Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

Yet the end of the Villa Batiatus was in sight when Spartacus and seven other gladiators returned from an engagement in Larinum at the end of the month Sextilis in the year Caesar left Gytheum and the service of Marcus Antonius to assume his pontificate. Larinum had been a fascinating experience, even for eight men kept cooped up in a prison cart and chained for every moment save those spent fighting in the ring. At the end of the previous year one of Larinum's most prominent men, Statius Albius Oppianicus, had been prosecuted by his stepson, Aulus Cluentius Habitus, for attempting to murder him. The trial had taken place in Rome, and a horrific story of mass murder going back over twenty years had tumbled out. Oppianicus, the whole of Rome had learned, was responsible for the murders of his wives, sons, brothers, in laws, cousins, and others, each killing committed or commissioned in order to accumulate money and power. A friend of the fabulously rich aristocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus, Oppianicus had nearly been acquitted; the tribune of the plebs Lucius Quinctius became involved, and a huge sum of money had been set aside to bribe the jury of senators. That Oppianicus had ended in being convicted was due to the avarice of his appointed briber, the same Gaius Aelius Staienus who had proven so useful to Pompey a few years earlier and kept ninety thousand sesterces for himself when Gaius Antonius Hybrida had hired him to bribe nine tribunes of the plebs. For Staienus was incapable of honorably fulfilling the most dishonorable commissions; he kept the money Oppianicus gave him to bribe the jury and let Oppianicus be condemned. Larinum could still find little to talk about except the perfidy of Oppianicus, even when gladiators were in town to stage funeral games there had been too many funeral games in Larinum, was the trouble. So while they ate chained up to a table in the courtyard of a local inn, the gladiators had listened to the four archers marveling, and looked interested. Though they were not allowed to speak to each other, of course they did. Time and much practice had enabled them to carry on snatches of shortened conversation, and mass murder among the upper classes of Larinum was wonderful cover. Despite the huge obstacles the obsessive meticulousness of Batiatus had thrown up everywhere, Spartacus now the veteran of more than twelve months as a resident of the Villa Batiatus was gathering together the threads of a plot aimed at a mass escape and a mass murder. He finally knew everybody and had learned how to communicate with people he couldn't see daily or even monthly. If Batiatus had created a complicated web which kept his whores and his gladiators from getting to know each other well, Spartacus had constructed an equally complicated web which enabled whores and gladiators to pass on ideas and information and pass back comments, favorable or critical. In fact, the Batiatus system had allowed Spartacus to make positive use of this enforced indirect contact; it meant personalities were not thrown together often enough to clash or to contemplate supplanting Spartacus as the leader of the coming insurrection. He had started to send out feelers at the beginning of the summer, and now at the end of it his plans were in place. Every gladiator without exception had agreed that if Spartacus could engineer a breakout, he would be a part of it, and the whores a vital part of Spartacus's scheme had also agreed. There were two Roman deserters whose understanding of military discipline and methods were almost the equal of Spartacus's, and through the whisper network he had appointed them his deputies in the escape. They fought as Gauls and had adopted the ring names of Crixus and Oenomaus because the audiences disliked Latin names which reminded them that most of their sawdust heroes were Roman military outlaws. As chance would have it, both Crixus and Oenomaus were with Spartacus in Larinum, a boon for Spartacus, who had been able to move the date of his projected breakout forward in time. They would go eight days after the return from Larinum, no matter how many or how few gladiators were actually at the Villa Batiatus. As this was the day after the nundinae the number was likely to be higher than lower, enhanced by the fact that Batiatus curtailed his show bookings during September, when he was accustomed to take his annual vacation and pay his annual visit to Philippus. The Thracian priestess Aluso had become Spartacus's most fervid ally; after the plot had been agreed to by everyone, whichever men were in the same cell as Spartacus contrived with the aid of the other women to ensure that Spartacus and Aluso were able to spend the whole night together if Aluso was one of the women's detail. In voices more breath than noise they had gone over the innumerable factors involved, and Aluso vowed that through the agency of her women, she would keep all the men in a fever of enthusiasm. She had been stealing kitchen implements for Spartacus since early summer, so cunningly that when they were finally missed one of the cooks was blamed; no one suspected a gladiators' revolt. A cleaver a small carving knife a hank of stout twine a glass jar since smashed to slivers a meat hook. A modest haul, but enough for eight men. All of these were held in the women's quarters, which the women cleaned themselves. But on the night before the breakout the women delegated to visit Spartacus's cell carried the implements concealed within their scanty clothing; Aluso was not among them. Morning dawned. The eight men left their cell to eat in their enclosure. Clad only in loincloths, they carried nothing, but tucked inside the V of scarlet cloth each man wore was a section of twine about three feet long. The archer, an assistant doctor and two ex gladiators who now served as yardsmen were garroted so quickly that the iron door of the cell still gaped open; Spartacus and his seven companions grabbed the weapons from their beds and were scattering along the row of cells using a key found on the archer before anyone knew what was happening. Each group of gladiators had dallied and grumbled on rising, shuffled and delayed, so that none had finished moving from cell to yard before eight silent athletes were among them. A cleaver flashed, a knife was plunged into a chest, a wicked chunk of broken glass sliced through a throat, and the eight pieces of twine were passed on. It was done without a word, a shout, a warning; Spartacus and the other gladiators now held the row of cells and the yards leading from them. Some of the dead men carried keys, more gates leading further into the labyrinth were unlocked, and the seventy men who were imprisoned in the Villa Batiatus at the time streamed silently onward, outward. There was a shed in which axes and tools were kept; a muffled jangle, and anything useful was in a gladiator's hand. Another flaw in Batiatus's ground plan now lay revealed, for the high internal walls kept what was going on limited to the immediate vicinity. Batiatus ought to have erected watch towers and put his archers in them. The alarm was given when the men reached the kitchens, but that was far too late. Possessed now of every sharp instrument the kitchens owned, the gladiators used pot lids to ward off arrows and went after everyone left alive. Including Batiatus, who had meant to leave on his vacation the previous day but instead had stayed because he had found a discrepancy in his books. The men kept him alive until they had liberated the women, who tore him apart a little at a time under the clinical supervision of Aluso; she ate his heart with relish. And by the time the sun had risen Spartacus and his sixty nine companions had taken the Villa Batiatus. The weapons were removed from storage and every cart was yoked up to oxen or to mules. The food from the kitchens and all the spare armaments were piled into the wagons, the main gates were thrown open, and the little expedition marched bravely out into the world. Knowing Campania of old, Spartacus's planning had not been confined to the taking of the Villa Batiatus. It stood beside the route from Capua to Nola some seven miles out of the city; Spartacus turned away from Capua and headed in the direction of Nola. Not far along the road they encountered another wagon train and attacked it, for no other reason than that they wanted no one alive to report which way they had gone. To the delight of all, the wagons turned out to be loaded with weapons and armor for another gladiatorial school. There were now more items useful for a war than people to wear or wield them. Soon the cavalcade left the main road to take a deserted track which headed west of south toward Mount Vesuvius. Clad in an archer's scaly jacket and carrying a Thracian's saber, Aluso moved to join Spartacus at the front of the column. She had washed off Batiatus's blood, but still licked her chops with the purring content of a cat every time she thought of how she had eaten his heart. "You look like Minerva," said Spartacus, smiling; he had found nothing to criticize in Aluso's treatment of Batiatus. "I feel like myself for the first time in ten years." And she jiggled the big leather bag dangling from her waist; it held the head of Batiatus, which she intended to scarify and transform its skull into her drinking cup, as was the custom of her tribe. "You'll be my woman only, if that pleases you." "It pleases me if I can be a part of your war councils." They spoke in Greek since Aluso knew no Latin, and spoke with the ease of those who had enjoyed each other's bodies without any emotional clouding of simple passion, united in the pleasure of being free, of walking unchained and unsupervised.