Free Spartacus by Lewis Grassic Gibbon Page B

will follow him without question – the land we dream is Italy, we its Masters, not its slaves.’
    Still Spartacus said nothing. Kleon stirred a little, even he uneasy under that uncanny stare of a wakening child or a wakening beast. Again it was Elpinice who spoke.
    â€˜And this leader and his men?’
    Kleon had finished his olives. He wiped his fingers on his thighs, and rose up slowly, his twisted smile on the Gladiator with the giant stallion behind him.
    â€˜There is your leader. He might change the order in Italy as no man before, casting down the Masters and raising the slaves, for the Republic is weak and its armies scattered, he could seize and hold all Southern Italy, and carve it out the state that Plato dreamt.’
    Elpinice would have spoken again, but Spartacus motioned her to silence, his eyes on Kleon.
    â€˜Of this matter we’ll speak while we ride. Now we’ll ride.’
    Elpinice looked at him wide-eyed. And it seemed to her in that moment, being wearied, that the God, nameless, terrible, endearing, had left him at last and for ever. In his place rose sure and sane and strong – alien and strange, the King of the Slaves.
    [iii]
    A mist and a light, warm rain came down with that sunset. In a little at a trot, the three slaves had left the horreum behind, and went south with the shadows in pursuit till those shadows overtook and devoured them. And presently Elpinice, riding behind, heard the high shrill voice of the eunuch raised eagerly in explanation.
    All that night he talked, as they still rode south, into the mountains of Lucania. Then, in the morning, they learned from a shepherd that they had missed the track of the army, for the slave-horde had swung east. So eastwards turned the three, and Elpinice, in weariness, heard still the shrill of Kleon’s voice, and unceasing throughout the hour, the Thracian question him.
    So, in a night and a day, he crossed a great measure of country.
    And at last, late in the afternoon, they rode into the camp that Crixus had entrenched under the spurs of Mount Papa.
    [iv]
    The slave-army had marched from Campania without a casualty; but the most of the slaves were in rags, their feet torn and bloody from the wear of the rough tracks crossed, their throats and voices choked with dust. Even the Gladiators grumbled, and unending in the baking heat of the march the dreamings went on in each man’s head; dreamings in German heads of the sound of the Rhine and its steel-blue splash, the easeful scrunch of pine cones and mists that hid off the sun; dreamings in the heads of Eastern slaves of the yielding sands and a bright, white glare; black men’s dreamings of blue-shadowed forests and the rich mould lands that slope by Nile. Only the Gauls and Thracians and Iberians were unvexed by the mountains, and hailed them with cries, some thinking them the veritable mountains of home.
    In their three days’ march into Lucania the country had cleared before them as dust clears before a broom. Twice they had come on deserted villages, tenantless and foodless, waterless even, the wells filled up to hinder the slaves. One of these villages the Gladiators fired, hearing that it belonged to Licinius Crassus. Gershom ben Sanballat had looked on, keeping his Bithynians under sharp surveillance, his black beard curling in haughty contempt for this childish display of servile spite.
    Though meat was plentiful enough, for they drove a great herd in the van of their march, the slaves grumbled continuously for lack of clothes, for tents such as strategoi and Gladiators used, for the comforts that most of them had known but seldom in all the years of their slavery. They had tasted freedom and raved to devour it, starved men set down at a giant dish. Rumours and scandal spread through the host. Were they being led into Lucania to perish? Why had they not scoured the land in their march, for clothes and gear and the Masters’ women? Where was the