Laelia isn’t sure. In the silence after the question, with the others looking at her, she tries to understand herself. She thinks of Hustus. She thinks of the pebbles he took from his dream-mouth and put into her hand, the stones that slipped through her fingers. She imagines herself opening her hand and counting the stones she’s managed to hold on to. Four stones for four days. Once she thinks it, she’s sure. She says, “A spirit spoke to me. One more day. If he’s to come, it will be tomorrow.”
“A spirit spoke to you?” Nonus asks.
Not liking the doubt in his voice, Laelia says, “Remember who I am.”
That quiets them. She’s Laelia, whose name is like the Thracian word that means moon. It’s she who Astera made a priestess of Kotys. She’s the one who drank the Bright-Eyed Lady and heard the goddess’s will and saw what would really happen on the field beside the Silarus River on that day that Spartacus fought his last battle in this world. She’s Laelia. Because of it they’ll wait one more day.
—
The day of the battle, Drenis took Laelia away from the camp followers and away from the main battlefield. They rode into the tree-thick hills, into cover and up through boulders, onto a deer trail and into a grove of sweet pines. Laelia would always remember the scent of the trees, so strong and soothing. She’d remember the soft snapping of the pine needles beneath the horse’s hooves, and the stillness of the place that, in turn, quieted her. Her misery collapsed into awkward, muted sobs. Astera, she believed, was lost to her. Hustus as well. Cerzula. Everyone and everything that had come to be her life, all gone.
Drenis repositioned her so that she straddled the horse in front of him and leaned back into his chest. He spoke softly to her in Thracian. He explained that she didn’t need to be afraid. Spartacus might yet win the day. Maybe she’d be back with Astera in a few hours. It was possible, if the gods willed it. But if they didn’t, they had another path to take, one that Spartacus and Astera had told him of. Spartacus had ordered him to do this, so he would. He would take her to a place where a man, Spartacus promised, would be waiting there for them. He would help them to safety.
Laelia said, “No.” She wasn’t sure what she meant by it, but she said it.
He told her that the priestess wanted her to live, regardless of how the battle went. She wanted her to see Thrace, to climb into the Rhodopes, and to gaze upon the face of the moon from up close, on a clear winter’s night when the air is crisp. She wanted her to hear how the wolves praise the goddess, and she wanted her to go forward with life there, a Thracian woman whose mother had loved her and who had taught her what she could in the time she had. Isn’t that what mothers do—teach what they can in the short time they have? Isn’t that what daughters do—take life forward when their mothers cannot anymore?
“No,” Laelia said. It seemed the only answer.
If it came to it and they had to flee, Laelia wouldn’t be alone. He’d be there to tell any who questioned her who she was, who Astera and Spartacus had been, what they’d done together here, right in the Romans’ own lands. And it wouldn’t only be the two of them. No matter what, he said, she wouldn’t be alone.
“No.” She would always be alone. She was sure of it.
“I know it’s hard to believe me,” Drenis said. “You’ll see. There is no end to anything, Laelia. Just transition to whatever is next.”
A little later they rode out of the trees and up onto a naked elbow of rock. Epta and Deopus waited there. The Roman, Nonus, stood near them, looking nervous, holding a horse by its reins. There were others there as well. Some she knew. Some she didn’t. They were all skittery. Scared by their approach, some of them fled into the trees, only to slink back once they saw who they were. So not all of them were on the field or being attacked. What did it matter, though? Astera was back there, dead or dying. Hustus wasn’t here. He was dead or dying or lost to her.
There, on that bare swath of stone high up in the hills on one side of the valley of the Silarus, they watched the fate of the Risen unfold below them. The players were far away, the view partial, and the sight of them obscured by hills and dips and patches of spring mist that oozed like vaporous slugs intent on consuming the dead and the soon-to-be dead. The things Laelia could see were little more than a confused smear on a landscape that pulsed, bulged, and shifted as if enormous worms burrowed just beneath the surface. The things the gods saw, Laelia thought, were ever frightening. The truth of the world viewed with a goddess’s eyes had none of the comforting stillness of mortal sight. Laelia—seeing with a god’s eyes but not being a god—made little sense of the actions of the ant-size men slaughtering one another. Drenis, though, knew what he was watching, and Epta had unending questions. With her asking and him answering, Laelia heard pieces of what was happening.
Drenis’s words were fragments, arbitrary brutalities, willful orchestrations of mass death, anguish, cruelty. The barricade of earthwork mounds plumed with sharpened spikes that the Romans dug on the right flank. The fact that they hid trenches between them, covered over with sticks and turf. That the Germani cavalry, at a gallop, crashed into them, the earth falling from under them, horses screaming as they slammed down upon stakes angled to impale them, with more riders and mounts just behind them unable to pull up, mounding on top of one another in writhing, bone-breaking agony. The trick the Romans played on their left flank, using the Silarus River to hide caltrops beneath the glistening water, four pronged spikes that pierced the Risen’s horses’ hooves, causing agony, taking them down, throwing riders. The power of the Roman javelin volley, thousands of deadly needles leaping up, arcing in the sky, and plummeting like slim, emaciated birds of slaughter. Not once this, but twice. And then again a third time, tearing the front ranks of the Risen into a ragged, pierced, and stumbling disordered travesty of the roaring fury they’d been a moment before. All this before the Romans, drawing their swords then and rushing forward, collided with an army already defeated, the battle won through cautious preparation, prudent barbarity, death delivered before man ever touched man. The two sides dissolved into each other. After that it was nothing but butchery, tight-packed Roman discipline against the howling rage of the Risen. One side fighting to win, the other fighting to die.
Such were the details, whispered from Drenis’s mouth. They made no more sense to Laelia later than they did that day. But how the battle was lost didn’t matter. The goddess who had blessed them up until this point wasn’t watching; the outcome, to Laelia, had never been in question. Spartacus had said it. They need not win the day. They had only to fight like the warriors they were. They had to show the Romans that they were free until the last, that they were undefeated, even unto death. They had to be so glorious in their last moments that the gods couldn’t help but praise them and so that people would speak of them for ages to come. She knew the men dying believed this and that Astera believed it. She tried to as well, but it was hard to feel anything but misery. She turned her face from the sight of it, covered her face with her hands, and squeezed, sure that she had no future that wasn’t a cage of lonely suffering, sure that there was no way she could live in that, no matter Drenis’s grand words.
This, she thought, is the ruin of everything.
She was wrong, though, as she learned just moments later.
—
Laelia rises before the others. In the predawn light, she moves silently, placing her feet between the sleeping bodies in the ruin. It’s quiet, though the Roman has a peculiar snore. More like that of a sleeping bird than of a man. It’s not offensive, just amusing. She slips out through the gap in the wall, swishes through the grass, and welcomes the feel of the sand on her feet. She doesn’t walk toward the water but away a little distance and up onto the dunes. She sits there, knees cradled against her chest, and watches the sun rise out of the sea. She watches a ship approach from the south, drop sail a little distance out, and anchor. For a time nothing more happens. She knows that the others would say she should be hiding, but it feels r
ight to be sitting where she is. The sea is there before her. The world is at her back. The morning breeze is oddly warm, like a breath blown from a vast living body. She likes the way it makes her hair dance against her face.
Also, there’s Astera. That gives her peace too. Laelia has her voice in her head. It speaks to her. She would’ve thought it would pain her to hear her adoptive mother after her certain death, as it had pained her to remember her birth mother in the days after she and Hustus were taken from her. Back then she saw only loss, felt only grief and fear. It’s not the same this time, though. How can she be afraid when Astera’s calm voice continues to tell her not to be? As she had done in life, Astera still makes her see through the things fate throws at her. With Astera, she can see around fear, beyond misery. She takes worries and reshapes them, unveils them and reveals them as feeble things, answerable. It’s Astera really, speaking to her, who gives her the words that Epta thinks are wise.
She first heard her right after she thought about the ruin of everything. That’s when Astera said her name. She knew the instant she heard the voice that it wasn’t an earthly one. She didn’t cast about, looking for her. The voice was too much inside her. It was only partly words. Those were almost secondary. It was as if she thought it first and heard Astera’s voice in the echoes afterward. Speaking like this, from inside her, in thoughts and echoing words, Astera had said that Laelia mustn’t look away from the battle. If she looked away, she wouldn’t see the glorious thing that was about to happen.
Laelia didn’t want to see. Why was Astera telling her to look? She could hear the others around her moaning, crying out, arguing about what to do now, wailing their misery. She heard Drenis stop answering Epta’s questions, and she knew what that meant. No, she protested. No, no, no.
But as ever, Laelia could not refuse Astera. She did pull her hands away. She opened her eyes, and she stepped through the others, and she looked down on the battlefield again. For a time, the scene meant no more than before. Confusion. Killing that was, mercifully, far enough away that she could not see individual deaths.
The voice inside her asked, Do you see him?
Being asked, she did. It was as if a light came on inside one figure in all the chaos, making one man bright and the others dim shadows. She knew who it was. She could tell because he glowed with the energy that she’d seen under his skin earlier that very day. Back then Spartacus had hidden it. Now he let it burn bright. He wore a high-plumed centurion’s helmet, but he was no Roman. He glowed brighter and brighter, and she saw him more and more clearly. The distance didn’t matter anymore. He was still far away, but she could see him in minute, vibrant detail. She saw him fighting. He led a wedge of soldiers into the enemy ranks. He rushed forward at a run, slicing down the men he met with that strange weapon of his, the rhomphaia. He hacked and stabbed, twirled and thrust, so very fast. Blindingly fast, though she could see every motion. She watched the men attacking him fall one after another. Splatters of blood. Limbs twirling away. Bodies crumbling to the ground.
Do you see them? Astera asked.
And being asked, she knew there was more at play than Spartacus, more than just the battlefield. High in the sky, moving behind the clouds, shadows were in motion behind the gray plumes. She knew what they were because only one type of being moves across the heavens. Gods. They ran on top of the clouds, leaping here and there to better look down and see the battle. The gods had come.
Seeing them, she understood what Spartacus was doing. He was making his final charge, seeking out Crassus, to either kill him personally or die attempting to. This was him orchestrating his end, his appeal to the gods, his bid to leave this life on his own terms, as a warrior, free to die as he wished. Surely, he was succeeding at it. More and more Romans fell before him. His comrades could not keep up. He pulled away from them. Eventually, he was alone in the midst of the enemy, surrounded on all sides. He became a spinning vortex out of which his long blade flashed and flashed. More times than Laelia could count. Romans fell in a circle of carnage around him, so many that others had to climb over them to attack him. How many did he kill? Foot soldiers and officers. Centurions wearing helmets to match his. He killed them all, if they came within reach of his blade. He wouldn’t get to Crassus now, not enclosed as he was in the great sacrifice he’d encased himself in, but he didn’t have to. He’d done more than enough.
Laelia let out a breath of relief when he finally disappeared in the throng, his glowing brilliance obscured by the mass of soldiers that piled onto him, finally overcoming him. Relief, because his death was perfect. Relief, because the gods thought so as well. She knew this because just after Spartacus was covered over by thrusting soldiers, piercing and piercing and piercing him, something fell from the clouds. A thin string that dropped like a fishing line slowly falling through the sea, sparkling like a dew-wet spiderwebbing catching the first rays of dawn. It fell down, down, the long stretch of it trailing out gracefully, all the way to the bodies heaped on and around Spartacus.
Do you see? Astera asked.
And she did. She saw the tip of the shimmering thread touch Spartacus’s lips as his last breath escaped him. She saw the way it went into him, tethered him, and then lifted him out of the tangle of bodies and up, slowly up. For a time he was alone in this. The battle dragged on beneath him, but Spartacus rose toward the heavens, drawn upward by whichever god was hauling him into the next world.
Tell them, Astera said, so they can see what you do.
That moment was when Laelia knew that she could be a priestess. It would look as if she were doing it alone, but in truth she would always have Astera. She would see the face of the goddess—the one that was just like hers and yet also infinitely different. Hustus would come to her in dreams, and if she paid attention, he would reveal the things that needed to be revealed. Because she was not alone and never would be, Laelia found her voice. She asked those on the stone slab with her, “Do you see what’s happening?”
The others fell silent. One after another they drew closer. They gathered around her, staring at her. Someone told the others to look at Laelia’s eyes. See how black they are, pupils large and full against the light brown of her irises, like the moon when it passes in front of the sun. Epta whispered that she had the goddess inside her. Drenis asked her to tell them what she was seeing. So she did.
She told them about Spartacus, the way he fought and died. She told them about the gods running atop the clouds and the fishing line that dropped from the heavens and touched Spartacus’s lips as his final breath escaped them. More, she told them that other threads dropped, each one luminescent as it fell. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. More beyond that. Each of them loosed by a god moving behind the clouds, hauling his or her people home. Zagreus was there in the clouds, she told them. Zalmoxis as well. Sabazios and the god-hero Darzalas. All of them. The gods of other peoples as well. Wodanaz, one-eyed, called his Germani to feast in Valhalla. Freyja invited others to the field of the host. So many gods, so many souls to bear away from life and into the myriad things that come after it. They lifted the newly dead, Laelia told the hushed people huddled around her, and they lifted the old dead, the great host that had stayed true to their oaths to Spartacus. With his death, they were freed. She drew for them, as clearly as she could, the scene she saw. A battlefield with war still raging, but something beautiful above it. Souls, a great harvest of them, rising like fish from the sea, from this place to the next.
When she finished describing the scene, the small group around her held to silence. She wondered if they believed her. And then Epta dropped to her knees and pressed her forehead to the tops of Laelia’s feet. Others did the same in turn.
Thinking of it as she sits on a sandy bluff beside the sea, Laelia allows a faint grin. It’s strange, she thinks, that a thing can be true and not true, that a person can be alone and in company at the same time. Without the Bright-Eyed Lady to help her, she’d never have been able to see that harvest of souls. Wi
thout Astera speaking to her, she’d never even have known to look. Without Hustus pulling pebbles from his mouth, she wouldn’t have known they needed a fourth day here in this spot. It seems, really, that she’s getting credit mostly for things others bring to her. So be it. She will take what’s offered, and life will be a little easier to bear because of it, less of a mystery, more of a wonder.
Like now, when a skiff pulls away from the anchored vessel out behind the waves, she knows not to fear it. This is the fourth day, after all. She stands up and climbs down from the dunes, her heels digging into the sand. She walks toward the shore, watching the figures in the skiff grow larger and more distinct. Several rowers, backs to her. Two figures sitting forward, watching her. One is the boy from the day before. The other is the man they’ve been waiting to meet.
He jumps from the skiff and splashes through the shallow water, straight to her. She remembers his features as she sees them: wide-spaced eyes, dark brown, wavy hair, teeth pleasantly crooked, as if his mouth were drunk and dancing merrily. She doesn’t fear him. This man was never a warrior. He doesn’t have the temperament for it. He’s a healer instead of a killer. Maybe that’s what he’s doing here. Healing.
Stopping in front of her, he stares at her for a long, quiet moment. His arms half-rise toward her, as if they want to embrace her, but he checks them. Philon, the medicus who all the Risen thought had betrayed them, says, “You’re…Astera’s girl.”
Laelia doesn’t deny it.
“Is she here, then?”
She answers.
The Greek purses his lips, looks past her, gets right to it. “Spartacus?”
Again, she answers.
Philon closes his eyes and breathes a barely audible sound, like a sigh of exhaustion. He opens his eyes again, though they’re vacant in a way they hadn’t been before. He pinches his nose and looks down, speaking to the sand at his feet. “He died well?”
The Risen Page 55