‘Hush, child,’ his mother said after a while. ‘There’s nothing you can do. He’s gone. His shade has joined his comrades in the underworld. Titus is at peace. He is watching us now. You must show him that you are strong. So dry your eyes.’ She paused a moment, then continued, ‘Make your father proud of you. You must honour his memory, even if you don’t yet know…’ She stopped and eased him gently back. Marcus’s eyes were sore from his crying, and his head felt worse than ever, pounding away inside his skull. She stared directly at him and he nodded.
With great difficulty he controlled his grief and looked around the cage again. ‘Where are we going?’
‘They’re taking us to Stratos.’
Marcus frowned. He had never heard of the place. ‘Is that far from home?’
She nodded.
He looked out through the bars. The wagon was rumbling along a broad road. On one side hills rose up, covered in dense forests of pine and oak. On the other, olive groves stretched out. Through the gaps he occasionally caught sight of the sea sparkling in the distance. He did not recognize the landscape.
‘How long have we been in this… cage?’
‘Three days. You’ve been unconscious while we were taken by boat to the mainland and put on to this wagon.’
Three days! Marcus was shocked at the thought. They must already be further from his home on the farm than he had ever been. He felt afraid.
‘Marcus, listen – we’re being taken to the slave market,’ his mother explained as gently as she could. ‘Decimus has ordered that we be sold as slaves to cover the debt. I think Decimus is trying to take us far away from Leucas so that there’s less chance anyone will discover precisely what he has done in order to get his money back.’
Marcus listened to her words with difficulty. The thought of being sold into slavery had hit him like another blow. Of all the fates that could befall a person, slavery was one of the worst of them. A slave was no longer a person, but a mere object. He looked up at his mother. ‘They can’t sell us, we’re free. We’re citizens.’
‘Not if we can’t pay Decimus his money,’ she replied sadly. ‘In that respect alone he is acting within the law, but he knows if word got out that he had killed one of Pompeius’s veterans and enslaved his family, then life might become very difficult for him if Pompeius came to hear of it.’ She lifted his chin with her hand and stared directly into his eyes. ‘We must be careful, Marcus. Thermon said that he would have us beaten if we uttered one word about the situation to anyone. You understand?’
Marcus nodded. ‘What can we do?’
‘Do? Nothing for the moment.’ She turned her head away and her voice continued, broken and despairing, ‘The Gods have forsaken me. They must have. After all that has happened, to return me to slavery is a cruel blow. So cruel.’
Marcus felt a chill in his heart. What could his mother mean? Return her to slavery? ‘You were a slave, mother?’
She kept her face turned from him as she replied, ‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘When I was a child, Marcus.’
‘No.’
She nodded. ‘I was sold into a household in Campania when I was four years old, south of Rome. I was a slave for over sixteen years, until Spartacus and his rebels came to the estate and set us all free.’
‘You joined Spartacus?’ Marcus’s mind filled with memories of the stories his father had told him about the great slave revolt. And all the time, his mother had kept her silence. He cleared his throat. ‘Did father know?’
She turned her face back to him with an expression of bitter amusement. ‘Of course Titus knew. He was there at the end. At the final battle. He found me in the slave camp when the legions sacked it after the battle. He claimed me as spoils of war.’ Her tone had turned bitter. She swallowed and continued more calmly. ‘That’s how we met, Marcus. I was his slave. His woman. For the first two years, until he gave me my freedom, on condition that I became his wife.’
Marcus was silent as he reflected on what she had told him. It had never occurred to him that his parents could have met in such a way. They had always been there, constant and unchanging, and the idea that they might have led quite different lives before was something he had never really considered. True, his father had told him tales of his life in the legion, but in Marcus’s eyes the hero of such stories was not a young man, just a different man. Marcus had always imagined his father as he was now. He felt a stab of grief as he corrected himself – as his father had been when he was alive.
Then something else struck him and he looked up at his mother again. ‘The slave revolt was ten years ago, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I’m ten. If you married father after two years, then that means I must have been born a slave.’
She shook her head. ‘Titus had it declared that you were his son, and therefore free, the moment you were born.’
‘I see.’ Marcus was not certain how he felt. This was all painfully new to him, in addition to what had happened since the men arrived at the farm. His thoughts were interrupted by a bitter laugh from his mother. He looked at her in concern. There was a slightly mad look in her dark eyes.
‘Mother? Mother, what’s so funny?’
‘Funny? Nothing’s funny.’ Her lips quivered. ‘It’s just that I was born free, in Thrace, then enslaved when I was an infant. Then Spartacus freed me, then I was a slave again, until your father freed me. And now? A slave once again.’ She lowered her head and was still for a moment. Then Marcus saw a tear drip down on to her thigh. He shuffled round so that he could put a hand on her shoulder.
‘Mother?’ He swallowed nervously. ‘I’ll look after you. I swear it. On my life.’
‘You’re a boy. My little boy,’ she muttered. ‘I should be looking after you. Yet, what can I do? I am a slave… There’s nothing I can do.’ She raised her head and he saw the grief in her eyes. ‘After all that the Gods have done to me, I thought that they had finally given me some peace on that farm. Peace where I could grow old with Titus and raise a fine son who would never know the terrible burden of slavery.’
‘We won’t be slaves for long, mother. Decimus can’t do this to us.’ He frowned with determination. ‘I won’t let him get away with it.’
She stared into his eyes with pity, then gently pulled him into her arms and held him tightly. ‘Marcus. You are all that I have left.’
Her tears began to flow again, and Marcus felt his own eyes burn with a similar urge to cry. He gritted his teeth as he looked over her shoulder at the other slaves in the cage, fighting back his tears. They looked back with blank faces, too weary or despairing to react. Marcus silently swore a sacred oath that he would never accept slavery. Never.
6
It took another four long days before the wagon reached its destination, but finally, at dusk on the last day, they entered the town of Stratos.
Set astride one of the main trade routes across the mountainous interior of Graecia, the town had long outgrown the walls that dated back to the days of the small city-states that were almost constantly at war with one another. Nowadays the walls of the town surrounded a maze of narrow streets where the wealthier families lived and did their business. Beyond the walls sprawled the ramshackle buildings of the poor.
During the journey, Marcus and his mother had little to do with the others inside the cage. Their fellow slaves knew only a handful of words in Greek, had no understanding of Latin and spoke in unknown barbarian tongues.
The wagon rattled down the main road into the heart of the town, making for the slave market.
For Marcus, who had been raised on a farm for all his life, and who had only ever known the fishing village at Nydri, the town was unnerving. The shrill cries of street vendors and beggars assaulted his ears, while the stench of rubbish and sewage filled the air. He wrinkled his nose as he breathed in.