The Risen

by David Anthony Durham

  They could not truly have prepared for it even if they’d had twice the time. Most of them know nothing of the cold. They don’t have the clothing for it, or the footwear. Some wear sandals. Some are even barefoot, the poor, unfortunate fools. Others bind swatches of cloth to their feet, or woolen fleeces. Vectia is better off than most. Back at the coast, she’d scavenged from a fisherman’s shed and came away with her hooded woolen shirt. It’s huge around her. She’s secured it at the waist with a rope made of twisted vines. There’s a dual purpose in this: to keep the garment snug and therefore warmer, and so that she can carry her small treasures above the belt, wrapped in a square of cloth safe against her abdomen. Head tucked under the hood, she knows she must look a strange sight, but they all do. It reminds her of the early days, of how the soldiers had once been so motley in their armor. A helmet there, a greave here, a breastplate on one but not on ten others. The same is true now for the entire host of the Risen. They all walk with cobbled-together attempts to fight the cold.

  At night they huddle close together around fires built up from the ample fuel in these high woodlands. It takes a time to get them going, but the labor is warming, and it gives them all—men and women, old and young—purpose. Night is better because in camp animals are slaughtered and the food from them distributed through a system of Spartacus’s devising, each group being responsible for all those belonging to it, whether the bond be by blood and ethnicity or by chance. Some men grumble that women and children eat as much as they do. Vectia hears them. She sees it in their belligerent faces. But the rule is the rule. Few break it.

  It’s better at night because she sleeps in a tent close-packed with several others. When she is sure they’re asleep, she sometimes pulls out her small treasures, the things she collected as the Risen marched up and down Italy. A few gold coins that she rubs with her thumb. A silver hand mirror that, when the day starts to gray into existence, she stares into, trying to gauge whether she recognizes the wrinkled face there. She’s never sure. She wonders if her master, who had liked her face when she was young, would have liked this face she wears now. She remembers one thing about him that she wishes she had now—his heat. He slept warm, his body a furnace at night that she would welcome now. Thinking of him reminds her of Judocus, the old Celtic farrier from Cassino who had told her, “Speak Latin.” Is he alive still? Is he warm in his bed this night? Does he ever think of her? She bets he does.

  It’s better at night, but in some ways it is worse as well. Some who fall asleep rise again outside their bodies, as new additions to the host of the walking dead. Worse because the cold bites with savage teeth. One night the sky is a great mass of clouds obscuring the sky. It drops a blanket of snow. The next night the sky is clear and black and twinkling with stars. Beautiful, but all the more frigid because of it. High as they are, the air is thin and full of wolf song. So many wolves, all around them, raising their snouts to the night. It sounds, to Vectia, as if they’re baying to whatever god they worship, giving thanks for the trail of corpses the march leaves for them.

  Every day they have fewer animals, less grain, less to live on. There are more coughs, more frozen toes and fingers. They have only snow to make water from now, and few know how to do so. They don’t know that a cook pot packed with snow won’t melt. Instead the bottom of the pot will burn, ruining it. Many just eat the snow—even dirty, trodden-on, and fouled snow—by the handful. They don’t know that it chills the body and makes them crave even more. They don’t understand that a mouthful of snow is only a tiny amount of water, and they freeze their lips and tongues because of it. She looks back on them, cresting each rise, wanting to tell them all the things she knows, but there are too many, and they’re all encased in their own struggles. They are a moving stain on the ridges of the snow-white earth falling away behind her. She sees the whole long, meandering, ragged line of them, all the way back to the rear, where, she knows, a host of Roman captives marches in their wake, the captured soldiers whom Spartacus has continued to drag along behind them, especially since their victories last summer in the north. Why he’s done so for so long, she’s never understood. He must have a reason for dragging them even into this, though. He always has a reason.

  Still higher, the snow is deep on the ground and falls from the sky in such a thickness of large flakes that Vectia can no longer see the mountains she knows are all around them. They must be near the edge of the plateau, but she can’t be sure, and now that she can’t see, she doubts her own reckoning. She wonders if this is, in fact, a trap of snow and ice and rock, and she with a part in leading them into it. She’s not the only one beginning to despair. It’s in the air around her, as heavy as the falling snow.

  Spartacus must feel it too, because he fights it. He dismounts and walks down the line, urging all to keep climbing. So many people trudging, the world muffled, all of them moving through quiet misery. And then there’s Spartacus, voice loud and carrying. He assures them the distance through these mountains is not far, just difficult. Be strong, and it will be accomplished soon.

  Is he laughing? Vectia wonders. She knows the answer. Yes, he is. Of course he is.

  Every time Vectia sees him—and he passes up and down several times during the worst days—he is nothing but tireless energy, boundless enthusiasm. He slaps people on the back. He embraces them and rubs his hand on their cheeks, asking, “There. Does that warm you? It must. Look at the red of your cheeks!” He asks their names on one meeting, and by the next he repeats them, asking after their health, their hands, their cough, their sandals. All of this is not just for the fighting men either. The women, the old, the children: he seems to see them all and to care equally about all of them.

  Once, staff in hand, exhausted, feeling herself as cold as the snow, fighting for each step she takes, she comes up a rise and sees Spartacus sitting in the snow. A few stand around him. Several men. Two women. They are bundled against the cold and formless. But it’s a child who Spartacus attends to. A boy, five or six years old. Spartacus sits facing him, his legs around him. He has taken the boy’s feet and slipped them under his tunic. He holds them against his torso, warming them.

  “Can you feel your feet now?” Vectia hears him ask. “You must. They are hot on my belly.” He pulls a face, looks up at the adults, who are stunned speechless, every one of them. Back to the boy, he plays the fool. “So hot! I think I’m burning.”

  For his part, the boy just stares at Spartacus, speechless. He looks as if he can’t decide if he’s terrified or in heaven.

  That’s good enough, sweet enough, to reaffirm that she loves this man. Enough to make her feel that, misery aside, it’s not wrong that both the living and the dead follow him. But later the Thracian passes her again. He sings a song in his language. He steps high in the snow, looking as tireless as a god. The wonder is this: he carries that boy on his back. And this: the boy is smiling, joy written in every feature of his round face.

  So, Vectia concludes, it’s heaven.

  During her time with the Risen, there have been many things that Vectia has seen that she is sure she will never forget. That boy’s face, his arms wrapped around Spartacus’s neck, his small legs cinched around the Thracian’s torso: that’s one of them.

  —

  “You have to admit,” Gaidres says, “it’s impressive.”

  “It’s cowardly,” Ullio counters.

  “Yes, but impressively cowardly.”

  They’re speaking of Crassus’s wall. Spartacus and his generals have been studying it for a time when Vectia crawls up beside them, answering Spartacus’s summons. It’s not the full contingent this time, just Gaidres and Drenis, Gannicus and Castus, Ullio and Baebia: the ones who have now been with him the longest. They lie on their bellies on a rock blown bare of snow, hoping to stay hidden, gazing at the view it affords. The Roman deserter is with them, as well as one of the youths who scouted the way before the host. Hustus, twin of the girl Laelia, whom Vectia finds kind and sweet. Those are traits
not necessarily suited to being a priestess, but who is she to second-guess Astera?

  The wall. Finally, there it is, as the deserter said it would be. For most of the obstacle’s length, a trench cuts deep into the frozen turf, so precisely it’s as if it had been measured foot by foot to some pedant’s stipulation. Behind this, the wall itself is anchored into the mounded earth tossed up from the trench. It’s built of long, straight timbers, most of them with their bark still on, lashed together so tightly that, from a distance, it seems there are no gaps between the beams at all. It rises to more than twice a man’s height. The left side of the wall runs up a slow curve until the slant becomes impassably steep. On the right the wall collides with boulders strewn at the base of a cliff. It is, within this basin, a total barrier. Soldiers, hidden from the waist down, move atop it.

  “This wall has eyes,” Drenis says, voicing the very thought Vectia has just formed.

  “Be still,” Spartacus says. “They don’t need to see us. If you can, hold your breath so they don’t see the vapor.” He says this straight, and Vectia smiles. Not because it’s funny, but because she can see it confuses some of the others a moment, before they get the humor of it.

  “It must’ve been a devil of a time working on that,” Gannicus says, “with the ground frozen like it is.”

  The Roman deserter scowls. “Yes, it was a hard time, but digging is the first thing they teach us. Dig this fucking trench. Now fill it back in, and, oh…now dig it out again. March over here. Dig a trench. What? You’re not happy about it? Make it twice as deep, then. And after the digging, it’s building walls, lashing the poles together just so. We do it every night on the march. Build it before we sleep. And it better be done right. If not, do it again. The next morning, get up, take it down. March with the poles and everything else until it’s time to start digging and lashing again. Nobody can dig a trench and throw up a wall like us.” He pauses, and then concludes, “Crassus is a shit.”

  None dispute it. Baebia looks on the verge of saying something, but whatever it is, he keeps it trapped behind his teeth.

  Spartacus turns his head, finds Vectia. “The Roman says this is where that high route begins. Is it?”

  Vectia knows that it is. She has a place where she stores memories for land, and this place is in it. She was last here at the height of summer, not winter, but still, the shapes of the peaks are right. Those boulders on the left: she had walked among them in the evening light. In among them, she had lain on her back, the hulking stones framing pink clouds against a blue sky, made better with the erratic flights of bats. She’d thought it beautiful. She also remembers walking through the curve of the basin, alongside her master’s wagon, the mountain turf thick and spongy beneath her feet. She has no doubt. She says, “I passed through here before, and I remember it.”

  “If I were a bird and flew above the wall, what would I see?” Spartacus asks.

  “You would see that the Romans picked a spot that looks daunting from here on the ground, a place that was easy for them to close. You’d see a good route from here to Thurii. It’s mountainous, but there’s a gentling to it, a wideness. When I came here, we crossed with a wagon.”

  “It wasn’t winter, then.”

  “No.”

  “The other spots where they have walls?” Spartacus asks her.

  “I don’t know them, but no one sent us that way before. They might’ve built the walls to confuse us, to make each look like a place to attack, when some are false routes.”

  “Is that so, Nonus?”

  The Roman looks at Vectia as if amazed that she can put sentences and thoughts together. It takes him a moment to answer. “Yes. It’s…” He frowns, seems unsure a moment longer, and then accepts it. “It’s as she says. Some of the walls are false routes meant to confuse you. There is one a couple of hours’ march to the east. It looks much like this one, even more promising, it’s a narrower route, steeper. Getting so many through…it would take much more time than this one.”

  “Well, they might try to confuse us,” Spartacus says, “but they don’t know we have this one with us, do they?” He nudges his chin at Vectia. When the others glance at her as well, he winks, just for her to see. And then he’s back to his purpose. “How many, Nonus, man this?”

  “I’m not certain. It may have changed, but we were two thousand assigned to the high passes. Most will be here, camped behind this. Some will be posted at the other, smaller barricades.”

  Ullio grumbles something unintelligible.

  “You have a complaint?” Spartacus asks.

  “More than one,” the Celt says. “What are we doing here? We’re trusting on the one hand a Roman who claims to be a deserter, and on the other an old woman who, if she speaks true, has unusual vision for one so old. I realize she knows the land. I don’t dispute she’s helped before, but this is different. In these heights? In this cold? We’ve lost many getting here. More will fall today, and more tomorrow. You all know this. We must be through the wall without delay. Either that, or go back as we came and set to raiding again. If we waste time here—if the wall is too strong, or the route not as she remembers, or the Romans more numerous than he says—any of these doom us.”

  Vectia looks at Ullio directly. “I see many things. I can’t speak for the Roman, but this is the place. It seems to me that the Roman has done his part. I’ve done mine. Behind us, all the Risen have done theirs to climb. Whose turn is it now?”

  That, apparently, is good enough for Spartacus. He points a finger at Ullio. “She has you. It’s our turn. I hear you, Vectia. You as well, Ullio. This is the place, and we have no time to spare. Listen, and then go to your people and reveal this. Take it to the leaders as well. This is what we do.”

  He then explains what he intends for the coming night. Most of it, being the work of men, Vectia won’t witness. But she hears it as it is conceived. They are to attack both this wall and the one to the east. The Romans don’t—as far as they can tell—know they’re here. They’ve had riders lingering in sight of the walls on both coasts, keeping the Romans down in the lower regions. They haven’t even imagined that the Risen would make this dash up into the mountains. Their scouts have attested to this. They found no sign the Romans were sending out regular patrols, something they’d certainly do if they had the men to spare.

  They’ll keep the few Romans here from massing to full-strength defense with this dual attack. Only one effort will be genuine, though. This one. Gaidres is to lead the decoy attack, Spartacus the one on the main wall. They’ll attack at night, at the same hour. Fire arrows to begin. They have vats of pitch that have been brought up from the shore towns. There are many archers among the Syrians. They will dip arrows and rain fire down on the wall. Other archers will be hidden by the dark, shooting to pick off Romans on the walls, both to kill them and to keep them from putting out the fires. They are to keep up the barrage until men can get near enough to throw anchor hooks—again, brought up for the purpose from the seaside villages—onto the wall and, hauling back on the ropes, pull the weakened structure down. When there is a decent breach, it will be time to drive the Roman prisoners into view.

  “Then we’ll show them what we think of Roman walls and ditches, eh?” Just what he means by that, he doesn’t say. The others seem to know, and Vectia doesn’t ask. This side of things is not her domain. In truth, she doesn’t want it to be.

  So that is what she hears but doesn’t see, as she is sent back to the lower camp when troops for the assault assemble nearer the wall. From down in the camp, she hears the sounds of battle in the night, but they are muted. She sees the indication of a fiery glow in the sky, which is crystal clear and frigid. The wall burning? Yes, of course. The wind roars up from the south, driving whatever smoke there is away from them. It’s so cold, she gives up on the effort of gauging what’s happening. She spends the night as she has the others, with bodies pressed close to her, trying to pool their warmth. She secretly studies her treasure, her face i
n the mirror. She feels coins rubbed beneath her thumb. She thinks of recent memories and distant ones, both having the same clarity despite the difference in years. She thinks of that statue of Neptune in Brundisium, painted and soiled by bird droppings. Does it still stand? Surely so. She also imagines the future. She lets herself dream of it as she would like it to be. When the Roman wall falls, they will pour through it. They’ll race across the roof of the mountains and tumble down and out of them, free again, Spartacus and his army of the living and the dead. They’ll take a city and become equals to Rome, and the host of the souls will find enough solace in that to move on. That will be victory. And release. She will sit at the feet of that statue again, marveling that the paint makes the god look so very alive.

  And she will be free.

  —

  Vectia believes this even more the next morning. Spartacus has worked a wonder. He uttered the words, and what he said came to be. He shot a scorching arrow, and his aim was true. The wall, which was so formidable the day before, is a smoldering ruin now. It’s a charred mass that looks to have been savaged by some fire-breathing monster. Whole portions have been pulled down, torn apart. She watches from the same rock she’d met with the leaders on yesterday. From there, she sees the Risen pour through, a river of people surging over the trench, which looks to have been filled, and through the breaches. It’s cold standing on that stone. The wind is brisk, but the sight is glorious. The sky is brilliant and the sun bright enough that she has to squint against its glare. It’s a sight she takes in for some time. She wants to remember it, to store it in her mind to have it always there.

  Closer to the wall, the scent of the charred wood is strong. Smoke still swirls in the air. Also, though, there’s a stench. She knows it. It’s violent death. Blood and urine, feces and the foul fluids in people’s guts. It’s so strong a smell, out of place in the high, chill air. The trench, she discovers, has been filled in with many different things. Timbers were pulled into it, along with some of the earth of the fortifications and supplies from the Roman camp on the far side. But that’s not all. It’s filled with bodies. So many bodies. They lie in a grotesque, interlocking puzzle, arms and legs strewn as they can only be in death, heads with hair matted in blood, throats sliced, backs pierced through. She can nowhere see the entirety of a single person, but she can tell that they’re not all dead. There a light-haired man, eyes closed, tilts his head as best he can and sucks at the air. There a body is so covered that only a single foot juts up, toes moving. She’s sure that, if not for the flowing horde of people, she’d be able to hear the whispers of souls leaving their bodies behind. But there’s too much motion and noise. The others give no sign of caring about such things. Those crossing the trench stride across the bodies, troubled only when they stumble or trip.