From the folds of his dark cloak, Ashur produced a small leather pouch, which he handed to Batiatus. Batiatus gave it a shake, and both men heard the unmistakable jangle of coins.
“Mantilus concealed this beneath rock close to pool,” Ashur said. “He chose location with care.”
Batiatus narrowed his eyes.
“Coin for the traitor in our midst no doubt. A man short of brains enough to betray me.” He looked broodingly at Ashur. “You could identify this rock you spied?”
Ashur inclined his head.
“Mantilus marked it for return.”
Batiatus bared his teeth.
“Then let us set trap, and snatch this viper by the neck.”
For the second time in two nights Ashur found himself shivering on the mountainside. On this occasion, however, he was in an infinitely better mood than he had been the previous evening. This time he was not alone, but accompanied by Batiatus and Doctore. All three of them were perched behind a large rock, overlooking the pool which Mantilus had poisoned that morning.
So far Ashur, on Batiatus’s orders, had kept silent about his discovery. It had meant that the gladiators and the household slaves had unwittingly been forced to drink the tainted water for an extra day, but Batiatus had thought that this was a small price to pay if it meant not alerting their quarry, and thus frightening him away. Aside from the three of them, only Spartacus knew of what had transpired that morning. Though he had expressed no particular desire to join them on their evening’s quest, Batiatus had nevertheless clapped him on the shoulder and assured him that he should not brood on the fact that he had been left behind, because once the traitor had been uncovered the Thracian would be rewarded with a major part in the infliction of his punishment.
All at once Oenomaus, invisible in the darkness aside from the occasional gleam of his eyes, which reflected the sickly, pale light of the cloud-wreathed moon, murmured, “He comes.”
Ashur frowned. He had heard nothing. But barely had the thought of saying so entered his head than the faint sound of crunching footsteps and shifting rubble reached his ears.
A few moments later he saw the bobbing light of a flaming torch wink into view as the newcomer rounded an outcrop of rock and picked his way gingerly along the downward-sloping path, which was littered with scree and loose boulders and sparse foliage. Despite himself, Ashur tensed at the prospect of action, his stomach curling in on itself with excitement and apprehension. Beside him he heard Oenomaus breathing deeply and evenly, and sensed the veteran ex-gladiator standing motionless and watchful, like a panther observing the approach of unsuspecting prey. Batiatus stood on Oenomaus’s other side. He had given instruction that they were not to approach the traitor until he had retrieved his blood money from beneath the rock-where Ashur had replaced it less than an hour before-and was standing with it in his hand.
Just as Spartacus had surmised, the man was a household guard. In the flickering light of his torch, they could all clearly make out his familiar uniform beneath the dark cloak that he wore around his shoulders. They watched as the man halted by the pool and brought his burning torch low to the ground. The light illuminated his features as he began to cast about, searching in the dark for the rock which Mantilus had marked.
He was no one special. The household guards came and went as availability dictated, and this was one who Ashur vaguely recognized, but who he couldn’t have said for certain he had actually ever exchanged a word with. He was just another greedy man in a world that was overburdened with them. Ashur felt no particular animosity toward him, but neither-despite considering what the traitor’s ultimate fate was likely to be-did he feel any particular sympathy either.
After searching for a few minutes, during which time he occasionally picked up rocks and examined them, only to fling them in disgust over his shoulder, the guard finally found what he was looking for. They saw a grin spread across the glowing orange mask of his face, and then he darted forward, leaning down to push aside what was evidently the rock which Mantilus had marked with a cross. Next moment he was rising triumphantly to his feet with the pouch of money in his clenched fist. As he squeezed it in evident delight, Ashur, Oenomaus and Batiatus all heard the metallic chink of coins moving against one another.
“Now,” Batiatus hissed, and stepped forward. Although he was trying to be surreptitious, the near-blackness up on the mountainside, combined with his eagerness to apprehend the culprit, caused him to dislodge a lump of rock with his foot, which clattered down the mountain in the darkness, gaining momentum as it fell.
Startled, the man looked up, raising his torch above his head. Whether it cast enough light to illuminate the three of them standing there, Ashur had no idea, but suddenly the guard turned and began to run, slithering on scree and half-tripping over rocks and spindly bushes in his effort to get away.
“The shit attempts escape!” Batiatus snapped, and, regardless of his own safety, began to lope down the mountain toward him, dislodging yet more loose stones.
“I have him, dominus,” Oenomaus said, his voice an ominous rumble in the darkness. Ashur was vaguely aware of the big African drawing back his arm, and then the familiar sharp crack of his whip seemed to split the night in two.
Almost immediately the guard’s feet flipped up into the air in front of him as his body was jerked backward. He crashed on to his back on the rocky slope without making a sound, his torch and the leather pouch flying out of his hands in different directions. The torch landed in the lee of a rock a few feet away and continued to burn, providing just enough illumination for the rest of them to see by. The leather pouch disappeared into the darkness, landing with a weighty clink somewhere close by. Making a mental note of where he thought the sound had come from, Ashur began to pick his way carefully down the slope toward it.
Batiatus, meanwhile, who had a head-start, was first to reach the man. He was lying on the ground, his eyes bulging in panic, fingers clawing desperately at the whip, which had coiled its way tightly around his neck several times, cutting off his air. Batiatus stared down at him dispassionately, before clenching his teeth in fury.
“Fucking treacherous cock!” he snarled. And then, raising his foot high in the air, he stamped down hard on the man’s balls, grinding his heel into his groin.
The man’s mouth opened wide in a silent scream of agony and his eyes became so bulbous that they looked in danger of bursting from his head. His attempts to free himself became ever more frantic, until finally his scrabbling fingers found a gap between the thin black cord of the bull-hide whip and his own reddening skin, and he managed to wrench it away from his constricted throat, the end unraveling and loosening as he did so. Even as he gulped in air, his gasps for breath like small, raw screams, the guard curled into himself, his hands now going down to cup his mangled, aching balls. As he rolled on to his side, Batiatus drew back his foot and kicked him once more, this time in the small of his back.
“You shove greedy hand up the wrong ass!” he snarled, spittle flying from his mouth.
XII
When the men staggered out into the yard the next morning, groggy after another night of broken sleep, they found Oenomaus, whip in hand as always, standing with his arms folded, waiting for them.
“Form up,” he ordered. “Dominus desires a word.”
The men looked at each other, blinking and rubbing the sleep from their eyes. This was highly unusual. Dominus usually only appeared-if at all-after breakfast, once the day’s training was well underway. For him to show his face with the dawn light still streaking the sky overhead must mean that he had something of great importance to tell them.
“If he announces more games,” Varro muttered to Spartacus as he trudged beside him, “I may hurl myself from cliff to save opponent the trouble of cleaving my head from shoulders.”