The time comes for Crassus to frame the event that will be remembered far more than even his words. Kaleb focuses. Transcribes.
“Many of the men here assembled have come with me, newly recruited. Many of you are veterans of this fight. I am proud to join you, to serve with you.”
The commander pauses. Clears his throat. He’s not a brilliant orator, Kaleb thinks. He’s no Greek who’s trained to make speeches with a mouth full of pebbles, but his sureness in himself comes through, at least to the officers and the ranks of the troops who can actually hear him. As for the others, what’s to be done will matter more than what’s said about it.
“But not everyone among us has reason to be proud.” Crassus’s voice is suddenly edged with disdain. “Not every Roman has behaved as a Roman. For some, these barbarian gladiator slaves are too frightening to stand against. Yes, I said that. I don’t like the words, but they’re true. You doubt it? You think such a thing could not be true of Roman soldiers? Look at these ones. Five hundred to attest to what I say. Look at them!”
He shouts these last words. They reverberate a moment, then fall to form a greater, murmuring silence than preceded them. Crassus stands, jaw set, until there’s movement among the ranks. A large group of men—the five hundred just mentioned—are driven from hiding somewhere down a lane among the troops. They’re unarmed, wearing only simple tunics. They look dirty—grime-covered, bare-footed, long-haired like some barbarians, though their skin is Roman bronze. They run stumbling, pressed on by a host of armored men—centurions all—who smack them with the flats of their swords, punch and kick and shout at them. They’re driven into the empty square that awaits. It takes some time to get them all in, but they’re gathered in a tight, miserable jumble, hemmed in both by the men who drove them and by the thousands who stand in ordered ranks, peering at them.
Crassus raises a hand for silence. A barrage of horn blasts expound on the order. Eventually, there is quiet enough for the commander to continue. “See before you Romans who are not Romans, men who would throw down their arms and run. They are not from any one legion or cohort. They are the vilest of those who have failed the republic since first Spartacus and his gladiators began their crimes. See here cowards who abandoned Lucius Cossinius, their general, to be killed and stripped of his armor and tunic and be dragged behind a horse and pissed upon by slaves. See them. They are there!” He points, an angry gesture to accompany his rising ire. “See here the craven tremblers who abandoned Publius Varinius just when he most needed them. Have no doubt, though, they are cowards. I, now just arrived to command here, have to deal with them. Only after that can we go forward blessed by the gods. How do we deal with them?” He draws himself up and moves his gaze from one face, picked out of the masses, to another. “There is only one way to match their shame. The ancients knew it, and so do I.” He points at the prisoners with the spread of his fingers, indicating all of them at once and yet individuals as well. “Decimation. To these five hundred, let it be done.”
There, Kaleb thinks, he’s said it. In the stunned hush that follows, he writes, Decimation. To these five hundred, let it be done.
Three
THE BURDEN OF SOULS
Nonus
Nonus makes out some of what the commander says, but other parts of it escape him. He’s too far away. When Crassus turns to either side, his voice doesn’t reach him. “If he would just stand still and talk straight, we’d hear what he’s saying,” Nonus grumbles.
His brother, standing just next to him, jabs him with an elbow.
“What? It’s true. He doesn’t know how to speak in public.”
“And you don’t know how to shut up,” Volesus says. Then he adds, “Shut up.”
Nonus does, but only because he wants to hear. He catches the part about the shameful five hundred. Throwing down weapons. Something about tremblers. About Cossinius, that fool. And he hears Quintus Arrius’s name as well. So, double the shame on him, then. What he doesn’t hear is the last part, when the commander names their punishment. He—being one of the five hundred standing condemned for cowardice—has been wondering about this for a long time. Nobody has given him a straight answer. Sometimes deserters get death, but he doubts that will happen. The army needs bodies. Why kill their own? No, not a mass death penalty. Whipping? That’s more likely. That will be bad, but it’s not death. And perhaps, he hopes, the penalty might be yet less severe. Onerous camp duty. Maybe they’ll be stripped of their weapons and armor and made to dig the latrines for the rest of the campaign. Some idiots would rather die horrible deaths than face that humiliation, but latrine duty would suit him fine. He’d rather shovel shit than stand face-to-face with the gladiators again. Perhaps their pay will be docked. Rations halved. There are lots of punishments at the commander’s disposal—he just wants to know which will be his lot and then to get it over with.
Of course, none of it’s fair. Yes, Nonus had run into the hills with his brother after Cossinius got himself killed, but they’d not been caught for it. In all the confusion, they’d managed to avoid being slaughtered and then rejoined the army no worse for it. Not really desertion at all, then. Nobody even noticed they’d been gone. So how can he get punished for something he didn’t do? Nor did anyone know that he’d led the gladiators to the shipment of weapons back in the early days of this war. Well, Volesus knew. He’d even claimed that Nonus, in arming the gladiators, was responsible for everything that’s happened since. After that, he decided not to admit that he’d run from protecting the gate on the night of the escape from Capua. That was his secret alone. And the business with Arrius—which was why he’s stuck in the accursed five hundred—doesn’t qualify as desertion either. A mishap is all it was. That and bad timing.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he says.
Volesus scoffs. “Of all the men here, you are the first who should be here.”
“And not you?”
Volesus glares at him and says, “Fuck you. You stupid, stupid, stupid shit! It’s all your bloody fault.”
“Me?”
“Any fool would’ve known to hoof it.”
“You’re the one who took a nap. Snoring like to—”
“Instead, you sat there, doing nothing. Nothing! Until we were found. Alive, stripped of weapons and armor, the corpses of our comrades lying strewn about. The disgrace of it. I’d rather have died.”
Nonus imagines how easily that could’ve been arranged. Pinch the nose shut. Hand over that snoring mouth. The work of a moment, and he’d have been freed to go on his own way. He mutters, “I wish I’d done it when I had the chance.”
Volesus returns to ignoring him, scowling as he tries to hear.
The commander, apparently, has concluded his speech. Nonus sees him turn and climb down from the platform, the other high officers following him. Whatever he said as he finished has caused a great confusion. Those around them shout to one another, asking what was said. Some propose punishments and others deny them. Still others demand that they shut up and let the news reach them. They don’t shut up, but the news does reach them. It passes from mouth to mouth, a wave that washes from the front ranks back. It’s an auditory confusion, but in among it is a word repeated over and over again.
Nonus turns to his brother, whose face has gone pale, his skin flaccid. “Decimation? What’s that mean? Are we all to be killed?”
“No,” Volesus says, “it’s worse than that.”
—
The incident that landed Nonus and Volesus among the disgraced five hundred wasn’t so much an action as an inaction. A small thing of no consequence to the war. Two people living instead of dying. That’s all, a small blemish when compared to the service he’d given the legion. It wasn’t as if he’d not done his part in battle. He had. Once, at least. He’d hated it and loathed others for the way they spoke of it. They made it sound as if they had observed the entirety of the field and that every action they made was part of a grand, heroic plan. Nonus knew them to be liars
. He knew because he too talked of it that way, when he found himself forced to talk of it at all. The truth had been nothing like that. His sole battle—a skirmish, some called it—had been a terrifying confusion. He never managed to see farther than the tip of his sword. Beyond that was a storm that made no sense at all, one that kept throwing things at him. Blades. Body parts. Screams. Gouts of blood. His actions weren’t actions really. They were reactions, made moment by frantic moment. No plan to it all, just jerky terror that fortunately lasted only a few moments before the barbarians pulled back, shouting taunts and exposing their backsides as if they thought the whole thing a bawdy joke. Where, in any of it, was the heroism so many claimed?
He’d missed the fighting after Nola, when Publius Varinius pursued the rebels right into a trap they’d designed. He was spared the fighting, but he arrived in time to be assigned corpse duty. He and others kicked through bodies, looking for survivors to kill. Anyone injured badly enough that they couldn’t drag themselves from the field was unlikely to survive. Better they be sent on. From the corpses themselves, they retrieved valuable things, stripped off armor, and dragged men into piles to be burned. Cutting rings from bloated fingers. Chasing away the ever-present scavenging dogs. They had a particular fondness, he found, for belly wounds. Nonus dreamed of the canines often. Dogs and entrails. Entrails and dogs. Once he awoke in a sweat from a vision of himself on all fours, snarling and baring his teeth as he tugged on a loop of intestines.
And it was wrong the way they disposed of them with so little ceremony. No ritual cleaning of the body. No mourning period. No procession of family and friends to view the body. True, few would’ve wanted to view these bodies as they now were: blood-and-filth-encrusted, bone-broke, sliced and battered, with limbs severed. After a few days in the sun, pecked at by crows and savaged by dogs, bloated and belching gases, they were hardly bodies to be gazed upon lovingly by parents, brothers, and sisters. Still, it seemed a dangerous slight. Everyone knew a body had to be handled properly in order for the person’s soul to be able to cross the river Styx and enter the underworld. Surely all who fought and died for Rome had earned that much.
Instead, they just stripped the bodies and tossed them into great fires stoked to incinerate them. Miserable work. Blasts of heat, choking smoke, sweat pouring from his body and stinging his eyes and making his palms slick. It was hard getting a good grip on the flaccid corpses. Harder still to time the swing of the throw with another person. More than once he nearly followed the tossed corpse into the flames himself. Hair always ignited instantly, sizzling as it withered. The clothes too burned readily enough, but the bodies themselves resisted. They were like sacks of water, hard to make catch. Before he learned better, he threw too many on at once, which only killed the fires and prolonged everything.
Nonus would never forget how blistering skin goes strangely waxy. How it changes color, each body trying on varying hues before the flesh splits and ignites. He’d never forget how some bodies writhed as they burned, almost as if they were still alive. Arms and legs shifted; hands clenched or stretched. It made no sense to Nonus. The men were dead and gone. Why then, at that late stage, did they protest? Why make a last grasp at life when you were already a charred ruin? Fortunately, none of them managed to rise and walk from the flames, except in his nightmares.
And he would never forget the smell. He’d smelled it before. Everyone had. But not like this, not up close so that the scent clung to his skin and clothes and hair. It contained too many things at once. In truth it wasn’t just one smell but many, changing from moment to moment. Coppery with this breath, sulfurous with the next. Putrid and then sweet and then sharp. Sometimes it was so thick, he felt as if he were drinking it instead of inhaling it. And the worst was that mixed in with it all were bursts that made his mouth water. It was a foul, noxious stench, but it was also the scent of meat cooking. Beef, oily and roasting. Pork, fatty and sizzling.
Coated white from the work, he scooped up the bones and ashes once the pyres had cooled. No single marked grave for these men. Instead, shallow pits into which they mixed with hundreds of their fellows. A sprinkling of dirt shoveled onto them, and that was it. Nonus worried that the dead soldiers would feel disrespected, which was why each time he hauled a body to the pyre, he made sure to explain to it—out of earshot of others—that none of this was his doing. He was a blameless soldier doing what he must. If they desired to haunt anyone in retribution, let it be someone in command.
Then came his reassignment to the legion temporarily under Arrius’s control, since Gellius, his commander, had been recalled to Rome to explain the string of defeats he and Clodianus had presided over. Arrius’s assignment had been simple, to get near to Spartacus’s army and shadow it, keep track of it for the time being. He was not to engage, not even to skirmish. Rome, apparently, wanted to keep track of the barbarians, so that the new commander would know where to find them. Arrius kept close to the barbarians. Too close, Nonus thought. He wanted to prove himself and seemed to get a little bolder every day the enemy tried to evade them.
Nonus was pleased, then, to be sent with a small detachment to fetch grain from the depot at Eburum. As far as Nonus knew, the excursion took them away from the rebels’ most recent location. Twenty of them were to hike alongside the empty wagons, load the promised grain onto those wagons, drive them back, and rejoin Arrius’s column. A day’s work. A matter of procuring food, not making war.
Gabinius Servius, the leader of the expedition, seemed to find the assignment more a nuisance than a reprieve. He was surly the whole morning, riding circles around the group and berating them. They didn’t march fast enough. They didn’t load with all the alacrity that the job required. They took too long over their midday meal and were too slow on the return march. As if the mules pulling the wagons weren’t the ones setting the pace anyway! Nonus produced a steady stream of retorts, though he voiced none of them to the commander. He’d learned the hard way that low-ranking officers don’t respond kindly to even the smallest of jibes. In this case, though, Nonus need not have been so prudent. Servius was not long for this world.
They’d just crested a slow rise that offered views out in all directions. Beside them on either side sheep grazed the slow undulations of the hills. They were off at a little distance, penned in behind a low stone wall that kept them separated from the grain crops. The road before them stretched long and thin, two pale white ruts cutting through fields of golden barley, grown tall and thick, glowing golden under the midday sun. A single tree bloomed down the road a little ways, its plumage a dot of green in all that gold.
Nonus was wondering if he should propose capturing a few sheep before they left the pens behind. Requisition them, as it were. With a different officer, maybe. Servius wouldn’t go for it, though. He glanced at him, smirking his scorn of the officer’s imagined response to his unasked question. And then they appeared. The Gauls. They simply rose up from behind the stone walls. All at once, some thirty or forty of them. It was surreal, how near they were, how tall. How they seemed to have willed themselves into being. They stood with weapons in hand, silent until one of them said something. His words were unintelligible, but the tone was incongruously hospitable, as if he were asking them if they were enjoying the afternoon.
The Romans weren’t encumbered with their full kit, but they were in marching order, shields on their backs and helmets dangling from wherever they chose to tie them. Servius shouted for them to face about, draw swords, unsling their shields. They had time to do none of this before the Gauls attacked.
One of them jumped from the wall. It was a mad jump. His body bent backward, an ax gripped two-handed and stretched far back over his head. He hauled the weapon down, screaming his strength into it. The blow cut through Servius’s leg midthigh. It snapped the bone and punched into the horse’s side. The mount went mad, kicking and pulling against the ax blade even as the barbarian fought to yank it out. Servius shrieked and gibbered, sounds that didn’t seem
human except that they had words in them. His lower leg swung. Worse, though, was when he lost his saddle and fell over the far side of the horse. His leg, trapped against the ax blade, ripped free and fell to the dirt.
Nonus vomited. It came up and out of him right where he stood, spraying his chest and splattering to the ground. Because of it, he didn’t see the things that happened next. He didn’t see the barbarian leap onto the back of the wagon and vault across it. He kicked Volesus in the back of the head, sending him pitching forward, tangled in the horse lines and in danger of being trampled upon. The man sank his sword down through the driver’s neck, severing the artery there and killing him, but Nonus didn’t see that. Nor that three of the other legionaries fought in a tight group, backs to one another as the barbarians danced around them, whooping their pleasure. Twenty soldiers and the wagon drivers, and yet it took only a few bloody moments to cut them all down. Some hadn’t even drawn swords, much less gotten a grip on their shields. It was done with an efficiency that Nonus could barely believe. He knew why, though. These were gladiators.
Or maybe he did see it all, for he would have memories of it afterward. But in the moment he just saw Servius’s leg dropping as his body fell the other way. That and his vomiting. And then he found himself on his knees, with a brawny arm wrapped around his head, bicep hard as stone and painful. Metal pressed against his neck.
One of the Gauls shouted something. One guttural word in a savage language. He stepped into Nonus’s view. He punched a hand up into the air, held it high, and shouted again. He was bare-chested, with tattoos decorating arms damaged by the pox. He wore trousers of some sort that hugged his legs. His face was blue and his hair stuck up from his head in blond spikes. And he had a mustache. He was terrifying. He was Gannicus.
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