The Risen

by David Anthony Durham

  There are murmurs, half-spoken questions. Several men begin to speak at once. Vectia blocks them out. Brundisium. She knows this city. She had been to it many times over the years with her traveling master. She remembers a massive statue of Neptune near the harbor. She had climbed the steps to its base to study the colorful paintwork that, from a distance, made the figure look so lifelike, a living god but still as the stone it was carved from. Up close, she could see chips in the paint, a few splatters of bird droppings.

  Spartacus tamps down the barrage of questions with the flats of his palms. “You want to know why Brundisium? Then be still and let me tell you. Brundisium because I know it. I went there and stood before its gates and spoke with its magistrates. I offered them friendship. They refused it. I left them be, and we moved on. We had other goals at that time, and Brundisium was just one more Roman city that refused us. Why Brundisium now? Because we can take it, easily, and it will be a rich jewel to call ours. Think of what it gives us. Brundisium has a fabulous port, large and deep. Trade comes in and out of it from all around the Mediterranean. It opens all the Adriatic to us. From the gates on the landward side, the Via Appia will connect us to the heart of Italy. Trade abounds, and it could be ours to control. You see? Avenues across the ocean on one side; avenues across the land on the other. Us at the center of it. And we’d be safe and strong there. They’ve built a great wall abutting the water—to keep back the pirates whom they fear. And they have a solid wall around the city as well, a strong one, stone and earth, meant to withstand sieges.”

  As she listens, a half-smile lifts Vectia’s wrinkled cheeks. He’s using my words, she thinks. She doesn’t mind. They sound good in his voice. Spartacus has never set foot inside Brundisium, but Vectia has. She recalls now that he queried her about the city some weeks ago. The walls, the harbor, the fears of pirates, the bustling trade, the ships coming and going: all are things she told him of. She hadn’t thought about it since. He asked her about many cities, about features of the land and road routes and mountain passes and all manner of things. This had just been yet another one. But here it is, returned and at the center of this council.

  She feels the cool touch of a spectral hand touching hers, trying to clasp hers but instead sliding through, a frigid mist that can pass right through her warm flesh. She ignores it. She’s learned it’s better that way. Ignore them, and they will stop.

  “If the walls are so great,” Kut gets in during a moment in which Spartacus pauses for breath, “how are we to take it? We have no siege engines.”

  Spartacus paces, warms his hands over the fire, looks pleased, happy to hold for a moment to what he has to reveal. “As we marched south from Thurii, a man from Brundisium came and asked to speak with me. He was the slave of one of the city’s magistrates. An educated man who traveled often on his master’s business, his life was better than most. Yet it chafed him. It was he who did so much in his master’s name. He brought riches daily into his master’s house, oversaw warehouses and ship records, composed invoices and sent and received them. He knew exactly how his work profited his master. And yet he himself had no possessions. Even the clothes on his back—even his own person—were but a note on his master’s ledger. He knew this, because he made the note. He wrote in the value of his own being, himself. Measured in coins, see? This man was not happy with this. He wished to see a change, one that set him at the top and his master below. So he offered me the city.”

  A barrage of questions. Statements. Doubts.

  Goban: “Siege work is not for us.”

  Ullio: “A slave can hand over a city?”

  Kut: “I’m wary of promises. Another trick, that’s what this is.”

  Others chorus in agreement. Spartacus lets them, until he hears the question he wants to answer. It comes from Gannicus. “How could he make such an offer?” That one, Spartacus plucks out of the air as if he were catching an invisible ball thrown at him.

  “This is the part you will like the most!” he says, holding the question clenched in his fist, smiling as if he’s not heard the tenor of doubt in the men around him. “Among his many jobs, he hires and fires the soldiers of his master’s personal guard. The city has a small Roman garrison. Mostly, they police with bands of privately owned guards. His master has one of these bands, and regularly his men work the gates. This man from Brundisium promised me that I had only to send word and name the day. His guards—his, because he knows their hearts better than his master—will rise up on that day and take the gate. They’ll hold it open for us. And that’s it. We’re in. We don’t have to break down the walls. We have only to stroll in and claim our prize. The moment we do, we are no longer risen slaves. We’re a city, equal to the finest cities in Italy.”

  “If you knew this weeks ago, why did you not tell us?” The question comes from someone Vectia doesn’t know. A bold question, but whoever asked it speaks for others, clearly, as they echo it.

  Vectia sees what Spartacus has done. It’s funny that the men themselves don’t see it. They are all talking now, debating, worrying, and wanting. By mentioning that they could’ve had the city then, Spartacus is making the others long for it now. He has only just proposed it, and already many of them bemoan that they aren’t already within those walls. A thing they didn’t know they wanted, they now do, and they want it all the more for the days they could’ve had it already.

  “I confess it’s true,” Spartacus admits. “Had we turned on the city then, we might all of us be living in luxurious apartments, rich men, with harbor views. Some who have died would not have died. I would give anything to have turned around then, but we were already in motion. How could we turn around with Sicily so near and the pirates to arrive soon and offer of an entire island of many cities beckoning us? That’s what I believed the gods wanted for us. I was wrong, and because of it we are here instead of in our city.”

  Our city. Vectia smiles.

  “Now I understand that the gods sent that man to me because he spoke their will. Why leave the peninsula, when instead we can become an equal to Rome and finish this contest as two powers clashing as equals?”

  And now he invokes the gods. Yes, Vectia sees what he’s doing. He’s binding them to a new purpose, and only he knows it. He, and Vectia. And of course Astera, who watches, silent and still.

  “So I sent this Brundisian back,” Spartacus says, “thanking him, giving him gifts. I received his promises that if we later marched on the city, he would aid us in giving it over. So there it is. We return, we remind him of his promise, and we take Brundisium.”

  “That’s what you propose, you mean,” Goban corrects.

  “Yes, that’s what I mean. If any others have a different course to propose, do so. Let’s hear it. Let’s vote, and once we have our new path, we must attack it. In this council I’m the first voice, but I’m only one voice. I yield to others now.” He finds a seat and drops down. When nobody talks immediately, he looks around. Gestures with his hands. “Someone? Another plan. Let’s hear it.”

  Others do begin to talk, but Vectia doesn’t need to listen. The decision is made already. She’s sure it is. Who wouldn’t want to take a city? Especially if it was to be handed to them so easily. Who wouldn’t want those villas and warehouses, that port and those ships and the Via Appia and all the trade that flows along it? Who wouldn’t want safe walls around them for a time instead of sleeping on the cold ground? And who wouldn’t love the notion of declaring, in a single action, that each and every one of them was equal to the citizens of Rome?

  The scorching arrow that pierces all the rings. Spartacus, again, has aimed true. It’s only a matter of time before the others admit as much. Vectia, knowing this, turns to leave. To do so, she must face the thousands she felt behind her the entire time she leaned against that tree. The army of ghosts. The great host unseen by anyone but her.

  They’re there, standing mute, individual shapes that are semitransparent when her eyes drift over them. All too specifically detai
led if she looks at any one too closely. She doesn’t now, she wades through them, controlling the urge to part the way with her hands, as one might do among the living. She doesn’t have to. They move aside as she brushes past and through them. They are, each of them, a coldness, the swipe of a finger or hand, a thigh or shoulder, that she feels as a frigid area. It passes through her with ease. But it’s cold, and Vectia doesn’t like being cold. She keeps her gaze elevated and moves away. The dead close behind her, and they stay where they stand, a silent, invisible multitude, continuing to watch this council of the Risen, as if their lives still depend on what’s decided there.

  —

  Vectia understands the ghosts better now than when she first began to see them, after the slaughter of the Celts with Crixus. They aren’t just grieving the Celtic dead. They aren’t angry at their fate. They didn’t follow her back to Spartacus to ask that the living avenge them. Perhaps to some measure all these motives are part of it, but none of them is the whole truth. Vectia can’t know that for sure. She can’t ask them. She wouldn’t have wanted to even if she could have.

  What she has come to believe is that they are the ghosts of all those killed since this uprising began. Not the Romans. They don’t matter. No, the ghosts are all the dead who rallied behind Spartacus and swore faith to him and his cause. The ones who trailed behind her after Crixus’s army was destroyed did so only to be taken back to Spartacus. She led them, so that work was done. Now that they have him, it is he they follow. Not her. That is a relief, but only a minor one. She follows Spartacus as well, so the ghosts are only more and more crowded around both of them. There are always new dead. Some killed in skirmishes. Some from accidents, illness, colds brought on by weather that settles in a person’s chest. By the clamped jaws and the rigid convulsions caused by evil spirits. She has even seen lone figures walk in, new arrivals who, she thinks, must have died at a distance but with Spartacus’s name on their lips. And of course, there are the dead who attempted the crossing.

  Vectia watched from the bluffs with many others, both living and dead, when Skaris led the attempted crossing. She saw the doom of it. The currents, they looked savage from her vantage point, as if liquid serpents were writhing and at war with one another. She was not surprised by what happened, just sad that so many went into the water and down to the depths. Everyone saw that. Long after the mission had been abandoned and the bodies pulled from the waves and all those who could be rescued returned to shore, sputtering, coughing, praying…When the survivors had pulled back from the sea as if afraid of it. Once they built fires to burn the chill of the sea out of those who had been immersed in it…After the beach itself was deserted, backs turned to it as if they all wanted to forget what had happened and pretend the dream of Sicily was not even there behind them.

  Then when it was quiet, the dead began to walk out of the sea. She saw them and knew that their spirits must have left their bodies in the black depths. They must have walked across the bottom and so returned to the Risen. They were just like war dead, but these came without gashes and open wounds and missing limbs. They came, blue-faced, pallid, drenched, and they took their place among the thousands of others, waiting and sharing a silent purpose. They were still devoted to the cause and the man who led it, though they could only watch now. They couldn’t touch the world or affect it. Only watch. And follow.

  Vectia had tried a few times to speak with them. Once she rose from her tent to pee in the night. She found Beatha standing there in the starlight. She didn’t know if the ghost had come to her intentionally or if it was by chance. She approached her, feeling she had to. If there was some comfort she could give, she owed it to Beatha, who had said each night to her at the end of a day on the march with Crixus, “You are not Allobroges yet. Maybe tomorrow.”

  That night, outside her tent, her full bladder forgotten, Vectia whispered, “Beatha?” She moved close, as if she would take the woman’s hands and hold them in her own. Beatha was drawn in starlight, soft highlights on the features Vectia had grown to love. She didn’t react to Vectia’s approach. “Beatha, what can I do? Tell me, and I will try.” The woman looked into Vectia’s eyes, and slowly her face grew clearer, her features and the lines of her skin and contours of her face more distinct. She looked down at her torso, taking Vectia’s gaze that way as well. That’s where the wound was. The horrible wound. Whatever Roman made it, he did it to torture her, to punish her in a manner specially devised to shame even the ghost of what had once been a woman. Why had that happened to Beatha and not her? Why had she gotten away?

  When Vectia looked up again, Beatha was staring at her, an expression of anguish on her face. Her mouth opened and moved. There was no sound, but there was something like a cold breath of misery that blew into Vectia. Beatha reached for her, suddenly moving fast, as if she would squeeze her in anger or despair or love; Vectia wasn’t sure which. Reached for her, but as she was of no substance, she just passed through, the coldest, deepest touch yet. A coldness that had lingered in Vectia’s chest ever since. She didn’t try to communicate with the ghosts again. She knew what they needed, and it wasn’t something she could give. There was nothing she could do for them.

  She wonders, at times, if she should tell Spartacus the full truth about the ghosts. Instead, she had lied. Back in the summer, after the victory in the north and the games for Crixus, he had asked her, “Have they found peace? Have they gone on to the next world?”

  Standing there right in front of him, among the crowd of ghostly dead who surrounded them, Vectia had said, “Yes, they have gone on.”

  After that she had never spoken of them again. It’s better that way. She wondered if he would want to know that Skaris, whom he so mourns, walked across the bottom of the sea, up onto the beach, as tall and broad in death as he had been in life, though so vaporous any living person could now move through him. Would Spartacus want to know that his old friend shadowed his every motion? He was there behind him, a spectral bodyguard looking over his shoulder. Even at the council, Vectia had only to lift her gaze to see him. He’d stood as near as he could, in a manner that meant his legs touched one of the Libyans. The man had shifted uncomfortably, tried to rub the chill out of himself. Would Spartacus want to know these things? Would he want to know that when he moves through the mass of dead, the ones nearest him reach out and drag their hands through him? In those brief moments, when he was near enough to touch, they became animated. They seemed to have something they wanted to communicate. But they couldn’t. Spartacus walked on; the ghosts lowered their arms and stood, patient again.

  They are devoted, truly, to him. She doesn’t understand why, but she knows it to be so. She considers telling him these things, but she has only to look around at the living and how they move through a world so thick with the departed to know that she shouldn’t. They don’t know, she thinks, and it’s better that way. Especially for Spartacus. What sort of burden would it be to know so many souls still cling to him, attached to his fate, not free until he is free as well?

  —

  To keep the Romans guessing, Spartacus deploys cavalry to ride near the wall along both coasts. They’re to pester the Romans in all the ways they can think of. Setting fire to the wall when they can. Shouting insults in the night. Lurking, lest a chance comes to pounce on a patrol or work crew on the southern side of the wall. That will keep the Romans thinking the Risen are as yet undecided, still scouting, scavenging, growing weaker and more desperate. All that, in a manner of speaking, is true. But it’s not the whole truth.

  Spartacus has the bulk of the Risen—seventy thousand strong, men, women, children, along with all manner of beasts—break camp in the hills and march into the Sila Mountains. They leave behind enough young men and boys to keep the campfires burning, in hopes that the smoke in the sky will deceive the Romans into thinking that they are still encamped. The boys are to keep at it for a few days, then run for the hills themselves.

  They are, as ever, followed by the
ghosts. They trail behind, a flock being led at its own shuffling pace, slow, but always able to catch up before long. When the Risen camp, the ghosts stand still, as if they are asleep on their feet, spread throughout the camp in whatever space they come to rest in. They do nothing but follow. They carry nothing but the spectral scars that killed them. They should be as light as the air. Instead, they seem tethered to life, heavy because of it.

  Spartacus gives orders for them to travel leanly, to leave behind bulky things so they can move quickly up into the mountains, through the wall, and down again on the other side. It will be hard, he says; there will be suffering. Not all will make it. But it must be done. And once they’re through, he promises, they’ll roar down toward Brundisium, and then all will be rewarded. They’ll take the city. As of that very day they will be a state unto themselves.

  So they climb into the hills and, soon after, the mountains. Vectia walks with the Celts, who have grown in numbers again, led by Ullio, though she is often called to the Thracians to verify that the route is accurate. The wide, shallow valleys grow steeper. The heights before them take on greater bulk. The distances from here to there expand. A couple of days in, and the temperate chill of the southern winter is a memory. The third day, Vectia watches the plumes of vapor in front of her mouth. They all do, save for the dead, who walk breathless, without leaving so much as a footprint in the snow. That evening, as they all come to rest, Vectia sees snow covering the peaks in front of them. The fourth morning she awakens to a white, frigid world. She has seen snow, of course, but it’s still a quiet shock that such a change can be worked on creation in complete silence. It fell and stopped, and no one, it seems, saw it happen. They simply awaken to it and stand staring.

  After that morning, there is always snow. Always cold. The peaks ahead bulge from the land. Great slabs of stone thrust their shoulders up, as if the mountains are the eroded remains of stone giants who had once fought in close battle and died entwined with one another in heaps. Vectia sees the shapes of them, no matter what the centuries have done to erode them. No matter the stands of trees and the drifts of snow and hanging tendrils of ice.