“She did not,” Drenis says.
“Of course she did. Why wouldn’t she? You’re Drenis, loved by all women.”
Drenis knows he has a pleasing face and that his body, though he is past twenty years, has stayed that of a youth just becoming a man. Before he was a slave, back in Thrace, women teased him, calling him a twin to Paris, saying Bendidora was his Helen. He wanted his Helen, but having Paris’s face embarrassed him. It was a face to please women, yes, but he would have chosen a face to please men. A face that could make them trust and believe and follow. Could he choose his face, he would have one like Spartacus’s.
Spartacus settles back against his bedding, raining flecks of straw. Drenis closes his eyes until the debris stops falling. “Tell me something you remember, Drenis.”
They do this often, the two of them alone in the tiny cell they share, talking of home. Spartacus says if they keep Thrace alive in their minds, their gods will know of it. Zalmoxis will know they still live. Darzalas will drive their hand because they stayed loyal. He says of all the gods, the Great Mother has the farthest reach. She is on the earth wherever the animals and plants of nature are. If she knows they are true to her, she will aid them once they are free and in the hills. The Romans will not be able to find them. They don’t know her, and she cares not for them and their stinking cities.
“Speak up,” Spartacus says. “It’s better to talk than to wait in silence.”
He’s right. But what to say? Drenis remembers that when he was a boy, his mother took him to the hut the women went to sometimes to attend to private things. She walked him there while his father was away on campaign. She built a fire, and in the low, smoky light, she told him everything she knew about the Great Mother. As she talked, she heated a needle. She had him lie on his belly, and telling him not to wince, she pricked at the small of his back. For a long time she worked there.
“Do you know what I’m doing?” she asked. “This stigma will be of Zalmoxis. Men will see it and like it, which will be good for you. Here is a secret, just for you.” She traced a circle on his skin. “Here, this is the Great Mother. She encircles Zalmoxis. She contains him. Men won’t know this. They’ll see it and think it means that Zalmoxis owns the world. Really, though, the world owns him. It will be a fine stigma. It will grow as you do.”
Drenis believes it has, though he’s never seen it. He can’t tell Spartacus that, though. Instead, he says, “Do you remember the pit of snakes?”
“Snakes?”
“Once we found them, when we ran the hills as boys.”
“Who was with us?”
“Skaris. Prytos. Nico as well.” There is another, but he hesitates to name him. Then remembers he has a place in the story. “Ziles. Once we came upon a hollow that thronged with snakes. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. I couldn’t number them, there were so many, all of them writhing together. We stared at them from the crag above. And then Ziles went to throw down a stone on them.”
“Yes,” Spartacus says, “I remember that. I caught his arm and told him not to.”
“I was glad you did that.”
“Ziles wasn’t.”
“I tried to find that place again, but I couldn’t.”
“Why did you want to find it?”
Drenis knows why, but it’s not something he can say. After seeing them that one time, he often dreamed of it again. Only, in his dreams he was there alone. Each time he climbed down the rocks and waded into the snakes. He sank down among them. They writhed around him like a thousand lovers, touching him with their noses. He had the dream so often that he thought he should find the place alone and see what would happen. Perhaps, he had thought, he was meant to do in life what he did in his dreams. Perhaps, if he did, he would be blessed.
He doesn’t want to say all that. “No reason, really. I just wanted to see them again.”
“Not throw rocks at them?”
“No, I wouldn’t—”
And then Astera is at the bars of their cell door. So suddenly that it clips Drenis’s words in midthought. She stands there, skin white in the faint light coming from the corridor. For a moment, he thinks it’s not Astera at all but the ghost of her. Then he hears her breathing. He hears the keys she holds, searching for the lock. Spartacus is off the cot fast, leaving Drenis blinking as straw falls on him.
By the time Drenis has wiped the debris from his face and stood, the door is open. Astera steps in. She smiles. Even in the dim light, he can see her teeth. Amazed that he would ever feel such a thing, he thinks perhaps he should try to move in the world like Astera. A man who moved like her would be feared.
She reaches out and presses her hand to Spartacus’s face, smearing it with something dark. “Valens gave me something to give you. He said all great things begin with an offering.” Glancing at Drenis, she adds, “It’s for you as well. You should be less pretty.” As if to make him that, she draws her other hand across his face, leaving moist slashes.
It takes a moment, but then he understands. He tastes it. Blood. The first of that night’s offering.
Sura
Sura has never doubted Astera, not after what she saw her do in the arena. Not since she explained it afterward. When she said that this night would be their last as slaves, Sura knew it would be so. She waits, Cerzula and Epta with her, the three Thracian women close together in the tiny, pitch-black cell they share with Astera. They know that Astera has gone to pleasure fat Valens. She’s not the first to have done that. But tonight she promised not to pleasure him. This night he will serve her instead.
Sura and her sisters know things that the others do not. Other women sleep in the cells near them, down the corridor and on the floor below. They slumber, some snoring. One woman mumbles complaints, for she can’t sleep and wants to deny the same to others as well. They think this is a night like any other. They’ll awake as slaves and stay as slaves and die as slaves. Sura knows better and thinks them fools. How can anybody sleep tonight? How can they not know what’s about to happen?
“We should pray to Kotys,” Epta says. Her voice is brittle with fear. “Here. Do as I have. Offer blood to her.”
Sura cannot see the younger woman in the darkness, but she knows that she is holding out the feather that fell to her from the sky. She rubbed the tip of the quill to a sharp point, which she uses to nick her flesh. More than any of them, Epta has grown fervent for Kotys, Astera’s goddess. Of the four of them, she has always been the most afraid. Pretty and small, vulnerable in a way that makes men feel big beside her. None of them have it easy, but for Epta slavery has been harder than for most. That is why she loves Astera so fervently, for her strength and for the things she promises.
Sura doesn’t love Astera. She fears her, which is a truer emotion, she thinks.
“Give me the feather,” Cerzula says. A moment later she sighs and asks the goddess to see her. She swears her loyalty and promises to always make offerings to her and love her above all other gods. Epta affirms every word, breathless as if in the throes of passion.
Kotys is a Thracian god, but one nearly forgotten on the plains, where Sura is from. Kotys, Astera has said, is easily angered and hard to appease. She is the rage that burns in a person that sees her family killed, women and children raped. She is the one who never forgets. She whispers always of revenge. She slays those who anger her and showers her face with their blood. Kotys is the wolf that eats the moon when it grows fat. And she is the moon as well, for gods can be more than one thing. They can have more than one story. Sura, being Odomanti, had not known this before. Because of Astera, she knows it now.
—
Sura had thought little of her the first time she saw her. Slight and disheveled, her flame-colored hair was such a tangle that it hid her face. Her stigmas spoke for her, though. Dii markings. Serpents entwined with trees on her arms. Wolves copulating with the Great Mother across her right breast. Profane. Dii beliefs, not Odomanti.
They were chained together in the slave mar
ket. They stood naked and shivering in the damp morning chill, as other women, newly purchased, joined them. They weren’t slaves with a span of months or years ahead of them. They were the women of a people being punished for spurning Rome. Driven on foot from Thrace, abused over every mile, to see Roman might for themselves. Men went to the arena to die fighting in it. Their women, she was told, were to go to the arena as well, but not to fight. Just to die.
The morning of the day this was to happen, slavers roused them from the holding pen they had been housed in for several days. She didn’t know it then, but she was in the ludus of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia. Encumbered by chains and stiff from so long sitting immobile, Sura stumbled on the uneven paving stones of the city’s streets. She had never seen a city so large, so choked with humans living piled on top of one another. There was nothing like this place in all of Thrace.
They were taken to a great arena, a structure several stories high. Gardens of flowering plants surrounded it, pools of water with walkways between them. This was the moment she felt the filthiest, beside clear water and living plants, the fragrance of flowers floating on the air and the low hum of the insects that worked among them. It was the first place of beauty she had seen in the city, but it was a lie. They descended into a gaping mouth that led down into a network of tunnels under the arena, corridors full of wretched, chained, barely human things. The guards stuffed them in with others and left them.
It was a long wait, long enough for her to think of many ways she might be killed. As if to help her visions of torture, a voice began speaking in Greek, a language she knew. She couldn’t tell where among the bodies he was, but could hear him clearly enough. He said that once he had seen a funeral game in Rome. That one began with stunted men pretending to fight over a stunted woman. The men chased one another around the arena, dodging things thrown by the crowd, looking ridiculous with their wooden swords. In the end, the men joined forces and attacked the woman.
“The crowd liked that,” the voice said.
Sura tried not to listen to him, but her mind took in pieces of what he said. Images of the condemned tied to posts, whipped until they were raw, almost insensible. Slaves hunted by leopards and lions. Others doused in oil and set afire. Men made to fight without armor, each slash or thrust cutting deep.
And then a guard was yelling at them. Sura didn’t understand his Latin, but it didn’t matter. He yanked their chains and dragged them into motion. Other men joined him, men who had leave to kick and punch the women. They were shoved through the corridors, up a sloping ramp, and through a series of gates. Animal scents assaulted her, making the hairs on her arms and back prickle. A beast, somewhere nearby, roared over and over again. She wondered if that would be the thing that killed her.
They spilled out on the hot sand. Blinded by the sudden brightness, for a time she could see nothing. She could hear, though. Voices. Shouts. Applause. Eyes adjusting, the sight of so many people dizzied her. The bowl of the arena was an enormous mouth, and each of those heads was one of the creature’s teeth. They were inside a monster. This was its maw. This was where it fed and where she was meant to die.
Surely she would have, if not for Astera.
—
Sura is on her knees with her sisters, blood on her palms, when she hears a voice.
“The goddess heard you,” it says. “Heard and answered.”
Epta starts. The voice is disembodied. In the blackness, it seems to come from the air itself, but Sura knows it’s just Astera, arriving as she said she would.
“Touch my hand,” Astera says.
All three women clutch at Astera’s hand—which she has thrust through the bars—until Spartacus appears, holding a small lamp. This is the man whom Astera saw in a dream before she saw him in waking life. Sura thinks, not for the first time, that if Astera had wanted to choose her companion—instead of letting a dream do so for her—she could not have chosen better than Spartacus. Her breathing comes faster when he is near. She hides this, though. He is Astera’s man. Not hers.
“Sisters,” Astera says, holding the key out to Cerzula and indicating that she means Epta as well, “open the cages and free the women. Everyone. Tell them to be quiet. There will be a time for noise, but it is not yet. Move them toward the gate to the training grounds and wait. Gaidres will lead them from here.”
“But where are you going?” Epta asks.
“We have something to do” is all she says. To Sura, she says, “Come.”
They move in silence. Up out of the women’s quarters and then, keeping to the shadows, around toward the storage buildings. They crawl atop a pile of crates and emerge through an opening onto a rooftop. Some of the roofs drop off below their level. Some rise a story or two higher. Beyond the walls, the maze of Capua smolders. It surrounds them, a festering scab on the world. A haze of smoke hangs above the jumble of buildings and clouds the night air. Sura longs to be far from here, in hills and trees, away from the scents of fire and iron and the filth of so many people jammed together. She wonders how they will ever get through the city and out. It doesn’t seem possible.
They climb to the spine of the rooftop, over it and down. At the edge they jump to a shelf. Spartacus boosts them up and then manages to climb up behind them. They walk the spine of a higher roof. At the far end of it, Spartacus jumps down and waits for them. Astera first. Then Sura dangles from the edge. She lets go when she feels Spartacus’s hands touch her legs. He half-catches her, his body pressing against hers for a moment. Then he’s moving again. The creaking of the roof tiles beneath their feet, the scuffing of their feet on the mortar: every noise is a scream in Sura’s ears. Why are they doing this? Wherever they are going, this way will not take them out of the ludus. She wants to say this, but surely they know. Surely there’s a reason.
When she realizes where they are, her steps slow. She has been here before. Raised up above the stink of the cells and the training grounds…Air perfumed by incense…They are approaching Vatia’s quarters. Spartacus turns, finger to his lips. In the quiet—grown somehow more intense with that finger to those lips—she hears men talking. Spartacus glides to the other side of the corridor. He steps close, so he can see into the guards’ alcove, but he stays in shadow.
Sura joins Astera where she squats beside a low partition. Slowly, they both raise their heads. On the other side, two men sit on stools on either side of a round table, a game of dice between them. The older of them shells nuts with the nob at the base of a dagger. He sticks it, point first, into the table as he takes up the dice. They have weapons. The dagger. Short swords at their waists. She hopes this will decide the matter. They’ll turn back now. They’ll join the others and flee. But Spartacus keeps watching. His jaw hangs open. She thinks he is sliding his tongue across his teeth.
The moment the older man rises, Spartacus moves. He strides in like a person on urgent business. The standing man looks at him. He grabs his sword and starts to draw it. Spartacus snatches up the dagger. He slams it into the man’s neck, and then rips it to one side. The man spins with the momentum of the side cut, his artery severed and life draining out of him. He turns and takes a few steps before crumbling.
Spartacus closes on the sitting man. A youth, really. He has not risen or drawn his sword. He just sits, his lips in an oval, one arm ready to tip dice from his cup. Spartacus seems to know that he doesn’t need haste. He chooses precision instead. He puts a hand on the young guard’s shoulder and thrusts the knife into his chest. Just so, into his heart. Recognition of his own death is on the youth’s face. He almost looks as if he’s been waiting for it.
Spartacus says, “They made that easy.” The way he says it sounds like a complaint.
“Kotys held them still,” Astera says. She takes the dagger from him and motions that the swords are his. He wrenches the belt and scabbard from the fallen man and straps it on.
Turning to Sura, Astera says, “Sister, you have been to Vatia’s bed. Take us to it.”
To Vatia? Sura thinks. The idea is preposterous. He is the beating heart of the evil of this place. Why go to him when they are trying to be free of him? And more than that, he is her greatest shame. Yes, she went to his bed when he demanded it. Others did, but as far as she knew, she was the only one he used in a particular way, entering her from behind, not the normal way that makes children, but in the other place. He was rough at it, asking her if it hurt. He was so curious about whether it hurt. She’s tried hard to forget. Sometimes she did, until she saw him again. Until he summoned her again. Then he made her remember. She’d hoped that this was over, but, no. Vatia, through Astera, is summoning her again.
“You and Epta are the only two of us that he’s taken to his bed,” Astera says. “If I had your knowledge, I would not ask, but I don’t. I can’t ask Epta. You know that. But you’re stronger. We have purpose, sister. Take us. You will not mind seeing him this last time.”
She doesn’t want to, but those words—you’re stronger—warm her. It pleases her that Astera thinks so. She tries to look as if she is strong, as if she shakes off the things done to her with disdain. As far as she can tell, Cerzula does this, and Astera seems to forget the men who use her the moment they’re finished. For Sura, it’s a struggle. For her, only seeing Epta—the most often forced and the most devastated by it—gives her some comfort. The one time Sura feels full control over her memories is when she’s chastising Epta to control hers. In those moments, when she’s watching the small girl tremble: that’s when she believes and feels her own words—but only in comparison to Epta, who can’t do the same.
Astera steps closer. She speaks close enough that Sura feels her breath on her skin. “Remember the arena. I didn’t fail you there. I won’t here either.”
The Risen Page 2