The Risen

by David Anthony Durham

  Castus manages to get his feet back on the stone and both hands on the vine. Hand below hand, foot below foot, he descends. He looks at the rock wall in front of him, not down. He hates down because it is so far away and because he wants it so much. Who knew that to have one’s feet on the earth was such a blessed thing?

  It’s a different fear that keeps him moving quickly, though. His sword feels loose in his loincloth. It swings in the air, and he thinks it will fall. He imagines it dropping away and skittering down the stone into the darkness. He moves faster than he would otherwise, wanting to get to a safe place so that he can secure it better. Hand below hand, foot below foot, until he lands hard, jarring.

  “Careful, fool, you’ll break your tailbone.” Another Celt helps him up, indicates that he should walk a narrow, slanting shelf of rock. When he reaches another anchor point, they queue again, waiting as one man at a time begins the next descent. As he tries to tie his sword more securely in place, he looks up, wanting to see the long stretch of stone he’s already put above him. But there’s nothing to see, just a cornice of rock and the sky above. The moon has cleared the clouds, and he can see better now, both the contours of the ledge and the slope that careens off below him. The large boulders at the bottom look like elephants. He can’t shake the feeling they are moving.

  And farther, just partially in view around the curve of the rock wall, he sees the campfires that mark the Roman camp. They’re there, waiting, though they don’t know they’re waiting. He can’t shake the feeling that he created the army that waits for them on the side of the mountain. His were the first eyes to see it. He’d watched it turn up the valley and become more and more real, even as sounds from the raiding party reached up to him. It was the very same one they are to face tonight. His army. He wonders if someone else had stood lookout, if they would have seen it, or if only he was fated to create it. Silly thoughts. Thoughts that eat their own tails and grow no fuller in the process. He tells himself that the army didn’t begin the moment he spotted it. It had marched all the way from Rome. Every one of the soldiers in it had walked every mile, all of them intent on ending the uprising. The Roman who commands down in that camp would not think himself a figment of Castus’s mind. Castus shouldn’t think of him as that either.

  “You!” Yet another Celt. “Down.”

  —

  Finally he lands on the earth. A good thing. Not everyone has been so fortunate. He looks up at the slope and sees the black figures moving across the stone like ants. He thanks Wodanaz for the aid he surely gave. As the descent is behind him now, he changes to asking the god to be with him when he meets a Roman face-to-face. He has time to think about this, as many are not down yet and the waiting is interminable, not least because Castus is unsure of the nature of their mission. Will the gods welcome what Spartacus has planned? He’s unsure. He can’t refute the Thracian’s logic. The Roman force is not a full legion, but they are well-armed soldiers. Not gladiators, no, but a force that, all things considered, outmatches theirs. None of them, Castus is sure, wears only a single greave and a pitiful band of iron around his head. They don’t have swords so old they may snap with use. None of them are likely to fight naked. None carry sticks with charred points. They outnumber the gladiators by hundreds, at least, and they must have been trained to fight as a unit. The gladiators, no matter their individual skills, have not been so trained.

  Considering all this, he cannot dispute what Spartacus has argued. If they fight them in the light of day, on an open field of their choosing, they will lose. They may kill and have glory and perhaps distinguish themselves as they enter the next world, but their time in this one will be over. And their revenge against Rome will have been but a nick of the flesh, not the belly thrust the Romans deserve. Oenomaus wasn’t moved by the Thracian’s logic, but enough others were. And so they are here, below a cliff wall, waiting for those still scrambling down.

  When Spartacus appears, he does so right among the Germani Castus huddles with. He speaks Latin. “Brothers, come to me.”

  They begin to. Castus casts about for Oenomaus, but he’s not to be seen. If he is near, Castus believes, he would sense him, hear his grumbling. As he is not, Castus moves as the others do. Once many are huddled around him, Spartacus tells them that they could not ask for a better situation than the one they now have. He has them step back so that he can carve out the shape of the camp on the ground. Castus can barely see the lines, but he follows the motions of his arm. “I had eyes on them earlier, so I can tell you what you will find. A hasty camp, not a good one. What you will find is first a ditch. On the far side of the ditch, a mound of earth. The mound suffices as the wall and is not tall. But there are stakes there, friends, like a bristle of some mangy dog’s teeth. They jut at angles meant to impale you no matter which way you move. Careful with them. You will do better not to run at them. Go as slowly as you must to find your way through. It will be unnerving, but better you thread through them than be gored. If you do that, you’ll just block the way for the man behind you. You wouldn’t want that.”

  Though Castus can’t see his face, the light tone of his voice conveys the smile Spartacus said this last with.

  “Also, do not rush into the ditch. At the base of it are low spikes. You have only to step on one for it to tear your foot apart. No, mind your feet, be calm. The camp wall is best against men who rage against it. Be calm, and you take away its power. Beyond the ditch, the mound, and the stakes”—he clicks his tongue off the roof of his mouth—“the camp. The men we will kill. The hoard of weapons and supplies we will take. These coming hours will see our fortunes rise. Believe me on this, and it will be so. And if you have reason to doubt me, trust in your own gods then. Call them so that they turn their eyes here and see what we are about to do. It’s Kotys I pray to, and Zalmoxis, but all your gods are welcome. Speak to them in the tongues they love. They will not ignore you.”

  Unseen in the dark, Castus makes a motion with his fingers. He reaches out and catches Spartacus’s words. He cups them in his palm and presses them to his thigh, making a talisman of them. He makes an oath. If they triumph at this—if everything goes as Spartacus says it can—he will break with Oenomaus and pledge himself to Spartacus. He thinks the name of the goddess he has yet to say out loud. Kotys, he thinks, if you have ears for me, listen. If you wish for me to fight in your name, show me proof of it.

  —

  Castus’s group is to attack from the slope on the downward side of the camp. He didn’t notice when it began, but he realizes that day has started to gray the world, just enough for him to make out the dimensions of the camp. The mound. It’s not so tall, he thinks, but it has teeth. He creeps toward it, remembering the things Spartacus said.

  If the wait was bad, this slow approach is worse. They are to stay silent. No signal or sign to attack, just get into position, breathe deep, and then begin to crawl forward. He carries his frail sword in his hand. It’s wrapped in a torn portion of tunic, and he grips it by the blade to stop it from clinking or scraping on the ground. He wonders if Kotys is the Thracian name for Nerthus. He prays that it is, and in his mind, he says both names. Even more, he forms them on his lips and whispers them. He hopes that, should the goddess hear him, she will understand that he understands.

  They don’t get nearly close enough before it all begins. A sentry on the fortifications shouts. Another calls to him asking what’s the matter. He answers with his horn. The man nearest Castus rises and runs, screaming, toward the camp. Castus follows. He tosses away the scrap of fabric and gets the sword hilt in his grip. The ground beneath him is irregular. The man in front of him trips and goes down. He rolls howling, his own sharpened staff jutting out of his shoulder.

  Castus almost bends to help him, but the men around him keep running, keep screaming.

  “Move, you bastard!” The voice is a bellow. Oenomaus. He shoves past Castus at a full, pounding run. His fat back and naked buttocks jiggle, soft on top of the thick muscle ben
eath. Of course he’s here. Oenomaus would not leave glory to Spartacus, not without his share of it. Castus almost calls him to go slowly, as Spartacus instructed. But Oenomaus would hate him for doing so. He is gone into the front ranks and lost from view.

  By the time he reaches the ditch, javelins are punching into the ground around him. One slams into a man’s head, sticks out of the crown of it as his body twists and falls. Castus wants to run. To leap across the ditch and tear through the stakes and get at the men behind them. Surely Oenomaus did just that. But Spartacus said to pass slowly. Mind your feet, he said. Be calm.

  Holding this in his mind and forcing himself to slow, Castus steps over the spikes at the bottom of the ditch. He places his feet carefully as he climbs the far slope. He sees the Romans there. He knows any of them might pierce him like a fish. He touches the soil with his hands, scrambling up. When he reaches the maze of jagged spikes at the top, he doesn’t rush through them, though he wants to.

  A javelin pierces the skin of his side so fast, it’s painless. He twists and squirms through the spikes, the rough bark of them scratching his belly and back. He can see the man who threw the javelin. He wants to kill him. He hears men screaming, thrashing. The Roman hefts another javelin. He snarls, calls Castus a shit bag and promises he is about to die. He throws. Castus ducks. The point of the javelin glances off the ring around his forehead. He falls forward beneath the points of the spikes. He stays low, crawling like mad. And then he’s through them.

  The Roman is there for him. He jabs at Castus’s face as he rises. Castus tilts his head, and a blade slices his cheek and part of his ear. In the second the Roman’s muscles flex to slash his face, Castus stabs him in the belly. The thrust feels strange, and he thinks he’s lost his grip on the sword. But when he pulls back and jabs again and again and again, he still grips the hilt. It’s just that the first thrust broke the blade inside the Roman. He has only a short nub of it now. The soldier’s weight falls on him. Castus twists away, grabbing the man’s wrist and peeling his sword from his hand. There. Better armed already. He runs into the camp, down the lanes among the tents, looking for men to kill. He finds them easily enough.

  —

  When it’s over and he stands gasping with fatigue, he can think only one thing. It was all as Spartacus said. The Romans died, slaughtered, many before they were even fully awake and out of their tents. The gladiators now have a small legion’s supply of gear, just like that. The work of a few hours. But what does that mean for his oath? Must he break with his chieftain and pledge himself to the Thracian? That’s what he swore he would do, but then Oenomaus joined the attack. So is he pledged to the Thracian, or still with his chieftain?

  He’s still thinking about it when Gannicus and Philon find him. Philon is as blood-splattered as any warrior, though none of it is his own blood. The medicus drops his satchel of torture devices he calls medical instruments. He grabs each of Castus’s arms, pats his legs, and spins him around to check his back for wounds. As soon as he’s satisfied the man’s wounds are minor, he grabs up his satchel and is gone to check on others.

  Gannicus is unscathed and wearing a Roman officer’s breastplate and sword—he is pleased with himself. “Look at that,” he says, taking Castus by the chin and turning his head to one side. “You lost a little of your ear. It’s a good thing, I think. You had too much ear to begin with. Do you want me to trim the other side to make them even?”

  Castus yanks his head away, not interested in being amused.

  “Don’t just stand here,” Gannicus says. “Get a helmet. A breastplate and greaves.”

  Castus moves to strip a nearby body.

  Gannicus stops him. He tilts his head, indicating something. “Look at her.”

  He means Astera. She walks through the carnage as if strolling through a field of wildflowers, her women trailing her. She carries a Roman head clenched by its black hair in one hand, a sword that looks too long for her in the other, bloodstained. One of the women dances giddily atop any dead Roman she passes.

  “She swore that she would have Glaber’s head,” Gannicus says. “I think she has it. Maybe we should learn the name of her goddess.”

  Castus doesn’t say anything for a time. And then he does. “Kotys,” he says. “That’s her name. Kotys.”

  Vectia

  It may be that Vectia knows signs of divinity when she hears them.

  It may be that she has never forgotten the Boii woman who years before told her that if at all possible, she should take herself to her home country to die. If she did, the gods of that place would know her and take pity on her. Her life in the next world would be a thing unimagined during the miseries of this one.

  It could be that she has been waiting to hear the news from somewhere and, hearing it from Capua, knew that she must answer its call.

  It’s possible that it is the dream that prompted her. A field of rabbits running wild, hopping and hopping, until a wolf ran into them and ripped them to bloody shreds. That wolf had not eaten the rabbits. Just killed them and rushed on, unstoppable. In the dream she had wanted to climb on the beast’s back and ride it. She hadn’t done it, but she had thought it. Doing it, she decided, was a task for the waking hours. It may have been this that moved her feet to walk down from Ferentinum and on to the Via Latina, to turn south.

  Or it could be that she is an old woman with nothing else to do, a slave who has outlived her usefulness. Her first master had been a trader who worked a route from Rhegium in the far south to Pisae, the Tuscan town of his birth. He had dragged her up and down Italy since she was a girl with her first blood still inside her. Few traveled so far, but this man lived for it, finding his wares had greater worth for the distances they covered. A life of many years with him, many miles walked. She hadn’t exactly mourned his death, but she had found his son too sedentary in comparison. Later she’d been abandoned by yet a third generation. She herself had never grown a child, even though her bleeding came monthly and even though, over the years, she had her master inside her often. She had no say in this, but in truth she had not disliked lying with him. Sometimes, if she managed him just so, he even gave her pleasure, though he never knew it. He did not, however, give her a child. Her master’s grandson—she could never really come to think of the boy as her master—had dismissed her with curses, saying she wasn’t worth the cost of feeding anymore. No, she has only herself, and she finds herself free to do as she pleases. Considering that, why not join an insurrection?

  Also, there are Celts among the gladiators. Free men who just might accept her. Who just might take her home.

  Vectia is not one to attach herself to a single reason for anything. Each of these things is true, but they are only part of the story. Truths overlap. Truths contradict. She has found it better to hold them all within one basket, acknowledged but unsorted.

  She puts Ferentinum behind her. She leaves with a stolen carafe of oil, a sack of lentils and flour strapped to her back. She departs early, knowing the village urchins will be blamed for the theft and likely be punished for it. So what? They have most of their lives yet before them, and none of them has done her any kindness. No one stops her. Gray-haired, bone-thin and wiry, she has no value that other eyes care to count. The last span of ten years or so finally found her unmolested by men, unthreatening to women, of no interest to children. She doesn’t even need to document herself at Roman checkpoints. They don’t see her, though she stands right before them. She is invisible.

  Outside Frosinone she sleeps in the ruin of a shed, the crumbled back wall of which frames a marvelous view of the rolling countryside. It rains and she gets wet, but that doesn’t matter. There are wild berries and fresh, clean water, and snails that she pulls from their shells with a hook and eats while they are still alive, the muscle of them tensing against her tongue. A cat seeks shelter in the shed. It pauses in the opening where a door had once been, looking surprised and put out that Vectia is there. It stares at her, one-eyed, judgmental. When
Vectia calls out softly, it enters, slinks through the shadows, and hides in them. Later, she hears it crunching a rodent’s bones.

  It’s good being in that ruin, having it to herself instead of sharing it with her master. It’s one of many places she knew up and down the long stretch of Italy. She has the country in her head. Not like a map, for she has never used one, but like the place itself. Every rise and fall and turn of the road, memories linked to each step along the way.

  In Cassino she drops in on a farrier who had often serviced her master’s horses. Judocus is a Celt like her, but unlike her he had been born in Italy and has no desire to see their homeland. When she tells him what she has planned, he laughs and offers her a drink of honeyed wine and says, “You’ve lost your mind.” He tells her she will be back soon. When she returns, she can stay with him. He will feed her, and she need not do much in return. Vectia knows what that means. Judocus is an old man too, so her wrinkles and gray hair don’t put him off.

  As she has done before, she tries on him the few words she knows of her language. As he has done before, he says, “Speak Latin.” She does, of course, because she knows only a handful of Celtic words and isn’t even sure that they mean what she thinks or that she is pronouncing them right. “Speak Latin,” Judocus says, “and you have a place here. Value.”

  No small thing, that. She drinks his wine, but that’s all. She wants to be of value, but of a different sort.

  —

  Vectia has had many more eventful trips before. This is but a small one, just a few weeks of her time. Important, though, as it brings her to the lower slopes of the mountain called Vesuvius, to the Roman camp that the gladiators have taken as their own. It is not hard to find, for the gladiators are not hiding. Just the opposite; they are calling for slaves to join them. Making her way into it, she is wary of what she sees. Warriors occupy the camp itself, with many women and even children among them, so many of them with golden or red hair, Celts, surely. Like her. Some, she thinks, may even be of her tribe.