Raptor (102 page)

Those things I already knew, but the Gothic landlords told me other things that I had not known, things more pertinent to my compilation of history. I was told that, when the Goths left their early inhabitation on the Amber Coast, it was a King Filimer who led them inland and southward, to find a new homeland around the Mouths of the Danuvius. And, I was told, it was a King Amal the Fortunate who had been the progenitor of the Amaling line.

I learned also of some of the ways and manners and customs of those earliest Goths.

“Before they ever owned horses and learned to ride,” said one old man, “when they still hunted afoot, our ancestors improved the simple throwing-spear by inventing the twisting-spear. A hunter would wind a rope in a spiral coil about the shaft of his spear—not tying it fast, you understand—and then, holding tight to the rope end, would fling the spear with all his might. The rope, briskly unwinding, made the spear spin as it left his hand, so it would fly more straight and true and hard to strike its target prey.”

“But then,” said another elderly Goth, “during the long migration of our ancestors, they crossed the flatlands where in time they learned the many uses of horses and the skill of riding them. Thereafter, the Goths hunted and fought on horseback, using swords, spears, bows. But they also invented one weapon never known even by the world’s
best
horsemen, the Huns. That was the sliuthr, a long rope with a loop at the end, made with a running knot. At full gallop, a Gothic warrior could throw that loop an immense distance, and yank it tight around his prey—whether it be a game animal or a man or the man’s horse—and bind that prey instantly helpless. Best of all, it was a weapon even more silent than an arrow, ideal for ambushing an enemy rider or felling a posted guard.”

And the Goths, during their ages-long migration, had acquired other things than weaponry.

“They learned, as well, the arts of the Alani and the ancient Dacians and the once cultured Scythians,” an old woman told me. “Those peoples are all now dispersed or degenerate or totally extinct, but their arts live on in the minds and hands of Gothic artisans. Our jewelers know how to bend and twine gold wire into gorgeous filigree, how to back-hammer a design into a sheet of metal, how to rub enamel into graven designs, how to back a gem with gold or silver leaf so the stone gleams more brightly even than it would in nature.”

But the Goths’ gradual education and cultivation and refinement had not, it seemed, made them at all effete or neglectful of their sometimes severe codes of conduct.

“No Gothic king has ever
imposed
a law on his subjects,” said yet another old man. “The only Gothic laws are those that were conceived in antiquity and proved worthy by long observance. A man caught in a crime is held to be guilty of it. Say he slays a fellow tribesman without good reason. His punishment is to be slain by that man’s kin, or else to mollify those kinfolk by paying a satisfactory wairgulth. That is why ‘guilt’ and ‘debt’ are the same word in our Old Language. Or if a crime is committed and a man is not caught, but only accused of it, he can best prove his innocence in the trial by ordeal. Alternatively, he may be tried before a judge, and have his innocence warranted by a sufficient number of oath-helpers, so called, those being witnesses as to the probity of his character.”

The old man paused and smiled. “Of course, anyone having experience of
civilized
judges would hardly trust their adjudication, for they can be so easily swayed by bribery or self-interest. That was never so with any Gothic judge. His judgment seat was draped with a genuine human skin, flayed from some former judge who had proved corruptible. It may have been done so long ago that the skin was only a worn and tattered rag… because not many later judges would
ignore
such a reminder to be always fair and honest.”

As I think I have made plain, the Gothic keepers of gasts-razna told me more useful things than did the Ruman keepers of ospitune. But both Goths and Rumani told me one thing that was the same, and it was a warning. A Ruman landlord was the first to voice it:

“Take care, young man, that you and your companions keep to the directly northern path you have been traveling so far. Or bear west of north, if your quest should take you that way, but do not, on any account, stray to the eastward. Some distance north of here, you will come to the river Tyras. Whatever you do, stay on the western bank of it. On the eastern bank begin the tablelands of Sarmatia, and in those pine forests lurk the terrible viramne.”

“I do not comprehend your Ruman word ‘viramne,’ ” I said.

“In Roman Latin it would be ‘viragines.’ “

“Akh, ja,” I said. “Those females whom the ancient Greek historians called the Amazons. Are you telling me that they really do exist?”

“Whether they are veritably the Amazons, I could not say. I can say that they are a tribe of viciously warlike females.”

Genovefa was present, and she asked, as a woman would, interested in measuring the possible competition, “Are those women as beautiful as they are reputed to be?”

The Ruman spread his hands. “That I cannot say either. I have never seen them, and I know no one who has.”

“Then why do you fear them?” I asked. “How do you even know they are there?”

“The occasional vagrant traveler has wandered into their lands, and
very
occasionally one has escaped with his life, to tell hair-raising stories of what he suffered at their hands. I have never personally met such a survivor, but one does hear the stories. Also it is widely known that a band of Ruman colonists, yearning for farmland of their own, once got desperate enough to cross the Tyras, planning to clear a place for themselves in the Sarmatian forests. They have never been heard of since, not even by the relatives whom they left behind.”

“Vái, mere rumors,” Genovefa scoffed. “That is not evidence.”

The landlord gave her a look. “For me, the rumors suffice. I am not eager to seek evidence. If you are wise, you will not risk
being
the evidence.”

I said, “I have heard other tales of that virago tribe. But no tale has explained how, if they are all women, they propagate their kind.”

“It is said that they detest both sexual congress and childbearing, but do those things as a duty, to keep their tribe from dwindling. Therefore they submit to infrequent connection with the males of other savage Sarmatian tribes—the wretched Kutriguri, perhaps. But when the infants are born, the viramne expose all the males and let them die, and keep and rear only the females. That is why no king has ever sent a force to try exterminating the viramne. What warrior would willingly go against them? If he did not get slain outright, he could have no hope of living as a captive until he might be ransomed. Could he expect mercy from women who murder even their infant sons?”

“What nonsense!” Genovefa said impatiently, and then to me, “Why do you listen to balgs-daddja that has nothing to do with our quest? It is long past bedtime, Thorn. Come, let us retire.”

The Ruman gave her another look. “We have a saying in these parts. He is not an honest man who burns his tongue and fails to tell the others at table that the soup is scalding hot. I try my best to be an honest man.”

“Still,” I said, half humorously, “I
should
like to find out if the viragines are beautiful.”

Genovefa gave me a smoldering look, and the Ruman gave her a pensive one. Then he said only, “The most inviting soup can be scalding hot.”

And we heard the warning repeated by Gothic landlords, who called the Amazons baga-qinons, “war-women.” I even paused one day in a Slovene village just to ask if those people also knew of such a female tribe. They did, and as best I could make out the Slovene word for them, it was something like pozorzheni, meaning something like “women to beware of.” And everyone who spoke of those women told us they lived on the grasslands east of the river Tyras, and solemnly warned us, “Do not go there.”

When Genovefa, Maggot and I had traveled up the valley of the Pyretus for about a hundred and eighty Roman miles, the river’s course abruptly swung off to the westward. So we left it, continuing directly north and traversing some miles of rolling hills until we came down into the valley of the Tyras, and we went upstream along that, northwestward. We kept to the river’s western bank, not so much because we were heeding the warnings we had heard, but simply because we had no need or wish to cross over the water.

We were north of the Carpatae Mountains now, farther north than any of us had ever been before, and we saw numerous things new to us. Among the wild animals native to those parts, we came upon what must be the largest of all the world’s deer: the great northern elk, immense creatures bearing palmate antler racks that rival the spread of some trees—and the smallest of all the world’s horses: the dun-colored little ponies called tarpan by the local Slovenes. Since the lodging places for travelers were fewer hereabout, and longer distances apart, we spent many more nights camping in the open and having to rely on our own resources for food. I did not slay any of the elk for our meals, because we would have had to waste so much of its meat, and that would have been unthinkable for a woodsman. But we did dine twice or thrice on tarpan flesh, and Genovefa broiled it most tastily. From the Tyras waters Maggot could hook just about any kind of fish I had ever heard of, and, even more easily, could scoop up with an improvised net whole batches of the little white lavarets or silver bleaks or the still smaller gobies, all of which made delicious eating.

Though Genovefa was more than capable at cooking, she had no love for the chore, and sulked and muttered over it. So whenever we did come to a lodging place, even if it was only a Slovene krchma, she would insist on our taking advantage of it. I would have been willing in any case, just to give myself and Maggot a rest from hearing Genovefa’s mealtime complaints. In those places, too, we encountered things new to us. The Slovenes of the north seemed to subsist mainly on thick soups, and to their lodgers the krchma keepers serve little else. So we ate soups made of unfamiliar ingredients—sorrel soup and beer soup and sour-rye soup and even a soup made of beef blood and cherries—and we found them all surprisingly good.

At one krchma, another traveler was staying the night, and I made his acquaintance right gladly, although he was a Rugian and therefore a possible future enemy of myself and my king. I was pleased to meet him simply because he was an amber trader, the first I had ever spoken to, and he was traveling south from the Amber Coast with a pack-horse load of that precious material to sell in whatever nearest market could best afford it. The man proudly showed me samples of his wares—translucent chunks of amber of every color from palest yellow through gold and red to bronze, some of the chunks holding in their depths perfectly preserved flower petals, bits of fern frond, whole dragonflies—and I admired them unreservedly. I called in Maggot from his stable quarters, and introduced him, and we three sat together by the fireside, sharing jugs of beer. Maggot and the trader were still deep in converse when Genovefa and I went off to our bedchamber.

There she grumbled, “I think it is time I resumed being Thor. I am tired of being slighted.”

“Slighted? How?”

“Do I get introduced by name to a stranger? Ni allis! But that big-nosed Armenian creature? Ja waíla! The name Genovefa is perhaps negligible. The name Thor is not. It makes people take notice. And I prefer to be noticed, not treated as a mere appendage to the grand marshal Thorn. On the trail I am only your servile cook. In company I am regarded as your traveling whore, and am condescendingly ignored. I suggest that, from this place onward, we take turns. You ride for some days as Veleda, and I as Thor, and so on alternately. See how
you
like being the female and the mediocrity.”

“I should not like it,” I said with weary patience. “But not because I have ever felt inferior as a female. Only because I
am
the king’s marshal, and I must maintain that identity while I am on the king’s mission. You may do as you please. Be man or woman, whichever you please, whenever you please.”

“Very well. This night I wish to be Thor, and no one else. Here—put your hand here and you will realize that I am Thor.”

So all that night I was Veleda, and no one else. And Thor rode me hard, punishingly, vindictively, using me as his receptacle in every way a female can be used, again and again. But if he was doing his utmost to make me feel inferior, he did not succeed. A woman can be soft and submissive without ever feeling subservient, all the while thoroughly—akh!
throbbingly!
—enjoying the experience.

During the intervals between our couplings that night, while Thor rested and recuperated, I reflected. Early in life, I had recognized in myself the various masculine and feminine traits of personality, and thereafter I had striven to cultivate the more admirable attributes of both sexes, and to subdue the baser. But, like a speculum image, in which everything is the same but reversed, this twin of mine seemed to have done just the opposite. Thor was everything reprehensible in a male: insensitive, overbearing, self-centered, demanding and greedy. Genovefa was everything unlovely in a female: fretful, suspicious, spiteful, demanding and greedy. Both those entities were beautiful to look upon, and eminently satisfying in sexual embrace. But one cannot be always admiring or embracing one’s mate. Had I been a woman, I could not long have endured the boorish Thor as a husband. Had I been a man, I could not have endured the shrewish Genovefa as a wife. Yet here was I, all but wedded to them
both.

I was learning what my juika-bloth had learned when it fed on uncooked boar entrails—that a raptor can be eaten by its prey, from the inside. Just so, as if my guts were invisibly bleeding, I was being sapped of my strength, my will, my
self.
For the regaining of my independence and individuality, perhaps for my very survival, I must disgorge this prey and wean myself from this disastrous diet. But how could I, when it was so irresistibly tasty as to be habit-forming?