Mandracus had worked his way round to return to his position astride the road leading into the pass. He bellowed to his men to form up either side of him. Those who could did as f they were ordered, chests heaving as their breath plumed in the freezing air.
Caesar glanced round at his men, then thrust his sword I forward. ‘Stop for nothing! Go!’
The small party of riders burst into a gallop, and at the last moment the courage of the brigands failed and most tried to dive out of the way. A handful of the braver men stood by their leader, weapons levelled as the horses charged into them and they were either cut down or trampled. Only Mandracus remained on his feet, swinging his axe from side to side, forcing the nervous riders to swerve round him. Beyond, the road was open and Marcus briefly dared to hope they had escaped. He glanced back and saw Lupus behind him, cloak flickering wildly as he hunched over his saddle, still holding the dagger aloft.
‘Keep up!’ Marcus shouted.
Beyond his friend he saw Mandracus spin round, draw back his axe and swiftly take aim.
‘Lupus! Look out!’ Marcus yelled desperately.
Then the axe flew through the air. For an instant Marcus focused on Lupus’s confused and fearful expression. Then his horse abruptly collapsed to one side of the road, hurling the scribe from the saddle. Blood sprayed into the air from the shattered rear limb of the horse and it kicked and writhed as it struggled to roll back on to its belly. As it tried to rise up, the wounded leg gave way and the horse fell on to its side with a shrill, agonized whinny.
Marcus reined in, half turning his horse so it stood across the track. Then he saw Lupus stir. The boy pushed himself up on to his hands and knees, and shook his head. Marcus was about to ride back when Festus called out.
‘Marcus! What are you doing? Come on, boy!’
‘It’s Lupus! He’s fallen!’
Festus muttered a curse and turned back, slewing his horse to a halt beside Marcus. They both saw Lupus start staggering towards them. He had lost the dagger and stretched out a hand pleadingly. Marcus beckoned frantically with his spare hand as he sheathed his sword.
‘Run!’
Mandracus was already striding along the road behind Lupus, a cruel grin twisting his lips. He stopped beside the horse to snatch up his axe and continued after Lupus as Marcus looked on in horror. Then the spell was broken and he grabbed his reins to ride back and rescue his friend.
‘No!’ Festus shouted and snatched the reins from Marcus’s hands, causing his horse to rise up and snort.
‘What are you doing?’ Marcus snapped. ‘Let go!’
‘It’s too late. Look!’
Marcus turned. He saw Mandracus lean forward to grab Lupus by the scruff of his neck, then hurl him to the ground. Standing over the boy, he began to swirl his axe, looking up at the two riders watching him a short distance away. Behind him his mounted followers were dashing past, eager to chase down the Romans.
‘We can’t save him.’ said Festus. ‘We can only save ourselves, if we go now. Marcus!’
His raised voice jolted Marcus, who took a last despairing look at his friend sprawled in the snow. But he knew that Festus was right: it was too late. With guilt coursing through every inch of his body, Marcus snapped his reins and turned away, galloping after Caesar. The others were already well into the pass, making for the open ground on the far side. Behind them the sound of their pursuers echoed off the walls of the cliff as Mandracus bellowed an order.
‘Run them down! Kill them all!’
His booming voice sounded like thunder in the confined space and Marcus glanced back to see the first of the horsemen sweep past their leader. Then there was another sound. A dull crack. Something moved above the pass and drew Marcus’s eyes. The mass of snow piled there slowly tilted forward and then broke into large chunks amid an explosion of white that fell into the pass with a roar and a hiss. The horsemen barely had time to look up before the avalanche hit them and swept them and their mounts away, burying them amid a great swirl of snow and rocks. Marcus slowed down and turned in his saddle to look properly as the last of the dislodged snow pattered down. Then all was still.
‘Marcus!’ Festus called out. ‘We must go!’
‘Yes.’ Marcus swallowed and nodded. ‘Yes, I’m coming.’
Festus started to gallop away while Marcus took one last look. He felt a numbing sense of loss. ‘Lupus …’
Then he breathed deeply, gathered up his reins and turned his horse towards the others. He urged it into a gallop and the mount carried him away from the horror of the scene.
It was pitch-black and impossible to tell which way was up or down when Lupus recovered his wits enough to think. He lay curled in a ball, sensing an open space in front of him in which to draw breath. He was cold and his limbs were numb. Already the air felt foetid and there was a tingling sensation in his lungs as he began to suffocate. For a moment he could not recall how he had come to be in this place. Perhaps, he thought, he had already passed into the shades and this was what happened after death. An eternity locked in a stifling, black, icy void. The prospect filled him with dread and he tried to move. But he could only shuffle his head from side to side as he clawed at the blanket of snow.
‘No...’ he muttered to himself. ‘No! NO! I am not dead! I do not want to die! No!’
His shouts were muffled and the effort made it harder to breathe, so he stopped and gasped for air. Then he heard them. Voices. They seemed far away at first but gradually came closer, more distinct.
‘Here!’ he cried out. ‘In here!’
There was a pause before he heard them again, near at hand. Then a scraping sound. He sensed movement around him, and a faint gleam to one side. It became a glow as the sound grew louder, and then there was a rush of noise and light and the flow of fresh air. He gulped down several breaths as a hand grasped him under the shoulders, hauling him out of the snow and ice into the open.
‘Mandracus! Over here! I’ve got one of ‘em. A boy.’
Any relief that Lupus felt over his rescue instantly faded as he sat up and took in the scene around him. The pass was filled with a chaotic jumble of snow. There was a man wrapped in furs standing over him. Other men were frantically digging as they searched for their comrades. Some had already been rescued, along with several horses, and they sat nearby, caked in a layer of ice and shivering.
Mandracus picked his way over the debris towards them, his expression angry and dark. He loomed in front of Lupus and glared at him.
‘I lost over twenty of my men, killed by your master and his friends, or buried alive.’
‘Please, please don’t hurt me,’ Lupus begged as he sat trembling.
‘Hurt you?’ Mandracus frowned. ‘I won’t hurt you, boy. I’ve set you free. You are one of us now. For better or worse. Your days as a slave are over.’
Lupus could hardly believe what he had heard. When it did finally penetrate his confusion, he looked up with a surge of hope. ‘I’m free?’
Mandracus nodded. ‘Of course. Do as you wish. I will not stop you. After all, if you want to escape from me, you would simply run back to slavery. But there is one thing I would know. I want the name of your leader. I have a debt to settle with him. What is his name?’ he demanded.
‘Gaius Julius Caear.’
‘The consul?’ Mandracus could not hide his surprise. ‘That was him?’
‘Not any more. His term of office is over. He’s a proconsul now,’ Lupus explained. ‘On his way to take up a new command.’
‘Then what is he doing in the mountains? With such a small escort? Explain.’
‘Before he leaves for Gaul, Caesar has been tasked with putting an end to Brixus and his rebels.’
‘Oh, really?’ Mandracus smiled. ‘Tell me, how close are you to your master?’
Lupus struggled to his feet and stood proudly before the man. ‘I am Caesar’s scribe. I’ve served him for many years.’
‘Good. Then I’m sure you’ll have plenty to tell Brixus when I take you to him. He’ll want to know all he can about his enemy. Who else was in your party?’
‘No one of importance. Just his bodyguards.’
‘What about the other boy?’
‘Marcus?’ Lupus shrugged. ‘Not much to say. He’s my friend. Marcus was training as a gladiator when Caesar bought him.’
A strange gleam appeared in Mandracus’s eyes as he muttered to himself. ‘A boy gladiator... Where was he training? Which school?’
‘Porcino’s school in Capua is what he said.’ Lupus frowned. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’ll tell you later. But first we must find Brixus. He’ll be keen to hear all that you’ve told me, and more.’ Mandracus looked round at the survivors. ‘Perhaps this was worth it,’ he mused as he turned his attention back to Lupus. ‘Perhaps Brixus is right. The time has come to raise the standard of rebellion, and Spartacus, once again ...’
8
Ariminum was a small town on the east coast of Italia, with a modest port where the river entered the sea. On either side a broad beach of brown sand stretched out for several miles. The water was shallow for a good distance out and Marcus could see why wealthy Romans came here to rest and play in the summer months. But in winter the town reverted to being a quiet backwater where occasional cargo ships dropped anchor and the local fishermen sat on the sand in the shelter of their beached boats, carefully examining their nets. A mile to the north lay the camp of the army that Caesar had been appointed to command.
The twenty thousand men of the four legions occupied an area that dwarfed the nearby town. The camp was in the shape of a vast square, with one legion assigned to each quadrant. A low perimeter wall and ditch surrounded the city of tents, with towers at regular intervals and a fortified gate halfway along each side. Two wide thoroughfares intersected at the heart of the camp where the largest tents stood. Around them stretched row after row of goatskin tents, each shared by eight legionaries. Outside the camp, thousands of men were engaged in drilling and weapons practice.
It was a spectacular sight but Marcus could not summon up any excitement. He sat in his saddle beside the other riders, surveying the scene from the last rise in the ground before the road reached Ariminum. Three days had passed since their lucky escape in the mountains. The man injured in the leg had been left at Hispellum, the first town they had reached. A Greek surgeon there said he would recover, but would be left with a crippling limp for the rest of his life. It was the loss of Lupus that had hit Marcus hard. He had encountered few people he considered friends since being enslaved, and to lose another was a cruel reminder of his loneliness.
There had been Brixus during his days at the gladiator school in Capua. Then Brixus had discovered Marcus’s identity before escaping from the school to find his former comrades from the Spartacus revolt. And now they too knew that the son of their hero was alive. When Brixus had revealed the truth, it had shaken Marcus’s world to the ground. Titus, the man he thought was his father, and had admired and loved, had been one of the Romans who crushed the slave revolt and killed his real father. It had been hard to accept at first, but since Marcus had learned more about Spartacus his respect for the father he had never known had steadily increased. Respect, but not the affection he had known for Titus. How could it be otherwise?
Then, when he had been brought to Rome, he’d befriended Portia, Caesar’s niece, after saving her life. A few years older than Marcus, she had been sent to Rome to be raised by her uncle while her father campaigned in Hispania. Her loneliness and her gratitude to Marcus had drawn them closer than was usual for the niece of a consul and one of his slaves. However, Marcus had always felt a sense of reserve in her company. There were limits to what a slave could say openly in such circumstances. Marcus was a little nervous at the prospect of meeting her again in Ariminum. She would surely have changed now she was married to Quintus, and might not like reminding of her closeness to one of her uncle’s servants, even though he had been granted his freedom.
His other friends had been the two boys Marcus had shared a cell with in Caesar’s household: Corvus and Lupus. The former had worked in the kitchen, often bitter about the way life had treated him. But he had courage and in the end had given his life to protect Portia. Then there was Lupus. Lupus was a gentle soul who loved his craft and read books too, and even seemed to enjoy them. Now Lupus was gone, and Marcus felt alone again as he grieved for his friend.
‘We’ll make for the camp first,’ Caesar announced, interrupting Marcus’s dark thoughts, ‘before I arrange for accommodation in Ariminum.’
He waved his hand forward and broke into an easy canter to cover the last few miles. The others spurred their mounts and followed him down the road. A short distance from the town gate they turned on to a side road that led towards a wooden bridge over the river. The autumn and winter rains in the Apennines had swollen the river so that it threatened to breach the banks as it rushed past the pylons supporting the bridge.
As the riders approached the camp, they reached the first group of soldiers exercising at the palus, a wooden stake the size of a man. The legionaries stood crouched before their targets and alternated between thrusting their swords at the posts, and smashing their shields into them. Marcus was familiar with the technique from his days at the gladiator school. The centurion in charge of the soldiers glanced up but did not salute. His new commander was wearing a simple cloak and no sign of the authority granted to him in Rome. Caesar nodded a greeting as they pounded by.
It was different at the gate to the camp, though. There a timber bridge extended across the ditch and a section of fully armed men stood guard on the far side. Caesar reined in and walked his horse across the bridge, its hoofs making hollow thuds. The duty optio held up a hand and stood in his way.
‘Halt! What is your business here?’
Caesar tugged lightly on his reins and reached into the bag hanging from one of his saddle horns. ‘Bear with me a moment, I have it here ... somewhere.’
The optio puffed his cheeks impatiently. ‘If you’re the grain merchants the quartermaster’s been waiting for, then you’re late and I warn you he won’t be a happy man.’