“You won’t find them here. I’ll tell you where they are.” Kastor raises a hand, showing it as empty and harmless, and points back toward the market. “Turn that way and—”
The soldier lunges. It’s a jerky, nervous motion, a reflex of fear instead of a planned attack. The sword point slices through two of Kastor’s fingers. They twirl into the air as Kastor fends the sword away from his body. He swings under it and punches the soldier with his other hand. The blow catches him under the chin and snaps his head back. As he staggers, Kastor tries to break his grip on his sword. With one hand missing fingers and gushing blood, he can’t get the weapon free. The soldier won’t let go, even though he seems only semiconscious.
Kastor gives up the effort and shoves the soldier when the clank of hobnailed boots approaches. He dashes back toward Philon, grabs the Greek’s wrist, and runs, yanking him into motion with such savage force that the smaller man has no choice but to accept movement or lose his arm.
Philon thinks, But your fingers…
They race after Bolmios and Tarhun. Shouts behind them, demanding they halt, drive them faster. A confusion of shaky images and sensations assault Philon one after another. The arm of the man who, shoved by Kastor, knocks Philon on the forehead. A horse that shies when they burst into the street next to it, stepping back and then kicking out at a child passing behind it. The gutter that, after splashing through it, leaves Philon’s feet slippery against the leather, turning running into a deadly careen. They stampede down stairs and through alleys, plowing through people, dodging carts.
Racing through a run-down warehouse district that has seen better days, they reach the sea. Bolmios’s boat has pulled up on the far side of another boat moored to a decrepit wall at the water’s edge. The crew waits there, holding the vessel in place. Bolmios and Tarhun leap into the first boat, tiptoe across it like acrobats, and land in their own. Kastor and Philon aren’t as nimble. By the time they make the final leap, the crewmen have shoved off and are using their oars to push away from the moored boat. The two men fall into them, a confusion of bodies and oars and cursing. Bolmios kicks at both of them, ordering them toward the prow and out of the rowers’ way.
Once they are settled and the boat gains speed with each pull of the oars, Kastor clenches his mutilated hand within his good one and groans at the pain of it. It’s the first time, Philon thinks, that he’s acknowledged the injury at all. “That little gap-toothed bastard! He took my fingers! That bastard. Did you see it happen?”
Philon hadn’t noticed the state of the Roman’s teeth, but he nods. He’s still panting too hard to speak. For that matter, he’s stunned to be alive. But they’d reached the boat. Each passing moment pulls them farther away from the shore and into the bustle of boat traffic on a sea that is marvelously glistening and alive, with breeze enough that they’ll soon have the sails up and be hissing across the waves.
An arrow slips into the water off to one side. Another lands well behind them. Tiny things, gone in an instant.
Bolmios shouts from the stern of the boat, “Hey, Greek! You see now? Who betrayed you? Not us. See?”
He does see. He’d been so completely wrong, and because of it they’d almost been captured. Because of his hesitation, Kastor has two fewer fingers than he woke up with that morning.
“The little turd,” Kastor says. “I should’ve stepped on him. If I’d have had another few moments with him…” His words disintegrate into a garbled, profane groan through gritted teeth.
“Let me see.” Philon gestures for Kastor, who is slumped down on the deck, to sit up and show him the wound. The Galatian pushes himself up. Swaying with the pull of the oars, he unclenches his good hand and shows the bloody mess of the mutilated one.
That’s when the arrow appears. One moment it doesn’t exist. The next the broad-headed iron point of it juts through Kastor’s chest. Philon sees it first, and only afterward does he hear the wet thwack that announces it. And in the moments after, he senses the flight that brought it there, the hissing arc from the dock, through the sky, and down to punch through his companion’s chest. Had Kastor not just hauled himself upright, the arrow would have missed him. It might well have struck Philon instead. But Kastor had risen.
The Galatian sits down, staring at the Greek with a face that, for once, shows no humor.
Vectia
They’ve been searching for weeks. Vectia leads them and knows they don’t have many more days in them. Behind her, following, is misery walking. They are few instead of the many they had been. She sees them every time she looks back. Wounded men, anguished women, bedraggled children. Ullio should lead them now, but he is blank-faced, shocked by what happened. So Vectia keeps them moving. For some reason, they follow without question. Their clothes hang in tatters, ripped by the route their escape required. They are lean, cheeks ravaged into hollows, eyes bulbous, rattling in sockets that seem too large for them. Their bones grow more and more visible with each passing day. Less flesh and more bone. They are an awful sight to look upon, a responsibility Vectia didn’t wish for, hadn’t dreamed of, doesn’t want.
It would have been bad enough if they were the only things she sees when she looks back. But they’re not. The living are not alone on this walk. Thousands more trudge behind them. Pale ghosts that have not been freed from this world to be born in another one. They’re visible more in the shadows and at night than in the day, but she knows they’re always there. Even when she can barely see them, she can hear the rasp of their spectral feet through the grass, the crunch of them on the dirt. Ghosts, they huddle wherever the living camp. They hide in the trees, among rocks, on the far side of a stream. It’s as if they must follow, but also as if they fear to be too near the living bodies.
At night the ghosts become ghastly versions of what they’d been in life, almost real enough to touch. They move, but they don’t breathe. Their mouths hang open, but they don’t speak. They bear the wounds that killed them, though they no longer bleed from them. Bleeding, for them, is over. Being an army is over. Instead, they are one massive funeral procession. Vectia is their guide.
They avoid roads and towns, skirt villas and wide valleys and the farms there. She takes them up the course of a river called Cerbalus, hard going farther up, rocky and vine-choked. Her objective? There is only one. To find Spartacus. To take back word of what happened and to join them again and to find some way to release the ghosts. She doesn’t know how she’ll do it. How to find an army in a vast country? Spartacus planned to return to the south after the summer campaign, but she knows nothing of what transpired with him the last few months. Perhaps he too was massacred. She doesn’t want to believe that, but the gods are fickle, most pleased when they’re being cruel.
That puts her in mind of Kotys, the angry god of the Thracians. She had not been fickle. She’d given Spartacus everything he’d asked of her. Escape. Weapons. Victories. Whole towns to plunder. With Astera communing directly with her, surely the Thracians were blessed in a manner Crixus had never been, his whispering druid aside. She knows little of this goddess, but as she walks, Vectia calls to her. She asks to be led to the Risen. She promises that if she is, she’ll honor Kotys forever after, first among the gods she worships.
“Just lead me to them,” she says, though what she really means is lead me to him.
—
Had she known that Crixus was doomed all along? No, of course not. She could have numbered the reasons for going with her chieftain on her fingers. She was Allobroges. That meant he was her chieftain. He spoke the language she was trying to master. Many followed him. He plundered and brought them all riches. He was not troubled by the grand machinations that he claimed sapped Spartacus of vigor. They should just take from the Romans all they could carry, and then, when they were sated, why not go home? Over the mountains and back to their people and the land of their gods.
Things were good at first, traveling with her people, learning to be one of them. They marched north from Thurii
into Lucania, crossing river after slow-moving river. They terrorized the land around Heraclea, making it a flaming wasteland stripped of resources. Outside Metapontum, they received tribute in exchange for not doing the same. In Apulia, when they crossed the Via Appia, many squatted to make the road into a toilet. They turned and followed the coastline across the plains and hills, a land of olive groves, vineyards, fields of wheat. Midsummer as it was, they raided farms. They took what could be eaten, burned what was not yet ripe. And sheep. There were many sheep. The sheep herders, tough young men, were more likely to join them than fight them. They gave advice on where the bridges across the rivers were, so the Risen sent out advance parties to take them. Casuentus, Acalander, Aciris, Siris: they crossed them all with ease.
Near Cannae they found the place where a Carthaginian named Hannibal had killed more Romans than any other man. They had games there in his memory. The men raced chariots, horses’ hooves pounding dust up from the dry earth, wheels spinning and jolting so quickly the spokes were blurs. The men fought duels, meeting in single combat in the Celtic way. At night they feasted and drank. They sang to lyre music and danced in the warm light of large fires and told tales of their gods. Vectia learned their names—Teutates, Nerthus, Ogmios. Many men displayed the severed heads of Romans they had killed: dangling from their chariots, adorning their horses’ necks, nailed, along with severed hands, to poles outside their tents. These were Celtic things, and Vectia worked hard to learn all of it, to understand it and see it as the right way. She did her share of the women’s jobs; cooking, slaughtering animals, skinning them, keeping an eye on the children, tending the fires and hauling the cooking things and the camp supplies. Many things, for the women’s jobs were more numerous than the men’s. She proved herself useful and of value.
Yes, the men did horrors, but they were Allobroges men. The horrors were done to others, and the spoils of those horrors were brought to the group and there enjoyed. The men took joy in abusing the women they captured, but they weren’t alone. The Celtic women took joy in it too. In different ways, but still. And in the end they always ransomed the prisoners back to their kin before moving on. They weren’t Romans. They didn’t need slaves. They just needed each other.
She spoke Celtic as much as possible, trying to accent her words like an Allobroges should. It made her head hurt to do so. Her tongue grew sore. Forming the sounds was like speaking with a stone that she pushed around inside her mouth. Tiring to her jaw and her mind. She knew she did not sound like she was supposed to, no matter how she tried. That made her hurt, too, but in the stomach instead. A ball of worry-pain. Would she never speak the tongue she was born to? Too old, perhaps, to learn what even a babe could.
There was one woman, Beatha, who laughed whenever Vectia spoke. It was not unkind laughter, though—humorous, not derisive. She often walked beside Vectia, a wooden staff helping her along. Sometimes she even grasped Vectia’s wrist and squeezed. Her grip was tighter than her thin arm suggested it could be. From her limp and the sounds she made on rising and the wrinkles around her eyes, Vectia thought her old, but she didn’t ask her age. She didn’t call her mother, though there was respect in the term. She called her sister, and Beatha didn’t dispute it. Anyway, the woman likely didn’t know her age any more than Vectia knew her own. Why compare uncertainties?
One night when they lay together in a cluster of older women and younger girls, Beatha told them about the shapes drawn in the stars. She pointed at this cluster and then that and seemed to draw lines between things. Some of them Vectia knew: the Lesser Bear, Aries, Libra. When she named the Greater Bear in Latin, Beatha slapped her hand and made a motion as if to erase the words. And then she spoke fast and animated, so much so that Vectia could only pluck stray words from the stream of them.
Was she telling the same stories that Vectia knew? she wanted to ask. Was the Great Bear, to her, Callisto the huntress, the one whom the god Jupiter noticed and wanted and raped? It was never good, she thought, to be noticed by Jupiter. Because of it Callisto bore him a son. Is that the story Beatha was telling? She tried to find the shape of it in the Celtic words, of how Juno, angry with Callisto, turned her into a bear who was almost shot by her son, Arcas. Jupiter stopped him and transformed him into a bear as well and lifted him—along with his mother—into the sky and hung them there. They were still there because Neptune will not let them bathe in the sea. Instead, they forever swirl above the horizon. This, at least, is one of the stories Vectia knows of the stars.
She listened, but she couldn’t hear any of this in Beatha’s Celtic, and she was too embarrassed to ask. She believed she would later, once she knew more and could understand more. If that time ever came. She mostly felt as if she were learning little. On that, Beatha was kind. She spoke only Celtic to her, all day up until she turned away to sleep. Then only did she say in Latin the same thing every time. She said, “You are not Allobroges yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
Vectia didn’t question it when they left the gentler terrain of the Apulian plains and climbed into a rough territory called Gargano. It wasn’t a place she knew. It had not been along her master’s route, being too wild, a landscape of craggy limestone peaks, of forests of massive oaks and beech trees and high meadows blooming with wildflowers, caves carved deep into the stone. An isolated thumb jutting out to where its rocky coastline crashed into the sea, it wasn’t a place of towns and cities. It was rich in deer and boar and wolves, a place to ride and hunt. It was a haven in which they could be Celtic without Roman interference. They could strike down, Crixus said, onto the plains whenever they wanted to, taking what they needed and then vanishing again. The Romans would fear to come into the forested mountains after them. Life, he promised, would be good here for the summer.
By the end of it, Vectia hoped, she would be one with her people. “You are not Allobroges yet. Maybe tomorrow.” That, each time Beatha murmured it, gave Vectia hope. She fell asleep thinking it and awoke wanting it. How silly of her. How fickle a thing, hope. It can fill someone so completely one moment, only to be nothing but a raw, empty space the next.
—
In the end, Kotys does not lead Vectia to Spartacus. She leads Spartacus to Vectia instead.
Having camped for the day in a tight, hidden copse of trees, Vectia rises to the sound of bats flying out into the deepening dusk to feed. She lies still for a moment, watching the creatures dart through the patch of orange sky above her. Her body hurts. Her muscles and bones and skin. Her head hurts. It has for days now. She walks with her head pounding, sleeps with the same, wakes with it. There’s nothing to be done about any of that. She’ll lead them through the night again, searching. That’s all she can do.
She stirs those near her, and then she moves away from the group, out of the crevasse-like fold that hides them. The view opens up in its ridged, overlapping, auburn highlight and shadowed grandeur. She’s not alone in taking it in. The ghosts are there already, backs to her, still. They don’t turn or retreat as she approaches. They stand staring, all of them seemingly transfixed by something.
Vectia follows their gaze. Her breath catches. A great host is down the valley, where they hadn’t been in the morning, when she’d taken in this same view in the gray of predawn. Campfires, hundreds of them. Tents and wagons and things she can’t make out. People by the tens of thousands. They are so near that their appearance seems like sorcery. Or, she corrects, like the work of a goddess.
Her living followers begin to bunch around her. They brush shoulder to shoulder with the ghosts, though none of them know it but her.
“It’s them, yes?” It’s Ullio, one of Crixus’s generals, the one who should be leading this group but has not had the heart for it. Vectia thinks he sounds equal parts eager and frightened. He should be frightened. He bears no good news, and he’ll be the one who has to deliver it.
And a man: “Is it Spartacus’s camp? We’ve found them?”
“They’ll give us food?” a woman’s voice asks. “The
y won’t hurt us?”
They ask questions like children, as if only she knows the answer and whatever one she gives, they’ll take as truth. And she does know the truth. She exhales the breath she’s been holding and says, “Yes, that’s them. And no, they won’t hurt us.”
She begins the descent that will take her to them. Because she sees the ghosts and wishes she didn’t—because they are dead, and she wishes they weren’t—she doesn’t look back. She walks, slow and steady. She pauses when anyone calls to her to do so, but she keeps her eyes on the camp and, when it drops out of sight, on the smoke in the sky above it and the glow of the fires in the darkening night sky. She hopes that Spartacus won’t be angry with her for bringing an army of troubled ghosts to him.
—
Vectia is watching the flies crawling on her legs when someone emerges from the council tent. Astera. The men waiting outside stiffen in her presence. None of them speak. Most of them only glance at her and then look away. The priestess looks directly at her, shielding her eyes to see through the midday glare. She studies Vectia a moment, then walks toward her. The others clustered around Vectia draw back. They don’t go far, but they move away as if they had no connection with her and weren’t aware of Astera either.
The Risen received them with hesitant caution, knowing from the first sighting that they bore only foul tidings. They fed them and gave them water and tended wounds as needed. Still, they’re wary. Ullio is in that council tent, telling their tale to Spartacus and his captains. As he does, many watch Vectia and the others. People stare at them, whispering. Few come near, concerned lest the curse on them become a contagion. None of them see the ghosts who mill among them, which, Vectia decides, is for the better.
Vectia waves her hands to stir the flies. They alight again by the time Astera reaches her. She would’ve been nervous before as well—she’s never been this close to the priestess—but she is too shattered by the events of the past weeks, too fatigued from leading both the living and the dead. And Kotys had brought her here, hadn’t she? That meant something. She doesn’t even lower her gaze.
The Risen Page 27
