Читать книгу Spartacus - J. Leslie Mitchell - Страница 15

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The clamour of the roused camp around them, Elpinice sat in the tent with the head of the giant Thracian in her arms. He had ceased to groan and claw at his head in that madness that had come in him as he stumbled into the tent from the sunlight. But now a torrent of broken Latin poured from his lips.

‘But I can’t understand! Who am I? I can’t remember! Darkness ... and the forests, and waking. Night killing of men. Why should I kill them? I want only to hunt, to swim in the rivers, and lie in the hunt. I cannot kill them. Why should I kill?’

She had heard this raving before, though never in such frantic tones; she had soothed him from it before, the strange alien barbarian who, with his sword broken, had broken men with his bared hands and torn at their throats with his teeth; and who, outside the blindness of fighting, shuddered from the thought of killing like the frightened girl she herself had long ceased to be. Who was he, what origins had been his in that wild Thrace where he was captured?

And sometimes a terror would come on her, bright and dreadful, yet with joy in it also, as the great, glazed eyes turned to her for help, and the great hands held her, in appeal, in the lazy play of a drowsing beast that sheathed its claws and played in the sun, in the urgent hot hours of desire when she quivered alive as never before in the hands that had held her throughout four years. Dim and remote her own beginnings, she yet remembered again and again those faces in stone in the Violet City, and would sometimes shudder and stare at the Thracian. What God had stolen his reason and set there the strength of a lion when roused at last, the cunning and speed of a striking serpent—these, companioned with the dread of a child?

So she soothed him now, as before, and he sighed, holding the hands that held him. Then he raised his head and smiled, suddenly, as on Crixus.

‘Better now. Elpinice, there are forests where I’ll take you and we’ll go alone, only the bears and the deer are there; and caves; and the moon coming at night.’ His face crinkled in sudden anger. ‘After. There are the Masters who would stop us.’

She helped him with his armour, and armed herself; and as always, he plotted a plan in his mind, and traced it aloud, a hunter’s plan, one who had hunted and waylaid beasts. She whispered beside him, agreeing, amending; till a bucina captured from the Roman rout roared outside the rallying signal of the horde.

And Elpinice, once mistress of the lanista Batiates, raised up her small head, her young eyes old. And she knew that bucina ended a phase: the revolt was over, it was WAR that began.