Raptor (103 page)

Well, I should like to believe that I
could
eventually have done it of my own volition, but Genovefa did it for me. I have often since then wondered if her namesake, queen to the Visigoths’ great King Alareikhs or Alaricus or Arthurus, had been anything like my Genovefa. If she was, and if the old songs are true—telling how that queen was caught in adultery with the king’s best warrior, Landefrid—I have wondered whether Alareikhs felt, as I did, some relief mingled with his rage when he discovered the betrayal. To be truthful, my own rage may have been mixed also with some mordant amusement, because my latter-day Genovefa bestowed her favors on a person much less worthy than a warrior.

Thor’s having performed entirely as Thor, that one night long, seemed for a time to have satisfied my consort’s yearning for variety. There was no more talk of our alternating our male and female identities and costumes as we went on. Genovefa remained Genovefa and I remained Thorn, and every day we dressed that way, as we continued upstream along the Tyras. We came into another of the regions destitute of lodging places, so Genovefa had to work as our cook every night, but she did that with no more than nominal scowling and mutterings. To provide fish for the pot, Maggot had only to step aside from the trail to the riverbank and drop in a hook and line. But to procure flesh-meat I had to delve into the woods and go some way from the river. Though the road that ran beside it was hardly a crowded highway, there was always some human traffic on it, and that kept the wild animals at a distance.

One afternoon, I kneed Velox aside into the forest on one of those forays and, before I flushed and killed a good, plump auths-hana, I had to roam so far that it was well after sundown when I got back to where my companions had already laid camp. Maggot took Velox’s reins without remarking on anything unusual having occurred during my absence, and Genovefa made no remark when I took the big bird to the fire she had lighted. But I instantly perceived something out of the ordinary.

Even there in the wide-open air, even over the pungent odor of the fire’s wood smoke, I could smell that Genovefa had been engaging in sexual connection of some sort. Of course, that in itself was nothing exceptional; scarcely a night went by that we two did not; but I had become as intimately familiar with the aromas of her various emissions as I was with my own. This time there was an unaccustomed scent—corylaceous, not lactucaceous, so the source was male, not female, but that source was neither Thor nor Thorn.

I eyed Genovefa as she set to plucking the auths-hana, and for the moment I said nothing. I was going over in my mind the persons we had met or passed on the trail that day. There had been five: two men on horseback, with traveling packs behind; a man and woman on muleback; an aged charcoal-burner afoot, staggering under his high-heaped load. Each man had given at least a glance, if not a stare, at my comely riding companion. And some other or others might have come along while I was away hunting.

Genovefa was skewering the bird on a trimmed, straight branch when I asked grimly, “Who was it?”

“Who was what?” she said, without looking up, laying the spit over the fire on two forked upright sticks.

“You have very recently coupled with some man besides myself.”

Now she glared at me, defiantly but warily at the same time. “Did you sneak to watch me? Did you see me do any such thing?”

“I need not. I can smell the ejecta of a male human being.”

“Vái, I thought my own senses were acute. You must have the nose of a ferret.” She shrugged indifferently. “Ja, I lay with a man.”

“Why?”

“Why not? There was a man, there was an opportunity, you were not here. I pretended that my horse had picked up a stone in the frog of his hoof. I bade Maggot ride on ahead.” She added coolly, “I had not ample time, but time enough.”

I said, with feeling, “But why,
why,
Genovefa, would you do so sordid a thing? When, between us two, we have everything that either of us could possibly—”

“Spare me,” she said, rolling her eyes as if she had been tried beyond endurance. “Are you going to preach fidelity and constancy? I told you, I am tired of being your appendage. I wish to be noticed for my own sake. This man noticed me.”

I bellowed, “Who? Which man?” I seized her shoulders and shook her violently. “I have been reviewing every man who has passed. Which was it?”

The shaking chattered her teeth so that, when she spoke, she had to speak in spurts. “It was… it was the… the charcoal-burner…”

“What?!”
I roared, so astounded that I let go of her. “Of the men on this trail today, why that derelict and filthy Slovene peasant?”

She smirked complacently. “Akh, I have had Slovenes before. But I had never before tried such an old man. Or such a dirty one. Except for the novelty of it, I must admit that I found it disappointing.”

“You lie! You know I will go and kill the culprit. You are protecting the real one.”

“Ni allis. I care not whom you kill, so long as it does not discommode me.”

“Maggot!” I shouted. “Do not unsaddle Velox. Fetch him here.”

Undoubtedly having heard all our uproar, Maggot came almost hiding behind the horse, creeping apprehensively. I told him, “Mind our meal. Turn the spit. We will be back before it is done.”

Then I almost hurled Genovefa into the saddle and vaulted up behind her, and kicked Velox to a gallop. We had to retrace the trail only a short way before we found the old man. He was sitting hunched beside a small fire of his own charcoal, roasting mushrooms stuck on twigs. He looked up in surprise as I dragged Genovefa from the horse and pulled her over to him. Then I whipped out my sword and laid its edge across his throat, and snarled at Genovefa:

“Tell him to confess. I wish to hear it from
him.”

The aged wretch was spluttering, “Prosím… prosím,” the Slovene for “please,” and his eyes bulged in terror. Suddenly, instead of words, he spluttered blood from his mouth, all over his beard and my sword hand. Then, just as suddenly, he toppled away from me and I saw Genovefa’s belt knife protruding from his back.

“There,” she said, giving me a winsome smile. “Have I made amends, Thorn?”

“I have no proof that he was the one.”

“You do. Just look at him. That expression of serenity spreading over his face. There is a man who died happy.”

She bent to retrieve her knife, casually wiped it clean on the old peasant’s ragged cloak and returned it to her waist sheath.

“If I choose to believe you,” I said icily, “then this makes twice you have cheated me with the same man. I wanted to slay him myself.” I put the point of my sword under her chin. With my other hand, I bunched her tunic and dragged her face close to mine. “I wanted you to be convinced that I shall do the same to you if ever you stray again.”

I saw genuine fright in her blue eyes, and she sounded sincere when she said, “I believe you.”

But on her breath I smelled that hazelnutty odor of male ejecta, so I thrust her roughly away from me, saying:

“Believe, too, that I am talking to Thor as well as Genovefa. I will not share you with other women any more than I will with other men.”

“I believe you, I believe you. See? I continue to make amends.” She had found an empty sack belonging to the dead man, and was filling it with chunks of his charcoal. “I am even making up for the wood I squandered on our fire. Now let us pitch this corpse into the river and go back to our camp and eat our nahtamats. All this excitement has made me ravenous.”

She did eat heartily, too, and chattered all through the meal, very femininely, of inconsequential matters, as blithely as if the day had been an ordinary day of uneventful travel. Maggot only picked at the auths-hana carcass, as if he were trying to be inconspicuous to the point of invisibility. I ate no more than a bite or two, for I had lost my appetite.

Before we disposed ourselves for sleep, I took Maggot a distance out of Genovefa’s hearing and gave him some instructions to follow from this time on.

“But, fráuja,” he whimpered. “Who am I to spy on the fráujin? Or to disobey any of her commands? I am no more than baggage on this journey.”

“You will do so because I tell you to, because I am the leader of this company. If ever again I have to be absent, you are to be my surrogate eyes and ears.” I added, half to myself, with rueful humor, “I only wish your big nose were capable of—”

“My nose?” he cried, aghast, as if I had threatened to cut it off. “What of my nose, fráuja Thorn?”

“Nothing, nothing,” I said. “Keep it safe for your amber-sniffing. Just be my eyes and ears. Do not again let the lady Genovefa out of your sight and hearing.”

“But you have not told me what I am to watch and listen
for.”

“Never mind,” I grunted, loath to admit that I was now a cuckold, and gnawed by jealousy. “Simply report to me even the most commonplace occurrences, and let me be the judge of them. Now let us sleep.”

At least for that night, I had lost my appetite for things other than food. It was one of the very few of our nights together that not Thorn or Thor or Veleda or Genovefa indulged in any sort of frolicking at all.

During the subsequent week or so, there were no more than three days on which my hunting forays kept me long enough away from Genovefa for her to engage in any misconduct. And on each of those days, when I rejoined my companions, Genovefa looked luminously innocent, and I smelled on her no alien smells, and Maggot said nothing. He only raised his eyebrows and spread his hands to indicate that he had nothing to say. So there were no more wasted nights, either. As both Thorn and Veleda, I exerted myself to reward the chaste behavior of Genovefa and Thor, and they returned those attentions lustily enough to assure me that no outsider had been depleting their energies.

The river Tyras had been more and more flowing toward us from the west, and it was getting narrower and narrower, so we knew we were approaching its headwaters. At the last krchma we came to on that trail, I asked directions of its keeper, and he recommended that we cross the Tyras, an easy fording at these narrows, and strike northward away from it. Some forty Roman miles overland, he said, we would find ourselves at the upper waters of another river, this one called in the Slovene tongue the Buk—it would he the first river I had ever encountered or heard of that flowed
from south to north
—and we would follow that downstream all the way to the Amber Coast.

So now we had traveled about half of those forty miles, on a surprisingly good road with considerable wheeled traffic, and the road brought us to the village called by its inhabitants Lviv. Notwithstanding its unpronounceable Slovene name, Lviv was a comfortable place to break our journey. Situated midway between the Tyras and the Buk, it was nearly big enough to be ranked as a town, because it was the market and trading center for all the area’s farmers, herdsmen, artisans and others who brought to it their goods for shipping down one river or the other. We found a hospitium that was patronized by the wealthier visiting merchants and their families, so it was well enough appointed that it even contained separate thermae for men and for women.

Since Lviv was such an easeful place, and since it seemed a promising place for me to make historical inquiries, and since we likely would not come upon another such place for a long time, I decided that we would stay for more than just a night, perhaps for a few days. When Genovefa and I had carried our belongings to our chamber in the hospitium, she said to me:

“Now, Thorn, you cannot or will not abandon your august identity of masculine marshal and herizogo. But I can discard either of mine at will, and I intend to. I shall be alternately Thor and Genovefa, so I can amble about the various shops and smithies of this village and sample the wares offered to men and women, and perhaps purchase some items for one or both of my selves. Furthermore, as you know, I was delicately reared and I am of fastidious daintiness, and I have for too long been bathing only sketchily and in nothing better than river water. So I intend also to luxuriate alternately in the men’s and women’s thermae. There are enough people on the streets of this community, and enough of them lodging in this establishment, that none is apt to remark on the resemblance of my two selves. Even if someone does, what of it? Any gossip by these nobodies out here in the middle of nowhere can hardly harm or embarrass
you.”

I might rightly have been indignant at the ultimatum nature of that declaration, but I was more amused to hear such a person—horse thief, fornicatrix, murderer of a hapless old peasant—describing herself as delicate and dainty. So I only said indulgently, “As you please.”

Nevertheless, I went to Maggot’s stable quarters and told him that “again, for state reasons,” the fráujin Genovefa would occasionally be posing here as the young man Thor. “In whichever guise she goes, I want you to be always secretly in close attendance. And give me full report whenever I ask for it.”

“I will do my best,” he said, but looking very unhappy about it. “There are some places a fráujin can enter that I cannot.”

“Then wait and watch between her going in and her coming out,” I said, exasperated—not so much by his aversion to spying as by my own ignoble instigation of it.

Thereafter, it was only when Genovefa dined with me in the hospitium’s dining chamber that she accompanied me as my female consort, and once or twice strolled with me about the streets. Most of the time, Thor was being Thor. I always bathed alone as Thorn, of course, in the therma for men. If I encountered Thor in there, or elsewhere about the village, I and he took care not to recognize one another. But I trusted Maggot to be keeping watch when I was not, and, since he never reported anything suspicious, I was satisfied that both Thor and Genovefa were behaving virtuously. I spent most of my own time making the acquaintance of whatever elderly local men I found idling about the hospitium—or at wineshops or beer stalls around Lviv’s market square—and inquiring of them what they could tell me of the history of their forebears in this region.