“You see? We’ve been thinking of Italy as made up of Romans. That’s not the right way to think of it. Citizens, yes, but that is a privilege that chafes. On good days it’s a thing to be grateful for; on bad, it’s a stigma of defeat. Walk in these hills and ask any man where his loyalty is. To Rome? With a shrug, yes. But moreover it’s to his people. To Samnites. To Osci, Sabellians. To the Marsi. That’s what Vectia said, and I believe her.”
Crixus asks, “All this from the mouth of an old woman?”
“From her first, but not just from her. Philon, the medicus, says the same. Before the ludus he was slave to a learned man. This man taught him things from history. He confirmed what Vectia said. Much of Italy is not as it seems. Most of Italy still hates Rome.” He sweeps his arm in a gesture that binds them all in a circle. “We here were all slaves to Rome. These cities, they are not much better off. They are like brides married to Rome against their will. Being plowed by a husband they don’t love. They take it, but they hate it all the while. This is something we should think about.”
Crixus doesn’t see it. “So they are unwilling wives to Rome. So? They still hate us.”
“Thurii didn’t hate us,” Kastor points out. “They do now, no doubt, but at the start they were willing to let us be, even to trade with us.”
Crixus leans as if to cut the unstated criticism with the blade of his nose. “I got more from them than they would’ve traded. Much more. And their slaves don’t hate us. I even let your priestess work her magic on them. Say what you like. I did what I did and make no apologies.”
Kastor and Gannicus and Ullio all speak at once. Bricca, beside Crixus, moves his hand to the hilt of his long knife. A moment more like this, and everything could fall apart. Spartacus lifts his palms, trying to quiet them. Skaris bangs a fist on the table, making all the cups jump. One spills over. Neither Spartacus’s palms nor the slammed fist cut through the argument. But for some reason the slow tilt and spill of the single cup does. All eyes watch it and the wine that pooled on the table a moment before finding a crack to drain through.
“See no ill omen in that,” Spartacus says. “And do not break apart just yet. All the pieces are not yet before us. Give me a moment more to show you the game board presented us. There is another conversation I had this winter that has been circling my mind ever since.”
—
Midwinter a light snow blanketed the camp. It was a lovely thing to see, for Spartacus had not seen snow since his last winter in Thrace. He had taken a long ride on a new mount, a lovely, strong mare that he had not yet named. Dolmos rode with him, the two of them quiet, the hush on the land something neither seemed keen to break.
On returning to camp, in the noise and bustle again, Dolmos called a greeting to the Greek, Philon.
“You’ve grown to be friends, haven’t you?” Spartacus asked.
Dolmos said, “I think of him so, yes.”
“Then I do as well.”
Spartacus invited the medicus to share food with them. The three men dipped chunks of hard bread in olive oil as they sat cross-legged under a lean-to. A fire crackled nearby, but Spartacus sat farthest away from it. He liked the feel of the cold, even reaching outside the shelter every now and then to squeeze handfuls of the wet snow in his fist.
Dolmos prompted Philon to speak of his childhood on Sicily. He found it strange that the Greek had spent most of his life in cities. He asked him question after question. How many people lived in Syracuse? Did it smell? Had he never had a tribe? How did he mark becoming a man without going through initiation rites?
When Philon turned to the topic of slave revolts, Spartacus’s attention shifted more fully toward him. “It’s my country,” he said, “that had the first great slave revolts. Two of them, you know? So far this one here is young. We’ve yet to see if it will surpass what my countrymen did.”
“Tell me of these revolts,” Spartacus said.
Philon licked oil from his fingers. “They happened not so long ago. The first one was—oh, sixty or so years ago. A Syrian started it. A magician who the gods favored. He was in the east, you see?” To demonstrate, he repositioned a chunk of bread, pretending it was an island. “Eunus was his name, until he gathered followers and took land and farms and towns. Then he called himself King Antiochus. He had a good time of it, this king. But there was another who revolted at the same time. Kleon, he was called. Not a magician, this one. He didn’t work wonders to amuse people. But he was a mystic. It seems revolts need mystics.”
“As we have Astera,” Dolmos said, looking to Spartacus for confirmation.
Philon continued, “They held portions of the island for three years. Eventually, Rome sent an army and defeated them, first one and then the other. I’m not sure in which order. Some thirty years later it happened again. A slave named Salvius led slaves in the east; Athenion in the west. Four years they were in revolt. Four years.”
“Why did they fail?” Spartacus asked.
Philon shrugged. “Who can know? Perhaps it was just a matter of time. Maybe it always is. They never joined forces. If they had—” He pursed his lips, a gesture that expressed both other possibilities and his skepticism of them. “Mostly, though, I don’t think they saw far enough into the future. They rose and got their freedom, but then what? Nothing.”
“They could begin the thing but not end it.”
“Exactly!” Philon picked up his island and tore a chunk off of it. “Now, again a span of thirty years later, here we are. You’re right on time, Spartacus. One would think you’d read the histories and planned it this way.”
“Tell me, Philon,” Spartacus said after a contemplative moment, “have you any wish to see your homeland again?”
“I dream of it often.”
Spartacus smiled. “Sometimes the things one dreams come to pass.”
—
“Do you see what I’m building toward?” Spartacus asks the men in the council tent.
“If you would just say it, I would,” Crixus grumbles. “Conversations with a Greek, a woman, and a Roman soldier. Too much talk, I think.”
“Let me make it clear. The Romans will expect us to plunder and rape and burn. They think that will be the limit of our aspirations. Run back to home eventually. That will not surprise them. I say, let us surprise them. Let us stun them with a strategy that they won’t even see the shape of until it’s too late. And let us have an objective so bold, they will never imagine it of us.”
“And what is this objective?” Gannicus asks. “What’s better than home and freedom?”
“One thing, brothers. One thing is better by far. One thing outshines that with glory. Brothers, let’s not run from Rome. Let’s not just steal from them. Let’s not just reap the bounty of their land. Let’s not just be revenged for past crimes. Let’s make it so that there are no future crimes to bemoan.” Spartacus tents his hands and touches them to his lips. He inhales through his nose and says, “Let’s destroy Rome.”
Gannicus greets this with a guffaw. He turns and seems ready to make a joke with Castus, but the other man stares at Spartacus so seriously, whatever words were in Gannicus’s mouth stay there. Crixus frowns, lifts his chin. All hold to the silence.
Spartacus lets the silence sit long enough for all to own a part of it, but before any other speaks, he continues, “Listen to me, brothers. Rome. Destroyed.”
And then he explains how they will accomplish it.
Laelia
Early on the day that Laelia and Astera are to bring down the moon, Hustus arrives with the thing Astera asked of him. A sackful of tiny mice. Food for the priestess’s growing collection of snakes. They haven’t been fed for some time and will be hungry. This way they will feed and be sated and content. If the goddess—who will come to earth this night in answer to Astera’s call—looks to see that they have been well kept, she will see that they are.
The siblings tilt one snake at a time out of the sacks that they rest in. They fall into an enclosed
rectangle made of planks propped on their edges and held in place by the pressure of the siblings’ feet. First a snake, then a mouse. The gray snakes are always quick to attack. They bite lightning fast and then wait, as the mouse twitches to death. The one who had draped itself around Spartacus’s sleeping face becomes a twist of coils, wrapping the mouse in them and squeezing the life out of it. The black one with a ring around its neck is slower than the rest. When Laelia lifts the heavy rope of it and delicately places it in the enclosure, it does nothing for a time.
“It’s not hungry,” Hustus concludes.
Laelia knows better. This is just its way. She has changed since the spring before, a fact that Hustus comments on often. She doesn’t pretend to be a boy anymore. Her hair brushes her shoulders, and her tunic doesn’t try to hide her small breasts, slim legs. She wears new stigmas partially visible across her upper chest. They are shapes that show the turning of Kotys’s face, the moon going from a slim sliver to full. Mostly though, it’s the way she holds herself that is different. She is not timid, as she once was. She is not a trembling mouse. Instead, she’s the apprentice of a priestess. She’s the one who offers trembling mice to serpents.
The snake watches the rodent, dead-eyed, uninterested, tongue flicking, making no other movement for a long, long time. When it does move, it looks lazy, as if it had no purpose at all. The mouse grows frantic. It bounces this way and that, sometimes crashing down on the snake’s coils and hurtling away in terror. The snake has only to wait for the moment when the mouse’s own movements land it in the reptile’s mouth. One moment bouncing rodent motion; the next, twitching legs jutting from the snake’s unhinged jaws.
“See?” she asks, pleased with herself, with the snake. “I told you. That’s just its way.”
Hustus points out that she said no such thing.
Sura arrives. She glances at Hustus without greeting him. She asks if all the snakes have been fed.
“Not all of them,” Laelia says.
“Astera wants them all fed. All. No one must think another one is treated differently.”
Laelia nodded. “I understand, but they don’t always eat just because I offer food.”
“Then perhaps this is not a task you are gifted at. You should—”
She stops when a voice calls her name. It’s Kastor, having just come into view. He beckons for her. He’s grinning, as he usually is. Seeing him, Sura’s face changes. Laelia watches it happen. Her face normally is plain, a little wide, her features bulky instead of fine like Astera’s. And so often it’s tinged with disapproval, which does not favor her. Now, though, as she recognizes Kastor, the tinge vanishes. There’s an energy suddenly around her eyes. She doesn’t smile, but her lips loosen in a manner that is like a smile. She says, “Do as I said,” and then she goes to Kastor. He presents her with a flower, just a single, simple one. When she takes it, he sweeps in and embraces her, as if the act of taking the flower gave him permission to do so. Sura pulls back, but not seriously. She fights him, but playfully.
Laelia thinks, He softens her. A good thing, that. She needs softening.
When they are finished feeding the snakes and have slipped them, sated and bulging, back into the sacks they rest in, the twins sit talking. Laelia will have a busy, long night, but for the afternoon she is supposed to sleep—as if she could do that when she’s so near to seeing the face of a goddess. So she sits with her brother, listening to his chatter. That, for her, is akin to resting.
Hustus has grown since their days as slaves for Aburius. It’s as if his free status is manifesting in the swell of his chest and the long stretch of his legs. He’s shaved the sides of his head in a style he learned from some of the Germani. Laelia thinks it looks silly, but she doesn’t say so. He has a companion now, a puppy that sits on his haunches a little ways from them, watching Hustus. He’s thin, with a mottled gray and black and white coat. His front paws are the largest thing about him, and his eyebrows are the most expressive. They change shape every time Hustus moves or speaks or gestures. He looks as if he’s constantly surprised, always trying—and failing—to make sense of the world. Hustus thinks he’ll grow big and be fierce. Laelia agrees that he’ll grow. She’s less sure he’ll ever be fierce, not with those eyebrows.
To hear him tell it, Hustus has been up to all manner of adventures. He and the other boys too young to fight—just barely too young, he points out—have made themselves useful to Spartacus in other ways. They carry messages among factions in the camp. They help care for weapons and make repairs to armor and run to fetch javelins from the field when the soldiers train. They hunt for small game and scout villas to alert the men to. They once aided the Thyni night raiders in attacking a villa. They asked the shepherds to help because they’d heard they were good slingers. The Thracians heated stones until they were pulsing hot, then moved off into the night, having instructed the shepherds to wait a little while, then to start slinging the hot stones out into the fields, trying to make the mounds of hay catch fire. When the field hands and guards rushed out to fight the fires, the Thyni came out of the night and cut them down. “They’re good at that.”
Coming back from that night, Hustus’s group found a fine horse in the care of a stableboy who had been sent into the woods to hide it. They surprised him and set to beating upon him. The boy ran, leaving them the finest horse any of them had ever seen. They took it, of course. That was the easy part. Leading the stallion into camp was where things became trickier.
“Everyone looked at him,” Hustus said. “Men kept coming up to us, trying to take him, asking why we had such a horse. One of them began to cuff Rabbit with hard blows. It was going to end badly, but then Drex shouted that the horse belonged to Spartacus. He’d asked us to fetch him, and we were doing so. We all took that up. ‘Yes, it’s Spartacus’s horse! Leave us, or we’ll tell him you’re trying to steal it.’ It was a good lie. And then it wasn’t a lie. I said to the others, ‘Let’s give him to Spartacus. What else can we do? If we don’t, someone, sooner or later, will take him from us.’ That’s what I said. So we did.” Hustus grinned. “Spartacus said the horse reminds him of a mount he had in Thrace. He named him something in Thracian. I can’t even pronounce it. It means ‘slate-hard sky of winter’ or something like that.” With a finger pointing upward, he adds, “The stallion’s gray. Like a gray sky. I guess that’s what he means. He’s going to reward us for it. Me and the others, we’re to start training with horses. We’re to become scouts.”
“You on a horse?” Laelia asks.
“Exactly.”
“You’ll fall off.”
Hustus punches her shoulder. “What do you know about it?”
Hustus claims that Spartacus is trying to change the tenor of the campaign entirely, to give the revolt a new sense of purpose. He’s going to bring down Rome, Hustus declares. That’s what he said. First, though, he must change the minds of the men of the army. That’s no easy thing. “You know what happened in Forum Annii?” She did, but he tells her anyway.
The Allobroges reached the town before the body of the main army. It was early in the season, and Crixus’s men were hungry, thirsty, embittered because of having to leave all but their Celtic women behind when they marched. They were itching for plunder, and the season had not given it to them. They fell upon the district with all the brutality that Spartacus wanted them to refrain from. Spartacus had been livid when he found out. He arrived in a rage, shouting his way through the town. He yanked men off their victims and beat sense into them. It did no good. He and his officers were few compared to the many who had the bloodlust on them. In truth, Spartacus could not even control the bulk of his own men. They too were like hounds who’d caught their prey’s scent.
The next day Spartacus got the three factions’ leaders together. They met in the central square of the town, right out in the open, voicing their minds for all to hear. Hustus had perched on the warm tiles of a nearby roof, listening to all of it. Spartacus said they must restrai
n themselves from butchery. Hustus takes on a husky voice as he repeats the words: “ ‘Think hard on what I am saying. Make sure that your people know our objective is Rome itself. To get there we must have allies. Allies from right here in the south. We will have none if you treat them as you have.’ ”
It is not a very good imitation of Spartacus. Laelia laughs.
Hustus only grows more animated. He stands, too full of energy to be still. “Crixus, he was having none of it. He said the Celts would do as they pleased. None could stop them from taking what they want, as and when they want it. He said Spartacus’s rules applied to Spartacus’s people. His people would go their own way. Because of it, the army is going to split. Crixus and his Celts will follow their own route and their own way.”
“The Germani?” Laelia asks.
“They are with Spartacus. You understand what they want to do, don’t you? Spartacus wants to get Italians to rise up against Rome as well. Rome conquered them just as they conquered others. If he can win Italian cities to the cause, they can work together to end Rome.”
“Will that happen?”
Hustus stops his pacing. He runs a hand up through the tangle of his hair and considers, looking serious. “I don’t know. Italians are bastards, even when they’re not Roman.” He shrugs. “It’s worth a try, though. You should ask your goddess about it. Will you really speak with her this night?”
“Astera will, but I’ll be at her side.”
Hustus looks even more pensive at this. Then he shakes it off and declares, “We are the same, you and I. As you do for Astera, I do for Spartacus.”
Laughing, Laelia tells him he is right but only by half.
He threatens to tickle her. She pledges to kick him in his stones if he does. For a time they are children again. Hustus talks of the strange ways of the other youths. The Italians he could make no sense of. They all look alike but squabble among themselves with shallow tempers, bristling at slights nobody but them even noticed. The Celtic youths hang on each other like lovers. He finds it strange because they are so quick to anger and never happier than when they’re fighting. The Celtic girls are forward when they like you. One girl strode up to him and flashed her breasts and spat on his feet and walked away.
The Risen Page 23