Читать книгу Spartacus - J. Leslie Mitchell - Страница 18

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Gershom ben Sanballat had charged in the shelter of the cattle with his Bithynians, and was the first of the slave commanders to beat his men away from plunder and the killing of the wounded to make account of their losses. Wielding a great whip, as long before in the guerilla wars of the Hasidim, the Jew commander marshalled his panting, ragged horde into straggling lines. There he found that over a hundred of the company he had led from the north were dead; over a score had wounds of such nature that recovery was impossible. Himself half-naked, bleeding from a wound in his shoulder, his curled beard torn and dusty, the Jew walked up and down the ranks and tugged at his beard with an irritable hand. Then he gave an order, and turned the cold back of a Pharisee on the ranks while it was executed; for this order was against the Law, and a Gentile abomination.

The Bithynians surrounded their wounded comrades, chattering, weeping, and kissed them, and made pretence to serve them. But the wounded had heard the order, and panting, bared their throats to the knives. So they were slain that the slaves might march unencumbered.

On that sight Kleon of Corinth came to look with cold, amused eyes. The Jew turned and saw him and scowled, for the Greek had neither armour nor sword, and still carried no more than his knife. He bore as little sign of battle as that morning he had entered the camp of the Bithynians.

‘I see you sacrifice to Jehovah, Jew—or is it to Kokolkh?’

But Gershom did not look towards his company. ‘Sacrifice? I am no baal-worshipper. What could I do? These men were unfit to march. Would you leave them for Varinus to be tender with?’

‘Oh, it’s a good killing. All killings are in this country. I think the God of its land drinks blood. A bloody people and bloody Gods. But what do you think they’ve profited, those slaves you liberated five days ago?’

The Jew forgot his anger in weariness. Suddenly, in the blood and din of a thousand little fights, he saw, hopeless, the road to Kadesh. ‘What profit is there under the sun? wrote a King of ours. What truth is there in a Greek?’ His heavy lips curled. ‘Or valour?’

The eunuch’s cold look of amusement did not change. ‘With his manhood, no doubt. I’m classed with the women, Jew. What would one of the Mutilated do in a battle?’

Gershom ben Sanballat flushed with rage. ‘Now, by God, did those Gladiators refuse you a sword? I’ll teach the slaves courtesy with the edge of mine.’

Kleon’s laughter was the shrill, high laughter of the Mutilated ere he bit it to silence on his lips. ‘Keep your sword for the throats of your wounded, Jew. I need neither your help nor your pity.’

He turned away with twitching face, and Gershom stared after him angrily—angrily at the pity that twisted his own heart. Were he himself so defiled would he keep a quiet temper? And he shuddered at that thought, and passionately, a moment blinded his eyes in prayer that whatever end awaited him in this revolt, the cross, the stake, or the mines, it might not be that mutilation which would cut him from the kingdom of the Elohim, alone and lost and defiled in this heathen land.

And it was then that he swore to himself that wherever a Jew slavewoman should join them, he would take that woman to his bed, be she Samaritan or Sadducee, that the seed of his loins might not be lost and the eyes of a son remember him.