Spartacus

  She had heard of that order before. She caught his sleeve. ‘But not for the wife of a tribune?’

  ‘We take no women or baggage.’

  She wrung her hands, staring at the child. Gershom’s face seemed frozen as he girded on his sword. Then a quietness came on Judith. She rose and helped him, and they stared at each other. Then he took her and kissed her, and did not look at the child; and ran from his tent, cursing the Bithynians to haste as the bucina roared again.

  The wolves lairing up in the hills heard it and growled and turned in sleep. The Roman velites heard it in the south, and stirred from sleep and stared at the winking watch-fires of the slaves, and turned to sleep again.

  The morning came winged over Italy. The cities left in the wake of the slave-passing stirred to a furtive half-life. In the ruined fields and plantations the birds were crying from a dimness now shot and sprayed with the stippled arrow-hail of the sun. A low wind blew from Campania.

  The Roman velites rode north till they came to a hill, and looked down on the camp of the slaves around the abandoned villa. It seemed as on the day before. There was nothing to report back to the main army where Crassus the Lean was now stirring from sleep.

  Since the failure of the attack on Rome, it was now plain to the provincial praetor that the end of the slave-revolt was imminent. He could wait for the Spartacist army to disintegrate, and destroy it at his leisure. It would never advance on Rome again; if it marched south, he could hold it; if it retreated to the north Mummius would fall back in front of it, as instructed, giving battle under no circumstances but extreme necessity.

  The slave-revolt was near its end.

  The provincial praetor, the Dives, the Lean, sat waiting for news from the velites. But none came. At noon he sent a centurion of the Eighteenth legion to report on the appearance of the slave camp. The centurion was a grizzled Lucanian. Coming up with the velites who watched the camp of the Spartacists he looked across the ochre shimmer of the day at the palisaded dykes; then he rode his horse three stadia nearer.

  And then he knew what trick the Spartacists had played.

  He returned to the velites, cursing them.

  ‘Send to Crassus at once. The slaves escaped during the night. They have left only their baggage and women.’

  When Crassus heard this, the face of the Dives went livid with anger. He commanded that the hundred men of the velites be decimated. Then the whole army stirred at the shouted orders of the tribunes and marched north on the slave-camp.

  All day the women in that camp had watched stupefied the dark hovering of the Roman scouts to the south. Now they saw that the end had come. And some were glad, wearied of this life of travail up and down the Italian roads, rain in their faces, fear in their hearts, their food the leavings of hungry men. Better all ended: and for most their Gods had no terror of after-life for slaves and the simple, only death and long rest, long rest. But there were still other women of the slave-host, young, who looked at the nearing army of the Masters with hope and not fear in their hearts. Surely they would be spared, they were still young and fair, too fair for the cross; and the bed of a legionary better far than the bed of a rebel slave. And they washed their bodies and braided their hair and waited with trembling lips.

  But the woman Judith watched that approach, she and a little Jewish maid; and they looked at each other and then at the child, drooling and wailing for lack of milk. And Judith knew it must be the child first.

  So she took a cloth and held it over the child’s face, firmly, till the limbs ceased to kick; and there came a strange heat from the small face, though her own body was set with beads of frozen sweat. And then the maid plucked at her dress.