“Look at that guy,” Nonus mutters, “muscles on him like a gladiator, but he’s giving the senator’s cock a twist. You seeing this?”
Volesus, who maneuvered to be posted with Nonus seemingly just to annoy him, doesn’t turn around. He looks out across the gardens and the maze of pathways that cut through them. “He’s the commander. He can do what he likes. What are you complaining about, anyway? It’s here or marching down there, setting up camp. I’ll take an afternoon in a villa, myself. And this way maybe Cossinius will notice you. Stay sharp, Nonus, make an impression, if you can manage it.”
“Like you made an impression on Sulla? Lot of good it did you, veteran. You still lost our father’s farm.”
Volesus rounds as if to pound Nonus, as he did when they were young. He catches himself quickly, turns back to his post, chin high. “You’re stupid, Nonus. Always were.”
Nonus turns back to Cossinius. Apparently, the massage has been successfully concluded. The burly slave departs, and the legate is on his feet now, arms held high as several slaves dress him in what looks like a silken tunic. Another man, also attired in silk, offers him a goblet of wine. They toast each other and drink.
Nonus can’t stand it. He rolls his head on his shoulders. He’s about to complain about how the face flaps of his helmet make his cheeks sweat—when he notices something that makes him pause. A figure moves across a landing on the other side of the villa. There’s nothing unusual about that. The place has slaves in abundance. It’s the way this one moves that catches his eye. He’s bent over, stealthy, moving in fits and starts, as if he doesn’t want to be discovered. And more, his head is a bushy mane of hair. No house slave would have unkempt hair like that.
“Volesus?”
“What?”
Another figure climbs up over a wall near the first man. And behind him, another.
“I think—”
The blast of a horn from somewhere outside the villa cuts him off. From still boredom one moment to chaos the next. The first moments after that horn blast are a barrage of the confusing and the contradictory, with terror screeching in Nonus’s ears the entire time. He’s sure the lictors shout for everyone to converge on the legate. He tries to, leaving without even looking at his brother and careening down the nearest stairway. He shoves through slaves rushing past him, down a corridor and out into a lower courtyard, which is empty of all but an old woman at work arranging platters on a table. She doesn’t look the least bit perturbed. More importantly, it’s not the bath area he’d been aiming for.
Nonus rushes past her, down another corridor, praying to no particular god that he’s going the right way. He wonders where Volesus is, realizes he left his pack on the upper terrace, turns around, thinking he should retrieve it. He feels a shove from behind and hears a shout to get moving. A lictor, brandishing the reed-sheaved ax of his office. “What are you doing here?” the man shouts in his face. “Up to the terraces! Fight them off, fool!”
Nonus runs the way he’s been pushed. He remembers to draw his sword, finds a staircase, climbs it. He’s breathing hard when he punches into the open air again. More shouts. Worse, the sound of weapons clashing. Roars and some barbarian gibberish. There’s no one on the walkway he’s on, but he sees men fighting over on another one. A Gaul slices a Roman across the neck, sending a spray of blood that sparkles terribly red in the sunlight. As the man drops, Nonus realizes that this is the soldier who marched beside him, the one who said Nonus was making him lose his mind. He doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. The barbarian stoops to strip away his armor. Others of his countrymen rush past him. One sees Nonus and shouts, pointing at him. They’re moving in and out of view so quickly that he can’t count them, but there are more of them every moment.
“You!” It’s a soldier below him. “The legate’s going for the stables. Go!”
Nonus runs, crashing into slaves, kicking through chairs and tearing down a miserable maze work of passages. He stumbles out of the villa, casting about for the stables. He sees gladiators rushing in from around the villa. He runs in the opposite direction, leaping over manicured hedges, splashing through fishponds. Shouts follow him, getting closer. But then he smells the stables. He changes direction, weaves through a copse of mulberry trees, careens into a row of stalls, men, and horses. He finds the legate inside a hive of frantic activity, and he thinks that this can’t really be happening. Not like this. Not with the commander wearing his armor strapped hastily on over that orange robe, struggling to get his helmet secured as he hastens toward his horse. When he’s mounted, he barks orders. Soldiers to him. Stay tight. Weapons ready. Shields up. Forward.
Nonus left his shield behind, but thankfully he has his sword, still gripped in a white-knuckled fist. As one mass, some mounted, some afoot, the small group moves out of the lane and away. What of the others still fighting in the villa? He doesn’t ask. What of the family that owns the house? He doesn’t care. What of his brother? He tries not to wonder. All that matters is getting to the legion. They can’t be far, just a mile or so. Perhaps, but it’s going to be a hellish mile.
They’re not more than a few hundred yards before the slave rabble is on them. They come first from behind, hooting and barking, and then a mass of them emerge from the woods to the right. The rebels hem them in and surround them. They’re like animals hunting as a pack. Even worse. Animals don’t walk upright, talking in words that aren’t words to Nonus, thumping their chests and gesticulating and humping the air. Many of them are naked or nearly so. Some are blue-faced. One has hair that sticks straight up like a board atop his head. This one smiles and carries a scythe, an awkward, large thing that he slices back and forth in front of him, muscles popping with the effort. The worst of it is that many of them wear bits and pieces of Roman armor. A helmet on this one. Vest on that. Greaves on that one’s ankles. It’s as if they had taken apart his people and served pieces of them up.
They don’t attack all at once. They want to enjoy it more than that. They attack one at a time, striking with whatever weapon they have. Each time from a different direction, each a screaming monster, barely human. The Roman soldiers hold together, defending, attacking when they can. A few gladiators pay the price. One there with a javelin dangling from his chest. Another cut through the cheek and breathing through a bloody hand cupped to his face. The legate himself chops down a man who tries to grab his reins. He cuts halfway through the man’s arm, breaking the bone and making him twirl away, arm dangling sickly.
So much for the jab. A cut works, too.
But it’s not enough. Each barbarian they take out is replaced by two more. They’re not even all Gallic or Thracian gladiators, as Nonus has continued to think of them. Some look like farm slaves. Some are just youths, like shepherds. There are even women among them, adding shrill cries to the cacophony.
The soldier behind Nonus gets jabbed in the neck. One is felled by a hammer blow to the temple. Another by a brute who gets a grip of the Roman’s shield and yanks him into the mob. The Gaul with the scythe, still hauling it along, finally strikes. A stone bashes one of the lead Romans on the temple, sending him lurching forward. The scythe carrier rakes the curved blade around, his kinsmen jumping back from it, and slices the stumbling man through both legs at the knee. Nonus has never heard more horrible screams.
When the soldier beside him goes down, Nonus snatches up his shield in time to block an ax swung down with massive force. The blow wrenches his arm and pounds the wooden shield into his face, bloodying his nose. A moment later the man kicks him, sending him off his feet. His comrades close around him, preventing the brute from splitting him with his next blow.
This can’t go on much longer. The arithmetic doesn’t favor the Romans. They may be dropping as many of the enemy as they lose, but their numbers dwindle while the gladiators seem only to grow more numerous. But they’ve also kept moving. The villa is far behind them now. They’re marching through fields, stumbling over the rows of something growing low
to the ground. To one side a wooded hill, and in front of them, just down valley, is the legion. Cossinius, higher than the foot soldiers and with a better view, must have seen them for some time. He shouts and spurs his horse into a gallop. The mounted lictors do the same. Clearly, they aim to run over the enemy and make it to the legion. The legate’s horse knocks one gladiator to the side, to be trampled by yet another horse. Others jump out of his way. Cossinius holds his sword high, swinging it at the brutes as he passes. For a moment, it looks as if he’s going to get through.
“No!” Nonus shouts, knowing the man’s escape is his own death. Only the one word, and then the legate’s moment of glory is clipped.
The weapon that takes him down is crude. A Gaul with a long wooden pole, the end sharpened to a point, dashes in and pierces Cossinius in the armpit. The force of the galloping horse does most of the work, lifting the legate and yanking him around in the saddle. He flops over to one side, vulnerable to yet another Gaul. This one beats his head with a club. Cossinius goes limp. Dead or unconscious. The lictors circle, slashing with their ceremonial axes, steering their horses into the melee and trying to grasp the commander’s reins. The soldiers around Nonus rush forward as the barbarians converge on the legate.
Someone grabs Nonus by the arm, tugs so hard it whirls him around. Volesus. “Come on,” his brother says, grinding the words through his teeth. He pulls Nonus a half-step toward the woods, then lets him go, tossing his arm free as if he’s disgusted by the touch. Volesus runs toward the trees and the hillside behind them, climbing up and away.
Nonus stares after him. He’s stunned. Volesus is…running? But he’s a veteran. He fought with Sulla in—
A scream shreds through his thoughts, flips them over, and turns them back on him in an instant.
He’s Volesus, a veteran who fought with Sulla! Who would know better when it was time to run? Nonus follows, cursing himself for having hesitated at all. Each stride is a misery in which he’s sure a javelin or arrow or sword point is about to slam into his back. He can’t believe it when he reaches the trees. He plunges into them, underbrush scratching and tearing at him. He hits the slope, and he’s climbing, feet and hands and knees, all of him scrambling for life like a drowning man reaching for the surface and realizing he can see it and that his own limbs can raise him to it. It’s a revelation.
Who knew cowardice could feel so right?
Drenis
Gathering with the others, Drenis brushes shoulder to shoulder with the twenty of his countrymen chosen for this purpose. He’s not far from the slave with the tattered ears, the one called Shrew, whose lean face looks scared to death. Or perhaps scared at the knowledge of the death he’s brought through his actions. The lane is tight, an awkward place to gather, but it’s where the Nolan slave said they should launch from. Drenis listens to the growing chaos coming from over the stone walls that hem them in. He recalls what Spartacus had said as they planned this. Let surprise be their first weapon. Distance their second. The dark their third, with the light of dawn there just when they will need it.
Just as he said, it’s come to be.
Surprise, because they had not yet attacked an entire city. Villas, yes. Towns and farms and temples. But never a place as big as Nola, placed as it was on the plain between Vesuvius and the Apennines. Drenis had spied it from a distance on several raids. The city dwellers would be wary of them, but they had grown accustomed to the rebels being afoot. Why wouldn’t the Nolans feel safe within their homes?
Distance, because they were far from the city when the sun set. But Spartacus had rested them all the previous day. In the dark, they awoke and marched, for the road was right there for them and they could eat up the miles upon it. A few—Spartacus and Crixus and Oenomaus leading them—rode ahead. As the city slept, they scouted the best places to enter, planned, and coordinated. The city’s garrisons had watchtowers in the obvious places, so they would enter in less obvious places.
The dark, because the marching tide of the fugitives arrived under a moonless sky. They slipped into position unseen. There were walls to scale and locked gates to force. But the city’s defenses were a jumble, relics from the time of the kings and the bloody days of the early republic. So there was no siege in this case. Instead, there was a hushed scramble, over this bit of wall, through that rusted gate. In the dark, many of them were well inside the city before an alarm went up. And when it was announced—first by dogs and then by shouts and lastly by horns and a great bell wrung from high in a tower—the dark was still their friend. They banged open gates, and those still outside rushed in, heedless of the noise, shouting. The slaughter was fast and easy for a time, surprise still a weapon for them.
The light of dawn, because it came just after the killing began, all the better to see by. And the real work began as color bloomed with morning.
All of it as Spartacus had said.
Drenis is thankful that he has this assignment. It’s better this than roving from house to house slaying men and raping women. Spartacus said only slay those who fight against them. He discouraged rape, but he knew he couldn’t forbid it and expect to be heeded. If there was to be rape, let it only be slave owners who suffered, only the ones who would never see the right in their cause. Fine notions, Drenis thinks, but how does one tell slave from free in an instant? Or distinguish fear from hatred in the flickering light of homes aflame? And how many among them would leave a woman unmolested in the heat of a sacking, when the blood frenzy rages and the lust that comes with it ignites? Free or slave, noble or peasant, no woman will be safe this day. It’s one of many things that makes his skin itch, makes him frantic to be on their way.
Waiting is the worst part. That and listening to souls going to death. It’s a strange din in the growing light of morning. He wonders, for the thousandth time since Shrew appeared and put the thought in his head, if she’s here. And if so, does she hear the slaughter? Is she engulfed in it at this moment? Will she be defiled before he reaches her? He shakes his head, reminds himself that, no, that’s not what the slave said. There would be time, he said, to get to the ludus. People there would be locked away, to be found but not in the first moments of the onslaught.
Drenis prays to Bendis that he is right. Bendis seems the only god right for this particular prayer. Who more likely than she to protect one named in her honor?
Something brushes his leg. A rat. He lifts his foot to stomp it, but it’s gone into the shadows before he can. He nudges Shrew. “Have we time still?”
The man’s face is pallid despite his leather-toned skin. He says something, but it’s not an answer. Drenis begins to press him, but then Spartacus arrives. His face is splattered with blood. Drenis pushes toward him and reaches to check for wounds. Spartacus smiles. “It’s not mine. We leave this to them,” he says, indicating the confusion outside the lane. “They are well at it already. This city is ours. We have a different goal.” Spartacus turns to the man with the shredded ears. “Take us.”
The man nearly jumps out of his skin. He indicates which direction they are to proceed, then takes the lead. As they walk, Spartacus assures them that already this has been a success beyond any they would have dreamed of. “You’ll have plunder,” he says, “but first we must think of our brothers. That’s why we do this.”
The others affirm as much with grunts and echoes of his words. Drenis, silent, thinks, For our brothers, yes, but not only for them.
—
When the man came to them days earlier, he was nervous and stammering and looked like he’d been dropped into a den of lions. Still, he had brought himself to that den with his own feet. He said a name, one that was like a key. That’s what opened the council tent to him. It’s why he sat in the company of Spartacus and Gaidres, Nico and Drenis himself.
“What is your name?” Spartacus asked, interrupting the man’s stammering.
“M-my master calls me Shrew.”
An apt name, Drenis thought.
“Should I
call you by that name as well?”
The man shrugged.
“Shrew, speak more slowly,” Spartacus said. “And have a drink. You sound as though you need it.”
He accepted the skin that Dolmos offered. He tilted it, squeezing on the skin as he sucked at it. Drenis noticed that he lacked the smallest finger on both his hands. Not likely an accidental injury, that. Nor the tears ripped in both his earlobes. Those shreds of flesh marked him as a slave held in little regard. Whoever had owned this one had wanted it clear for all to see. Perhaps that was what drove the man to run and to seek out the gladiators, to claim that he came with a boon to offer.
Spartacus waited until the man appeared ready, and then asked, “You worked in a ludus in Nola?”
The man swept the stringy black hair from his face and nodded. It was a mean ludus, he claimed, with no large arena as in Capua. The man who ran it, Spurius Bruttia, had had little success so far, but he planned to build an arena, to make Nola a rival to Capua in putting on games. In preparation, he’d bought gladiators and the men to train and guard them. Spurius was evil beyond belief, taking pleasure in all manner of tortures, in the ring and out. He made life hard for all those unfortunate enough to be within his power.
“When you asked for an audience with me, you said a certain name,” Spartacus said. “Say it again, and tell me why it’s on your tongue.”
Shrew’s eyes ran the circuit of the Thracians, clearly trying to read them. He said the name, whispering it with a rising inflection that made it a question.
Hearing it, Drenis repeated it, louder. “Skaris? Our Skaris? What of him? Does he live?”
The man nodded. “He does.”
The Risen Page 17