Raptor (113 page)

“Vái, Maghib!” I interrupted. “I led the queen to believe that I am here as a representative of Theodoric
Strabo.
Have you let slip that I am an impostor?”

“Ne, ne, fráuja. My lady Giso did make some remarks that puzzled me, early on. But I soon divined their import, so I have let her go on believing that we are both—you and I—firmly on the side of Strabo and his ally, her husband, King Feva. Your imposture is undisclosed.”

“Thags izvis,” I said, relieved. To repay Maghib’s good offices, I went on to tell him what I had learned about amber-finding in the local “blue earth” and amber-working in the local lapidaries’ shops, and told him where to find those places in order to learn more of his new trade. I concluded, “I have no doubt of your success as an amber trader, given your exemplary initiative. I must say that you and
your lady
Giso seem to have become very close very quickly.”

He looked modestly proud. “She seems to favor me. I think she has never met an Armenian before, or ever even heard of such a thing, so she does not realize that a tetzte Armenian is unworthy of a respectable woman’s notice.” Now he looked sheepish, lowered his eyes and shuffled his feet. “She has even spoken admiringly of the length of my nose.”

I blinked in surprise and murmured, “Well, well, well,” for this opened possibilities. While I pondered them, I said absently, “I hope you complimented her in return, on the length of her teeth.”

“Eh?”

“Nothing, nothing. So the queen favors you, does she?”

“Well… she even asked if, when I watched her husband ride through Lviv, I noticed
his
nose. How small it is.”

“Gudisks Himins, man!” I said jovially, and pummeled his back again. “Why are you wasting time, then, standing here talking to me? Go and press your advantage.”

“She is a queen!” he squeaked. “I am an Armenian.”

“Many noble ladies have a secret taste for the squalid. Be not faint of heart, Maghib. Go. Make me proud of you.”

“But… but… have you no need of my services?”

“You
will
be serving me. My work here is done, and now I must hasten back to Theodoric.” I saw the guard returning, leading my Velox and Frido’s gelding, so I spoke rapidly. “I am taking with me the queen’s son, for reasons you need not know. Giso is going to be irate when she finds out, but it will mollify her some to suppose that I am taking him to the encampment of Strabo and Feva. Still, the boy and I must get away with as much of a head start as possible. You will provide that—you and your long nose, so to speak—by keeping Queen Giso distracted.”

He cried despairingly, “She will realize my complicity, fráuja! She will have me
hanged
by my—so to speak—nose.”

“Ne. She will not even know that the prince and I have been here today. I will send the ship back to sea.” Over Maghib’s shoulder I now saw Frido come ashore from the vessel, the other guards carrying our packs, so I spoke even more rapidly. “Here is what you do. Exert yourself to win that queen’s favor, this very day, and satisfy her curiosity about your nose. Keep her blissfully busy for as many days and nights as possible. When she has had enough, or you have, steal away to the place I told you of, the beach of the blue earth, and there make a good fire. The ship’s master will be watching for it. The vessel will return to Pomore as if for the first time, and to stay. Then, ja, Queen Giso will learn that Frido and I are not aboard. But we will be long gone, and she will not even think to connect you with our escape. Now go. Do it.”

He looked slightly dazed, but he nodded and clasped my hand in affirmation, then went hastily away. I rejoined Frido, who was directing the guards in fixing the packs behind our saddles, and I said in an undertone:

“Order all four guards back aboard the ship.” He did that, and they muttered but obeyed, and I told him the rest. “Have the master take the vessel out of sight of Pomore. He is to stay away and stay unseen until there is lighted a watch fire on that beach where you showed me the blue earth. Then, but not until then, he can bring the ship and the guards home again.”

Frido frowned a little. “As you said, Thorn, the master does seem to accede willingly to my commands. But can we expect that he will go on following my orders when I am not present?”

“Tell him you are playing a wicked and malicious jape on your mother. I have a feeling he will be pleased to help it succeed.”

Frido went aboard one last time and, after only a brief colloquy with the man, came back humorously wagging his head. “You are right again. He said he would be happy to disoblige the queen. He seems to have taken a dislike to her at their one brief encounter.”

“I cannot think why,” I said drily. I waited only to make sure that the rowers really were backing oars and the ship moving astern, away from the dock. Then I said, “Very good. Mount up, Frido. But let us not depart, as we first planned, at a dare-the-devil gallop. Let us go quietly, unobtrusively, through back alleys.”

I was satisfied that we were making a clean escape, and I thanked the goddess Fortune or whatever other agency had brought Maghib so fortuitously to our assistance. Queen Giso would, of course, erupt like Vesuvius, but her son and I would be beyond her reach, and there was no one on whom she could reasonably wreak reprisal. The ship’s master would only have been following the prince’s royal orders, and he had witnesses to vouch for that. The same with the four hapless guards. Maghib would have been innocently waiting for me to arrive, the whole time the queen was doing the same—and waiting
with
the queen, in her own bed and arms—so she could hardly suspect him of involvement in our ruse. Maghib might even help ameliorate the queen’s fury (I smiled when I thought of it) by going on plying his nose, so to speak. Unless (and I stopped smiling and winced) Queen Giso, with those awful teeth, should incontinently
bite.

Not until Frido and I had ridden as far as Pomore’s scattered outskirt habitations did I turn again to him. “From here on and from now on, lad, you have leave to gallop as fast and far and freely as you please. Come!” And I put heels hard to my own steed.

The long overland journey was uneventful, as far as I was concerned, but every mile and every day of it was an exciting adventure to the young prince, simply because everything outside the Pomore palace was so new to him. He had never before forded a river, and we forded many of them, or climbed a mountain, and we climbed many of them. He had never had to hunt or trap or fish to feed himself, but I showed him how and he learned quickly—even managing to rope small game with the sliuthr I had adopted from the Amazons. Except that there was not such a great difference in our ages, I felt very much like old Wyrd playing mentor and tutor to that inexperienced youth he had called “urchin”—because I taught Frido many of the same bits of woodcraft: how to recognize edible growth even in deep winter, how to cook venison in its own skin, how to use the sun-stone on a cloudy day to find direction…

The sun-stone was invaluable in helping us keep the course I judged the shortest way back to the Roman provinces—that is, going directly south. Of course, we had to deviate from that occasionally, where it was easier to go around obstacles than to struggle through or over them. I deliberately circled at a distance about every settled community we found in our way, to avoid having to answer all the questions that backwoods people always ask. But we encountered few such settlements and, after we left the Viswa River behind, there were almost none.

That straight-south course at last brought us to civilization, at the great bend in the river Danuvius. Or, I should say, it brought us within the borders of civilization, because there was nothing of that in evidence except the tumbledown remains of the old castrum city Aquincum, which I had seen before. Still, we were in the province of Valeria, and Prince Frido was as excited by that—his first setting foot in the Roman Empire—as he had been by every other novelty on the journey. I noted that the ice in the river was breaking up, meaning that springtime could not be far off, so I set us a brisker pace than we had yet traveled, hurrying downstream along the Danuvius, still directly southward.

That brought us to the naval base of the Pannonian Fleet at Mursa. While Frido ambled about, gazing wide-eyed at the first Romans he had ever seen, I introduced myself to the fleet’s navarchus and produced my document of marshalcy signed by his chief commander. He was instantly ready to oblige any request I might make of him, so I asked first what news he had of war or other doings in Moesia Secunda. The war was still pending, he said, and probably imminent, but he had nothing yet to report except routine events. So I asked next for ink and parchment, and sat down to write a message. I bade the navarchus send it by his swiftest dromo vessel to the Iron Gate, and there have it handed on to the Moesian Fleet, and have
its
swiftest dromo rush it to Novae and to King Theodoric.

The navarchus had the document on its way downriver before Frido and I reclined at table (for our first civilized meal ever indoors together) in the triclinium of the navarchus’s quarters. In my message to Theodoric I naturally had not wasted words to recount anything of my adventures and discoveries while on my mission to compile a history. I only explained, and succinctly, how I had been acting as his “Parmenio” in the land of the Rugii—and, in essence, my message was this:

Avoid engagement with Strabo and his allies until I get there. I bring a secret weapon.

By the time a barge brought me and Frido and our mounts downriver to Novae, there was no ice anywhere and the trees on either bank were in early bud. Because the Danuvius flowed past my farmlands before it reached the city, I had us put ashore there, and took the prince to lodge in my farmhouse, telling him, “You might as well be comfortable while I go and find out where your king-father is encamped.”

The farm servants all gave welcoming cheers when I came home after so long away, and the women servants cooed and clucked with motherly delight at my putting in their charge a new young fráuja, and Frido himself made pleased exclamations at finding my house rather grander than the royal one in which he had grown up. I saw him installed in his quarters and then, without even taking time to bathe and change into fresh garments, I rode straightaway to Theodoric’s palace.

I had thought that the king might be afield with his troops, but the aged steward Costula, greeting me most warmly, told me Theodoric was in residence, and ushered me immediately in to private audience. I found my friend looking more handsomely regal than ever. He had put on some weight—of muscle, not fat—and his beard had grown to heroic luxuriance, and he seemed to have a more deliberate air about him. That did not inhibit our embracing heartily and shouting salutations and assurance of our mutual good health. But then he held me at arm’s length and said:

“I obeyed your admonition, Saio Thorn. No battle has yet been joined. But I confess this has made me chafe, having to hold off. I should have preferred to fall upon the enemy before giving him any chance to choose the place and time.”

“Then you can do it now,” I said, and told him what weapon I had brought, and what I advised be done with it. “The lad supposes that I will take him to join his father. And, in a sense, I will be doing exactly that. However, I realize that my plan could result in there being no battle at all, which would probably displease you. I well remember your telling me that you care not to fare in peace, but
mith blotha”

Theodoric smiled reminiscently, then surprised me by shaking his head. “I used to speak fondly of blood, ja, when I was a warrior among warriors. But the longer I am king, the more I see the good sense of being not needlessly wasteful of warriors. It may displease
them,
but I will not decline any stratagem that can win a quick and clean victory. I heartily congratulate you and sincerely thank you, Thorn, for having brought us the weapon that can accomplish that.”

I asked, “Where is Strabo right now?”

“The other side of the Danuvius, a day’s ride to the north of it, near a village called Romula. According to my speculatores, he has put Romula under tribute for victuals, and is watering from a small river there. All the time you have been away, he has been gathering forces by little and little. Those of his old adherents who have stayed with him or returned to him. Still-defiant remnants of the Sarmatae whom we defeated long ago. And, of other nationalities, this and that small tribe or gau or even sibja that he has persuaded to gamble for greatness. His most numerous troops, as you must know, are the Rugii of the ambitious King Feva.” Theodoric paused to laugh. “However grudgingly, I must give credit to my cousin Triarius. Because of his swine-man mutilation, he remains a recluse, so he has somehow seduced all those ragtag constituents without any of them even laying eyes on him.”

“And evidently,” I said, “without any of them realizing what a foredoomed venture this is. Strabo is bound to lose. Why, your regular army aside, you could marshal all the Roman river-fortress legions against him.”

“Of course. And the Emperor Zeno has offered me as many more legions as I might want from the Eastern Empire. But I prefer not to owe any obligation to Zeno. Ja, my cousin knows very well that this is his last gasp. That is why he has not yet made his assault. He hopes that merely by being a nuisance once more—and more of a threat this time—he can wring concessions. A small patch of homeland for his still-loyal Ostrogoths. A small measure of dominion for himself. Nothing for any of those hopeful allies of his. But he would not weep over their disappointment, once they had served their purpose.”

Theodoric laughed again, and comradely thumped me on the back. “Well! Now let us prepare to disappoint them
all!”
He strode to the throne-room door and gave orders to a page outside.

We were shortly joined by the chief military commanders, some but not all of whom I already knew, and Theodoric briskly issued instructions.

“Pitzias, commence the ferrying of our main forces across the Danuvius. Ibba, have your centuriones draw up those troops in battle array just out of bow-shot of Romula. The enemy will be hastening to dispose their own formations, so, Herduic, you go under a flag of truce and tell Strabo that I desire a parley before we engage. Recommend to him that he have King Feva in attendance as well. I and my marshals Soas and Thorn will be outside Romula by the time those arrangements are made. Go now, and see to it. Habái ita swe!”