The general had his hands full defending his country against Gnaeus Pompey and holding together the delicate alliance of Iberian tribes that he’d created over his years in Spain. But he paid attention to anything that helped his cause and hurt Rome’s. Spartacus, he’d come to realize, was doing just that, in spectacular style. “He hopes this will continue and that you’ll keep Rome terrified at home, as he and Mithridates batters their troops abroad.”
“Does he offer us aid?” Spartacus asked.
Falcidia’s eyebrows pressed together, making his forehead a momentary maze of creases. “As I said, Pompey is a challenge. The war with him requires our full resources. We will prevail, though. Sertorius, he is a rare leader, like yourself. The Iberians love him. Many call him a second Hannibal.” The man smiled. “They may be right, and not just because he too has lost an eye. Maybe one day, after Pompey is defeated, he’ll march an army just as Hannibal did and come down from the Alps and join you in ending Rome’s domination for good. That’s what he wants.”
“Why does he want that?” Gaidres asked. “He is Roman himself.”
“Yes, but Rome is hardest on her most gifted. He has too many grievances with Rome for me to voice now. But believe me, he sees an Iberia that welcomes him—much of it, at least. He has set up his own senate, has a vast network of oaths and agreements, and has control of the country’s riches. He manages them in a way that wins him favor with the people. But as I said, the contest is hard fought. For now, we offer friendship. And I can take our strong opinion of you with me to Pontus. Mithridates, I’m sure, is watching you as well. Perhaps, in the future, we can see an arrangement made that benefits us all—and that brings down our common enemy. Sertorius wants you to know that he wishes for such a future, and he will put the bug in the king’s ear as well.”
When the meeting was over, Drenis sat working through each moment of it again in his mind. Had it just happened? Were they now talked of by kings? Did men who ruled whole nations consider them worthy of praise? Apparently, the answers were yes, yes, and yes.
—
They disappeared when they wished to. Seventy thousand fighting men. Just the men, for who could number the women and children? So many, and yet when wished to, they became invisible. The woman Vectia, who was Allobroges in name but of Italy in truth, knew the places to be avoided. She knew the places to loot and the places to disappear into. They turned the curve of the Apennines toward the northwest, traversed the spine of the country, through rocky peaks and forests and mountain passes, walking, it sometimes felt, hidden behind cloudlike screens thrown up for them by the gods.
How far would they go? As far as they pleased. Spartacus wanted to run the length of Italy and back again so that every city and town and village feared them. If they all feared the Risen, how long before some of them began to fear them more than Rome? And then how long before one or two of them pleaded for common cause? Before this town or that thought, Let us befriend Spartacus before my neighbor does? It would happen. And soon. And when that began, it wouldn’t end until the gates of Rome were kicked open and the world restored to balance.
When they came down out of the Apennines onto the undulating plains that stretched toward the Padus River and the Alps beyond it, the people fled before them. Either that or they ran toward them as liberators. It was a beautiful country, wide open like the plains of Thrace but with a character all its own. A land to race across, which Drenis did. He rode a gelding that one of the shepherd boys from Vesuvius had brought him. He raced with his Maedi brothers—with Spartacus and Skaris, Nico and Dolmos—as when they were young and unscarred. They played foolish games. They galloped up and down the slopes, beside ridges of rock that protruded from the earth like the skeletons of ancient monsters. In the distance, buttes punched toward the sky, reaching to touch the clouds that roiled above them.
An army marched, finally, out of the city of Mutina. Two legions under the leadership of the governor of the province, Gaius Cassius Longinus. Ten thousand men. A year ago that would have seemed a great force, one they had better run from. Now? Now the Risen scoffed at them. The Risen formed up in ranks twice as wide as the Romans could. Yes, the Roman slingers were fierce. Wolf-headed velites hurled pellets and insults, the first to smash skulls and the latter to batter minds. Yes, the Romans threw great volleys of javelins. They rose into the air like thousands of wingless, sleek birds, tilted, and then dropped with furious speed. Yes, those furious birds killed. They pierced through shields, through breastplates, through men’s faces. They encumbered them as the weight of the javelins’ shafts made them awkward, dangling protrusions that dragged men down or made them throw away their shields. Yes, the Romans held to their tight formation, a single creature with thousands of legs and eyes and stabbing stingers. None of this was enough.
The Risen closed the gap between them at a run and smashed into their wall of shields with murderous, suicidal force. It was gladiators who assaulted them. The wings of the Risen’s foot soldiers swept around, roaring as they ran, and attacked the Romans from both sides. The Romans had cavalry on either flank, but they were only Romans, not Thracians. Not Germani. On the far side, Gannicus’s mounted force did the same as Drenis’s. They both swung all the way around the enemy army, driving the Roman horses before them, and then they kicked the Romans’ main force in the backside. There was a great deal of slaughter after that, though not only slaughter. Spartacus ordered that they take prisoners if possible, the higher ranking the better. They might prove useful in later negotiations with Rome.
And then afterward, near the Padus, with the Alps so close they could almost be seen—maybe, on a perfect day, with young eyes, they could be—there Spartacus held funeral games for Crixus. He did him honor, building a pyre and burning a replica of the Celt’s body. He recited the chieftain’s deeds and said how he and all those who died with him were fully and truly avenged. If any souls still hungered for proof of it, let these games be that.
And what games? Gladiatorial. Battles to the death. Who fought them? Not slaves. This time Romans fought Romans. They selected, from the thousands of prisoners they had after Mutina, only the ones who would kill so they might live. Some were paired in single combat. Some were thrown together in a melee. The Risen watched. They cheered the sight of Romans killing Romans. They ate food taken from Romans and drank the wine of this Roman-dominated land. It was a festival none of them could’ve imagined before Spartacus, before Astera and her goddess. It made Drenis giddy, dizzy with it, hot on his face. Or was that the wine? Maybe both, which was good. It was all good.
The next day they cut the tendons in the sword hands of the Romans who had fought and won. They kicked them out of the camp so they would run and spread the word of what had happened. Another defeat. Another humiliation. And then Spartacus led his closest companions on a hunt.
Or he was supposed to. Drenis dressed for it. He took up his spear and mounted with the rest. He kept to himself that he was still dizzy. Only more so and not from wine. Hot, and not just on his face. He wasn’t giddy anymore. He was dazed. The world was not as it should be. It was there before him, but he could see nothing except through a watery blur. Riding would clear his mind and make the world sharp again, he told himself.
As they began to move out, he noticed a biting fly on his horse’s shoulder. He smacked at it. His gelding shied to one side. A small motion that would normally have simply swayed him. This time he toppled over, almost out of his saddle. His grip on his spear slipped so that the shaft hit the ground, and he pushed up on it. But something about the gesture made the horse shy again, a few quick steps. Drenis fell. He caught the spear point in his shoulder and the weight of his body drove it in. He toppled awkwardly to the ground, stuck to the spear, thinking, This is a stupid way to die.
—
After that he learns what death is like. It isn’t as he’s been told. He doesn’t find himself before an assembly of his gods and his ancestors. They don’t query him on his life, on t
he battles he fought, or on how he died. He doesn’t need to make a case for himself and is neither rejected by them nor accepted into their company. None of that happens. If he had a mind to note this, he would be disappointed. Angry even. He isn’t, though, because he never thinks about it. His mind is otherwise occupied.
Death is a never-ending movement in and out of sensibility. Death is like dreaming and dreaming and then stopping, falling into empty moments that last until they end. There’s no rest in those empty moments, and waking is not true waking. It’s just joining a chain of dreams. It’s memories plucked from the past and relived: feeling his mother cut the stigma of the Great Mother into the small of his back, naming the chickens in the lane among the huts, running the hills with his brothers and finding the pit of snakes, rushing out into the night during a summer thunderstorm and shooting arrows into the sky to quiet gods, killing the Libyan gladiator named Musena in his first fight. All those things, just as they happened. But also things that happened merged with things that didn’t: his mother had put a stigma on the small of his back, not on his face and chest, and she didn’t stretch tentacles of ink down as far as his toes, and the chickens had not converged behind the cockerel to threaten him, mad at being named after Odomanti women, which Drenis hadn’t known he’d done, and the pit of snakes had not been so fathomless that he’d jumped into it, falling and falling as snakes hissed and snapped at him as he passed, and those arrows had not dropped back to the earth as boulders that smashed and destroyed and set them all running, and the Libyan Musena had died, he hadn’t sat up after being killed and spoken perfect Thracian, telling him how best to cook whitefish.
When you are dead, Drenis learns, small horned men about a foot tall can approach you when you’re sleeping. He sees them, the way they creep and whisper and make signs with their hands to one another. He’s terrified. He would scream and kick at them, but he can’t move at all. He’s frozen there, watching wide-eyed as the small men collect around him and lift his body. One of them could never do that by himself, but together, it’s as if they make him float above the ground. They move him, pull him along toward the flap of the tent he’s in. On the other side of that flap is something horrible. He can see the vaguest glimpses of it. Something large, moving. A god or demon that the horned men are taking him to.
Thankfully, he never gets through that flap. He’s never devoured by the god of the small horned men. Instead, he goes to darkness. When he comes out of it, the montage of lived and unlived, possible and impossible, moments continues. Sometimes they are mundane moments. Other times he sees horrors. And sometimes he finds wonders.
The most wonderful thing is that Bendidora comes to him. He’s sitting on a rock, dark all around him. Pitch blackness. Only he and the rock on which he sits are illuminated. He doesn’t question where he is or why or how. He just is. And when Bendidora steps out of the darkness, she just is as well.
“Are you dead?” he asks. She doesn’t answer, but he concludes that she is. There’s comfort to be found in that, and Drenis falls into it. He thinks to ask her how she died but decides it doesn’t matter. “Sit with me.”
“I don’t have long,” she says, in a voice that isn’t quite as he remembered it. But they’ve been apart for some time. Voices change, don’t they? “The war is about to start.”
That’s true, of course. The war is always about to start. She does sit beside him, though. She smiles at him. She doesn’t look the same as she had before. At least, he thinks that at first. After a time he can only envision her as she is. She may wear a different face and speak with a different voice, but she’s still the one he’s loved and always will.
Which is why it’s horrible when she says, “You forgot about me.” That’s all she says, but he knows that she believes he left her intentionally, that he went off to Capua instead of marrying her and did not care that she was left behind. It’s not true, and he tells her as much. He holds her hand and details everything that’s happened since last he saw her. He explains to her how much, and how often, he thought of her. Sometimes he actually speaks. Other times thoughts just pass back and forth between them, ideas wrapped in the folds of things unspoken.
She shakes her head. “What about the others?”
“What others? There were no others.” He swears to her that he’s taken no woman to bed since he was enslaved. Nobody since he fell in love with her. He opens his mind so that she can see the whole of it and find no other woman in it.
She says, “If that’s true, you’re not a very good Thracian man.”
She’s got him there. What Thracian man spends his life pining for only one woman? “That’s not my fault,” he says. “It’s yours.” And that’s true. It’s as if she has cast a spell on him so that he can only think of her, only want her.
There’s a rumbling out in the darkness. It’s the mountains rearranging themselves. He can’t see them, but he knows that is what’s happening. When the dawn comes, they’ll be different than they were before—though he has no memory of how they were before. The movement of the mountains has something to do with the coming war.
Bendidora says, “Here.” She places something in his hand. Three things. Tiny creatures that look like mice but aren’t quite mice. They’re their children. She doesn’t have to say it. He just knows. She wants him to protect them during the war. He speaks to them, telling them he’ll take care of them. He’ll carry them inside his tunic and nothing bad will happen, and after, they’ll take their true shape and not have to hide.
When he looks up, Bendidora is gone. He sees her walking into a faintly lit distance, one of many moving silhouettes. The mountains begin to take shape in the distance.
Then everything changes. This moment—which he’s sure is not a dream but something else—ends, and the loop of his other dreams continues.
All this happens over and over. All the dream memories that are and that aren’t, interspersed with conversations with Bendidora. Sometimes they make love. Sometimes they argue. Once she accuses him of not caring for the children. He goes to fetch them but realizes he has lost them. It’s a horrible moment, but later they are grown and human so he must not have lost them after all. One time when she arrives, her lips have been sewn shut. Another time Drenis is a woman as well. He kisses Bendidora, and she kisses back, not minding that he is a woman.
Sometimes he is aware enough to find death strange. In those moments, he wonders why nobody ever told him it would be like this. Someone should have.
—
The other thing about death is that it’s not nearly as permanent a condition as he’d believed. As it begins, it can also end.
It’s sound, first, that wakes him from the dead. A tune hummed by a soft, sweet voice. It’s a lullaby that he remembers hearing his mother hum to his younger siblings back in Thrace. For a moment, while the world is still just sound and his eyes are closed, he thinks he’s back there. It feels completely normal. He’s still a boy with life before him and no knowledge of the things to come. He likes it. He would stay feeling so if he could, but it slips away.
He remembers that he’s not a child. He’s lived a life already. He feels an ache that slowly grows as he acknowledges it, a dull throbbing in his chest, with the rhythm of a heartbeat but painful, as if each beat were the impact of a blunted weapon. He was hurt, he remembers, and that makes him think another thing: that he isn’t himself anymore. He’s a babe, and this is the next world. It’s as the Celts say. Reborn in the other place.
Still the voice hums. It’s so near.
Perhaps, because he died so foolishly, he will never get to stand before his ancestors and be judged and win their favor and feast with them and hunt. Instead, he’ll have to live all over again. That last thought saddens him. Because of it, he keeps his eyes closed, afraid to open them to see what he’s become. A helpless child, cursed again with trials of an awaiting life.
The humming cuts off, and a woman’s voice says, “Oh, stop that you silly boy! Stay still.
”
It’s such a crystal clear voice, so unexpected, that Drenis’s eyes snap open.
He’s on his back. Above him a piece of fabric hangs, rippled slightly by a breeze he doesn’t feel. Several flies perch there, as if watching him. He moves his head—which makes the pain in his chest surge—and sees his body. It’s his man’s body. He lifts a hand, and that’s his too, just as before. He’s in his flesh again. He can move his toes and feel the rasp of the rough blanket that covers them. He can hear movement outside, a voice in the distance, a bell that must be around some grazing animal’s neck. There is a clarity to everything that is different than the hazy existence he’d thought of as death. This is something else, a not-death.
Gasping, he lets his head fall back. When did his head get so heavy? It’s like a stone.
A face appears above him. It’s in shadow and hidden by a drape of dark hair. “Oh, look at this. He’s awake at last. How are you feeling?” The woman hangs above him for a few breaths. “You don’t look well at all, but you’re not dead. Not yet at least. Can you drink?”
She vanishes, leaving him staring at the sheet. He understands nothing. He knows her, but he didn’t see her face. He doesn’t know why he knows her or what’s going on. He turns his head to see her. She’s twisted away, doing something on the far side of the small shelter they’re in. He can see a thin sliver of woodland through a gap in the door flap. Low yellow light oozes through the trunks of stout trees.
There’s a sound. Nearer to him than the woman’s back. It’s hard, but he twists his torso, pushing down with one arm so he can raise his shoulder and see better. Right beside him, eyes watch him. Enormous brown eyes in a round, chubby face. As he struggles to place what it is, the woman turns back and moves toward him on her knees, cradling a wooden bowl before her. Her face, lit now with her hair framing it, is lovely. It’s Epta. The beauty. The one who was used badly and often during her slavery. And that reminds him what the creature with large eyes and a chubby face is. It’s all he can take. He collapses back onto the mat, breathing, looking at the sheet.
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