The Risen

by David Anthony Durham

  Spartacus lets the rhomphaia’s point touch the ground. He says, “All right. I hear you.” He shrugs free of the hands and arms holding him. The men draw back, looking nervous, or shocked, or proud to have laid hands on their commander. Astera rubs the horse’s neck, whispering to it. Spartacus sheaths the blade and slips it back into position on his back.

  “Whatever fate awaits you tomorrow, it’s mine as well as yours. That…” He pauses, swallows. He finds the Iberians again, though they shifted somewhat in all the commotion. He says, “I am free to choose, and I choose to fight with you. I want the best life, or death, for us all. I swear it. That is what I wanted you to know.”

  —

  Later, when it grows dark, he retreats to his tent for a reprieve. He knows Astera will be with her sisters, posing questions to the goddess. He wants at least a brief spell in solitude. But when he arrives at his tent, someone is waiting for him. Vectia. She sits with her legs crossed beneath her, with her head bowed forward and her eyes closed. Spartacus wonders if she’s fallen asleep like that. The crunch of his feet on the ground brings her head up. He gestures that she should enter through the open tent flap. Inside, he motions for her to sit. She does. He does as well. Somebody has lit a lamp for him. He positions it between them and asks, “Have you a need?”

  The old woman shakes her head. “I’ve no need.”

  “What then?”

  “I misspoke to you once.”

  “Misspoke?”

  “More than that.” Vectia clears her throat. “I spoke an untruth. I meant no harm. I just thought the lie was better for you than the truth.”

  “But you’ve changed your mind. Tell me, then.”

  “Last summer, after all the victories and after the games for Crixus, you asked me if the ghosts had found peace and moved on to the next world. I said they had. Since you couldn’t see them, I thought, why let them haunt you? I said they’d gone and you were lighter for it, which was good. But it was a lie. The ghosts are still with us.”

  “You see them still?”

  “All around us.”

  Spartacus stares at her, and then his gaze drifts away, over to the open tent flap and the dark world outside it. The patch of ground around a fire pit. Other tents. A tethered horse. People busy with their tasks. All of it looks mundane, and yet he feels suddenly cold. He asks, “Why are they here? We avenged them, surely. Many times over.”

  Vectia shifts uneasily. A mosquito rears into view, drunk, large in the lamplight. Neither of them acknowledges it. “The ghosts are not just the Celts with Crixus,” Vectia says. “That’s when I first saw them, but now I know that all the Risen’s dead stay with us. With you. They made oaths to you, didn’t they? They promised to see this through to its conclusion. That’s what they are doing. The Celts, and many more as well. Everyone who has died since. Spartacus, they are a great host. More so today than before.”

  Still looking out into the world, he asks, “Are they right there?”

  “Yes,” she says. “They stand watching. Outside the tent.” She hesitates a moment, then adds, “They are within it as well.”

  Spartacus finds himself breathing shallow breaths, quick ones. It’s not exactly fear that he feels. It’s not that he’s in danger, for there’s nothing in Vectia’s calm demeanor to suggest that. What makes his breathing shallow and quick, and his skin cold, is the unease of having something huge about the world revealed—something he doesn’t for a moment doubt—but still having it remain beyond him to fully grasp. He has eyes, and yet his can’t see what Vectia’s do. He can feel beings present in the tent with them. He believes they’re there, but other than Vectia telling him it’s so, he can’t say why he believes. Not only that, it’s also the realization that they’ve been with him all these long moments. Unseen, but watching him. The dead—who know what all people fear to know and yet must someday know—how have they judged him?

  “Before,” he says, “you said they were not angry. Are they now?”

  “No. I don’t have a word for what they are. But they’re not angry.”

  Shaking his head, Spartacus says, “I wish I could see what you do.”

  “No,” Vectia says, “you don’t.”

  He’s sitting still, barely moving at all, but thoughts rush at him, collide into him. “The Germani?”

  The woman nods. “Many thousands. They are still loyal to you.”

  It’s almost too much. Gannicus. Castus. Are they beside him? Are they listening? He doesn’t ask, afraid of the answer. Then another thought collides with him. This one, he asks before he can think not to. “Skaris? Is he with them?”

  Vectia takes her time in answering. She tugs distractedly at a ball of wool on her tunic. She holds it pressed between a thumb and a forefinger, seems at a loss for how to discard it. Eventually, she presses it back against the tunic and says, “He is…near.”

  Spartacus closes his eyes. He breathes in and exhales and then opens his eyes. “I should’ve known. Perhaps, if I had faced it before, I wouldn’t have needed you to tell me. For some time, there’s been a thickness to the air. Or a thickness in my mind. Perhaps that is a better way of saying it. My mind is crowded as it never was before. Sometimes when I’m walking, I think of one person and then another. Another after that. Some of them are people I know. Some of them not. But I think of them. How is it that they’re inside me?”

  “When you move through the masses, the dead reach out to you. I think they want you to remember them and the pledge they made. They want you to know that they are still true to it.”

  After a long time sitting in silence, Spartacus asks, “What if I release them from their oaths?”

  “They swore to you, not you to them,” Vectia says. “They are with you until this is concluded.”

  “And how can it be concluded, Vectia?”

  “I think that you already know.” Vectia makes a noise in her throat. “But it’s not for me to say, in any event. Me? I will not see it.”

  Spartacus raises an eyebrow. “You’re leaving us?”

  “If you’ll let me, yes.”

  “You are free. You know that.”

  Vectia nods. “Yes, but…I don’t want to displease you.”

  “You’ve done so much for us. You could never displease me.” He inhales, tries on a smile, lets it fade. “What will you do?”

  “I know a man in Cassino. He is a Celt like me. I saw him last when I was on my way to join the uprising. He was sure I’d return soon.”

  “But years have passed. This man may not be there, or he may be dead. Or—”

  “He’ll be there.” Vectia smiles. “I would know if he were dead.”

  “Where is Cassino? It’s far, yes? It will be dangerous. After tomorrow…perhaps especially so.”

  “Not for me.” She holds up her arms, asking him to acknowledge the truth as she knows it. “I’m a woman the world doesn’t see. I’m invisible. Nameless. But that’s good sometimes. No one will bother me. I’ll walk right past them all. Nobody will stop to ask me what I know. What I’ve seen. Who I am. Nobody will guess the things I’ve done. I’m starting to get tired, but I have one last journey in me. I’ll walk all the way to Cassino, and I’ll find Judocus waiting for me. I’ll tell him all the things I’ve seen that he has not. I’ll tease him. And then I’ll challenge him to walk with me over the mountains to find our people. He won’t go, so I’ll tease him for that as well. If I must, I’ll carry on alone. I’m not afraid of that.”

  “I believe you,” Spartacus says after a moment. “I see you, as well. I don’t see all that you do, but I do see you, Vectia.”

  When she’s gone, he sits, alone but not alone, trying to understand. Failing at it. He watches the mosquito land on his thigh. It probes him with its needle for a time, selective, particular, and then it pierces him. He doesn’t swat it. Instead, he watches it fill with his blood and fly away, bloated.

  Soon he’ll walk among the campfires, taking drinks with men, talking softly with wom
en, finding things to make light of with children. It will be good to do so. He is still among the living, and there are still people in the world with him whom he owes the best of himself to. He’ll walk for a time leading Dolmos by an arm, talking through the morrow with him. Drenis, as well, he needs to have private words with, as he has a special mission for him. After all that, he’ll lie on his cot, unsleeping, alone but not alone. And later still Astera will join him, smelling of the smoke and incense of her communion with Kotys. He’ll ask for her promise. She, being Astera, will give it. She’ll lie entwined with him, breathing warmth onto his neck, and maybe then he’ll sleep.

  Thinking of that, he sees an image. He and Astera, lying with ghostly bodies pressed against them, shadow shapes that have form but no substance. A mass of spectral lovers. It’s a chilling image, the dead sleeping with the living. He doesn’t know if it’s true or just a figment of his mind. Do the dead sleep as the living do? Do the dead dream and, if so, of what? He should’ve asked Vectia, though likely she would’ve said she didn’t know. Or that it wasn’t for her to say. Likely, that’s true enough.

  He stands. It’s time to walk among the campfires. It’s time to be Spartacus for those who need him to be Spartacus. For a little longer, at least.

  Laelia

  Leaning her shoulder on the crumbling stone wall of the ruin, Laelia watches the Nubian boy. She knows she should hide, but he doesn’t look like a threat. He’s just a boy. Five or six years old, brown-skinned, with bushy black hair. He walks the beach carrying a net over his shoulder. Every now and then he stoops to pluck something from the edge of the water. She’s not sure what—clams, maybe. Something he can eat. He slips these things into the net and continues. She likes watching him. He is, in all likelihood, a slave, but he looks free. The way he skips at times. The way he seems pleased when he finds what he’s looking for. She wonders if she appeared as free as he when she was a girl. Probably not.

  She peers out over the bluffs, beyond the white sand of the beach, out to the Adriatic Sea. There is only one ship out there, anchored at a distance. It’s been there in the same spot since they arrived here three days ago. There’s a skiff traversing the coastline, and the large vessel out in the deep. Mostly though, the sea is just the sea, all the way to the horizon. Large clouds move like a herd of sheep grazing, all at different speeds, blown by winds meant only for them. The sun is strong enough that the clouds cast shadows on the water. Laelia wonders if the fish in the sea are frightened when the shadows pass over them. Hustus would say that fish don’t think anything, but Laelia disagrees. Everything that lives, she has found, has thoughts. They are thoughts in a different language, that’s all. And then she’s surprised at herself. With all the things crowded into her mind, where did she find space to wonder about the thoughts of fish?

  “Sister,” a woman says. Epta. “Sit down. We’re not supposed to be seen.”

  Laelia looks down the coast toward the mouth of the river and the village, unseen, beyond it. And then back the other way, until the shoreline curves out of sight to the south. There’s nobody to be seen. When she looks back to where the Nubian boy had been, he’s not there. His tracks in the sand are, but not he. Puzzling, but she’s seen more fantastic things than a disappearing Nubian boy in the last few weeks. She says, “There’s nobody to see me.”

  Saying that reminds her of Hustus. He’s not here to see her either. Such an ache in her, his absence. She wants so badly for him to simply appear, to take her hand again and complete her. Why can’t he do that? It would be unbearable except that she so often dreams of him. He’s not, apparently, with her in the waking world, but he is in the sleeping one. Maybe that means he’s dead. She doesn’t know. She saw him last on the eve of the final battle. With all the things that happened the next day, they never found each other. Now, she knows, they never will. It’s only the dream Hustus she has now. Maybe, if he is dead, it means that he’s waiting for her in the afterlife. She likes that thought. She likes that he seems to be reaching out to her across whatever divide there is between them. Last night he spoke to her by taking small stones out of his mouth. He gave them to her one by one. Stones instead of words. He wanted her to hold as many of them as she could in her hand, but most of them slipped through her fingers. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t hold all of them, just a few.

  “I wish you would sit,” Epta says. “They’ll return when they return. You watching won’t bring them any faster.”

  Laelia scans the beach and the sea a moment longer, then drops down behind the wall. Epta has done her best to flatten the overgrown grass inside the small ruin. She’s spread a tattered wool blanket beside her. Deopus lies on it, on his back, sleeping. Epta leans against the stones, watching Laelia with a tired expression. One arm cradles her belly, the other touches her son’s foot. She’s so thin. Everywhere but in her abdomen. There she is swelling with the life inside it—Drenis’s baby. Sometimes, looking at her, Laelia thinks the child in there is sucking the life out of its mother. Other times, as now, she tries instead to think that the fullness of that belly is proof that the child is sustaining Epta, helping to keep her full and round and healthy.

  As she has so often over the last few days, Laelia touches the wooden plaque that hangs at her neck. She runs her fingertips over the Roman letters drawn in thick ink, the ones that name the man who calls himself her master. Epta wears one as well, though she’s slipped it around so that the plaque is on her back, pressed against the stone. She says that the baby doesn’t like it. When it’s on her chest, she says, the baby kicks her insides, turns, protests. When it’s on her back, the baby calms.

  “Do you think he will come?” Epta asks.

  “I don’t know,” Laelia says.

  It’s the truth. She doesn’t know, and moreover, she doesn’t like talking about it. In asking if he’ll come, Epta is asking what the shape of their lives will be. Laelia would rather stand up again and watch the Nubian boy who looks free, and stare at the sea and the world in its largeness and think only the strange thoughts these sights bring to her. She’d like to think about things other than all those who have died and all that’s been lost and all the ways the world might yet abuse her. Each moment that she forgets to worry about the entirety of what her life will or won’t be is a sweet reprieve. These moments are few, though, and they’re easier for her than for Epta. She has only herself. Epta is more than herself. She’s three times herself, so of course she wants to believe something better than the worst.

  Knowing her answer isn’t enough, Laelia changes it to “Maybe.” It’s little different than I don’t know, except more suggestive of possibility. That’s why she says it and then repeats it, as if saying it twice doubles the possibility. “Maybe.”

  Epta nods, seems comforted to a small degree. She tugs on a tuft of grass. “Did it really happen? It doesn’t seem possible. Sometimes when I wake, I forget and have to remember it all over again.”

  Laelia doesn’t have to ask what she means. She says, “It really happened.”

  “The ghosts that Vectia saw, did you truly see them as well?”

  That question is harder to answer than the first. She knows what she saw. That part is easy. But whether it was real or imagined, or whether it was real because it was imagined: those things she’s not as sure of. She wishes she could ask the old woman to verify the things she witnessed, but she’d not seen her on the day of the battle, or since. Most likely, she will never see her again. She’s not yet used to that fact, but she knows it is true, of Vectia, and of so many others. She says, “I think so.”

  “You saw what happened to Spartacus?”

  “I think so.” And then adds, “Yes.” Both things are true at the same time. She’s uncertain. And yet she’s also sure. She did see what happened to Spartacus. She saw what happened to all of them.

  “That’s good, at least. It’s one thing that’s good.” She tugs on the string around her neck. “Still, I don’t know if you have a gift or a c
urse. I saw only what my eyes showed me. You saw the rest.”

  “It’s Vectia who had the gift,” Laelia says. “Everything I saw…she saw it first. She saw it without even the Bright-Eyed Lady to help her.”

  Epta is quiet for a time. She pulls her eyes away and looks at the swell of her belly. “It doesn’t seem possible that everything ended in a single day.”

  “Not everything has ended,” Laelia points out. “I thought that, too. But I was wrong. We’re still here.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Laelia doesn’t dispute the point a second time. Both women fall into silence. They wait. Two women with plaques about their necks marking them as slaves. A boy child. A baby not yet born. They wait. As unsure about the future as they are about the past.

  —

  The morning of the last battle began with Laelia frightened by what Astera was asking of her. She, Astera, and Cerzula walked down from the hill on which they’d spent the night calling down the moon. In the dim, misty grayness before the dawn, they weaved through tents. They navigated figures just starting to take shape in the growing light. They avoided lumbering wagons and horses that seemed already agitated, as if they sensed the coming tumult and were neighing and stomping on the ground and tossing their necks and snorting to discuss it among themselves. The air was alive with sounds, more like midday than so early an hour. Occasionally trumpets blared, speaking a military language Laelia didn’t know. And there was a constant sound all throughout the camp, a chorus of sorts made by the grating of iron on stone. Thousands of weapons being sharpened. They called to Laelia in strange, rasping whispers that sometimes sounded far away and other times were so near it felt as if lips were pressed against her ears. Laelia wished the day would come faster. She wished the world didn’t look so eerie, that the shadows didn’t move when they should be still, that her lips didn’t tingle with the taste of the Bright-Eyed Lady, and that her eyes hadn’t seen what they had.