Spartacus: Swords and Ashes

by J. M. Clements

  “An investigator? With what intention?”

  “Perhaps none of concern.”

  “And if this proves worthy of concern?”

  “Then let us hope no misfortune befalls him.”

  The bearers took their rest at the next hilltop, before the descent into the valley taxed different muscles in their legs. Ilithyia slid daintily from the litter, supporting herself without a word upon the proffered shoulder of one of the bearers.

  “Oh, this is… tiresome!” she breathed, flapping her fan. The sweat-drenched slaves who had borne her thus far knew better than to say anything. She stretched provocatively, uncaring that her breasts strained against her sweat-dampened silks in full view of the slaves.

  Sighing with the effort of being carried for several hours, Ilithyia walked to the edge of the cliff, to gaze down at the long, undulating land that slid away toward the mist in the distant southeast.

  “Can you see the sea?” Lucretia asked, as she too stepped away from the litter.

  “I am not sure,” Ilithyia replied. “The distant land fades into cloud, as the clouds fade into the horizon.”

  Just for a moment, the sun peeked through, glinting on something in the distance.

  “A spark on waters?” Ilithyia said. “The bay of Neapolis lies before us.”

  “Yet some hours of walking, I fear,” Lucretia said.

  “Then let us tarry a while. We are plainly ahead of your husband’s litter.”

  “I see no reason why not,” Lucretia agreed, flapping one of the panels of her gown in an attempt to dispel the muggy heat. “We may as well enjoy the open air before the rain’s inevitable return.”

  Ilithyia stretched again.

  “I shall come to enjoy this road, I hope,” she mused.

  “Are you planning on making this journey often?”

  “Perhaps,” Ilithyia replied. “There is talk of a new dawn in the fortunes of Neapolis.”

  “I have always found it a ghastly place.”

  “And yet you accompany me, fearful your own counsel might be mistaken? Rumour has a hundred eyes and a hundred ears. I must see for myself and decide whether to broach the subject further with my husband.”

  “You would really consider a move to Neapolis? Your household and slaves? Your life and impediments?”

  “Rome may be the eternal city, but one cannot live there eternally.”

  Lucretia bit her lip, and thought of the countless citizens who boasted of their connections to Rome, and yet still yearned to see it.

  “Does Capua not offer enough diversions for you?” Lucretia enquired with half her mouth.

  “It boasts certain primitive charm, of course. Though one mired in heat and dust. Do you not tire of it?”

  “The Batiatus family has dwelt in Capua for three generations.”

  “Mobility is a virtue.”

  “Says one dragged from eternal City of the Seven Hills, her fingernails clawing at the stones of the Appian Way! Perhaps I shall just make us mutual hospes, and then appear at your doorstep whenever I have the urge for sea air.”

  “But if my husband were to be made consul…” Ilithyia said.

  “An honor that lies yet before him.”

  “A course to which he is eminently capable!”

  “Of course, Ilithyia.”

  “And he shall have some divine aid set to his purpose.”

  “Sacrifices? Games in his honor?”

  “My husband struggles to find favor with the senate. The foreign wars go badly, and he is shunted aside on the course of military commands. He seeks possible avenues elsewhere.”

  “Politics? The gods?”

  “The conditions are as changeable as this autumnal weather. Sunny one moment. Tinkling with rain the next.”

  “And no man can predict the weather.”

  Ilithyia giggled and took Lucretia’s hand.

  “No one man.” she whispered. “But perhaps ten special men.”

  Lucretia frowned.

  “There are men in Rome, a select group of men to be sure, but a group that falls open to newcomers when death claims a new member. Men who consult the books of prophecies past to divine future course.”

  “And your husband has a guide to posterities yet unknown?”

  “He may yet gain one, should he be well considered.”

  “What books?”

  “There are books, in Rome. Kept by the priests of the Capitoline, collating oracles and predictions from all over the known world, all to the greater good of Rome. Catalogues of prophecy.”

  “I have heard of them,” Lucretia said.

  “Then you must know only few may consult them.”

  Lucretia laughed, feeling the weight of her journey lifted by such humor.

  “If the priests of the Capitoline Hill truly had books foretelling futures, would we not already know what tomorrow holds?”

  “We are citizens of Rome, the greatest Republic that the world has ever seen!”

  “But it would still be a blessing to know if the day yet holds rain.”

  IV

  IMAGINES

  The hillside was cloaked with cypress trees, old and young, reaching to the sky like tall, green fingers. Below, the streets and houses of Neapolis stretched toward the distant sea. Above, the slopes continued ever higher, as the hill became the dark, ashen mountain that loomed above Neapolis like a permanent shadow.

  The scent of pine wafted. As the trees bowed in the wind, they sometimes revealed the bright white of stone memorials, glimpsed for the briefest of moments before the limbs sprung back into place.

  Slaves placed cypress branches against the stack of dry wood, while others carefully slipped rolls of cinnamon or cassia wood into the gaps between the logs and straw. They set final, greener branches against the sides, putting the workmanlike bonfire kindling out of sight, creating the impression of a green, growing altar in the middle of the hillside forest. With each gust of wind, the branches shifted slightly, making it seem as if the altar could breathe.

  The slaves turned to other activities. They swept the ground clear of pebbles. They fiddled with the line of lit torches, deliberately incongruous in the daylight, that stretched toward the road into Neapolis. And they studiously ignored the men who were picking through a pile of outsized, burnished armor.

  “We are to be attired as warriors of the north, it seems. Cimbri, perhaps, or Teutones,” Varro said.

  “And these warriors from the north, they wear helmets such as these?” Spartacus mused.

  “I believe so.”

  “Believe? No wonder the gods did not favor them.”

  “Your meaning?” Varro asked.

  Without warning, Spartacus leapt at the tall Roman, grabbing his newly donned helmet by one of its prominent horns. Varro stumbled backward in surprise, but Spartacus had him in a firm grip, dragging his helmeted head down into the dust as if he were wrestling an ox.

  Varro hit the ground with a whoosh of air, and did not even attempt to struggle from the hold, instead raising the two fingers of submission.

  The slaves with brushes and torches looked up momentarily from their labors, and then returned to work as if the fight had never happened.

  “The horns serve no purpose,” Spartacus said coldly. “There is no way for you to employ them in combat, and even if you did, they are blunt to the point of futility. But to an opponent, they offer secure purchase. Absent the defence of your sword-arm from the front, these horns offer your foe a handle by which to drag you down.”

  “Very well!” Varro protested in an anguished growl. “Your point is made. Let me go.”

  Spartacus climbed nimbly to his feet, holding out a hand to help up his friend.

  “The costumes are chosen for us,” Varro said. “I cannot choose my armor.”

  “Indeed,” Spartacus agreed. “But you can choose how to wear it.”

  He drew his sword from its scabbard and carefully began sawing through the leather chin strap.

&nbs
p; “Have you lost mind?” Varro asked, scraping the worst of the black Neapolitan dirt from his frame.

  “I do not wish to enter battle unprotected,” Spartacus said calmly. “But I can aid its removal if pulled with sufficient force.”

  He held it up for Varro to see. A neat nick in the chinstrap left it only half as wide as it once was.

  “I suggest you do the same,” Spartacus continued.

  Varro nodded, unsmiling, with the calculation of a man in search of any advantage.

  “You are cunning, Thracian,” he said. “No ordinary man would think to win victory by losing that which is to protect him.”

  “My only thought, to stay alive,” Spartacus said.

  Their fellow slaves from House Batiatus, the swarthy Galatian Cycnus and the jet-black Numidian Bebryx, watched their chatter sullenly.

  “You would do well to listen to the Champion of Capua,” Varro said to them quietly. “Or die with closed ears.”

  Bebryx sucked thoughtfully on his teeth, peeling them back from his lips with a contemptuous smack. Cycnus also said nothing, fussing instead with the straps of his armor.

  “Please yourselves,” Varro said with a shrug. “But mark well our opponents.”

  He jerked his head across the clearing toward a second group of gladiators, picking through a pile of antique Roman swords and shields. The others followed his direction.

  “Why are there but three of them and four of us?” Cycnus asked.

  “Their fourth marches in the procession itself,” Varro explained. “The freedman Timarchides, friend to the deceased.”

  “Does this mark advantage?” Spartacus asked.

  “A freedman will not seek true danger. He has too much to lose.”

  “Strike him with flat of sword and see honor restored?” Cycnus suggested with a grin.

  Bebryx sucked on his teeth again, and looked away at the trees warily, as if expecting the wood itself to come for him.

  “But he is a freedman,” Spartacus said, “in a house of gladiators.”

  “What is your meaning, Thracian?” Varro asked.

  “He is not a weak-willed patrician, thinking of wine and the next banquet,” Spartacus said. “He is a gladiator so proficient that he received the wooden sword. We fight a man skilled enough to fight his way to freedom.”

  “Oh,” Varro said quietly. “Fuck.”

  Batiatus wore black. The unfamiliar color kept taking him by surprise, as if there were a fly on his arm or a mosquito at his neck. He looked around him at the Neapolitan villa, so oddly like the one he had left behind in Capua, as if its architect had hoped to imitate every aspect of House Batiatus.

  The floors had been cleaned, scrubbed and washed, but there were still telltale stains. To a lanista’s accustomed eye, a benign pink patch on the marble was no mere discoloration, but evidence of the recent removal of a pool of dried blood. There were chips and nicks in the friezes, suggesting swords and metal objects had been swung in an enclosed space in some recent frenzy.

  Pelorus ran a house of warriors, but there was no cause for there to be war in his dwelling. Slaves had cleared away the worst of the debris, but Batiatus still sensed the echoes of that last, bloody dinner party.

  Marcus Pelorus was laid out on a long bier in what had once been his atrium. The pool was drained, the furniture removed. Many of the side doors were firmly shut. The house was conspicuously, ominously, silent.

  Batiatus approached the bier, glancing down the side aisles in the vain hope of seeing other mourners. Much to his surprise, he appeared to be alone.

  “Well,” he said grimly to the corpse. “Present moment holds just you and me, you old bastard.”

  Pelorus said nothing, for Pelorus was dead. His face had an odd yellow pallor, dusted with pollen to present the illusion of life, but dusted too much, it seemed the pollinctores had been over-zealous. Batiatus reached out, and then decided against it. He looked around, saw nobody was coming, and reached out once again to poke Pelorus tauntingly on the chin.

  Batiatus’s touch inadvertently dislodged the shroud that covered Pelorus’s neck, revealing a gaping throat wound. His lip curled in revulsion as he carefully tucked the folds of cloth back into place. They had been poorly tied, and he shook his head at the low quality of Neapolitan craftsmanship.

  “Good Pelorus, at last you find end,” he said to the body. “An end that proves its worth I hope.”

  “And what worth is that?” said a loud voice from behind him. Batiatus started. He turned to see a thin, handsome man with carefully tousled hair, wearing a patrician toga with practiced ease.

  “Apologies,” Batiatus said. “I thought myself alone.”

  “I am Gaius Verres, hospes of the deceased,” Verres said.

  “Quintus Lentulus Batiatus, likewise.”

  “I do not recall him mentioning that name. Was your friendship close?”

  Batiatus’s eyes widened.

  “My name never crossed his lips?” he asked, carefully.

  “Never,” Verres said, smiling apologetically. “But perhaps he never spoke of Gaius Verres to your ears, either.”

  “The years have found us infrequent companions, save haggling over matters of human cargo.”

  Batiatus made as if to say something more, then thought better of it.

  “The friend of my friend…” he said hopefully, holding out his arm.

  “Indeed so,” Verres responded, clasping it firmly with his own. “You have journeyed far?”

  “From Capua!” Batiatus said.

  “His former home,” Verres said nodding, “though I think his preference was to be by the sea in Neapolis.”

  “And you?”

  “From Rome,” Verres said quietly. “I was traveling to Sicilia, and resting here with my hospes good Pelorus, before my journey’s resumption. My expectation was not that this would also be our last farewell.”

  “You are on business Republican?”

  “I am to be Sicilia’s governor!”

  Batiatus gasped.

  “I was innocent of the elevated circles in which my old friend good Pelorus moved,” he said.

  “He was a contributor of great generosity to my campaign,” Verres said. “A wondrous benefactor for a Roman on the course of honors. I am in debt to him for my position, in some ways. And you?”

  “Many years ago,” Batiatus said, “the good Marcus Pelorus saved the life of my father.”

  “A deed that deserves recurrent voice.” He shook his head and stared appreciatively at the body on the bier. “May the gods bring you reward in the afterlife,” he said to the corpse.

  “I have exchanged messages with a man called Timarchides,” Batiatus said. “I am to receive my payment from him.”

  “Payment for what?”

  “I bring gladiators for the funeral and celebratory games.”

  “Then you are in my employ. I am editor of the games!”

  “I have brought many fine gladiators from Capua. Although I confess to finding such a request strange.”

  “Why?”

  “You are aware, good Verres, that in the house of a murdered master…”

  “…all slaves must die. Of course.”

  “And since the ludus must be considered part of House Pelorus, and prize gladiators played their part in the revolt, there can be no debate upon the subject. They too, must perish.”

  “A sad state of affairs,” Verres agreed.

  “My fine gladiators fight in these games as executioners more than warriors,” Batiatus pointed out. “Why bring in such men from Capua? Pelorus was not the only lanista in Neapolis. Why not seek such executioners closer to hand?”

  “Perhaps good Timarchides knew of your past association with Pelorus, and felt the coin best spent on friends?” Verres said expansively.

  Batiatus sighed. “The bitter death of Pelorus, sweetened by last gesture of friendship.”

  From outside came a dreadful cacophony of flat horns and discordant flutes.


  “Curse them,” Verres muttered. “This cloud leaves no sun for the dial, making it a task near impossible to tell when the procession should start.”

  “It holds the sound of starting now,” Batiatus said.

  “I must don my mourning robes,” Verres scowled, dashing toward the bedchambers.

  “I shall see what weight I can add to its slowing.”

  “Do not trouble yourself,” Verres called behind him. “They would not start without me.”

  Clad in dark, heavy clothes a world away from her habitual lightweight silks, Ilithyia watched the distant sea from the colonnade that circled the house of Pelorus. She heard footsteps approaching, and the rustle of rough cloth.

  “You should attend to your husband, Lucretia,” she said, without turning around. “I think he is still sulking after the journey.”

  “I expect the solitude pleased him.”

  “You are cruel!”

  “I know my husband. Besides, I do not wish to enter the house while the body is still laid out within. Let him take on the bad fortune!”

  Ilithyia smiled to herself.

  “Your mourning weeds become you,” Lucretia said.

  “Gratitude,” Ilithyia said. “It was kind of you to provide them.”

  “Anything for a dear friend.”

  “I have none of my own, not even in Rome. One is supposed to wear rags to funerals, and all of my clothing is too fine!”

  Lucretia smiled with clenched teeth.

  “It is to your good fortune that my clothing should be so poor,” she said.

  “The great and the good of Rome are building their holiday villas here,” Ilithyia continued.

  “For all that is sacred, why?”

  “The views across the bay. The sea air.”

  “But the journey here is miserable. As our own experience can attest.”

  “Not with the right companion,” Ilithyia said, pointedly. “One does not have to trudge through the hilly backwaters of Capua, you know. You can ignore the Appian Way and take the road along the coast from Rome.”

  “Ilithyia, you tease me. That way lays Cumae and the Fiery Fields.”

  “The fiery what?”