by Jack Ludlow
‘Pentheus!’ The single shouted word made both men turn to face him. Gadoric looked confused, Hypolitas angry. ‘How long has he been gone?’
‘You dare question me!’ snapped Hypolitas.
‘Aquila?’ said Gadoric, shocked at the expression in his young friend’s eyes.
‘He’s gone after Flaccus with eighty men.’
‘Who?’ the Celt enquired, still confused.
‘Pentheus did so with my blessing,’ said Hypolitas, with an airy wave of the hand. ‘We agreed that…’
‘You old fool!’ It was a long time since anyone had even checked Hypolitas, let alone insulted him, and the shock on his face was total, almost like a man who had received a hard slap. ‘He’s wanted to get his revenge on Flaccus ever since we started this revolt. Gadoric kept him well away from the area for that very reason.’
The Celt still looked confused and Hypolitas’s thundering response did nothing to help him. ‘I lead here! Don’t think that bauble round your neck gives you the right to question me.’
Not in the least cowed, he grabbed at his charm, pushing it out towards Hypolitas. ‘I’m not sure of what you trusted, my dreams or this, but the message was clear. No Roman blood, remember? That was the policy and it was supposed to give us some hope.’
For the first time Hypolitas, his eyes fixed fearfully on the eagle, seemed to falter, his voice, for once, devoid of confidence. ‘Pentheus knows that as well as anyone.’
‘He didn’t tell you where he was headed, did he?’
‘We must remind the Romans that we are here.’
‘Hypolitas,’ said Gadoric, sadly.
‘Get out! I will not be addressed like this,’ screamed the Greek. ‘I will be obeyed.’
Gadoric took him by the shoulders and shook him, speaking quietly. ‘We didn’t escape one tyranny, Hypolitas, to endure another.’ They stared at each other for several seconds before Gadoric spoke again. ‘Go after him, Aquila. Stop him if you can.’
His nose informed him that he was too late before his eyes; the smell of burning wafted into his nostrils on the northerly wind. The horse, which he had pushed to the limit of its endurance, was winded, so he could not urge it to greater speed. The black smoke rose into the sky and as he came closer he saw the flames at the base. Then he heard the screams, high pitched, mixed with loud and maniacal laughing. The fire rose above the barracks which had, at one time, been his home. When he saw what Pentheus and his men were doing he jumped off the horse and ran as fast as he could towards the blaze. The screams grew louder, so did the laughing and he barely noticed the row of flayed bodies hanging from the trees. Had he looked closely he would not have recognised any of those he had lived with, men like Dedon and Charro. The skin had literally been stripped from their bodies, leaving a bloody pulped mass dripping into the dark soil and onto the heap of broken staves under their feet.
He saw one of the women break out through the window, her hair on fire so she looked at this distance like a flaming torch, a small child cradled in her arms. One of Pentheus’s men tripped her up, grabbed her as she fell, lifted her and the child bodily, then threw them back into the burning building. Aquila was amongst the raiding party now: some of the men, disgusted as he was, had stood back from this outrage. Pentheus was in the middle of the compound directing operations, his face and arms purple from the blood that had spattered all over him. In the flames, with his wild staring eyes and grey hair, he looked like a madman, laughing in that high-pitched cackle that came upon him in the presence of death. He screamed with crazed delight as his men poked their long spears through the windows to drive back the maddened women who were trying to escape from the all-consuming flames.
Aquila grabbed him and spun him round, slapping his face to try to bring him back to his senses. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Whores!’ spat Pentheus, pointing to the bodies swaying on the trees. ‘They pleasured that vermin. Some of them are with child by the bastards. This fire will cleanse that plague.’
Aquila hit him, knocking him to the ground, then ran towards the inferno screaming Phoebe’s name, but no one was alive in there now, for the flames had started to suck in the surrounding air, and they rose to a flickering peak, carrying the souls of the dead women and children with them in a huge funeral pyre. Some of Pentheus’s men, as bloody and wild-eyed as their leader, had seen him strike the blow, seen their leader knocked to the ground, and they turned on him angrily. Others, mainly men who had served with Gadoric, and who had stood off from this barbarity, rushed forward to protect him, swords and spears at the ready. For a moment the two groups stood facing each other, until one of his rescuers took Aquila’s arm and led him away. Only when he got away from the heat of the fire did Aquila realise that he was crying.
They led him towards a steep-sided pit which had been dug in the ground, surrounded by bulging grain sacks, and Aquila leant on one and looked down. Flaccus was there, as bloody as the men on the trees, but still alive. His hands and feet had been hacked off and Pentheus had laid the hands where the feet should be and the feet in place of the hands.
‘There he is.’ Aquila turned to face Pentheus, who had lost none of the crazed look he had before. The man was giggling insanely as he talked. ‘He’s not so mighty now, is he, your Roman friend?’
Aquila wanted to kill him, but if he tried now, others would die. These two groups of men, still eyeing each other warily, would fight, and once joined who could say how many would be killed? Flaccus and Phoebe were beyond any help he could give. Pentheus came closer, the smell of his sweat mixed with the odour of dried blood.
‘Have you heard his prophecy, Aquila? That he would not die till he was showered with gold? He told me all about it as I tore off his skin.’
He threw his head back and laughed out loud and those who supported him laughed too, a crazy cacophony mixed with the loud crackling of the flames. Aquila turned and jumped down into the pit to kneel beside Flaccus. The centurion’s eyes, staring out of a bloody smashed face, flickered in recognition.
‘I never did thank you for not turning your back on me, Flaccus.’ With that he slipped a coin out of his pouch and started to place it under Flaccus’s tongue. ‘I cannot avenge you or Phoebe now, but I will, I swear. Think well of me when you’ve crossed the Styx.’
The eyes flickered again and the lips parted to expose the pulverised teeth. A slight hissing sound escaped from the centurion’s throat as the coin slipped into the pool of blood in his mouth. He was trying to speak, but no words came. Aquila stood up and, pulling out his sword, he saluted him like the Roman soldier he had once been. Hands reached down to help him out of the pit and he stood watching silently as Pentheus’s men cut open the sacks. Then, to the sound of loud cheering, they poured the golden grain into the pit, suffocating what was left of the life, as well as fulfilling the prophecy of the one-time centurion, Didius Flaccus.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He had no choice but to send a verbal message; Gadoric could not read or write, so Aquila sent his farewells with one of the men he knew the Celt trusted. Surrounded by the smouldering ruins of the farm he had watched as Pentheus led his men back into the hills. The bloody bodies of the mercenaries still swung on the makeshift gibbets, so he cut them down and transferred the corpses to the embers, then piled loose wood on to make a proper fire. A flaming ember was enough to torch the grave of Flaccus; grain burns easily, especially when dry. It was only then that he remembered Pentheus’s words about the women bearing the mercenaries children. Had Phoebe borne him a child? It was possible. He fingered the eagle round his neck, seeking guidance, at the same time recalling the way she had stroked it, which made him feel guilty; he had never really made any attempt to free her from a life she must have hated after he had gone.
The flames behind him again shot into the sky, fired by the grease from the numerous bodies of the mercenaries, and he knew that it was time to leave, for the smoke would bring others from the nearby farms to find ou
t what had happened. Retracing his route without really having any idea where he was going, Aquila abandoned his original intention, to shadow the party ahead of him until he could find Pentheus alone and kill him. That would bring him back into an orbit he was determined to avoid, having, as he had, lost all feeling for this revolt, which seemed designed more to satisfy Hypolitas than as a fight to free more slaves. Gadoric would at least know what troubled him and he hoped he would understand, and perhaps detach himself from that hopeless endeavour before it was too late.
He rode till he was too exhausted to go any further, then, dismounting, he made up a bed for the night and spent the dark hours, clutching the eagle, pursued by dreams of fire and death. The following weeks were spent alone, close enough to the slave camp to observe them, but far enough off to hunt and fish in peace. He slept under the stars, wrapped in his cloak, the nights growing warmer as spring came.
‘Where are they now?’ asked Titus.
Silvanus glanced at Marcellus before replying, wondering at a youngster, not yet old enough for military service, being included in these discussions. Come to that, he was twice the age of this legate, Titus Cornelius, and he had held many important magistracies in Rome before becoming governor of Sicily, yet he felt that he was being obliged to explain himself like a nobody. He jabbed a finger at the map on the table between them.
‘They moved out of the mountains some three weeks ago, turned south, bypassed Catana and Leontini. We believe they are marching on Syracuse.’
‘What is their strength?’
‘Their numbers increase daily,’ the governor replied, as though that was too obvious to require explanation.
‘Numbers mean little,’ said Titus. ‘What I want to know is their fighting strength. Could we, by levying all the Romans on the island, make up a force strong enough to offer battle, or at least reinforce Syracuse?’
Silvanus bridled, unaware that Titus had not intended to be rude. He was just too wrapped up in the military problem to consider whether he was being polite.
‘What do you think I’ve been doing, sitting here on my thumbs? I wrote to Rome last year, warning them, but no one took a blind bit of notice. If I’d had an ounce of real support then I could have gone into the hills and easily flushed them out.’
Titus, with the powers vested in him by Lucius Falerius, did not have to choose his words even if this noble senator considerably out-ranked him, and it seemed to him the man was intent on laying the blame for everything at any door other than his own. ‘You could have done that anyway without the need of troops from Italy. You even called in the militia and left them lounging by their own hearths. Sitting on your thumbs seems to be exactly what you’ve done.’
Silvanus, who was a plain-speaking man, raised his eyebrows, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘I know. All I had to do was get the largest group of avaricious cretins it’s ever been my misfortune to meet, who are spread all over the island, and persuade them to let their crops rot in the fields while they chased all over Sicily trying to bring back a load of slaves, people who would disappear again at the drop of a straw hat.’ He leant forward, his finger pointed insultingly at Titus. ‘If you’re so clever, Titus Cornelius, with your little scroll of instructions from the Senate, you do it.’
Silvanus then turned round and stormed out of the room.
Aquila had trailed them round the saddle of Mount Etna, which was, as usual, smoking and rumbling threateningly, then followed them through the foothills until the whole mass of runaways, with their women, livestock and children, debouched onto the littoral north of the city of Catana. Coming down onto the plain, in their wake, he found empty farms, with the houses ransacked and storerooms stripped bare, but no bodies. Word spread quickly of this slave army and every overseer for miles around, and his guards, deserted their property and fled south to Syracuse. Even from a distance Aquila noticed the increasing size of the host as every freed slave, exposed to the flowing ideas of Hypolitas, flocked to join them. By the time the walls of Syracuse showed on the horizon their numbers filled the landscape.
Marcellus stood on the walls. To the north he could see the dust cloud created by the insurgents as they marched towards the city, behind him, if he had cared to turn, he would have seen numerous ships pulling out of the harbour as the less stalwart Romans, with those Greeks who had helped them, sought to escape across the narrow straits to Italy. Titus’s attempts to persuade them to stay had come to nought; indeed he had been asked, caustically, what he was doing on the island, supposedly a military legate, without a couple of legions to back him up.
‘They’ll be outside the walls tomorrow,’ said Titus.
‘Do we stay?’ asked Marcellus.
‘Yes. They have no ships, so they can’t blockade the harbour. They’ll soon find out it’s impossible to take Syracuse without a supporting fleet. We need to get a message to your father. If we can pin them down here, it will be easy to bring troops into the town by sea. If another legion came down the coast from Messana, we could trap them between two forces and destroy them.’
But they did not stop for the city; Gadoric was wise to the notion that he needed a fleet to subdue such a place, just as he knew, from the locals, that Syracuse had a history of withstanding lengthy sieges, even against enemies who possessed ships in abundance. It was too Roman and too well fortified to be easily taken. They invested it nevertheless, but only so that they could strip the countryside bare for miles around of food and slaves. The inhabitants of Syracuse who had stayed behind, under Titus’s command, and who had set themselves to fight until help arrived from Italy, woke one morning to find the plain before their city devoid of their foes, who had decamped during the night and headed south. Aquila watched the party of twenty mounted Romans, their red cloaks billowing behind them, leave the town and set off in pursuit. Too few to fight, they were obviously intent on shadowing their enemy.
Gadoric, turning west along the southern coast, ignored the offers of surrender from the small conurbation of Camarina, moving on quickly to stay ahead of the spreading panic, by-passing the major city of Geta by fording the river well to the north. He forced-marched his trained bands to the next river, one of the two that hemmed in the city of Agrigentum, leaving the mass of untrained slaves to follow. Mounted detachments were sent to cut the bridges and hold the fords on the river to the west and he ordered the straggling mass of slaves into the foothills north of the city, then spent two days sorting them into manageable groups. Finally, with no moon to warn of their arrival, he ordered everyone down onto the plains that stretched away on either side of Agrigentum.
The inhabitants, who supposed this threat, if it existed at all, was still well to the east of Geta, woke one morning to find what looked like a huge army camped outside their crumbling walls, with a simple offer available to them. Open your gates and you will be spared; resist and the whole city will be put to the sword. The recently freed slaves, in truth useless in a fight, looked formidable enough in their newly rehearsed and static formations, so for someone looking out from the crumbling walls of Agrigentum, the position seemed hopeless. Hypolitas, with Gadoric and Pentheus at his side, rode forward to talk to the leading citizens who lined the walls. He spoke of the tyranny of Rome, told them that he had no desire to hurt fellow-Greeks, and promised that his army would not occupy the city in strength, but would instead disperse to the surrounding farms to assist, as free men, in the cultivation of the land. He promised to respect the temples and the women and to abide by the statutes of the city, as long as he was afforded the same civility he intended to give to them.
Even those who wanted to resist knew that it was impossible. Given time, the walls could have been repaired, making the city as formidable as it had been a hundred years before, but there was no time, the enemy was at the gates. Only Roman legions, backed by a strong fleet of ships, could oppose this slave army. The legions were nowhere to be seen and, besides, in such a Greek city, they would scarcely have been any more welcome
than Hypolitas. He capitalised on this, talking of freedom for the whole island, of throwing off the Roman yoke, with slave and freedman combining to create a prosperous future. Such a dream, such words, in the mouth of another man, would have been risible, but Hypolitas had that compelling voice, which could hold the attention of the largest crowd, plus the finale with his magic fire. For him, the gates were open before the sun had reached its zenith.
Marcellus looked at Titus to see how he would react but the face was still, as if set in stone, gazing on the gates of Agrigentum, wide open, with the runaway slaves as free to enter as the citizens were to leave. Hypolitas and his ramshackle horde had a city and a fine harbour and they could see that some of that army was already busy repairing the walls.
‘Well, Marcellus,’ said Titus finally, gesturing towards the white walls. ‘What do you suppose this means?’
‘A long hard fight, a fleet to blockade the harbour, siege engines to batter the walls and several legions to carry out the assault.’
Titus swung his horse round. ‘The first thing we must do is seal the approaches east and west. That army is big enough. When word gets out that they’ve taken a city, every slave in Sicily will be trying to join them.’
Marcellus pointed towards the solitary horseman watching them from the ridge. ‘He’s still there. Is he following us, or the slaves?’
