J. Clements: Spartacus: Swords and Ashes

He said something else, but all Medea heard were spits and coughs of Aramaic.

He tried Greek instead, broken Greek, with Latin smeared upon it like dirt.

“Not slave ! Not slave! Free Medea free ?”

Medea smiled with only half her mouth, grabbing the bolt that held the door closed and shoving it aside. She did not even stop to open the door, darting instead to the next cell, and the next, pulling away the opened locks, and slamming their bolts aside.

The occupant of the first cell gleefully shoved open his prison and stumbled into the hallway. The hellish light from Medea’s old cell had rapidly diminished, the noise of the woman’s shrieks now reduced to whining sobs. The acrid smell of burnt hair drifted into the corridor on a pall of invisible smoke.

“Fucking painted bitch!” roared the voice of the Roman from somewhere within.

Medea peered up at the man she had just freed. He looked back at her expectantly.

“ Vhat? ” he said carefully, his Latin still slurred and unkempt. “Now vhat ?”

Behind him, several other freed gladiators stumbled into the gloomy corridor, some still bleary-eyed, others alert and ready for action.

Medea gestured toward the staircase up to the atrium.

She chose her words carefully, as best she could.

“ Kill them ,” she said. “ Kill them all .”

The band was in full sway, the drummer beating a rhythm like that of a galley slave master. Valgus was on top of a woman in the shallow atrium pool, thrusting into her in time to the music. Timarchides lay back on his couch, cradling the head of the girl who fellated him. Marcus Porcius humped his woman like a dog, grunting and wheezing as he clutched her haunches.

Pelorus lolled smugly on his couch, watching with a contented smile as the Gallic whore ground herself against him. He reached up to tug on her braided red hair, and was faintly disappointed when it came off in his hand. He cast the wig aside with a grumble and concentrated instead on kneading her small breasts.

Medea came out through the band, pitching the pipers into the pool, kicking the drummer headfirst onto his drum. The music came to an immediate stop, with only the cymbals playing on, clashing three last times as they bashed into the wall, each other, and then the ground. One spun momentarily like a dropped plate, coming to a swift and silent halt.

The musicians complained loudly, while the partygoers stared in blank amazement at the ferocious naked woman in their midst. The flickering firelight danced on her skin, making her alien pigments seem to writhe in sinuous whirls. The decorations on her face slid into shadows made by the curls of her hair, making it impossible to tell where the hair stopped and the skin began, as the shadows moved like snakes across her skull.

“Do you come to entertain?” Marcus Porcius asked, slapping his woman’s behind. Medea punched him in the eye.

Several diners laughed at the sight, but not Pelorus. He shoved his wigless couch-mate to the ground, stumbling to his feet.

“Who allowed her to go free?” he yelled, as the freed slaves began to pour from the same door that had permitted Medea’s entry.

“Guards! Guards!” Pelorus called, before Medea leapt right at him, propelling him to the ground. She snatched up his discarded fruit knife and plunged it into his neck. It caught on something, and Medea wrenched it free with a spray of blood. Pelorus clutched his hand to his throat, desperately trying to staunch the flow, as the gore-soaked Medea upended the nearby dining table into the pond.

Behind her came a platoon of men in loincloths, wielding what meager weapons they had managed to snatch from the house. One held a goblet in each hand. He punched with the metal cups, etching deep red welts into the head of Marcus Porcius. The other freed slaves, armed with fence posts and statuettes, clubbed their way through the dinner party in a scene of terrifying chaos.

Then the slaves came face to face with Timarchides, a towering well-muscled Greek, his skin criss-crossed with the thin white lines of forgotten battles. He stared back at them in shock and surprise, a hurt look on his face, as if they had wounded him more deeply than Pelorus.

For the briefest of moments, the escaped slaves and Timarchides stared into each other’s eyes, separated by an insurmountable gulf of liberty. But then the deadlock evaporated in a flurry of limbs, shouts and screams, as the slaves hurled themselves into the fray.

Timarchides dodged a blow from a man swearing at him in Egyptian, who was brandishing a statuette. The snatched deity whisked past Timarchides’s head, missing by mere inches. Timarchides leapt forward and grappled with both arms, forcing his assailant backward into the churning waters of the atrium pond. The man’s head met the marble poolside with a crack, and Timarchides felt the straining arms relax in his grip.

Dark-clad armored figures poured into the room-the guards from the villa’s outer grounds, their numbers increased by members of the nightwatch. With swords and clubs, they swiftly dragged the remaining slaves away from their opponents, cornering them against the far wall of the garden: three bleeding, dishevelled men, and one defiant woman. A guard flung the fifth, unconscious slave at their feet.

Timarchides willed the throbbing in his head to go away. He covered one eye with his hand in an attempt to stop seeing double. But Pelorus lay dead on the floor, surrounded by the wreckage of his last party, his throat torn open like a second mouth, his life’s blood swirling into the oily surface of the pond, flowing across the water toward the drain at the far end.

“Dozens of slaves occupy the cells below,” Timarchides said, addressing the man from the east as if he were their leader. “And yet, you five alone bring death to them all. ”

The man from the east stared back, uncomprehending, at Timarchides.

“Vhat?” he said. “No.”

“‘ Vhat ’ indeed,” Timarchides said. “You bray as if a fucking horse. Do you not know what you have done?”

The slave simply stared back at him.

“You repay your master’s kindness with the greatest price. His life and your own. And all other slaves in this house.”

“Command and I shall strike the blow,” the lead guard declared.

“No,” Timarchides said. “The death must be answered publicly, as Pelorus must be mourned.”

“We can kill them now,” insisted the guard, glancing anxiously at his men.

“Lock them all away,” Timarchides ordered curtly. “They shall die a slave’s death. And all shall see it.”

“It looks like rain,” golden-haired Varro said grimly.

Spartacus looked at him and smiled. He shifted his feet experimentally in the sand of the training ground, still damp from the previous day’s shower.

“For a change?” he asked.

“Back inside, Rain Bringer,” Varro said. “I do not wish to fight in rusty armor.”

But Spartacus waited, ready, his wooden training sword and battered shield at the ready. The training space referred to simply as “the square” resounded with the clonks and smacks of wooden swords on wooden shields.

“Look to the heavens,” Varro continued. “They will soon break open.”

“As will your head,” Spartacus responded, “before it has chance to get wet.”

Varro turned pleadingly to Oenomaus, the towering African trainer who frowned down upon them like an irritated god.

“Doctore, I beg you,” he pleaded.

But the black man shook his head and stood with his arms folded, his whip twitching in his hand.

“A gladiator,” Oenomaus said quietly, “has no fear of water .”