“How many?” Epta asks. “Are others with them?”
Hearing the urgent hope in the woman’s voice, Laelia wishes she had a different answer. She takes a moment before responding. She says, gentling the words, “No, it’s only the two of them.” The flare of hope that had animated Epta’s face vanishes, leaving just the fatigue and the worry she so often wears now. Laelia says, “Look, I’ve found clams. Help me open them.”
—
Back on the day that everything ended—and everything did not—the three women parted from Spartacus and Gaidres so quickly that Laelia could hardly believe that the moment really came and went. One moment Astera was in Spartacus’s embrace and Cerzula was holding Gaidres’s head in her palms. The next they turned and strode away, cutting through the confusion of an army mustering for battle. Everyone, it seemed, was in motion, hurriedly at whatever tasks they deemed most important.
Astera kept Laelia moving, her fist clamped over the young woman’s wrist, forcing her to keep up. Laelia looked back over her shoulder again and again. It seemed impossible that they’d left the men. Just a few strides away, and they disappeared behind moving bodies and horses and wagons. Something had happened, or not happened. Had she missed a moment? They’d said so few words. Surely, there was more that needed to be discussed. She had said the things she had to, but that was meant to be only the opening. She’d expected Spartacus to have an answer that would make sense of what the goddess had conveyed. Surely he would be able to flip it over and spin it around and present the situation back to her as something marvelous. The goddess was sated, and that meant…she didn’t know what it meant! But he should have. The goddess had freed them, Astera said, and that meant…what? Why hadn’t either Spartacus or Astera said it? Astera always made complicated things understandable. And Spartacus, he had time and again seen ways forward that were invisible to everybody else. Why not again? Why not now, when Laelia wanted it more than she ever had before?
“What is Spartacus going to do?” Laelia asked. She had to yell it, as the world was filled with shouts and rumblings, noises right beside her ear and also distant, a sound like boulders rolling over smaller stones, splintering them. “What will he do?”
“Fight” was Astera’s terse answer. She didn’t shout it, but it came clear and fierce, right into Laelia.
Fight. How many times had he done that already? More than she could count. He’d prevailed each time. When Spartacus fought, the world shifted beneath their feet and amazing things were possible. Why, then, did something about the word fight make Laelia feel tiny? Not like a new woman at all. Not like a little mother but like a little girl. An emotion balled in her belly, an anguished stone that she’d somehow swallowed. She’d forgotten the feeling, but she’d had it before, back when she was ten and her father died and her mother had no claim on them and men took her and Hustus away, and a thing that simply could not be true was revealed as real and terrible and callous. She had been powerless against it then. She felt the same now.
“Astera…” They were trudging along a column of soldiers, tall men of leather and metal and wood and paint and ink, faces framed in iron, gaudy figures dressed in the finery of slaughter. Cerzula strode in the lead, and Astera pulled Laelia toward what, she didn’t know. “Astera, the goddess doesn’t bless him.”
Astera pulled Laelia up beside her but kept on pace. “Kotys is great and vast, but she is only one goddess. And she’s a woman. I’ll tell you what Spartacus will do. He’ll look to male gods, the ones who love war for war’s sake. He’ll say, Zalmoxis, see me. He’ll say, Darzalas, bless me today. He’ll call to Zagreus and ask him to remember the time when he came down to earth and filled Spartacus’s body. You recall that, don’t you? It was good that he did that. Good even that he made love with Sura and the others. It was a way for them to have part of Spartacus. I’m glad Sura had that.”
That was more than Laelia could take in at once, in motion, with the world seething around them. Laelia planted her feet and hauled back on her gripped arm. That stopped Astera.
Cerzula walked on without noticing.
“What is happening?” Laelia demanded. “Did he not understand me? The goddess is finished with us. He can’t…he can’t still mean to…”
“Laelia,” Astera said softly, sounding it out as if she were talking to a child. Like Spartacus, her skin pulsed with energy. She looked as if there were a sun inside her, burning but not destroying her, hot, but only with the force of the life within her. “What would you have him do? Run away?”
“Yes! He should run. We all should.”
Astera looked at Cerzula, who turned at the same moment and glanced back. Astera gestured for her to walk on. She squeezed Laelia’s hands and said again, “Daughter, not all of us can run. Not all of us wish to.” Laelia still couldn’t understand how she could hear Astera’s quiet words so clearly. She saw them on her lips and heard them inside her head, no matter the tremors of noise around them, the shouts and tromp of feet and creak of leather. “You have to know this. Many things will end today, just as many will begin.” She reached up and ripped the silver torque from her neck. She pulled the opening apart and slipped it onto Laelia’s neck. It was oversize on her as it was on Astera, heavy, a man’s adornment. “You are as dear to me as my own children. Dearer, because you are alive and I can look upon you. Do you know what it did to me when my children were taken from me? It destroyed me. I loved them so much. So very much. I was sorrow in living flesh. I thought that that was all there would be in life. But then I dreamed of Spartacus, and I found him. And later, I found you. I knew who you were as soon as I heard your name. Not Mouse. Laelia. Do you know that in my language there is a name like that that means moon? When I heard that I thought, Yes, this is her. Here is my moon at night, the one I will teach about the goddess. I claim you as my daughter. Do you accept me as your mother?”
Laelia nodded.
Astera smiled. The freckles on her cheeks like dark stars against a radiant sky. “Then be a good daughter. Believe me when I say that I will always be with you. Always. Do you hear me?”
Laelia nodded.
“And you always will. Good daughter, come with me, and do as your mother says.”
And that’s what Laelia did.
She was a good daughter in that she followed Astera out of the main army and away from the battlefield to where the camp followers gathered. She stayed by her side as Astera worked through the crowd of women and children, of old ones and of men who, for some reason or another—deformity, injury, illness, acknowledged softness—were here instead of with the army.
As a good daughter, she stayed silent as Astera called for people to have weapons in hand, short swords and knives of all shapes and sizes, clubs with nails jutting from them, axes and makeshift weapons, farm implements twisted into deadly things. She worked a crowd of thousands, as did Cerzula and others who had spirit like them, all of them saying that they could not count on the men to defeat the Romans. They might; they might not. If they prevailed, praise them and the gods. If they didn’t prevail, the Romans would be coming for booty, for rape and the joy of torture. They must be ready to bloody their knives. They must kill as many as they could. They must not be taken alive. They must kill. Or die. Those were the only two options.
Laelia, a good daughter, had not complained that she didn’t want to kill. Or die. She didn’t ask how they could be sure that the next world was better than this one. She didn’t call out her brother’s name, as she so wanted to. She gave no sign that as soon as she remembered him, it seemed essential that she find him. They hadn’t spoken since the day before, and they’d never said whatever needed to be said. How could she have let that happen? By herself, she was only half a being. With him, she was complete, and she needed that. She would understand everything better if he were beside her. She didn’t say this, in words and tears, as she wanted to, and that was her being a good daughter.
When she saw Drenis arrive amid them on horseback,
she felt a swell of hope. He wasn’t in the fighting and that meant he was that much more likely to live. Knowing men, she didn’t understand it. Surely, he would want to fight and die and go to the gods and heroes as much as any man, but it was better that he was here, helping them, talking urgently with Astera.
When she heard the din of battle in the air and through the earth, she didn’t betray how much it shook her bones. It was a vast, distant noise, something unseen from where they gathered. She heard the bellowing of great beasts, and felt the ground shake when they crashed down. She’d never imagined the armies would deploy monsters against each other, but she was sure of it now. Just one more thing unreal about this day. It was midday, and the skies had largely cleared of the clouds of the day before. Not blue heavens, though. Red tinged the sky, splotchy, streaked, like a dye thrown into water and left to swirl as it would. It wasn’t the sunset. It was blood. The spray of so much blood floating in the air. If not for the loyalty she felt for Astera, Laelia would surely have run screaming into the hills. To hide, maybe to be Mouse again. She didn’t do that.
See? She was good in so many ways, for as long as she could be. Good all the way until the Romans arrived.
—
In the ruin, Laelia can’t interest Epta in shucking the clams. The pregnant woman stands, pressed against the wall, looking out just as she’d chastised Laelia not to do. “It’s just the two of them,” she says. She has said this more than once.
“So?” Laelia asks. “You wouldn’t want it to be less than that, right?”
Epta answers with a silent back.
“And you wouldn’t want it to be anyone but those two, right?”
“Shush,” Epta says. “You know what I mean.”
“I do, but look at things the right way. Not the wrong way.”
“Just shush,” Epta says. “When did you become so wise?”
Smiling, Laelia bends over a clam, trying to work the point of her dagger between its tight lips. When did she become so wise? That amuses her. Though she is different from before, she’s also not. She hasn’t entirely stopped being the girl called Mouse. The girl who cried over a dying lamb and feared her growing breasts and was awed by the callousness of the world. She’s still a twin who feels incomplete without her brother. Just a few weeks ago—the day of that final battle—she hadn’t been wise when she burst into a fury. That day she’d scratched the face of the man who had come to save her. She’d fought against him. She’d wailed her misery.
Why had she had that paroxysm of misery? It wasn’t because soldiers roared out of the trees in the hills behind the camp followers, the same hills Laelia would’ve run into to hide. They fell upon those nearest them. So fast and violent, stabbing and punching, kicking and screaming. Grabbing women by the hair, slitting throats. The screams were near now, sharp and savage, instead of vast and far away. She knew that the main battle went on out of sight. These men were here simply for them. To kill them, defile them, enslave them again. She knew all that, but it was none of that that made her so anguished. It was being saved from it. All her desperate fighting was against a man who was acting on her mother’s orders, who was trying to save her at the risk of his own life.
Laelia hears the two men reach the ruin. The Roman walks the horse around to the far side of it. There’s a dip in the ground there, and cover provided by a copse of shrubs. This is where they hide the horse. Because he’s attending to that, it’s the slave who comes to them first. Laelia hears the swish of his feet in the grass, the clink of iron. Epta is on him the moment he steps into the gap that was once the ruin’s doorway. She kisses his face, touches him, whispers to him. She seems to want to make sure that he’s real and, just after that, that he’s unharmed. The intimacy is so fervent that Laelia looks away. She turns a clam in her fingers, looking for a good place to press the point of her knife.
“I’m well,” Drenis says. “As whole as I was this morning. Hello, child.” This latter, Laelia knows without looking up, is directed at the swell in Epta’s belly. He will be patting it, as he always does on reuniting with her. “And what’s this? Those are strange rocks you’re collecting, Laelia.”
Laelia looks up.
Handsome Drenis, no less so because of the red welts scratched across his cheek. Four tracks from four fingernails. It’s she who scratched him. Laelia wishes they would fade faster than they are. He is the man she fought against so frantically when he hoisted her onto his horse. She knew what he was doing, but in that moment she couldn’t accept it. In that moment, she hated him for it.
The moment was this. The Romans were attacking, killing, horribly, cruelly. Astera was a little distance away, rallying the others, stopping them from running and urging them to fight. She turned and found Laelia. In one hand she held a short sword. The other hand she raised and held in front of her. She seemed to frame Laelia between her thumb and forefinger. She held her there a moment, then whispered something. Laelia shouldn’t have been able to hear her. But she did. Astera said, “Live for me, daughter.”
The next moment she became a running fury, red hair flying, with her sword clenched in her fist. She ran toward the Romans. Not away from them, as Laelia wished. She disappeared as a chaos of bodies swallowed her, obscured her, erased her. Laelia had just started to follow when Drenis swept in. His horse was suddenly there, a wall of snorting muscle and equine scent. The Thracian reached down, slipped his arm under Laelia’s, and dragged her up and across the horse’s back. That was when she fought. She fought because Astera had said, “Live for me, daughter.” She hated what that meant, the things it said by not saying them, things that she should’ve known were coming but hadn’t believed and couldn’t accept.
No, she had not been wise at that point. Right then, on that horse, she was nothing except the misery of a child losing her mother. Who can reason with a child losing her mother? Drenis didn’t try. He just rode with her. Because of it, she lived. Because of it, she’s here beside the sea.
“Did you find him?” Epta asks. “He’s coming, yes? Say that he is.”
Drenis looks fatigued. He’s weighed down by the thick iron ring around his neck—which he wears instead of the silver torque that had adorned him in the high days of the Risen—and by the ring of chains that runs down and splits to secure both his wrists. He shakes his head. “There was no sign of him. We looked as long as we could, made ourselves as visible as we dared. We didn’t find him.”
“Will you try again tomorrow?”
“Perhaps,” Drenis says, in a tone that belies his uncertainty. “It’s already been three days of trying. We may need to move on.”
The Roman joins them. He steps, hesitantly, into the enclosure, which seems overcrowded with his arrival. He’s a small man, dark, black-haired, with nervous eyes. Laelia doesn’t like the way he holds his hands, fingers fiddly, always moving. She hadn’t trusted him at first. She still doesn’t, though with the passing days she sometimes forgets to hate him. Since fleeing the battle, he’d done nothing to endanger them. He could have. At any moment, he needed only to decide that instead of pretending to own them, he actually did. In chains, with plaques about their necks, what could they do if he simply opened his mouth and, in the hearing of other Romans, claimed them? Laelia has never spoken to him directly. Never uttered his name, though she knows it.
Nonus doesn’t say anything. He sits down in a corner, flattening the tall grass, and begins to take things out of a coarsely woven sack: a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, strips of dried, leathery-looking fish. Deopus, who has woken up, totters toward him, awkward on the irregular, grass-thick ground. He balances with a hand on the Roman’s knee and surveys the bounty. He fists a piece of fish and punches it into his mouth, looking as if he’s intent on gumming all of it, even the hand that holds it. Nonus grins at him.
For a time they don’t talk about the thing they’re all thinking about. They share the bread, the fish and cheese. Drenis shows Laelia how to open the clams. They eat them, raw and s
alty, still living. Laelia isn’t sure she likes the way the soft, slippery creatures slide past her tongue and vanish into her, so quick, almost as if they want to be swallowed. But she eats her share and, once they’re gone, thinks about going and digging more.
It’s Epta, holding Deopus in her lap, who asks the thing that needs to be asked. She speaks in Latin, to include the Roman. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to go home,” Drenis says.
Epta exhales. “I want that, but what if he doesn’t come? It’s been too long already.”
“We have to make sure,” Drenis says.
Nonus, talking as he looks at his hands, says, “We came to where we were told to. We spent three days skulking about town. Disappearing out here and then appearing again. Today people noticed us. I tried, but I’m not good at deception. It takes a lifetime to learn to be a slave owner. I’ve only had a few weeks. Sorry to say it, but I don’t think we can go back to the town. The end of the rebellion is on everyone’s mind. They’re still looking for any who got away. Like us.”
Laelia notices that he said us. How can the Romans hunt him the same way as they do them? She doesn’t understand them, but Nonus has been consistent on the point. He’s in this with them, as he’s pledged over and over again.
“I know Spartacus wanted us to find this man,” Nonus says. “We tried, but a thousand things may have happened to keep him from us. If he was true to his word at all. We have to find a new way.”
“What?” Epta asks.
“I don’t know,” the Roman says, “but whatever we decide, we should leave tonight.”
“No,” Laelia says. The others all look at her, startled to hear her speak. She is a little startled herself. She hadn’t a conviction on this until the moment she spoke. The word came before her understanding of it. “No. One more day.”
Drenis looks at her guardedly. “Why do you say that?”
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