Raptor (109 page)

I did not even try to guess. I had no least interest in guessing. Though I myself might be only half woman, I could make myself be as untouchably cold as any whole one. So I rode off into the night without looking back, without a qualm, without caring what happened to
any
of those I left behind in that place.

I did not go back to Lviv. Although I knew that Maghib could not yet have recovered from his wound, I did not care to loiter there until he did. I remembered the Mudman’s prediction that the Rugii, if they
were
going south to ally themselves with Strabo against Theodoric, would make their move when the harvest was in and before the winter came down. In these northern climes, winter was fast approaching.

So I made straight for the Buk River, then followed it northward. Over the course of some hundred and fifty Roman miles, I found no more villages of even modest size, but only the occasional clustered huts and riverside stackyards of Slovene woodcutters. Eventually I emerged from the dense evergreen forests into one of the more dismal lands I have ever had to cross. It was a flat plain, clammy clay underfoot and coldly drizzling gray clouds above, where the trail wound among marshes and peat bogs. I could well understand why the migrating Goths had not paused hereabout, but had pressed on southward in search of more inviting lands.

So I was immensely grateful when I did at last come upon a village, though its populace was almost totally Slovene, and its only lodging for travelers a lowly krchma. The Slovene spoken here was even more atrociously juicy than I had heard elsewhere—the village’s name I can only render in writing as Bsheshch—but the speakers were a rather higher grade of Slovenes. They were typically broad-faced, but they were taller, fair of skin and hair, quite clean, and they called themselves Polanie. My fellow lodgers in the krchma were all rivermen, stopping here while their boats unloaded and loaded again, for Bsheshch stands at the head of navigation on the Buk. Since I was mortally tired of traveling the boglands, I willingly traded my extra horse to the master of a freighting barge in payment for his carrying myself and Velox clear to the Wendic Gulf.

The big flatboat, laden with flax and furs and hides, riding the current and also being poled or paddled by its crewmen, moved much faster than I could have done on land. It was not until we were three or four days out from Bsheshch that I thought to inquire of the master what he could tell me of the Rugii who lived at the other end of his back-and-forth voyages. I was thunderstruck when he said:

“Right now, Pana Thorn, a goodly portion of them are not living there. All the able-bodied men are on the march, and by this time they are surely far south of where we are.”

“What? On the march?”

“Tak,” he said, which means “ja” in the Polanie dialect. “On our way toward Bsheshch this trip, we were passed by King Feva and his columns, also going southward. Even on horseback and on foot, they of course outpaced us because our barge was breasting the current. But also, of course, the king’s troops were only lightly laden.”

“They were on their way to join Strabo?”

“What or who is Strabo?”

“Theodoric Triarius,” I said impatiently. “He who is preparing to make war against Theodoric Amaling.”

The barge master spread his hands; he had never heard of either Theodoric. Well, I should have expected that. The man may have traveled thousands of miles in his lifetime, but never so much as a mile to either side of his river runs.

“All I can tell you, Pana Thorn, is that they went south. And tak, they certainly looked warlike.”

“You said they were of
course
lightly laden. What did you mean by that?”

“On our several previous voyages upriver, we were not freighting trade goods. At the order of the Rugians’ King Feva, we brought military provisions and supplies—and not just this barge, but many others—depositing those things at various points along the rivers Viswa and Buk. The king arranged that, so his men and horses would not have to carry everything they needed, but still could be sure of finding food and feed and such along their line of march.”

A very well-planned campaign, I thought, and executed without my being aware of it until now. The Rugian army must have gone southward past me while I was off in the Amazon lands. Though I was somewhat chagrined at that, I did not feel impelled to leap overboard from the barge or demand to be set ashore. There was no point in my trailing after that army, or trying to get ahead of it to warn Theodoric. If even the common boatmen knew of the march, so would he.

When the war commenced, I ought rightly to be with my king, and I trusted that I would be. The hardiest warriors do not care to do battle in the wintertime, any more than they do in the nighttime, and for the same reason: the cold and ice and snow, like the darkness, can impede their movement. So, while Strabo would muster his forces before the onset of winter, and perhaps would make strategic disposition of them during the winter, he would not start the fighting until the spring. I had time to get there before then. But even when I did, I would be only one additional warrior in Theodoric’s ranks. In the meantime, I might be of far more usefulness where I was. Theodoric had said that he would not at all mind having “a Parmenio” behind the enemy’s lines.

So I stayed aboard the barge, and during the voyage I catechized the master and his crewmen to learn as much as I could about the Rugii. Since we had a long, long way to go—about a hundred and thirty Roman miles down the Buk to where it joined the much bigger river Viswa, and from there to the sea another two hundred and fifty miles—I had time to learn a fair amount, and to conjecture much more.

The Rugii, I was informed, were a Germanic people of some relation to the Vandals, who had always inhabited the lands along the coast of the Sarmatic Ocean. They were of the Old Religion, Christianity being still scorned by the far northern races. The Rugii shared those seaside lands with Slovene tribes called the Kashube and the Wilzi. Those Slovenes were the peasants who did the farming and fishing and other hard work, while the Rugii were their overlords, living on their labor, even taking the richer profit from the amber that the peasants found along the shore. For ages, the Rugii had been satisfied with their little kingdom and their semi-slaves. But now, belatedly becoming aware of the grander domains that the other Germanic peoples had carved out in the south—the Visigoths in Aquitania, the Suevians in Lusitania, their own Vandal cousins in Libya—the Rugii had been stirred by envy to ambition and emulation.

“So they march,” said the barge master, “to see what
they
can win for themselves in the south.”

I knew that their aims were not so vague as that. They were marching to help Strabo seize Moesia, because he had no doubt promised King Feva a piece of it. From what the bargemen told me of the supplies and foodstuffs they had deposited along the riversides, I calculated that the Rugian force was a substantial one, numbering perhaps eight thousand, horse and foot combined. And when the barge master happened to mention that Feva’s wife, Giso, was a woman of an Amal Ostrogoth tribe, I was able to make further surmise.

I had thought it strange that Strabo, in seeking war allies, had not solicited any of the peoples near and convenient to him, but had enlisted the Rugii, even though they were so far away. I wagered that I now knew the reason. This Queen Giso must be a woman of his own branch of the Amaling line. His emissaries would have begged her, in kinship, to cajole her husband into participating in Strabo’s uprising. I wagered, too, that Strabo had meanly and flagrantly lied to his kinswoman. She and her royal husband, being so far distant from Moesia, likely were not aware that Theodoric Amaling was the rightful and universally acknowledged ruler of that province—that the importuning Theodoric Strabo was only a desperate, outcast, impotent pretender. Therefore, to have won Queen Giso’s sympathy to his cause and King Feva’s army to help prosecute it, Strabo must grossly have misrepresented the true state of affairs.

I would have to see what I could do to rectify those matters.

Like the Danuvius, the Viswa fanned out into a delta of lesser rivers and minor streams as it approached the sea. The land was mostly dunes and beaches that would have been pleasant places except that they were scoured and chilled by a continuous north wind. The barge master kept to the Viswa’s main channel and that brought us to the Rugian capital, Pomore, right where the river debouched into the Wendic Gulf of the Sarmatic Ocean. Pomore means “by the sea” in the local language.

Actually the town was laid out so that it fronted as much on the river as on the sea, and was fringed with piers jutting out into both of those cold, gray, choppy bodies of water. Every building facing the waterfronts was solidly constructed of stone to withstand the perpetually wind-sprayed spume and sand. Handsome though that made the town, it also made Pomore look forbiddingly like a fortress. Our barge put in at one of the riverside docks, because, said the barge master, the docks around on the seafront were for the use of the Pomorenian fishing fleet and coastal freighters.

Before I led Velox off the boat, I paused to ask, “When will you be heading upriver again? Perhaps, when I conclude my business here, I could ride back south with you.”

“Not unless your business keeps you here all winter. The Viswa will start to freeze any day now, and it will be solidly iced over for three months or more. Not I or any other master will be taking a barge out of here again until spring.”

Even in my fur cloak, I shivered at the thought of being winterbound on this unappealing coast. I growled, “Guth wiljis, I shall be far from here by spring. Now, what are these two busybodies asking of me?”

None of the many people working about the docks had paid any attention to our barge’s arrival, except for this pair of armed men—too old and overweight to be soldiers—who came on board officiously barking questions.

“Harbor officials,” said the barge master, “here to assess my load of freight. But they also wish to know who you are and what brings you to Pomore.”

I told the truth, or told it partway. “Inform them that I am the Saio Thorn, marshal to King Theodoric”—I did not say
which
Theodoric—“come to thank their Queen Giso for having sent their fellow Rugii to join in that king’s war.”

I showed the document I carried, confident that such lowly officials could not read it, but also that they would be impressed by the look of it. They were; when they next spoke, it was without barking. The barge master also sounded newly respectful as he interpreted:

“They say that a high personage should not have to lodge in a common boatmen’s krchma. They will escort you to quarters at the palace, and have you announced to the queen.”

I would have preferred being left to my own arrangements, but I could hardly refuse to be treated as a dignitary. So I let them lead me inland through the cold streets and to the palace grounds, where they summoned a steward to take charge of me. And I let the steward call a groom to stable Velox, and then lead me to a small house on the grounds, and there produce several pudding-faced Kashube servants to attend me, and then order a meal set for me.

The house was rather less palatial than my farm home back in Novae, and the servants of rather less quality than my own. Also, the meal turned out to consist almost entirely of herring dishes prepared in various ways, but none of the variations disguising the fact that it was herring. So I was glad I had not put up in a krchma offering accommodations of an
inferior
order. Anyway, the circumstances enabled me to make an appraisal of Queen Giso even before I met her. A hostess conscious of the shortcomings of her establishment ought rightly to make up for them by showing more than common courtesy. But Giso loftily refrained from granting me audience until late the next day.

My estimate of her as an affected posturer was confirmed when at last I was summoned to the main building. The “throne room” there was slightly pathetic in its pretense at splendor, and the queen spoke the Old Language in a deplorably rustic dialect, and her robes and jewels were less than rich, but she received me as if this had been the Purple Palace and she the Emperor Zeno. Giso had to be quite a young woman, for her son was also in attendance, and Prince Frido was only about nine years old. But, possibly because she was not a pretty woman—her teeth were so prominent that her lips had trouble closing—Giso affected the prickly condescension of an elderly dowager being bothered by an impubic youth.

“Exactly
what
is your business with us, Marshal?”

I proffered my parchment, but she waved it away as if to say that it was beneath her notice, and really indicating that she could not read. Nevertheless, she continued pretentiously to speak of herself in the royal plural.

“We accept that you come from our cousin Thiudareikhs Triarius. We hope he has not sent you to ask for further contribution from us.”

I was momentarily tempted to deflate her pomposity by telling her which Theodoric I actually did represent, and making plain to her that the Rugii, at her instigation, had wasted their “contribution” on the wrong Theodoric. But before I could speak, she continued:

“Excepting the Slovenes, of course, since those wretches would be useless as warriors, we have already sent you every man older and abler than our dear son Frido here.” The boy made a glum face; he did not seem happy for his exemption. “And we have much depleted our treasury to outfit that army for you. So, Marshal, if men or money or material is what you came to beg for, this audience is concluded and you have our leave to depart.”

Though I had not yet spoken a single word, she stood up, erect on her throne’s dais, and stared haughtily down at me, hugging her son close to her side, as if to prevent my snatching him away to war. So I resisted my temptation to tell her the truth. It was evident that plain facts and an appeal to common sense would not persuade Queen Giso to transfer her misplaced allegiance. Such a woman as this would never admit to having made a mistake—still less would she consent to correcting it—even if her stubborn vanity should cost the life of her king-husband and every soldier he was leading. So I said only, and unctuously: