Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  "I wouldn't lend to him," said Crassus. "Verres won't last."

  "I hope you're right! How does he know so much about what happened between the pirate strategoi and Spartacus?"

  Crassus grinned; it worked a small miracle upon his big smooth face, which suddenly looked young and naughty. “Oh, I daresay they told him all about it when he applied for his cut of the two thousand talents."

  "Do you think they gave him a cut?"

  "Undoubtedly. He lets them use Sicily as their base."

  They were sitting alone in the general's command tent, in a stout camp pitched beside the Via Popillia outside Terina, a hundred miles from Scyllaeum. It was the beginning of February, and winter had begun; two braziers produced a glow of heat.

  Just why Marcus Crassus had settled upon the twenty-eight-year-old Caesar as his particular friend was a source of great debate among his legates, who were more puzzled than jealous. Until Crassus had begun to share his leisure moments with Caesar he had owned no friends at all, therefore no legate felt himself passed over or supplanted. The conundrum arose out of the incongruity of the relationship, for there were sixteen years between them in age, their attitudes to money lay at opposite poles, they looked inappropriate when seen together, and no mutual literary or artistic leaning existed. Men like Lucius Quinctius had known Crassus for years, and had had close dealings with him both political and commercial without ever being able to claim a deep-seated friendship. Yet from the time Crassus had co-opted this year's tribunes of the soldiers two months too early, he had sought Caesar out, made overtures and found them reciprocated.

  The truth was actually very simple. Each man had recognized in the other someone who was going to matter in the future, and each man nursed much the same political ambitions. Had this recognition not taken place, the friendship could not have come about. But once it existed other factors came into play to bind them more tightly. The streak of hardness which was so evident in Crassus also lay in the smoother, utterly charming Caesar; neither man cherished illusions about his noble world; both had burrowed deeply into mines of common sense and neither cared very much about personal luxuries.

  The differences between them were superficial, though they were blinding: Caesar the handsome rake developing a formidable reputation as a womanizer versus Crassus the absolutely faithful family man; Caesar the brilliant intellectual with style and flair versus Crassus the plodding pragmatist. An odd couple. That was the verdict among the fascinated observers, who all from that time on began to see Caesar as a force to be reckoned with; for if he was not, why would Marcus Crassus have bothered with him?

  "It will snow tonight," said Crassus. "In the morning we'll march. I want to use the snow, not become hampered by it."

  "It would make so much sense," said Caesar, "if our calendar and the seasons coincided! I can't abide inaccuracy!"

  Crassus stared. "What provoked that remark?"

  "The fact that it's February and we're only beginning to feel winter."

  "You sound like a Greek. Provided one knows the date and waggles a hand outside the door to feel the temperature, what can it matter?''

  "It matters because it's slipshod and untidy!" said Caesar.

  "If the world was too tidy it would be hard to make money."

  "Harder to hide it, you mean," said Caesar with a grin.

  When Scyllaeum drew near the scouts reported that Spartacus still camped within the little promontory beyond the port, though there were signs that he might move fairly soon. His Spartacani had eaten the region out.

  Crassus and Caesar rode ahead with the army's engineers and an escort of troopers, aware that Spartacus owned no cavalry; he had tried to train some of his foot soldiers to ride, and for a while had attempted to tame the wild horses roaming the Lucanian forests and mountains, but had had no success with either men or mounts.

  The snow was falling steadily in a windless afternoon when the two Roman noblemen and their company began to prowl the country just behind the triangular outthrust wherein lay the Spartacani; if any watch had been set it was a halfhearted one, for they encountered no other men. The snow of course was a help, it muffled noise and coated horses and riders in white.

  "Better than I hoped," said Crassus with much satisfaction as the party turned to ride back to camp. “If we build a ditch and a wall between those two ravines, we'll shut Spartacus up in his present territory very nicely."

  "It won't hold them for long," said Caesar.

  "Long enough for my purposes. I want them hungry, I want them cold, I want them desperate. And when they break out, I want them heading north into Lucania."

  "You'll accomplish the last, at any rate. They'll try at our weakest point, which won't be to the south. No doubt you'll want the consuls' legions doing most of the digging."

  Crassus looked surprised. "They can dig, but alongside everybody else. Ditch and wall have to be finished within one market interval, and that means the hoariest old veterans will be plying spades too. Besides, the exercise will keep them warm."

  "I'll engineer it for you," Caesar offered, but without expectation of assent.

  Sure enough, Crassus declined. "I would rather you did, but it isn't possible. Lucius Quinctius is my senior legate. The job has to go to him."

  "A pity. He's got too much office and oratory in him."

  Office and oratory or no, Lucius Quinctius tackled the job of walling the Spartacani in with huge enthusiasm. Luckily he had the good sense to lean on the expertise of his engineers; Caesar was right in thinking him no fortification architect.

  Fifteen feet wide and fifteen feet deep, the ditch dived into the ravines at either end, and the earth removed from it was piled up into a log-reinforced wall topped with a palisade and watchtowers. From ravine to ravine, the ditch, wall, palisade and watchtowers extended for a distance of eight miles, and were completed in eight days despite constant snow. Eight camps-one for each legion-were spaced at regular intervals beneath the wall; the general would have ample soldiers to man his eight miles of fortifications.

  Spartacus became aware that Crassus had arrived the moment activity began-if he had not been aware earlier-but seemed almost uninterested. All of a sudden he bent the energies of his men toward constructing a huge fleet of rafts which apparently he intended should be towed behind Scyllaeum's fishing boats. To the watching Romans it appeared that he pinned his faith on an escape across the strait, and thought the scheme foolproof enough to ignore the fact that his landward escape route was rapidly being cut off. Came the day when this mass exodus by water began; those Romans not obliged by duty to be elsewhere climbed the flank of nearby Mount Sila for the best view of what happened in Scyllaeum harbor. A disaster. Those rafts which remained afloat long enough to load with people could not negotiate the entrance, let alone the open strait beyond; the fishing boats were not built to tow such heavy, unwieldy objects.

  "At least it doesn't seem as if many of them drowned," said Caesar to Crassus as they watched from Mount Sila.

  "That," said Crassus, voice detached, "Spartacus probably thinks a pity. Fewer mouths to feed."

  "I think," said Caesar, "that Spartacus loves them. The way a self-appointed king might love his people."

  "Self-appointed?"

  "Kings who are born to rule care little for their people," said Caesar, who had known a king born to rule. He pointed to where the shores of the bay were scenes of frenzied activity. "I tell you, Marcus Crassus, that man loves every last ungrateful individual in his vast horde! If he didn't, he would have cut himself off from them a year ago. I wonder who he really is?"

  "Starting with what Gaius Cassius had to say, I'm having that question investigated," said Crassus, and prepared to descend. "Come on, Caesar, you've seen enough. Love! If he does, then he's a fool."

  "Oh, he's definitely that," said Caesar, following. "What have you found out?"

  "Almost everything except his real name. That may not come to light. Some fool of an archivist, thinking Sulla
's Tabularium would hold military records as well as everything else, didn't bother to put them in a waterproof place. They're indecipherable, and Cosconius doesn't remember any names. At the moment I'm chasing his minor tribunes."

  "Good luck! They won't remember any names either."

  Crassus gave a grunt which might have been a short laugh. "Did you know there's a myth about him running around Rome-that he's a Thracian?"

  "Well, everybody knows he's a Thracian. Thracian or Gaul-there are only the two kinds." Caesar's laugh rang out joyously. "However, I take it that this myth is being assiduously disseminated by the Senate's agents."

  Crassus stopped, turned to gaze back and up at Caesar, a look of startled surprise on his face. "Oh, you are clever!"

  "It's true, I am clever."

  "Well, and doesn't it make sense?"

  "Certainly," said Caesar. "We've had quite enough renegade Romans of late. We'd be fools to add one more to a list that includes such military luminaries as Gaius Marius, Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Quintus Sertorius, wouldn't we? Better by far to have him a Thracian."

  "Huh!" Crassus emitted a genuine grunt.

  "I'd dearly love to set eyes on him!"

  "You may when we bring him to battle. He rides a very showy dappled grey horse tricked out with red leather tack and every kind of knightly knob and medallion. It used to belong to Varinius. Besides, Cassius and Manlius saw him at close quarters, so we have a good description. And he's a distinctive kind of fellow-very big, tall, and fair."

  A grim duel began which went on for over a month, Spartacus trying to break through Crassus's fortifications and Crassus throwing him back. The Roman high command knew that food must be running very short in the Spartacani camps when every soldier Spartacus possessed-Caesar had estimated the total at seventy thousand-attacked along the entire eight-mile front, trying to find the Roman weak point. It seemed to the Spartacani that they had found it toward the middle of the wall, where the ditch appeared to have crumbled under an onslaught of spring water; Spartacus poured men across and over the wall, only to run them into a trap. Twelve thousand Spartacani died, the rest receded.

  After that the Thracian who was not a Thracian tortured some prisoners he had saved from the consuls' legions, scattering his teams of men with red-hot pincers and pokers where he thought the maximum number of Roman soldiers would see the atrocity and hear the screams of their comrades. But after experiencing the horror of decimation Crassus's legions feared him a great deal more than they pitied the poor fellows being ripped and burned, and coped with it by electing not to watch, stuffing their ears with wool. Desperate, Spartacus produced his most prestigious prisoner, the primus pilus centurion of Gellius's old second legion, and nailed him to a cross through wrist and ankle joints without according him the mercy of broken limbs to help him die. Crassus's answer was to set his best archers along the top of his wall; the centurion died in a blizzard of arrows.

  As March came in Spartacus sent the woman Aluso to sue for terms of surrender. Crassus saw her in his command hut, in the presence of his legates and tribunes of the soldiers.

  "Why hasn't Spartacus come himself?" asked Crassus.

  She gave him a compassionate smile. "Because without my husband the Spartacani would disintegrate," she said, "and he does not trust you, Marcus Crassus, even under truce."

  "Then he's cleverer these days than he was when he let the pirates swindle him out of two thousand talents."

  But Aluso was not the kind to rise to any bait, so she did not answer, even with a look. Her appearance was, Caesar thought, deliberately contrived to unsettle a civilized reception committee; she appeared the archetypal barbarian. Her flaxen hair streamed wild and stringy over back and shoulders, she wore some kind of blackish felt tunic with long sleeves, and beneath it tight-legged trousers. Over the clothing of arms and ankles she blazed with golden chains and bracelets, had loaded the long lobes of her ears with more gold, and her henna-stained fingers with rings. Around her neck she wore several loops of tiny bird skulls strung together, and from the solid gold belt at her trim waist there dangled grisly trophies-a severed hand still owning some nails and shreds of skin, a child's skull, the backbone of a cat or dog complete with tail. The whole was finished with a magnificent wolf pelt, paws knotted on her chest, the head with bared teeth and jewels for eyes perched above her brow.

  With all this, she was not unattractive to the silent men who watched her, though none would have called her beautiful; her kind of face with its light, mad-looking eyes was too alien.

  On Crassus, however, she failed to make the impression she had striven for. Crassus was proof against any attraction save money. So he stared at her in exactly the same way as he stared at everyone, with what seemed a gentle calmness.

  "Speak, woman," he said.

  “I am to ask you for terms of surrender, Marcus Crassus. We have no food left, and the women and children are starving in order that our soldiers may eat. My husband is not the kind of man who can bear to see the helpless suffer. He would rather give himself and his army up. Only tell me the terms and I will tell him. And then tomorrow I will come back with his answer."

  The general turned his back. Over his shoulder he said, his Greek far purer than hers, "You may tell your husband that there are no terms under which 1 would accept his surrender. I will not permit him to surrender. He started this. Now he can see it through to the bitter end."

  She gasped, prepared for every contingency but that one. "I cannot tell him that! You must let him surrender!"

  "No," said Crassus, back still turned. His right hand moved, its fingers snapped. "Take her away, Marcus Mummius, and see her through our lines."

  It was some time later before Caesar could catch Crassus on his own, though he burned to discuss the interview.

  "You handled it brilliantly," he said. "She was so sure she would unsettle you."

  "Silly woman! My reports say she's a priestess of the Bessi, though I'd rather call her a witch. Most Romans are superstitious-I've noticed you are, Caesar!-but I am not. I believe in what I can see, and what I saw was a female of some slight intelligence who had got herself up as she imagined a gorgon might look." He laughed spontaneously. "I remember being told that when he was a young man Sulla went to a party dressed as Medusa. On his head he wore a wig of living snakes, and he frightened the life out of everyone there. But you know, and I know, that it wasn't the snakes frightened the life out of anyone. It was-simply Sulla. Now if she had that quality, I might have quaked in my boots."

  "I agree. But she does have the second sight."

  "Many people have the second sight! I've known dear old grannies as dithery and fluffy as lambs who had the second sight, and grand-looking advocates you wouldn't think had a single corner of their minds that wasn't solid law. Anyway, what makes you think she has the second sight?''

  "Because she came to the interview more frightened of you than you could ever have been of her."

  For a month the weather had been "set," as the mother of Quintus Sertorius might have put it-nights well below freezing point, days not much warmer, blue skies, snow turned to ice underfoot. But after the Ides of March had gone there came a terrible storm which started as sleet and ended with snow piling up and up. Spartacus seized his chance.

  Where the wall and ditch fused into the ravine closest to Scyllaeum-and the oldest of Crassus's veteran legions had its camp-the whole one hundred thousand Spartacani left alive hurled themselves into a frantic struggle to bridge the ditch and climb over the wall. Logs, stones, the dead bodies of humans and animals, even large pieces of loot were flung into the trench, heaped up to surmount the palisade. Like the shades of the dead the enormous mass of people rolled in wave after wave across this makeshift passage and fled into the teeth of the storm. No one opposed them; Crassus had sent the legion a message not to take up arms, but to remain quietly inside its camp.

  Disorganized and haphazard, the flight unraveled what little structure the Spartacani h
ost had owned beyond hope of knitting it up again. While the fighting men-better led and disciplined-floundered north on the Via Popillia with Spartacus, Castus and Gannicus, the bulk of the women, children, aged and noncombatants became so lost they entered the forests of Mount Sila; amid the tangles of low branches, rocks, undergrowth, most of them lay down and died, too cold and too hungry to struggle on. Those who did survive to see better weather came eventually upon Bruttian settlements, were recognized for what they were, and killed at once.

  Not that the fate of this segment of the Spartacani held any interest for Marcus Licinius Crassus. When the snow began to lessen he struck camp and moved his eight legions out onto the Via Popillia in the wake of the Spartacani soldiers.

  His progress was as plodding as an ox, for he was always methodical, always in possession of his general's wits. There was no use in chasing; cold, hunger and lack of real purpose would combine to slow the Spartacani down, as would the size of their army. Better to have the baggage train in the middle of the legionary column than run the risk of losing it. Sooner or later he would catch up.

  His scouts, however, were very busy, very swift. As March ground to its end they reported to Crassus that the Spartacani, having reached the river Silarus, had divided into two forces. One, under Spartacus, had continued up the Via Popillia toward Campania, while the other, under Castus and Gannicus, had struck east up the valley of the middle Silarus.

  "Good!" said Crassus. "We'll leave Spartacus alone for the moment and concentrate on getting rid of the two Samnites."

  The scouts then reported that Castus and Gannicus had not gone very far; they had encountered the prosperous little town of Volcei and were eating well for the first time in two months. No need to hurry!

  When the four legions preceding Crassus's baggage train came up, Castus and Gannicus were too busy feasting to notice. The Spartacani had spread without making more than an apology for a camp on the foreshores of a little lake which at this time of the year contained sweet, potable water; by autumn the same locale would have held few charms. Behind the lake was a mountain. Crassus saw immediately what he had to do, and decided not to wait for the four legions which followed the baggage train.