Now the horsemen rode near. They numbered half a century, and were heavy cavalry, armed and armoured in the new fashion borrowed from the Greeks, with iron leggings and breastplates and crested helmets. Two officers rode at the head of the company, men of high rank, middle-aged and grave. The sunset was in Kleon’s eyes, but his company and the hasty defences were plain to the eyes of the soldiers. A shout arose.
‘Slaves!’
With this came a roar of laughter. The horsemen splashed through the ford. Then, at a word, they wheeled and halted below the knoll. One of the officers held up his hand, stilling his soldiers, and addressing Kleon.
‘Excrement: a hundred lashes and the mines for those of your following who surrender. For such of the others as escape our swords – the cross. Choose. Quickly.’
Behind Kleon the giant Gaul who had beaten Petronia throughout the march laid aside his switch and wrenched a great stone from the ground. Before the officer had ceased to speak the Gaul swung the stone twice and thrice till he reeled in the momentum. Then he hurled it from him. It soared through the air, struck a soldier from his horse, and broke the back of the animal, which neighed a shrill scream. Wild laughter broke from the slaves. All seized stones and hurled them upon the horsemen, Kleon alone standing inactive, watching the horsemen scatter. As they did so, slaves and soldiers alike were startled by a woman’s scream.
‘Father! Petronius! My father!’
One of the daughters of Petronia attempted to climb the wall at the summit of the knoll. Titul seized her hair and held her. Weeping, she knelt and flung out her arms. Titul licked his thick lips.
‘It’s Petronius himself.’ He laughed, and snatched one of the swords from the Negro executioner. Then, twisting the girl to silence, he rent her robe from her shoulders and bent her back over his knee. In the half-dusk her body shone white, and the sword, a moment ceremonially poised in the sun’s last rays, descended to sever her breasts. But Kleon leant forward and held Titul’s arm.
Then he called to Petronius: ‘We hold your wife and daughters. Come nearer and we’ll cut their throats.’
Petronius, the officer who had threatened them with the mines or the cross, gave a cry and fell forward in his saddle. Two soldiers went to assist him. He was an old man, in the Social War notorious for his cruelties. From the knoll Kleon watched him recover and again sit erect in his stirrups. His face was now indistinct, as were the faces of all the soldiers, but his voice carried clearly uphill in the evening quiet:
‘If you’ll surrender the women you can go.’
A howl of laughter rose from the slaves. Titul, with mad, drowsing eyes, again swung up the sword. But again Kleon the literatus held him.
‘And what’s our surety that you won’t follow?’
The soldiers debated. ‘The surety that a body of slaves, too strong for us to assail, is camped three miles beyond the ford.’
Kleon looked into the darkness where the sunset had been. The Romans spoke the truth, for he saw the glint of watchfires. He decided quickly, with a cold amusement that he ordered the Masters.
‘Withdraw your soldiers, Petronius, and we’ll send down your daughters. Beyond the ford only we’ll release Petronia.’
The body of horsemen manoeuvred dimly. A segment of it trotted away, with rhythmic hoof-beats, into the darkness. Kleon freed the girl from Titul’s clutch. Half-swooning, she staggered down the hill. Then the eunuch literatus became aware that the Gauls, laughing, had surrounded Brennus and the other girl. In a sudden, sick distaste he thrust through the group. At the girl he did not look.
‘Run!’
She sped down the hill towards the ten horsemen who still waited. Singing and laughing, the slaves descended the hill in her rear and splashed through the ford. Petronia, fast-gripped by the giant Gaul, was dragged in their midst. They had gained the further side when a rhythmic beating of hooves again arose to their ears. Then, out of the darkness on either side, burst the horsemen who had ridden away. At the same time Petronius and his ten charged through the ford.
Too late Kleon realized his own simplicity. He screamed:
‘Scatter! Westward is the slave camp.’
Then the horsemen were on them. With shrill screams the Negroes fled, all except the executioner, who swung his swords and disembowelled a horse. A moment later, clawing at a pilum buried in his stomach, he fell into the water and was carried away. Maddened, the sun-blackened Gauls stood fast and fought, or, running to a little distance, swung their slings and poured a volley of clay pellets into the mellay. Each pellet was of the hardness of stone and fashioned to ensure straight flight. Several horsemen fell from the saddles, and an Iberian and a Greek, struck by these projectiles of their fellow-slaves, were killed instantly. Then the horsemen wheeled and charged again, and the Gauls, drawing their short knives, attempted to hamstring the horses. A sickening smell arose from the slicing of warm flesh. Then complete darkness descended.
[iv]
In the darkness a half-mile beyond the ford Kleon stumbled upon the Ionians. One of them limped and another was attempting to staunch the flow of blood from his neck. Him Kleon bandaged with strips torn from his tunic. Then they listened, but now the night was void of sound.
Yet presently there neared the noise of a galloping horse.
‘The Masters!’
Kleon listened, panting, having fought at the ford, not only run from it. ‘There is only one. I’ll stab the beast in the belly.’
With his short dagger in his hand, he crouched by the side of the track. The horse shied in alarm from his leaping figure. Then Kleon saw it was no Master, but Titul. The Iberian grinned with gleaming teeth.
‘I dragged down a soldier and dashed out his brains with a stone,’ he said. ‘His helmet cracked like a shell. Then I stole his horse.’
‘Brennus?’
‘Brennus is dead,’ said Titul. ‘For I saw him killed. As for the other Gauls, they’re also dead and doubtlessly in hell, being men without GODS.’
‘They were heroes,’ said one of the Ionians, a clerk, a thin man who had run with rapidity. ‘Such men they bred once in Greece.’
‘Mighty in valour were those of the vanished Western Isle,’ said Titul, being mad.
Kleon clung to the horse’s mane. The Ionians trotted behind. The darkness began to clear and soften till, brilliant and white, the stars came out. Up the hill-side a wolf howled long and piercingly.
‘The wolves are late about,’ said Titul, ‘for the flocks are unguarded.’
Again the long howl, wild and cold and cruel, arose. It was a lone wolf. None of its kind answered it.
‘It may be the Wolf of the Masters herself,’ said Kleon, ‘come down from Rome to bay.’
The Greeks shivered, believing it a werewolf. Remote in the distance, they heard a last howl, then the beast left them.
Suddenly one of the Greeks, a young man, stumbled and fell. Titul halted his horse and Kleon went back and bent over the man.
‘What ails you?’ he asked.
Then he saw it was the young man who on the hill-top had spoken of Delos harbour. Now between his lips his breath blew out in a bloody spume. The eunuch squatted beside him and wiped his mouth.
‘I’m wounded in the breast. But I said nothing. Lest you leave me behind to die. Alone. In the dark. Like a slave.’
He coughed and murmured. Broken Greek came to his lips, though he had never seen Greece. The spume grew to a warm stream. Suddenly he gripped Kleon’s arm.
‘Oh, the sea!’
Then Kleon knew that he was dead, and a sad and terrible anger stirred in his frozen heart. But there were no tears in the body that had lost its manhood.
[v]
It was near to dawn and the morning cold with a drizzling rain before Kleon, Titul, and the four Ionians came to the slave camp. They had twice lost their way, wandering up stark ravines or into canebrakes. By accident they stumbled upon the camp, nor did they know it the camp at first, for the fires were long dead, no s
entries placed, no trench had been dug or stake-fence erected. The slaves were men from the Eastern world, and they slept under dripping sycamore trees, shivering, numbed in their dreams. But one was awake and he challenged them on the verge of the camp, in a whining, sibilant Latin.
‘We’re slaves,’ said Kleon, peering at him in the dawn-gloom, ‘seeking freedom and empty bellies, not to mention a band of Gladiators.’
The man held an axe in his hand. Now he came from under the dripping fronds and looked at Kleon with a frowning face. The Greek saw before him one stout and black-haired, with a curling beard and a curling nose, bright, scowling eyes as black as his hair. He was clad in an ill-fitting toga, edged with a senator’s fringe.
‘If you seek empty bellies you’ve been misdirected, for these hogs are filled with the wine we looted. As for the Gladiators of Capua, they’ve surrendered at last, or so it’s said, betrayed by a Thracian who led them.’
The eunuch shrugged. ‘Then we don’t seek the Gladiators. Couldn’t the fools find a leader other than a Thracian savage? And who is your leader here?’
The bearded man scowled upon the morning. ‘I am the leader – may Jehovah give me wit. Half of these’ – he waved an arm at the dim groups huddled under the trees – ‘are Bithynians, newly-come from Brindisium and speaking no Latin. I and twenty household slaves of Crassus the Lean freed them, for we surprised their guards on the marsh and strangled them.’
‘That was well. I am Kleon of Corinth, a Greek.’
‘That’s ill, for I’ve no love of Greeks. I am Gershom of Kadesh, a Pharisee and a Jew.’
In revolt against Jannaeus and his Hellenistic priests, Gershom ben Sanballat had twice raised the standards of the Hasidim, and twice had been defeated. But so dourly had he held his own in the mountains around Kadesh, that the King had been forced to grant him a pardon, and thereafter left him in peace. Gershom had retired to cultivating his farms and engrossing himself in the Ochian mysteries of the synagogue. These practices lost him his following. In two years’ time Jannaeus died and his widow Salome Alexandra reigned in Jerusalem. Among the first to fall was Gershom, secretly seized and sold into slavery in Syria, from there re-sold to Rome, from there re-sold to the household of Marcus Licinius Crassus. For less than a year a slave, his iron spirit was but faintly bent when he heard the news of the Gladiators’ revolt, and stirred his fellows to emulation. Now he fronted Kleon, unclean, a Greek, the old, strong Gentile hate in his face, that hate forgotten while he was a slave, stirring now to a flame from old embers.
But also, the Greek had a strange attraction. The flame died down. Scowling, Gershom raised a hand to head and heart. Kleon responded, and they then touched hands, watched by Titul and the Ionians. But Gershom secretly cleansed his palm against his tunic, remembering that the touch of a Gentile was defilement.
‘This is an Iberian,’ said Kleon, pointing to his company, ‘and these are Ionians.’
‘There’s Greek wine under these cloths,’ said the Jew. ‘And unclean meat. Eat, if you’re hungry.’
Titul and the Ionians squatted on the ground, and drank, and were warmed with the strong Greek wine, choking and gulping on the mouthfuls at first, being slaves unaccustomed to wine. Famished, they tore with their fingers at the roasted meat, Kleon eating but sparingly, hungered though he was. For even hunger in his mutilated body was only a faint ghost of the lusts he had known. Slave or free, that would alter never, and a moment that thought came twisting his mouth. Then he filled a silver cup with wine and went to Gershom, who had drawn away.
‘This is a fine cup of good workmanship,’ he said.
‘I stole it from the pantry of Crassus the Lean,’ said Gershom, moodily. ‘He will crucify his overseer because of its loss: unless the man has fled. Which is unlikely: for he was a fool.’
‘Why is he named the Lean?’
‘His soul is lean,’ said Gershom. ‘May it howl for ever in the wastes of Sheol. Which is hell.’
A taciturn and calculating man, the attraction of the Greek was growing upon him. Looking at Kleon, he combed his curled beard with long, brown fingers, and sighed, remembering Kadesh, though memory and heart and soul alike were encased in an armour of iron. Kleon drank the wine in a cold amusement, and answered with sardonic politeness.
‘I hadn’t heard of your hell. Also, but a little while back you spoke of an unknown God. Who is he?’
‘Jehovah, the One God. Your Greek and Roman Gods are but idols of demons. No idols are reared to the One True God – unless by Salome’s Hellene rats.’
‘There are no Gods,’ said Kleon, ‘but Time and Fate. I worship neither, which doubtlessly vexes them. This Iberian also has a new God – with a name like a cough and a serpent’s head and its home, I gather, the sea.’
‘Doubtlessly it is Behemoth, the Beast of the Waters,’ said Gershom, looking at Titul contemptuously. ‘For he is a Gentile.’
‘He is also mad,’ said the eunuch, indifferently, and looked about him. ‘Your Bithynians are awakening.’
The rain and the morning gloom had passed away. Above the ridged Italian hills uprose the sun, trailing a translucent veil that shivered and faded like a bubble-wall. In the air was the smell of green life rain-drenched. From under the trees the slaves thronged forth to stand by Gershom and peer into the East. As the sun rose full and rested upon the brow of the hill, round, splendid and scintillant as a new gold coin, the shivering Bithynians droned an Ormuzdic hymn, their arms upraised in adoration, their mouths engaged in singing and yawning. Titul, the Iberian, prostrated himself, howling at the sun like a dog. But Kleon, Gershom, and the Ionians did not worship, knowing the sun to be but a ball of fire three leagues away.
One slave still lay asleep under a sycamore. Yet presently he awoke and looked at the worshippers, companioned by those who did not worship. One of these attracted his attention. He crawled to his feet and came softly behind Titul.
‘As big a fool as ever, Iberian. Your God’s a slave like yourself, and cannot keep his bed.’
His sleepy bass laugh boomed out, disturbing the hymn. Then he turned his face towards Kleon the eunuch, who saw that it was Brennus.
His tale was short:
‘At the ford I broke the knees of a horse. Horse and rider fell on me. I took the man by the throat and lay with him under the horse, strangling him. I held his throat till he ceased to move and his skin grew cold in my hands. Then the Masters came slicing their swords in the dead and cutting the throats of the wounded. So I feigned death, but looked out a little, the shine of the moon was on us by then. Petronius and his wife stood by the ford and near them stood two others. Petronia wept like a bleating sheep, and knelt, and wrung her hands. The two other Masters cried out at Petronius, and pleaded with him, but he grunted and spat. Then he put his arm round Petronia and drove his dagger in her heart. I hid behind the dead horse and saw no more. She was strong in love, as I found that night I took her in bed. But a bitch.’
He ruminated a little, vexed with some memory. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her then – overmuch. Pity that that fool should kill a good bedmate. He’ll not spare the daughter either, if she tells – Gods, she was ripe and fair!’
‘Fair from the womb were the children of women in the vanished Western Isle,’ said Titul, being mad.
[vi]
At noon Gershom ben Sanballat marshalled his Bithynians. One man who was quarrelsome he slew with his own hands. Then he marched southwards, resolved to seek some stronghold, and from there escape to the sea.
With him went Kleon and Titul and Brennus. They marched until sunset, and then, hard by a marsh, came on the rout of a battle. Horses, riderless and ridden, streamed north in drumming flight. Already wolves howled on the verge of the dark. Seeing the fugitives soldiers of the Masters, the Jew flung his company upon them, slaying many and possessing themselves of armour and swords.
Only then they learnt that this rout from the Battle of the Lake had been wrought by the Gladiators, still undefeated
. Their leader had fallen on Clodius the praetor, taking him unawares and scattering the half-legion he had brought from Rome.
Gershom halted his company and waited till dawn. But from east and west and south, all that night, the slaves gathered by rumour and an insane hope, marched into the camp of the Gladiators.
The Gladiators
[i]
A YEAR before the Battle of the Lake there had arrived in the ludus of Batiates at Capua a Threce called Spartacus, condemned to death ad ludam as a bandit. One side of his head was split with a great sword-wound, and he sat long hours on the benches, saying nothing, staring at the clang and wheel of the training Games-men. He was young and bearded, heavy-chinned, with a brow that rose straightly to thick-curled hair. The thick-lipped mouth was set evenly, his eyes were clear and grey. Batiates stared at him move and saw the hunter’s stride. No story came with the slave from the barbarous land where he had been a bandit. Then presently, in the idle gossip of the ludus, the story spread that the bandit himself remembered nothing, the sword-wound had destroyed his memory.
Presently the wound healed. He was quick and strong, his grey eyes cool and patient, his hands learned readily the grip of the gladius, the shameful, curved sword of the Games-men. Batiates matched him with mirmillones, then with a retiarius, both times in test. But a madness came on the Threce, caught in the retiarius’ net. He dropped his wooden sword and caught his opponent and strangled him to death ere the lanistae could save him. Panting, he flung the body on the ground while all the school gaped and Batiates smiled. With a thorough training this slave would earn a good price for the Circus at Rome.
It was a time of hardship and heavy taxes. Batiates cut down the supply of meat to the men in the ludus. Accustomed to flesh, not corn, the Gladiators grumbled and dozed in the sun, unheeding the shouts of the lanistae. Batiates had these armed with great wire whips, and the Gladiators driven again to their exercises. Watching them, Batiates would calculate on each the profit, and retire at night, satisfied, to the arms of Elpinice.
She was sixteen years of age, a Greek slave, and four years the mistress of Batiates. She was Athenian born, the slave-master had affirmed, as she stood naked, with white-painted feet on the platform of the ergastulum. Batiates, in need of a mistress, had kindled, grunting, but demanded if she were yet a virgin. Reassured, he had bought her and taken her to his bed. His slaves heard that night sounds that rang through the ludus. But by morning she had learned the place of a bed-slave. In the months that followed she was quiet and demure, with ivory skin and deep red hair, and dark brows meeting intently, Greekwise, across her nose. Hated by the rest of the slaves, she kept Batiates’ bed and his favour. Wakeful in the middle of a night, she would hear the drone from the sheds of the Gladiators, and a God of horror havoc in her heart as she looked on the sleeping Batiates.