living high in Capua.”
“I’ve moved on,” Nonus said tersely, not wanting the subject to change to his own travails. “What’s happened to the farm?”
Volesus wouldn’t meet his eyes again. “I’m a veteran. A veteran and landowner. You know that, don’t you? You would think that meant something, but not anymore.”
“And now you’re old and having difficulty staying on the subject.” Nonus moved his stool around to the opposite side of the table. He peeled Volesus’s fingers away from the wooden cup and took it. Holding it hostage, he asked, “What happened?”
The facts were these: Volesus had an ill year, dry for a few weeks longer than the norm, the rivers thin trickles and locusts a constant plague. He spent what little coin he had on offerings in the nearby shrine to Tellus. That was as it should be. His wife, Heia, built a household shrine to Tellus and another to Rusina, who was beloved by her people in Umbria. Still, they brought in next to nothing to sell at harvest time. They survived, barely managing to pay the year’s levy of taxes. Volesus had to sell a slave he’d just bought, his first and only. His for a few months but now no more.
In the spring of that year, a man came saying he represented a senator by the name of Gaius Burriena. He offered to buy the hilly land among the rocks to plant pears there and wondered if he might lease out some acreage for growing grain crops. Volesus’s land would pay him, the man claimed, without needing him to labor on it.
Volesus refused. What true Roman didn’t want to work his own land? He sent the man away with the best wishes for his master’s health and well-being.
Their prayers and offerings still went unanswered. The next year little green beetles descended silently on plant after plant and scoured them until they were stripped corpses. And a blight did something to the cabbage roots, stunting their growth. They starved themselves so as to have produce to sell. In all likelihood, it’s why Heia lost the child that was in her. She mumbled once that the child was too great an offering to Tellus. Volesus had beat her for that.
“I wish I hadn’t,” he admitted. “She worked hard, too.”
They all did, and because of this they took a modest crop to the late summer markets, with hopes for an autumn harvest as well. Perhaps Tellus had finally softened her heart. But at the markets, a new problem. No one would buy their goods. Cabbage? No, there was a glut of it. Kale or broccoli? Not that day. And then later, when he returned with artichokes that none wanted, they were in the market for what he had offered but a few days before.
“In the end I sold it all, but at no return. For a loss, even. Can you believe that?”
So the next winter, when he heard that Gaius Burriena’s man was talking with other farmers, Volesus sought him out. Just to listen, and just to confirm that he wanted no part in whatever he was offering. The thing is, he found he did want a part in it. Burriena had a different offer this time. He would grant him a loan with the land as collateral. Volesus could still work the land. It would still be his. The loan would provide him the means to supply himself with the improvements necessary to make a better go of it that coming year. Better seed. Fertilizer. A larger cistern system to store the spring rains. When the profits from the season came in, he could pay back the loan at modest interest.
But there were no profits. Not when he had just as much trouble selling his goods. Not after paying the taxes on what he’d produced but couldn’t sell, and which rose as the apparent infrastructure of his property did, expenses that produced nothing in return but higher debt. That winter they were removed from the land.
“You lost it?” Nonus asked. “The entire farm? All our lands?”
His brother nods. Three times to answer each question in turn. Each answer like a spike nailing Nonus’s future to a cross, with him stuck to it.
“What of Heia? You didn’t sell her, did you?”
“I just let her go. Better to be unburdened. She and the children work one of Burriena’s farms. They’re free in name and are free to come back to me when I can support them. I won’t work Burriena’s land, though.”
They sat for a time. Nonus watched a hornet climb into the wine cup. He was momentarily jealous of the wasp. Small as it was, a drop of red liquid was likely enough to make it fly in blurred circles. To be so small, he thought, that one could swim in a saucer of wine as if it were a lake. That would be fine.
Volesus flipped the empty wooden cup over, trapping the insect.
Or not so fine.
Nonus asked, “What will you do now?”
“The same as you, I think.” He motioned over h
is shoulder in the vague direction of the city. “The garrison is recruiting for a new legion. They’ve said they would take me. See? Not too old yet, am I? I imagine they’d even take the likes of you. They’re keen for bodies to throw at those fool gladiators. You’ve heard of them, right?”
—
That’s where it began, the reversal of all the careful work Nonus had put into not being noticed by conscription officers. He’d been pretty sure his birth had never been recorded properly, but he’d furthered his military avoidance by never making appearances on any official documents that he knew of. He’d even declared himself a slave on one occasion when he stumbled on recruitment officers looking for bodies to send off to Spain. He’d been a bit put out that the man had so readily believed his claim of subservient status.
But Volesus had convinced him to toss that history away with promises of guaranteed pay, of status, of booty. “Think on it, Nonus. The gladiators have loot from their raiding. Some of that coinage, surely, is for our pockets. And they have women and children following them. Hordes of them. When the brutes are dealt with, who is to sort out all the others? The soldiers. Get your hands on a comely girl to cook your meals and for you to plow when you’re stiff. Or a boy you can hire out, or bugger if you want to. Either way, you’ll be a slave owner. Think on that. Let someone else do the work for once.”
Nonus had thought on that. And he had thought on Volesus’s claim that they were unlikely to be in much danger. The slaves would fracture along ethnic lines. They’d squabble among themselves and be no match for a proper Roman legion. “It’ll be a cleanup operation,” Volesus said. “The best of it is that the rich pricks in Rome are scared. They don’t want to show it, but I know they’re scared. A cleanup operation, that’s all.”
Because of such convincing oratory, Nonus now stands guard on a terrace of some senator’s villa in Salinae. He’s got a vantage onto the baths on the level below. Cossinius, clearly having dropped in on friends, has bathed, been cleaned and oiled, and is now enjoying a massage—if it can legitimately be called that—from a burly slave. By the scent newly risen on the air, he’ll soon be dining as well.
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