Читать книгу Spartacus - J. Leslie Mitchell - Страница 11

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Waking the morning after the Battle of the Lake, she crouched by Spartacus and remembered these things. They seemed part of a far tale now. Between them and now lay the first wild days in the crater of Vesuvius, unsheltered, when a troop of velites was sent against them, and routed, and five centuries of legionaries routed as well: between them and now lay the days of starvation when Spartacus had fought, possessed by a God or a demon, to keep his fellows from surrender: between them and now lay the perilous descent of the lava crags, at night, by ropes, to a sleeping countryside and food for the seizing: between them and now lay the days when the slaves round Capua revolted and joined them, and decimated the half-legion that Clodius had led.

The camp was silent in the hush of the dawn. Elpinice knelt and stared at the face of the Gladiator, he had turned uneasily in the night, throwing the cloths from his face. Now the great wound was no more than a faint, dark limning on the dark-bronzed skin, on head and chin and breast the hair curled blue-black and metallic, the face had a terrifying simplicity in sleep, so that Elpinice remembered the great stone faces she had seen in her childhood in Athens. She shivered and drew the cloths about her, and watched through the tent-opening the coming of the dawn.

It had been Clodius’ tent, captured with much other gear in the Battle of the Lake. All night it had sheltered a Threce Gladiator and an Attic slavewoman, the leaders of the servile host. For the rest, the slaves had flung up shelters of earth and grass, and slept in these, or rolled themselves in the garments stripped from the Roman dead, and lain in the lee of the waving clumps of rushes. But Gannicus, the German retiarius with palms, elected strategos under Spartacus, had erected a skin tent in imitation of the Thracian. The third strategos, Castus the Gaul, had patrolled the camp.

Hating the Roman titles and ranks, the Gladiators had named their leaders strategoi, as in the armies of Greece, and elected each from day to day. The girl, looking into the morning and the future, saw trouble awaiting that order of things: till the Masters marched down their legions and crowned the revolt with the cross.

For that was the certain end. No armies yet had withstood the legions, despite the chance defeat of Clodius. He or another would return, and unless the servile host dispersed, seeking the mountains or the sea——

Elpinice turned. Suddenly, through the stir of the slave-camp outside, a bucina roared. Then the pad of hurrying feet came near.

‘Strategos!’