Spartacus (9 page)

He shrugged and said to Batiatus, “You must understand that I have no feelings about Spartacus in relation to yourself, or the war either, for that matter. I am not a moralist. I had to talk to you because you can tell me what no other can.”

“And just what is that?” asked Batiatus.

“The nature of my enemy.”

The fat man poured more wine and squinted at the general. A sentry entered the tent and placed two lighted lamps upon the table. It was evening already.

In the light of the lamps, Lentulus Batiatus was a different person. Twilight had been kind to him. Now the light roved up on his face as he massaged it with a napkin, hooking slabs of shadow over the pendulous layers of flesh. His large flat nose quivered constantly and incongruously, and bit by bit, he was getting tight. A cold glint in his eyes told Crassus not to misjudge him, not to think that this was an amiable fool. No fool indeed.

“What do I know of your enemy?”

Trumpets sounded outside. Evening drill had finished, and the roll of leather-shod feet on the double rocked the encampment.

“I have only one enemy. Spartacus is my enemy,” Crassus said carefully.

The fat man blew his nose into his napkin.

“And you know Spartacus,” Crassus said.

“I do, by God!”

“No one else. Just you. No one who ever fought Spartacus knew him. They went to fight slaves. They expected to blow their trumpets, beat their drums, cast their
pilum
—and then the slaves were to run away. No matter how many times the legions were torn to shreds, they still expected that. What was couldn’t be, and so today Rome makes the last effort and if it fails, there will be no Rome. You know that as well as l do.”

The fat man roared with laughter. He held his belly and rocked back on his stool.

“You find it funny?” Crassus asked.

“The truth is always funny.”

Crassus contained himself and his temper and waited for the laughter to subside.

“There will be no Rome—there will only be Spartacus.” The fat man had subsided to a giggle now, and Crassus, watching him, wondered whether he was quite in his right mind, or only drunk. What things a land produced! Here was the
lanista
, who bought slaves and trained them to fight; of course, he was laughing over that. He, Crassus, also trained men to fight.

“You should hang me, not feed me,” Batiatus whispered ingratiatingly, pouring another glass of wine for himself.

“I would have a dream,” said the general, pulling the conversation back to his own needs, “a sort of nightmare. One of those dreams that one has over and over again—”

Batiatus nodded understandingly.

“—and in this dream I would fight with my eyes bandaged. That is horrible, but logical. You see, I don’t believe that all dreams are omens. Certain dreams are simply reflections of the problems one faces when awake. Spartacus is the unknown. If I go to battle with him, my eyes are bandaged. That isn’t the case in any other circumstances. I know why the Gauls fight; I know why the Greeks and the Spaniards and the Germans fight. They fight for the same reasons—with natural variations—that I do. But I don’t know why this slave fights. I don’t know how he takes a rabble, all the filth and sweepings of the whole world, and uses them to destroy the best troops the world has ever known. It takes five years to make a legionary—five years to make him understand that his life is of no consequence, that the legion and only the legion counts, that an order must be obeyed, any order. Five years of training, ten hours a day, every day—and then you can take them to a cliff and order them to march over the edge and they will obey. And yet these slaves have destroyed the best legions of Rome.

“That is why I asked you to come here from Capua—to tell me about Spartacus. So I can take the bandage away from my eyes.”

Batiatus nodded somberly. He was mellowing now. He was the confidant and adviser of great generals, and that was as it should be.

“Firstly,” said Crassus, “there is the man. Tell me about him. What does he look like? Where did you get him?”

“Men never look like what they are.”

“True—profoundly true, and when you realize that, you know about men.” Which was the very best flattery to offer Batiatus.

“He was gentle, so gentle, almost humble, and he’s a Thracian; that much about him is true.” Batiatus dipped one finger in his wine and tallied his points on the table. “They say he is a giant—no, no, not at all. He’s no giant. He’s not even particularly tall. About your height, I would say. Black, curly hair; dark brown eyes. His nose was broken; otherwise, I guess, you would call him handsome. But the broken nose gave a sheep-like expression to his face. A broad face, and gentle, and all of this deceived you. I would have killed anyone else who did what he did.”

“What did he do?” asked Crassus.

“Ah—”

“I want you to speak frankly because I must have a frank picture,” Crassus said slowly. “I want you to know that everything you say to me will be held in the strictest confidence.” He laid aside for the moment the specific incident for which Batiatus would have killed Spartacus. “I also want to know his background—where did you buy him and what was he?”

“What is a gladiator?” smiled Batiatus, spreading his hands. “Not just a slave, you understand—or at least the gladiators of Capua are not just slaves. They are special. If you fight dogs, you do not buy house pets that are reared by little girls. If you fight men, you want men who will fight. Men who chew their gall. Men who hate. Men with spleen. So I inform the agents that I am in the market for men with spleen. That kind are no good for house slaves and they are no good on the
latifundia
either.”

“Why not on the
latifundia?
” asked Crassus.

“Because if a man is broken, I don’t want him. And if you can’t break a man, you must kill him, but you can’t work him. He spoils the work. He spoils the others who work. He is like a disease.”

“Then why will he fight?”

“Ah—and there you have the question, and if you can’t answer that question, you can’t work with gladiators. In the old days, they called the arena fighters
bustuarii
, and those fought for the love of fighting, and they were sick in the head, and there were only a few of them, and
they were not slaves
.” He touched his head meaningfully. “No one wants to fight to the blood unless he is sick here. No one likes it. The gladiator doesn’t like to fight. He fights because you give him a weapon and take off his chains. And when he has that weapon in his hand, he dreams that he is free—and that is what he wants, to have the weapon in his hand and dream that he is free. And then it’s your wit against his wit, because he is a devil, so you have to be a devil too.”

“And where do you find such men?” asked Crassus, intrigued and captured by the flat, straightforward account of a man who knew his trade.

“There is only one place where you can find them—the kind I want. Only one place. The mines. It must be the mines. They must come from a place compared to which the legion is paradise, the
latifundia
is paradise, and even the gallows is a blessed mercy. That is where my agents find them. That is where they found Spartacus—and he was
koruu.
Do you know what that word means? It is an Egyptian word, I think.”

Crassus shook his head.

“It means three generations of slaves. The grandson of a slave. In the Egyptian, it also means a certain kind of loathsome animal. A crawling beast. A beast who is untouchable by the company of beasts, yes, even by the company of beasts.
Koruu
. We may ask, why did this arise in Egypt? I will tell you. There are worse things than being a
lanista
. When I came into this encampment of yours, your officers looked at me. Why? Why? We are all butchers, aren’t we, and we deal in carved meat. Then why?”

He was drunk. He was full of pity for himself, this fat trainer of gladiators who kept the school at Capua. His soul came forth; even a fat and dirty pig who has a
ludus
where the sand turns into stuffing for blood sausage has a soul.

“And Spartacus was
koruu,
” said Crassus softly. “Did Spartacus come from Egypt?”

Batiatus nodded. “A Thracian, but he came from Egypt. The Egyptian gold operators buy from Athens and when they can, buy
koruu,
and Thracians are valued.”

“Why?”

“There is a legend that they are good under ground.”

“I see. But why is it said that Spartacus was purchased in Greece?”

“Do I know why all the garbage spoken is spoken? But I know where he was purchased because I purchased him. In Thebes. Do you doubt me? Am I a liar? I am a fat
lanista,
a lonely man sitting in this lousy rain in Gaul. Why do I live with loneliness? What right have you to look down on me? Your life is your life. Mine is mine.”

“You are my honored guest. I don’t look down on you,” said Crassus.

Batiatus smiled and leaned toward him. “Do you know what I want? Do you know what I need? We are two men of the world, both of us. I need a woman. Tonight.” His voice became hoarsely soft and entreating. “Why do I need a woman? Not out of lust, but out of loneliness. To heal the scars. You have women—men don’t cut themselves off from women.”

“Tell me about Spartacus and Egypt,” Crassus said. “Then we will talk about women.”

 

 

In the month of July, when it is dry and awful, go up the Nile from Thebes. Go up to the First Cataract. Already you are in the devil’s own land. See how the ribbon of green along the riverside has shrunk and withered! See how the hills and mounds of the desert have changed to a finer and finer sand. Smoke and powder; the wind touches it and it bursts up here and it throws out tentacles there. Where the river flows slowly—and it does in the dry time—a crust of white powder lies upon it. The powder is in the air too, and it is already very hot.

But at least there is a little wind in this place. Now you have passed the First Cataract, and you must strike out into the Nubian Desert, which lies southward and eastward. Go into the desert far enough to lose the little wind that survived over the river, but not far enough to catch even a breath of breeze from the Red Sea. And now go southward.

Suddenly, the wind is still and the earth is dead. Only the air is alive, and the air is glazed with heat and shimmering with heat, and man’s senses are no longer valid, for he sees nothing as it is, but everything bent and warped and curved by the heat. And the desert has changed too. It is a mistaken notion many people hold that desert is everywhere the same; but desert means only a lack of water, and this lack of water varies enormously in degree, and the desert varies too according to the nature of the soil or landscape where the desert is. There is rock desert and mountain desert and sand desert, and white salt desert and lava desert—and there is also the terrible desert of drifting white powder, where death is the absolute signature.

Here, there grows nothing at all. Not the dry, twisted, tough shrubbery of the rock desert; not the lonely tumbleweeds of the sand desert, but nothing at all.

Go into this desert then. Plod through the white powder and feel how wave after wave of the dreadful heat beats down upon your back. As hot as it can be and yet allow a man to live, so is it here. Make a track through this hot and terrible desert, and time and space become boundless and monstrous. But you go on and on and on and on. What is hell? Hell begins when the simple and necessary acts of life become monstrous, and this knowledge has been shared through all the ages by those who taste the hell men make on earth. Now it is frightful to walk, to breathe, to see, to think.

But this does not go on forever. Suddenly, it is delineated, and the further aspect of hell appears. Black ridges show ahead of you, strange, nightmarish black ridges. This is the black stone escarpment. You go on toward the black stone, and then you see that it is streaked through and through with veins of shining white marble. Oh, how bright this marble is! Oh, how it gleams and shines and with what heavenly lustre! But it must have a heavenly lustre, for the streets of heaven are paved with gold, and the white marble is rich with gold. That is why men came to this place, and that is why you are coming here, because the marble is rich and heavy with gold.

Go closer and see. It was long ago that the Egyptian Pharaohs discovered this black rock escarpment, and in those days they had only tools of copper and bronze. So they could chip and scratch at the surface, but little more. But after generations of scratching at the surface, the gold gave out and it was necessary to go into the black rock and cut away the white marble. This was made possible because the age of copper was past and the age of iron had come, and now men could work the marble with picks and iron wedges and eighteen-pound sledges.

But a new kind of man was needed. The heat and the dust and the physical contortions necessary to follow the twisting gold-bearing veins into the rock made it impossible to employ peasants either from Ethiopia or from Egypt, and the ordinary slave cost too much and died too quickly. So to this place were brought war-hardened soldiers taken captive and children who were
koruu,
bred from slaves who were bred from slaves in a process where only the toughest and the hardest could survive. And children were needed, for when the veins narrowed, deep inside the black rock escarpment, only a child could work there.

The old splendor and power of the Pharaohs passed away and the purses of the Greek kings of Egypt dwindled; the hand of Rome lay over them and the slave dealers of Rome took over the operation of the mines. In any case, no one but Romans knew how to work slaves properly.