Spartacus by Howard Fast Page A

memories persist among the damned people of the black escarpment?

    “Thracian,” they call him, and now he feels them on every side, and when he stretches out a hand he feels the face of one of them, all covered with tears. Ah, tears are a waste.

    “Where are we, Spartacus, where are we?” one of them whispers.

    “We are not lost. We remember how we came.”

    “Who will remember us?”

    “We are not lost,” he repeats.

    “But who will remember us?”

    One cannot talk in such a fashion. He is like a father to them. For men twice his years, he is a father in the old tribal way. They are all Thracians, but he is the Thracian. So he chants to them softly, like a father telling a tale to his children:
     
    “As on the beach where churning water broke,

    In close array before the western wind,

    Churning finely up from the ocean deeps,

    And arching as it breaks upon the land,

    Its white foam spewing hard and far,

    Just so in such array the Danaans moved

    Unhesitating to the battle line—”
     

    He captures them, and holds their misery, thinking to himself, “What a wonder, what a magic in the old chant!” He eases them out of this terrible darkness and they stand on the pearly beaches of Troy. There are the white towers of the city! There are the golden, bronze-girt warriors! The soft chant rises and falls and loosens the knots of terror and anxiety, and in the darkness there is shuffling and motion. The slaves do not have to know Greek, and indeed the Thracian dialect of Spartacus is little enough like the tongue of Attica; they know of the chant, where the old wisdom of a people is preserved and kept for the time of trial . . .

    Finally, Spartacus lays himself down to sleep. He will sleep. Young as he is, he long ago met and conquered the terrible enemy of sleeplessness. Now he composes himself and explores the memories of childhood. He wants cool, clear blue sky and sunshine and soft breezes, and all of these are there. He lies among the pines, watching the goats graze, and an old, old man is beside him. The old man teaches him to read. With a stick, the old man traces letter after letter in the dirt. “Read and learn, my child,” the old man tells him. “So do we who are slaves carry a weapon with us. Without it, we are like the beasts in the fields. The same god who gave fire to men gave them the power to write down his thoughts, so that they may recall the thoughts of the gods in the golden time of long ago. Then men were close to the gods and talked with them at will, and there were no slaves then. And that time will come again.”

    So Spartacus remembers, and presently his memory turns into a dream, and presently he sleeps . . .

    He is awakened in the morning by the beating of a drum. The drum is beaten at the entrance to the barracks, and its crash echoes and re-echoes through the stone cavern. He rises, and all about him he hears his fellow slaves rising. They move in the pitch darkness toward the entrance. Spartacus takes his cup and bowl with him; if he had forgotten it, there would have been no food or drink for him this day; but he is wise in the ways of slavery, and there is not such great variation in the manner of slavery that he should not anticipate. As he moves, he feels the press of bodies around him, and he lets himself move with them to the opening at the end of the stone barracks. And all the while, the drum continues its crashing beat.

    It is the hour before the dawn, and now the desert is as cool as it will ever be. In this single hour of the day, the desert is a friend. A gentle breeze cools the face of the black escarpment. The sky is a wonderful fading blue-black, and the twinkling stars gently disappear, the only womanly things in this cheerless, hopeless world of men. Even slaves in the gold mines of Nubia—from which none ever return—must have a little surcease; and thus they are given the hour before dawn, so that a poignant bitter-sweet may fill their hearts