Spartacus hears the slave blowing to dry the ink of the last words he wrote. He’d forgotten about him. He wonders what this man thinks of what he’s overheard. He must think something. His mind can’t be as blank as his face pretends. Does he love his master? Is life good for him in Crassus’s house? Has he been deceived into thinking so? He wants to ask him, but he doesn’t. He’s curious, and he’s also not. Gaidres calls to him. In a moment, he’ll have to turn and walk back to them with the news. It’s battle. Tomorrow. He’ll have to tell them what to say to their people.
The Ethiopian slips the scroll into a narrow drawer built into the table. He scrambles to his feet and snaps the portable table’s legs closed, working with deliberate speed. When he’s finished, he looks at Spartacus. His eyes are brown. The same dark hue as his skin. He looks to be on the verge of saying something.
Crassus pauses, turns around, shouts. “Kaleb! To me!”
“Yes, Kaleb,” Spartacus says, “go to your master. Keep him happy.”
Kaleb says, “Rufius Baebia betrayed the Germani to Crassus.”
“What?”
“Never trust a Roman.” The slave backs away. He says, “I’m sorry. I was only thinking of her. I regret…” The thought is incomplete, until he repeats it, making the two words into a statement of its own. “I regret.”
Before Spartacus can ask what he means, Kaleb turns and hurries after his master.
—
Back among the Risen, Spartacus sends a team of men to fell a straight timber and to affix a beam to it crossways. He tells them why he needs it and instructs them to find people who know how to do what he wants them to.
That’s the first thing, but it’s just one of many. From the morning on into the afternoon, Spartacus does all the things he’s supposed to do. He briefs his generals. He discusses tactics with them, works out a battle plan, tries to see the unforeseen and to have responses prepared. He tells them what messages they should pass on to the men who serve under them. He tells them to think back on how much they’ve gained by owning their lives and shaping their own fates. Years of freedom. Years of living as they wished, walking where they wished, doing what they wanted, allowing no man to call himself their master. Years of dignity instead of degradation. Years of working and laboring and killing for their own benefit instead of doing those things to make Romans rich. Years that they took from Rome, instead of having things taken from them by Rome. Years that they’ve proved through their own acts that a life of restored freedom—even a short one—is a magnificent thing that can be filled with deeds to make the gods love their defiance. He says that if he had died on the Via Annia, just moments after escaping Capua, he would’ve died happy. The air was so crisp that night that even a few inhalations of it—as a newly freed man—was worth any price. Each breath made him more himself and less the slave he’d been turned into. He reminds them that no matter what happens to them tomorrow, Italy is not the same as it was before. Slaves all up and down the country now know that they can grasp for freedom. They know Romans can die. If the Risen have taught the world that, all their struggles were worth it. He promises that what they’ve done will be remembered. They’ll be spoken of years and years from now. As people still talk, generations later, about the armies of Hannibal and Pyrrhus and Alexander, so too will they look back at the army of Spartacus—at the Risen—and wish they had been there to see them, that they had shared in the glory of the moment. The ages will love them because they faced their enslavers and refused them. They proved that all one needed to do to have freedom was believe in it, grasp it, and fight for it. He assures them that the believing, grasping, and fighting matter more than anything else. He asks them to remember the men who have fallen. Say their names and fight for them. Avenge them. Teach the enemy that their lives are worth as much as Roman lives. He points out that though they may die as soon as tomorrow, eternal life awaits them if they do so bravely. Rome, he argues, gives them a great gift in doing battle with them, a choice between two glorious fates: triumph on the field or death with sword in hand.
Spartacus says all those things, and more, to his generals. He bids them all to go to the people under them and share his words. He knows that they’ll talk to them in large groups and in small ones, in the languages dearest to them, so that they can best understand. He wants his words to ring in their ears and to comfort them. He wants them to sleep and to dream with them, and to wake up believing them all the more because of it.
Walking the camp, he pulls men aside and gives them courage, lets them know the things he wants from them. He surveys the field, imagining how it will look tomorrow. He goes over the signals with which he’ll communicate through horns during the battle. He rides with the cavalry captains, explaining what he requires of them. He reorganizes the camp so that, in the morning, they can more swiftly take the field in good order, each unit in the correct place. He makes sure that lookouts are posted at the best points, and that schedules of watch through the night are made up. He sends out orders for the preparation of weapons, the gathering of stones for the slingers. He calls for the slaughter of animals. He releases stores of grain to be baked into bread. They should have food and gain all the strength they can. For once, they can eat heartily. The horses as well. Let them have their stores of hay.
So many things, and he faces them tirelessly. He appears to, at least.
—
And then it’s late in the afternoon. Spartacus paces in front of the cross, hating the thing that he’s done and fearing the thing he may have to do, feeling both as if the world has slowed to a crawl and yet also as if he can’t keep up with it. His head is a crucible of pain, but standing as near to suffering as he is, he hardly acknowledges his own.
The gathered army of the Risen surrounds him. They stand shoulder to shoulder, tight and close and silent, waiting under a light drizzle to hear their commander’s last oration to them. Spartacus has centered the group in a depression, to provide the best view for as many as possible. Him. The cross. And Astera, who holds Spartacus’s horse by the reins. The stallion he’s grown to love, the one he named after the slate-gray sky of the Thracian winter.
Spartacus looks from face to face. Some of them meet his eyes with the grim resolve of warriors contemptuous of death, some with the desperation of men who fear it, some like beggars hungry for food they believe only Spartacus has. Others look away when his eyes meet theirs. A few stare back at him with simmering contempt. He’s not surprised. He’s led them here, to the eve of a battle few of them want. Spartacus feels the weight of their lives on him, the burden of having led them here to this moment. He knows they wanted to come. He knows they’re here because he helped them declare their freedom. He believes in what they’ve done these last two years. But there are so many eyes watching him. So many ears waiting, and people hoping that he can somehow change the world with his words. He knows he can’t do that. He hopes, though, that he can help them face fate.
“Do you see this man?” he asks. He lifts his chin so that his voice can be heard far back into the crowd. “Look at him and the death he faces.”
Spartacus turns around and studies the man he’s speaking of. He is a Roman, a cavalryman who had been captured a couple of days before. His horse had been lamed while on a patrol near the Risen. When rebel cavalry offered to skirmish, his fellows rode away without him. Unfortunate for him.
Crucifixion. Nonus, the Roman who had deserted to the Risen, knew how it was done, and so did several others who had seen it. The prisoner had his hands pressed to the flats of the crossbeam. As the man pleaded, long, tapering nails had been hammered through the centers of his wrists. Each blow of the hammer ripped a scream out of him, until the nails came to rest thick and deep, set firm in the bone in a place that makes the pain of them scorch through his arms and into his center. His feet had been pressed together on the vertical pole, knees bent slightly. Two more nails had been pounded through the top of each foot, high up on the bridge, where there were thic
k bones to punch through. Each strike of metal on metal making him shriek. Then the cross had been raised, the man with it, crying out in a different pitch of agony as his wrists and feet pulled against the nails and took his weight.
Spartacus asks them to see the death he faces, but many already have. They came here and watched through the day. At first the Roman had begged to be spared. Later he babbled. And then made sounds older than words. He cried out each time the source of his anguish changed. That was often. For a time his bent legs struggled to support his weight. Pushing down on them took pressure off the nails in his wrists, but it caused torment in his feet and quivering thigh muscles. Relieving his feet and legs brought back the full misery of his arms. He would lean forward to change the pressure on his wrist, but doing so pulled his chest muscles against his lungs, so that he couldn’t breathe. The muscles and tendons and ligaments of his arms all strained under his weight. But there was nothing he could do. He squirmed, shifting again and again from one torment to another, finding relief only in exchange for a different variation of torment. His fingers became trapped in an unending spasm, clenched and clawlike.
All this Spartacus knows, but he’s waited until now to view the man himself, until this gathering. He’s a slim youth, naked, his legs stained with feces and urine. His face is swollen, splattered in dried blood from the beating he’d taken before being nailed to the cross. Fresh blood still drips from his wrists and feet, crusting them brown. Several of his toes have been cut off as he hung there. The tracks of blood running down from them attest to it. Small cruelties, added to the larger one done on his orders. At some point, his legs had given out. He can’t push up on them anymore. He just hangs, too exhausted to fight. His head droops and his eyes are closed. His mouth is a dry crevice. Every now and then he mumbles, so faintly Spartacus can’t make out his words. If they are words. He doesn’t have much time left.
“Why have I done this thing?” Spartacus asks. “It’s not because I hated this man. It’s not even because he is Roman. It gives me no pleasure to kill a man with such suffering. I have done this so that you will know what fate awaits you if we lose the day and Rome captures you alive.” With a long finger, he touches his cheek just below his left eye, then points at the suffering man. “Crassus will cut down all the forests of Italy to erect crosses to hang us on, just like this man. He will make you die slowly, in shame. I offered him a way to end this war. He offered this. And if the Romans become bored and angry that you’re taking too long, they’ll do this…”
Spartacus finds one of the men who’d nailed the Roman to the cross. He gestures for him to do what they’d discussed. The man goes to the cross, hefting the big-headed hammer he’d already used on the nails. The Roman’s legs hang about shoulder height to him. The man takes aim at them and bashes them until he’s broken the bones of both his shins. It’s awkward work, pummeling flesh, breaking bone. Many blows miss and hit the pole. The man’s head comes up, his eyes open and pleading. He wriggles, but barely. Without his legs to prop him up at all, the full weight of the Roman’s body is transferred to his arms. He cries out, the sound more like an exhaled breath than the scream it wants to be.
“Don’t just see a Roman dying here,” Spartacus says. “See yourself. Look, and see yourself.”
Again, he gestures toward the cross. As if cued by it, one of the man’s arms slowly pulls free of its shoulder socket. The crowd inhales. Groans. The Roman’s mouth is a twist of misery without the breath to scream. His body shifts to the other side, and a moment later that arm is dislocated as well. More cries of disgust. Someone tries a taunt, but nobody else picks it up. Mostly, they just stare as the man’s weight keeps pulling, elongating his arms, ripping the upper arm from the lower, the flesh taut and stretched. The man’s eyes are huge. They find Spartacus. They scream the scream that the man’s mouth can’t make. Silent, but just as anguished.
That, Spartacus decides, is enough. He strides to a man standing nearby. He snatches his spear from him, rounds on the cross, and thrusts the point of the weapon into the Roman’s chest. He aims well, tearing his heart apart. He pushes hard, waits until the man’s head droops forward again, his body finally, truly still. Then he tugs the weapon free. He hands it back to the man he took it from. He starts to pace again.
“If we lose this day, our fates are death as no man wants death to come to him.”
He is about to go on, but a man a little distance away grumbles something under his breath. Wavy-haired and tan, with several similarly complexioned companions around him, the man might be an Iberian. Certainly, the language he speaks is foreign to Spartacus. He doesn’t have to understand his words, though. It is enough to see his sullen expression and the way his fellows shove him and hiss him to silence.
Spartacus looks away, paces. “Some of you, I think, wonder if now is not the time to run, to hide yourselves and to escape Roman wrath. Why face a cross like this one, when instead you can sneak away like a rat and at least live on like a rat? Some of you may think I’ll do the same.” Spartacus stops pacing and looks at the Iberian who has complained. Staring at him pointedly, he says, “You may think, Spartacus has a fine horse. If the battle turns against us, he’ll ride away to save his skin. He’ll be afraid, for who does Rome want to nail to a cross more than Spartacus himself? I know the answer. Nobody. Oh, it would give them such joy to make me suffer. But do any of you truly believe that after all I’ve fought for, I would turn from this now?”
A chorus of shouts denies that he would do so. One of the Germani challenges those around him to call Spartacus a coward. Many shout their faith in him. They affirm him, but not unanimously. Not with a single voice. The Iberians stand close-lipped. Others whisper to the people near them. Some just watch him, waiting. There is doubt, Spartacus knows. He’s seen it on people’s faces more and more often over the last few weeks. His officers have conveyed it to him. Even more, the shepherd boys—who are now young men and scouts—have always spoken to him with an honesty he enjoys. They know the tenor of the Risen; so does Spartacus.
“I won’t abandon you. Don’t even think such a thing. I am here with you, and I swear that your fate is the same as mine. Mine is the same as yours. That’s what it means to be the Risen. You know that, don’t you? It’s the thing that binds us above all other things. But if you doubt my words, let me prove them.”
He reaches up, grasps the hilt of his rhomphaia, and slips it around from his back. He draws the long, slim blade, then positions the sheath on his back again. Holding the weapon in a two-handed grip, a fist’s space apart on the handle, he turns toward Astera and his stallion. “You see here my horse. Young men brought me this horse. They took it from some rich Roman, and they didn’t keep it for themselves. They brought it to me and made a gift. I love them for it. And I love this horse. I named him for the color of the cloud-heavy winter sky in my homeland. This horse is the only one I will ride tomorrow. No other. All of you hear me say that. And this: I will kill him right now if that will prove that I will not attempt to ride from the battlefield and abandon you. I’ll kill him so that you’ll know I have no choice but to stand beside you in battle. I love this horse, but I will kill him to show my devotion to you. Should I do that?”
In the stunned silence that answers his question, Spartacus points the sword at the horse’s chest. It’s still standing some distance away, but the creature seems to know it’s being addressed. It backs slightly. Astera holds it steady. She speaks soft sounds to calm it. Spartacus moves the long, curved blade as if testing where best to press the point in, seeking the right angle. It takes all his effort to keep his face blank, for he hates what he’s proposing. Hates it, but he’s made the offer. He’ll do it if he has to. He’ll thrust the blade between the animal’s ribs and find its heart as quickly as he can.
“I’ll do this for you,” Spartacus says. “Why not? If I die here today, I won’t need this mount. If we win this day and I live, I’ll have my choice of mounts. None will I love as much a
s this one, but it means more to me that you have faith in me. Watch, I will show you.” With that, he starts toward the horse.
Shouts of protest erupt. Many yell, frantic that he not do it, swearing they believe. He doesn’t need to prove it. They believe. A man grabs him by the arm. He wraps his hands around Spartacus’s biceps and says, “No, no! Leave the horse. We believe!”
Another shouts, as if ownership were in question, “But he is your horse! Yours!”
One throws an arm over his shoulder and pulls against his chest, trying to stop him. Others likewise grab hold of him. Spartacus keeps fighting his way forward. He wants them to stop him, but they must truly do it if he’s to be believed. He’s grim, determined, and yet also careful not to slice anyone with the rhomphaia, not to step on them or shrug them off too viciously. The horse, which he’s near now, tosses its head. Its nostrils flare large and threatening. It’s more a warning to the men milling around Spartacus than to the man with the blade bearing down on him.
Spartacus doesn’t halt until Astera steps in front of the horse. She slides to one side of the Thracian blade and pins him with her fingertips. It’s not a gesture they’d agreed upon ahead of time, but she touches him with such certainty that it stops him. “You have your answer,” she says.
“Do I?” Spartacus asks, speaking from within a crosshatch of arms and clinging bodies. He looks at the faces of the men holding him, from one to another, searching them, saying, “I will do it. I will if you need me to.”
But they don’t need him to. The men make it clear they still believe in him. They trust him completely. They have no need to see such a fabulous creature slain to verify what they all know. Spartacus would die for them. And they would die for him. They say all this, loud and entreating. It seems that they, like Spartacus, love this horse and wish no harm to come to it.
The Risen Page 51