Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

All of this Spartacus gradually discovered from the time he had re entered Campania. As his army was still growing, he had learned to weld it on the march, forming and drilling new cohorts as he went. It had been a grief when Oenomaus was killed during the successful attack on the camp of Varinius and Valerius, but Crixus was still very much alive and other capable legates were rising to the surface. The Public Horse which had belonged to Varinius made a wonderful mount for a supreme commander! Showy. Every morning Spartacus kissed its nose and stroked its flowing silvery mane before leaping upon its back; he called it Batiatus. Certain that towns like Nola and Nuceria would rally behind him, he had sent his ambassadors to see their magistrates at once, explaining that he was intent upon helping Quintus Sertorius establish a new Italian Republic, and asking for donations of men, materiel, money. Only to be told firmly that no city of Campania or any other region in Italy would support the cause of Quintus Sertorius or of Spartacus the gladiator general. "We do not love the Romans," said the magistrates of Nola, "and we are proud of the fact that we held out longer against Rome than any other place in all of Italy. But no more. Never again. Our prosperity is gone, all our young men are dead. We will not join you against Rome." When Nuceria returned the same answer Spartacus held a small conference with Crixus and Aluso. "Sack them," said the Thracian priestess. "Teach them that it is wiser to join us." "I agree," said Crixus, "though my reason is different. We have forty thousand men, enough equipment to outfit every last one, and plenty to eat. But we have nothing else, Spartacus. It is all very well to promise our troops lives of distinction and wealth under the government of Quintus Sertorius, but it might be better to give them some of that wealth right now. If we sack any town which refuses to join us, we will terrify the towns we have still to reach and we will please our legions. Women, plunder there's not a soldier born who doesn't love a sack!" His temper frayed by what he saw as unappreciative rejection, Spartacus made up his mind more quickly than the old Spartacus of pregladiatorial days would have; that had been a different life, he a different sort of man. "Very well. We attack Nuceria and Nola. Tell the men to have no mercy." The men had no mercy. Looking at the results, Spartacus decided that there was much merit in sacking towns. Nuceria and Nola had yielded treasure as well as money, food, women; if he continued to sack, he would be able to present Quintus Sertorius with a huge fortune as well as an army! And if he did, then it seemed likely that Quintus Sertorius the Dictator of Rome would make Spartacus the Thracian gladiator his Master of the Horse. Therefore the huge fortune had to be obtained before he left Italy. Requests were still pouring in from whole districts of men anxious to join him, and telling of rich pickings in parts of Lucania, Bruttium and Calabria which had not been touched by the Italian War. So from Campania the rebels journeyed south to sack Consentia in Bruttium and then Thurii and Metapontum on the Gulf of Tarentum. Much to Spartacus's delight, all three towns were possessed of staggering wealth. When Aluso had finished scarifying the skull of Batiatus, he had given her a sheet of silver with which to line it; but after Consentia, Thurii and Metapontum, he told her to throw the silver on the nearest rubbish heap, replace it with gold. And there was a certain seduction in all this as well as the ever present seduction of Aluso, who thought like a barbarian but had terrible magic and stood to him as the talisman of his luck. As long as he had Aluso by his side, he was one of Fortune's favorites. Yes, she was wonderful. She could find water, she sensed when disaster was looming, she always gave him the right advice. Growing heavy with his child, her rich red mouth a perfect foil for flaxen hair and wild white wolfs pallid eyes, ankles and wrists clashing with the gold she loaded upon them, he thought her perfect, not the least because she was a Thracian and he had become a Thracian. They belonged together; she was the personification of this strange new life. Early in April he was marching into eastern Samnium, sure that here at least the towns would join him. But Asernia, Bovianum, Beneventum and Saepinum all rejected his overtures we won't join you, we don't want you, go away! Nor were they worth sacking. Verres and Cethegus had left nothing. However, individual Samnites kept flocking to join his army, which had now swelled to ninety thousand men. So many people, Spartacus was finding out, were difficult to manage. Though the troops were organized into proper Roman legions and were armed in Roman style, he could never seem to find enough capable legates and tribunes to keep an iron control over soldierly impulses, wine, the hideous strife the female camp followers provoked. Time, he decided, to march for Italian Gaul, Gaul across the Alps, and Quintus Sertorius in Nearer Spain. Not to the west of the Apennines he had no desire to venture anywhere near the city of Rome. He would proceed up the Adriatic littoral through regions which had fought bitterly against Roman control of the peninsula Marrucini, Vestini, Frentani, southern Picentines. Many of their men would join him! But Crixus didn't want to go to Nearer Spain. Nor did the thirty thousand men in his division of the army. "Why go so far?" he asked. "If what you say about Quintus Sertorius is true, then one day he will arrive in Italy. It's better that he finds us in Italy still, with our foot on Rome's neck. The distance from here to Spain is half as far again as a thousand miles, and we'd be marching the whole way through barbarian tribes who would see us as just another lot of Romans. My men and I are against the idea of leaving Italy." "If you and your men are against the idea of leaving Italy," said Spartacus angrily, "then don't leave Italy! What do I care? I've close to a hundred thousand men to look after, and that's far too many! So off you go, Crixus the further, the better! Take your thirty thousand idiots, stay in Italy!" So when Spartacus and seventy thousand soldiers together with a vast baggage train and forty thousand women, not to mention babies and young children turned north to cross the Tifernus River, Crixus and his thirty thousand followers turned south in the direction of Brundisium. It was the end of April.

At about the same moment, the consuls Gellius and Clodianus left Rome to pick up their troops from Capua, Quintus Arrius the ex praetor having told the Senate that the four legions of new soldiers assembled in Capua were as good as they were ever going to be; he could not guarantee that they were battleworthy, but he hoped they were. When the consuls reached Capua they were informed of the split between Spartacus and Crixus, and of the new direction into the north that Spartacus himself was taking. A plan was developed; Quintus Arrius would take one legion south to deal with Crixus at once, Gellius would take the second legion and shadow Spartacus from behind until Arrius could rejoin him, while Clodianus took the other two legions on a rapid march past Rome, then east on the Via Valeria to emerge on the Adriatic coast well to the north of Spartacus. The two consuls would then have Spartacus between them and could close the jaws of their pincer. Some days later came splendid news from Quintus Arrius. Though outnumbered five to one, he had concealed himself in ambush on Mount Garganus in Apulia and fallen upon the undisciplined, jostling mass of men Crixus led into the trap. Crixus himself and all thirty thousand of his followers were killed, those who survived the ambush by execution afterward; Quintus Arrius had no intention of leaving live enemy in his wake. Gellius was not so lucky. What Arrius had done to Crixus, Spartacus did to him. The troops of the single legion Gellius possessed scattered in wild panic the moment they saw a vast force descending upon them a good thing, as it turned out, for those who stayed were slaughtered. And at least they fled without abandoning arms or armor, so that when the reunited Arrius and Gellius managed to round them up they still had their equipment and could (theoretically, anyway) fight again without needing to return to Capua. The course Arrius and Gellius took after their defeat was of no moment to Spartacus; he marched immediately into the north to deal with Clodianus, of whose ploy he had been informed by a captured Roman tribune. At Hadria on the Adriatic coast the two armies met with much the same result for Clodianus as for Gellius. The troops of Clodianus dispersed in panic. Victor on both fields, Spartacus continued his northward progress unopposed. Nothing daunted, Gellius, Clodianus and Arrius collected their men and tried again at Firmum Picenum. Again they were defeated. Spartacus marched into the Ager Gallicus. He crossed the Rubico into Italian Gaul at the end of Sextilis and started up the Via Aemilia toward Placentia and the western Alps. Quintus Sertorius, here we come! The valley of the Padus was lush, rich countryside which provided forage aplenty and towns with granaries full to overflowing. As he now systematically sacked towns likely to yield good plunder, Spartacus did not endear himself or his army to the citizens of Italian Gaul. At Mutina, halfway to the Alps, the vast army encountered the governor of Italian Gaul, Gaius Cassius Longinus, who tried valiantly to block their progress with a single legion. Gallant though the action was, it could not but fail; Cassius's legate Gnaeus Manlius came up two days later with Italian Gaul's other legion and suffered the same fate as Cassius. On both occasions the Roman troops had stayed to fight, which meant that Spartacus collected over ten thousand sets of arms and armor on the field. The last Roman to whom Spartacus had personally spoken and if he spoke to none, then nor did anyone else in that vast and terrifying horde had been the tribune captured during the first defeat of Gellius months before. Neither at Hadria nor at Firmum Picenum did he so much as see Gellius, Clodianus or Arrius at close quarters. But now at Mutina he had two high ranking Roman prisoners, Gaius Cassius and Gnaeus Manlius, and he fancied the idea of speaking with them: time to let a couple of members of the Senate see the man of whom all Italy and Italian Gaul was talking! Time to let the Senate know who he was. For he had no intention of killing or detaining Cassius and Manlius; he wanted them to return to Rome and report in person. He had, however, loaded his prisoners down with chains, and made sure that when they were brought into his presence he was seated on a podium and wearing a plain white toga. Cassius and Manlius stared, but it was when Spartacus addressed them in good, Campanian accented Latin that they realized what he was. "You're an Italian!" said Cassius. "I'm a Roman," Spartacus corrected him. No Cassius was easily cowed; the clan was warlike and very fierce, and if an occasional Cassius committed a military blunder, no Cassius had ever run away. So this Cassius proved himself a true member of his family by lifting one manacled arm and shaking his fist at the big, handsome fellow on the podium. "Free me from the indignity of these bonds and you'll soon be a dead Roman!" he snarled. "A deserter from the legions, eh? Put in the ring as a Thracian!" Spartacus flushed. "I'm no deserter," he said stiffly. "In me you see a military tribune who was unjustly convicted of mutiny in Illyricum. And you find your bonds an indignity? Well, how do you think I found my bonds when I was sent to the kind of school run by a worm like Batiatus? One set of chains deserves another, Cassius the proconsul!" "Kill us and get it over and done with," said Cassius. "Kill you? Oh, no, I have no intention of doing that," said Spartacus, smiling. "I'm going to set you free now that you've felt the indignity of bonds. You will go back to Rome and you will tell the Senate who I am, and where I'm going, and what I intend to do when I get there and what I will be when I come back." Manlius moved as if to answer; Cassius turned his head and glared; Manlius subsided. "Who you are a mutineer. Where you're going to perdition. What you're going to do when you get there rot. What you'll be when you come back a mindless shade without substance or shadow," sneered Cassius. "I'd be glad to tell the Senate all of that!" "Then tell the Senate this while you're about it!" snapped Spartacus, rising to his feet and ripping off the immaculate toga; he raked his feet on it with the relish of a dog raking its hind legs after defaecation, then kicked it off the podium. In my train I have eighty thousand men, all properly armed and trained to fight like Romans. Most of them are Samnites and Lucanians, but even the slaves who enlisted under me are brave men. I have thousands of talents in plunder. And I am on my way to join Quintus Sertorius in Nearer Spain. Together he and I will inflict total defeat upon Rome's armies and generals in both the Spains, and then Quintus Sertorius and I will march back to Italy. Your Rome doesn't stand a chance, proconsul! Before the next year has passed, Quintus Sertorius will be the Dictator of Rome, and I will be his Master of the Horse!" Cassius and Manlius had listened to this with a series of expressions chasing each other across their faces fury, awe, anger, bewilderment, amazement and finally, when they were sure Spartacus had ended, amusement! Both men threw their heads back and roared with unfeigned laughter while Spartacus stood feeling a slowly rising tide of red suffuse his cheeks. What had he said that they found so funny? Did they laugh at his temerity? Did they think him mad? "Oh, you fool!" said Cassius when he was able, the tears of hilarity running like a freshet. "You great bumpkin! You booby! Don't you have an intelligence network? Of course you don't! You're not a Roman commander's anus! What's the difference between this horde of yours and a horde of barbarians? Nothing, and that is the simple truth! I can't believe you don't know, but you really don't know!" "Know what?" asked Spartacus, his color gone. There had been no room for rage at the derision in Cassius's voice, at the epithets he hurled; all that filled Spartacus's mind was fear. "Sertorius is dead! Assassinated by his own senior legate Perperna last winter. There is no rebel army in Spain! Just the victorious legions of Metellus Pius and Pompeius Magnus, who will soon be marching back to Italy to put paid to you and your whole horde of barbarians!" And Cassius laughed again. Spartacus didn't stay to hear, he fled from the room with his hands clapped against his ears and sought out Aluso. Now the mother of Spartacus's son, Aluso could find nothing to say to console him; he covered his head in folds of his scarlet general's cape snatched from the couch, and wept, wept, wept. What can I do?'' he asked her, rocking back and forth. "I have an army with no objective, a people with no home!" Hair hanging in strings over her face, knees wide apart as she squatted with her blood cup and her knucklebones and the grisly tattered hand of Batiatus, Aluso whipped the bones with the hand, stared and muttered. "Rome's great enemy in the west is dead," she said at last, "but Rome's great enemy in the east still lives. The bones say we must march to join Mithridates." Oh, why hadn't he thought of that for himself? Spartacus threw away the general's cape, looked at Aluso with wide, tear blurred eyes. "Mithridates! Of course Mithridates! We will march across the eastern Alps into Illyricum, cross Thrace to the Euxine and join ourselves to Pontus." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, snuffled, gazed at Aluso wildly. "In Thrace is your homeland, woman. Would you rather stay there?'' She snorted scornfully. My place is with you, Spartacus. Whether they know it or not, the Bessi are a defeated people. No tribe in the world is strong enough to resist Rome forever, only a great king like Mithridates. No, husband, we will not stay in Thrace. We will join ourselves to King Mithridates."