Читать книгу Spartacus - J. Leslie Mitchell - Страница 6

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In the darkness a half-mile beyond the ford Kleon stumbled upon the Ionians. One of them limped and another was attempting to staunch the flow of blood from his neck. Him Kleon bandaged with strips torn from his tunic. Then they listened, but now the night was void of sound.

Yet presently there neared the noise of a galloping horse.

‘The Masters!’

Kleon listened, panting, having fought at the ford, not only run from it. ‘There is only one. I’ll stab the beast in the belly.’

With his short dagger in his hand, he crouched by the side of the track. The horse shied in alarm from his leaping figure. Then Kleon saw it was no Master, but Titul. The Iberian grinned with gleaming teeth.

‘I dragged down a soldier and dashed out his brains with a stone,’ he said. ‘His helmet cracked like a shell. Then I stole his horse.’

‘Brennus?’

‘Brennus is dead,’ said Titul. ‘For I saw him killed. As for the other Gauls, they’re also dead and doubtlessly in hell, being men without GODS.’

‘They were heroes,’ said one of the Ionians, a clerk, a thin man who had run with rapidity. ‘Such men they bred once in Greece.’

‘Mighty in valour were those of the vanished Western Isle,’ said Titul, being mad.

Kleon clung to the horse’s mane. The Ionians trotted behind. The darkness began to clear and soften till, brilliant and white, the stars came out. Up the hillside a wolf howled long and piercingly.

‘The wolves are late about,’ said Titul, ‘for the flocks are unguarded.’

Again the long howl, wild and cold and cruel, arose. It was a lone wolf. None of its kind answered it.

‘It may be the Wolf of the Masters herself,’ said Kleon, ‘come down from Rome to bay.’

The Greeks shivered, believing it a werewolf. Remote in the distance, they heard a last howl, then the beast left them.

Suddenly one of the Greeks, a young man, stumbled and fell. Titul halted his horse and Kleon went back and bent over the man.

‘What ails you?’ he asked.

Then he saw it was the young man who on the hill-top had spoken of Delos harbour. Now between his lips his breath blew out in a bloody spume. The eunuch squatted beside him and wiped his mouth.

‘I’m wounded in the breast. But I said nothing. Lest you leave me behind to die. Alone. In the dark. Like a slave.’

He coughed and murmured. Broken Greek came to his lips, though he had never seen Greece. The spume grew to a warm stream. Suddenly he gripped Kleon’s arm.

‘Oh, the sea!’

Then Kleon knew that he was dead, and a sad and terrible anger stirred in his frozen heart. But there were no tears in the body that had lost its manhood.