“Magistrate,” Spartacus says, “my point was just that—that they never forget.”
This seems to make Statius fume. “Would you like to see another one of your men die? Which one? This big one who so wants to get at me? How about him? Dead before your eyes. Smell his shit and entrails? Or the tall stupid one?” He points in Dolmos’s direction.
Bantia starts to make some entreaty but gets punched again, hard enough this time that he seems unable to rise. He lies on his side, blinking, his mouth an oval that sucks at the air like a fish just pulled from the water. Dolmos doesn’t want to crush his neck or pop out his eyes anymore. Bantia, he thinks, was tricked as well, by his own people.
“Statius, you are making a mistake,” Spartacus says. Dolmos is stunned by his deference, by his calm tone. “Let us give you Rome. You know we can. Let us give you Rome.”
“Oh, the time for that has passed. Blood has been spilled.”
“No more has to be spilled. Let it be forgotten.”
Forgotten? Nico dead and forgotten? Impossible. And then Dolmos understands. Spartacus is lying. He’s trying to create a moment. His calmness is a feint. He’s looking for a way to attack. Dolmos tries to as well. But the sword pressing into his back and the one at his shoulder—he’s trapped. They all are.
Goddess, he prays, save us. Eater of Men, let us kill these ones for you.
Statius twists his lips. Shakes his head. “No, no, there will be no deals between us. It was all toward a purpose. To know your mind. To be able to tell of your arrogance. And for you and your generals to be captured by Asculum. I’ve beheaded the beast that you created. Slave, your rebellion is over. It won’t end well for you, but it was never going to, was it? Asculum, however—I think we will do very well out of handing you over to Rome.”
“You hate them,” Spartacus says. “You said it, and I heard the truth in your voice.”
The magistrate shrugs. “I will not hate them nearly so much when they grant us citizenship.”
“My army will—”
“Will what? They can do nothing to us. You saw our walls! We are perfectly safe here. And your army, without your clever leadership, will be slaughtered.”
Furious One, work a wonder, Dolmos thinks.
Spartacus is still trying to delay. He begins again, still reasoned of tone, almost friendly.
Statius talks over him. “Enough! Stop speaking!”
The slave behind Statius slips between the soldiers whose spears hover above the magistrate.
The magistrate talks on. He addresses the soldiers: “Bind them. Hands and feet. Hurt them if they fight, but don’t kill them. They’ll get to see Rome one last time.”
Please, Dolmos thinks, Bleeding Mother, please work a…The thought trails away as he watches Statius’s slave.
Statius doesn’t notice him. The soldiers don’t either. It looks as if the slave has read some sign from his master and is rushing to complete a task for him. That’s why nobody does anything at all when he reaches over Statius’s shoulder and slams a knife into his chest. His slim arm stabs, pulls out, and then slams in again, again, and again. He’s saying something, but it’s soft enough that Dolmos can’t make it out. The wet thwacks of his fist on Statius’s chest are louder. The magistrate spits a gout of blood, but other than that he’s stunned immobile. The attack only lasts a moment, but it’s a moment in which the room is otherwise frozen, staring, everyone slack-jawed. Statius topples forward, the slave riding his back. It’s a slow, stretched-out twisting of time that defies comprehension. In it, Dolmos knows exactly where one of the men behind him stands. Just a moment ago his sword pressed into his back. Now the point has drawn away. The grip on his shoulder loosened. The blade at his shoulder is still there, but the man’s attention must be on Statius’s slow tumble.
The slave, pushing up from his master’s body, shouts, “For the Risen!”
With those words, the twisting of time snaps back into place. Everything happens at once, all around him, though at first Dolmos experiences only his part of it. He drops his shoulder away from the sword point. He sweeps around, grabs the ankles of the man behind him, and yanks. The soldier’s arms fly out as the world comes out from under his feet, knocking the second soldier back. The first lands hard on the stone floor. Dolmos scrabbles over his body. He grabs him by the chin, his fingers pushing into the man’s mouth. He bashes his helmeted head against the floor. He grinds his knee into his sword arm until the man’s grip on the hilt wilts. Dolmos has the blade in hand just in time to sink it into the groin of the second soldier. He lunges behind the blade, pushing it into his flesh and probing for an artery.
The effect is immediate. Blood. A gush of urine. The stench of feces. The man stands motionless, sword in hand, but he’s done, trying only to be still in the hopes that what just happened didn’t. Dolmos pulls the blade from the man’s groin and looks back at the soldier trapped beneath him. The man’s face is desperate. He’s bitten into Dolmos’s fingers, and his face is a smear of blood and drool. Dolmos presses the point of the man’s sword into his neck and leans into it.
Dolmos gets to his feet. The others have done the same. They’re all killing. They all have managed to get weapons. The magistrates try to flee, but they’re tangled among the legs of the soldiers who are guarding them. The spearmen are thrusting at the gladiators, trying to reach them over the table. Dolmos, being at one end of the table, rounds it and attacks the spearmen from the side. He stabs one in the neck. The next through his armpit. He smashes his foot down on one of the magistrates’ hands, and then sinks the sword into his back. He leaves it and grabs a spear and rages into the spearmen, roaring, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, slicing with the point at times. It’s a blur, but he’s killing. He’s still alive, but he’s made others dead.
And then Spartacus is pulling them together into a tight knot. Fighting defensively, they move as a group toward the courtyard. The soldiers are all around them, but they’re tentative. They’ve no advantage other than numbers now, and the gladiators are so much more skilled at killing.
“Dolmos,” Spartacus snaps, “to Gaidres!”
Only then does he notice that the older man is injured. He wears a Roman breastplate, but a spear must have punctured it. He clutches at his bloody side. His other hand is still deadly with his sword, but he’s unsteady on his feet. He stumbles as they descend the stairs into the evening air and down toward the city’s wide streets. Dolmos gets under his arm and props him up. Spartacus taunts the soldiers around them, moving quickly, feinting at them. Who among them wants to die? Step forward, he says, and it will be done. Who wants to live? Back away, and you will. Let them pass. Gannicus is repeating over and over, You thought to betray us? You thought to betray us? Skaris is a horror. He roars wordless anger from a face covered in blood—his own from a scalp wound, by the looks of it.
Spartacus leaps upon a man who stumbles, opens his belly, and kicks him hard in the chest. The man crashes to the ground.
The soldiers give way more easily, and the gladiators pick up speed. It’s hard with Gaidres, but Dolmos runs with him as best he can. The city gates aren’t far. They’re open still. Skaris shouts in Thracian to the soldiers outside. They’re up in an instant and dashing toward the gates. The guards atop the wall start to close them.
They won’t succeed, Dolmos thinks. He knows it now. They’ll survive. Kotys answered his prayers. He realizes he doesn’t know what happened to Statius’s slave after the goddess moved his body and spoke through his mouth. Maybe the goddess made him vanish. Or maybe she was done with him and he’s dead now. He doesn’t know Bantia’s fate, either. Perhaps he’s dead too. Like Statius. And many others. But they’re not. That’s all the proof he needs of Kotys’s love of them.
He limps along, Gaidres propped on one side. They’re a little behind the others but not much. The older man’s legs grow weaker with each step, but he’s strong. He’ll live, and they’re getting there. Before them, Spartacus and Skaris and Gannic
us and Castus bellow the way forward, unstoppable, warriors driving Italians before them, as they should always do. Never trust them.
Just kill them.
Those are the words he’s thinking when the blow takes him from behind.
Sura
When Sura hears that the Greek medicus, Philon, has returned from his mission to Sicily, she’s in the middle of making a new vial of tincture of nightshade, the Bright-Eyed Lady. She’s grinding the root and measuring it with a small spoon, dropping the correct dosage into a fermentation of apple vinegar. She finishes as quickly as she can, and then she puts away the herbs that she’s been using, each to its own little sack: the soapwort and meadow rue, Bendis flower and horse tongue. The roots from the nightshade she sets carefully into a metal container, lifting them with a cloth to protect her fingers. The seeds she pours into wooden boxes, and the leaves she scoops into a sack marked from the others by the rodent skulls attached to the fastening strings. She makes bunches of the larger stalks. As soon as they are in good enough order that Astera won’t notice her haste, she leaves the tent and goes searching.
She finds the Greek seated with Gaidres, Drenis, and the Roman, Baebia, who has been allowed into Spartacus’s inner circle since he posed as a messenger to Clodianus’s army, a deed that, Sura begrudgingly admits, led to the killing of many Romans. They sit in the clearing at the center of the Thracian camp, a new one just established in the foothills of the Sila Mountains, south of Thurii. That town—which had welcomed them the year before—shut its gates to them, just as most of the cities they’d approached did. Spartacus had spoken at length with officials in Brundisium, but nothing had come of that either. So they were here, camped, in need of a purpose. Philon and Kastor, she hopes, will bring it to them.
A man she doesn’t know sits where Kastor should, beside Philon. He’s copper-skinned, darker than the Roman, though what tribe he is, she can’t place. His black hair is matted into snake-thick locks. He looks devious, dark-eyed, and murderous, but not like a warrior; he wears too many rings and wrist bracelets for that. Instantly, she doesn’t like him.
But what matters is that he’s not Kastor, the one she cares about seeing again. She wants him to walk in, tall and cocky as he is, easy with his body and with his smile. She wants to see him and to watch him grin on seeing her. She’s been waiting for that moment these many months. She could have had other men, but the ones she would have accepted are not hers to have. Though Spartacus as Zagreus had made love to her, it had changed nothing. It didn’t happen again. He didn’t look at her differently afterward, or speak of it, or seek her out again. She’d thought that, having caught his seed inside her womb, she might bear his child. But no, she hadn’t.
Spartacus is Astera’s. Gaidres is Cerzula’s. Skaris keeps several Celtic women in his tent, ones who came with him out of the ludus he was rescued from. Even Drenis—whose face is too much like a woman’s for her to desire—has found Epta. Everyone has someone. Except her. That is why she wants Kastor back.
Laelia tends a small fire near the men. She pushes a pot filled, no doubt, with spiced wine into the coals at the fire’s edge. She glances at Sura, greets her with a smile. Sura acknowledges it with a thrust of her chin. She goes to her and asks in Thracian, “What of Kastor? Have you seen him?”
“No,” the girl says. She speaks slowly, as if she is thinking hard, in her strange accent. “The Greek is waiting until Spartacus arrives to speak of what happened.”
Of what happened? She stares hard at Laelia, waiting for more, trying to read if that means she knows that something happened, something specific. She stares until Laelia shrugs and says, “Sister, I know nothing. Wait. You’ll know soon.”
Sura, annoyed with her, moves away.
Epta is there too. She sits right beside Drenis, near enough that they touch at the knee. The girl is constantly at his side now, like a puppy beside its master, Sura thinks. She’s no puppy, though. She’s a mother. The evidence of it crawls in the dirt nearby. Deopus, the boy child who should have been abandoned. Why would she want it? It’s a child of Vatia’s abuses. It keeps that time alive. The boy’s eyes are brown, not like his mother’s. His hair is light, but Sura knows that it will darken as he grows. His skin already suggests olive tones deeper than Epta’s. He will ever be a reminder of the evils of their slavery. One day, she’s sure, when he’s grown, he will emerge from under his skin and reveal the face of the rapist that made him. Sura could end him so quickly by spilling a few drops of the Bright-Eyed Lady into his mouth. It would’ve been so easy before and better for all of them. Now Drenis has taken Epta and the boy to his side. He’s a strange man, Drenis; Epta, a strange girl, deserves him. The most frustrating thing is that Astera has said nothing against the child. She’s even bounced the boy on her knee, saying nonsense words to him, making him laugh. It all annoys Sura, but it doesn’t matter. She’ll forget them once she sees Kastor again. So where is he?
Sura hovers around the talking men, who barely notice her. She feels stupid pacing, but her body wants to move. Cerzula, watching her, indicates that she should come and sit beside her. She doesn’t. The boy is near her. If she sat there, Cerzula would expect her to coo over him, to keep him safe from the fire, and to pretend she doesn’t wish him gone from the world. Instead, she sits down behind the men, near enough that she can hear.
“The Risen look as strong as ever,” Philon says. “Can we actually have grown our numbers since the spring? I wouldn’t have thought that possible.”
His voice sounds different than before. Sura remembers him always having a wry confidence he didn’t deserve. A Greekness. As if he knew better about everything and was ever amused at the ignorance all around him. It wasn’t necessarily the things he said, just how he said them. Now there’s a flatness to his tone that doesn’t hint at multiple meanings.
“And this string of victories,” he continues, “seems never-ending. In Sicily I told tales of what you’d accomplished. If I’d known what you were accomplishing, I’d have had more deeds to speak of than I have words.”
“I doubt that,” Drenis says.
That makes Sura think of Kastor. If he were here, he’d have uttered a jibe at the Greek’s expense. He’d have turned his words back on him and poked fun, as he always did. He’d have said something more amusing than I doubt that. Where is he? Does he live, and is he well? And, mostly, will he come back to her? It’s strange, how much the question fills her with dread. She hadn’t known he mattered as much to her as it now seems.
The man with the black hair points at Philon with a heavily ringed finger. “I heard this one talk about your growing army over and over again. He didn’t exaggerate. Have you all the slaves in Italy with you?”
Gaidres slides one hand across to cradle his spear-wounded side. It’s healed somewhat but—Cerzula says—it causes him constant pain. “Never so many as that,” he says. “We have numbers, yes. More than we want. We’ve had our way with Italy from end to end. There was Crixus and that hardship…but mostly we’ve been blessed. Still though, not everything is as we would have it, especially since Asculum. Before then, no city had shunned us. Since then, no city has joined us.”
Drenis chimes in to name them. Canusium, which had seemed well disposed to them during the spring, was cool to their return. Tarentum turned them away, citing the insults Thurii endured the winter before. Metapontum refused to even speak with them. As did all the coastal cities of Lucania. Any place large enough to have great walls to hide behind did. None would give Spartacus the vow of friendship he wanted so badly. And that, Sura believed, was Crixus’s fault. He’d been too harsh in his campaign in the spring and summer, and his winter abusing the people of Thurii had left no kind feelings there. Everything that Spartacus worked for, Crixus had managed to undermine. At least he, like Oenomaus, had died; that was one thing they both did right.
“It weighs on Spartacus,” Drenis says. “It’s the thing he wanted most to come out of this season. The key to point
ing ourselves at Rome and finishing them.”
Sura can’t fathom why Spartacus cares so much about whether cities join them. The Greek is right. The Risen are as strong as ever. The only things the Italians have given them in return for their efforts to woo them are deceit and treachery. Don’t befriend them. Kill them. Destroy them. Bring them misery. That’s what they deserve.
A few others arrive. Not Spartacus but the Germani, Gannicus and Castus. It’s the latter who asks, “Kastor?”
Sura feels a quickening of her attention, an instant energy in her abdomen. But Philon only shakes his head. What kind of answer is that? It’s not one. It’s the denial of one.
“He’ll tell it all in a moment,” Gaidres says. “Wait for Spartacus. Whatever the news, he should hear it with us.”
Sura grinds an exhaled breath through her teeth. She’s loud enough that the men turn and look at her. She looks away.
Skaris arrives trailing Dolmos behind him. He leads him as one would an elderly person, holding him by the wrist and showing him where to sit. Dolmos. He’s different than he was. He’s silent, slow moving. The blow to his head has rendered him a dumb beast that can follow simple instructions, that can be moved and be directed, but with no mind of his own. He sees the world without understanding it. He eats when food is given him. When he needs to relieve himself, he grows agitated and has to be led to a private place or be shown how to use the latrine. What are they to do with him? He’s no warrior anymore. Spartacus should, Sura thinks, kill him. Mercifully. Quickly. But kill him, for everyone’s sake. She knows ways that it could be done, without even doing violence to his flesh.
The Risen Page 38
