Raptor (114 page)

They saluted smartly and departed, and Theodoric said to me:

“I will not detain you now, Thorn. I know you must be anxious to soak in a hot therma and get into clean clothes. But I am eager to hear the account of your other quest, the historical one. Come to nahtamats tonight and we will enjoy a long, leisurely colloquium. You can bring along Prince Frido if you like.”

“Ne, let us not confuse the boy. He thinks I am reporting to Theodoric Strabo. You can hardly pretend to be that Theodoric without somehow similarly contorting your eyeballs. Frido is happy enough at my farm, well attended and well guarded. With your permission, I will keep him lodged there until we are ready to ride to Romula.”

So I returned to my farmhouse, and luxuriated during the rest of the day in a steaming bath, and then dressed in my finest Thorn garb. On my way back to the palace, I stopped by my Novae house, just to make sure it was still intact, and to stow there the Veleda belongings I had carried all over the continent.

In the palace triclinium, over a sumptuous repast and much excellent wine, I told Theodoric of my adventures since he had sent me on the journey and the mission. In general, I told the truth, however much it might contradict the old songs and other treasured myths and legends and fables. However, not to invite too many searching questions, I considerably glossed over the reasons why a certain Thor had come unexpectedly from the Visigoth lands to join me in my quest. I also glossed over the circumstances by which both that person Thor and the onetime palace cosmeta Swanilda, while in my company, had “come to grief,” as I phrased it. I told him of the folk I had met along my way, I told him also the names of unfamiliar peoples of whom I had heard or actually walked among, I spoke also of the many curious customs and practices I had been told about or actually witnessed.

“Now, as to the history of us Goths,” I said, “it appears to have begun far back in the mists of time, when that old, old god-family called the Aesir appointed one of their number to sire all the Germanic peoples. He was Gaut, evidently something less than a god but more than a king. And of his numerous descendant nations, only we Goths have kept his name, though it also lives on as the word meaning ‘good’ in every dialect of the Old Language.”

“Why, so it does,” murmured Theodoric, looking pleasantly surprised. “I never thought to make the connection.”

“The first
mortal
name I encountered in Gothic history,” I went on, “is that of King Berig, who commanded the ships that brought the Goths over the sea from Gutaland. Then, after they had dwelt on the shores of the Wendic Gulf for I do not know how long, it was a King Filimer who started them on their long migration southward across the continent. One thing I can tell you, Theodoric, from personal experience and observation. I have now seen the island called Gutaland, and I have seen the Amber Coast, and I have seen every other land that the Goths lived in or stopped in or traveled across. And I say this: I can well understand
why
they left or hastened past those places. I am heartily glad—and so should you be—that our ancestors did not remain in any of them, for it would have meant
our
being born in one of those bleak barrens. I am even glad that our forebears got evicted from the Mouths of the Danuvius, though they seem to have found those marshes and grasslands habitable enough. That place was so much to their taste, in fact, that they were becoming soft and complacent and phlegmatic. I was told, and I believe it, that the Huns did the Goths a great favor by driving them off those Black Sea lands before they could deteriorate into extinction, like the ancient Scythians, or worse, could generate into a race of pallid tradesmen.”

“I quite agree,” said Theodoric, raising his goblet in salute and then taking a deep swig from it.

“To get back to the sequence of kings,” I said, “from Filimer onward, there is considerable confusion as to names and dates and order of succession.” As I spoke, I was riffling through the notes I had taken during my journey, for I had brought with me to the palace the various scraps of parchment and wax tablets and even plane-tree leaves on which I had scribbled or scratched my memoranda. “For one thing, I was told the kings’ names in a reverse listing, so to speak, because as I progressed northward I was, so to speak, progressing backward through time.”

I read the many names to him, and at a few he nodded that he had heard them before, but at most he raised his eyebrows to indicate that he was hearing them for the first time.

“Here and there,” I pointed out, “a name is recognizable as Visigoth or Gepid. Uffo the Once-Tetzte would have been a Gepid and Hunuil Immune-to-Magic would have been a Visigoth. Other names are clearly those of Ostrogoth kings—Amal the Fortunate and Ostrogotha the Patient, for example. But many others I cannot confidently identify. And I have not yet determined where in history the royal Amaling line diverged into the branches that became your family and Strabo’s family—and, for that matter, the family of the overbearing and over-toothy Queen Giso.”

Theodoric said, “I can appreciate the difficulties. There is really no way to substantiate any of those names and reigns until one gets down to fairly recent history.”

“Ja,” I said. “Until we arrive at that King Ermanareikhs who was called the Gothic equivalent of Alexander the Great. If he truly did commit suicide in despair at being overrun by the Huns, that would have been about the Christian year 375.”

Theodoric mused, “He was likened to Alexander, eh?”

“He may have been great,” I said, “and of great longevity, as I was told. But he could not have been the king who settled the Goths at the Mouths of the Danuvius. At least a century before the reign of Ermanareikhs, the Goths were already the terror of the Black Sea shores. They employed the seafaring Cimmerii—the people now called the Alani—to ferry them about on their raiding voyages. And, by the way, those pirate Goths used to send a wonderfully terse advice to every city they advanced upon. ‘Tribute or war.’ “

“Akh, I admire that!” Theodoric exclaimed. “In any language, easy to communicate and impossible to misinterpret. I shall hope to have opportunity to use it myself. Thank you, Thorn, for providing it.”

“I am glad I heard of it,” I said. “Anyway, to continue with the history… two kings
after
Ermanareikhs, we arrive at your greatgrandfather Widereikhs the Wend-Conqueror. And from there on, the royal succession is well attested. After him, your grandfather Wandalar the Vandal-Conqueror. Then your co-ruling father and uncle.” I began to shuffle my notes together again. “Well, as soon as I have leisure, I will puzzle and ponder over everything I have collected. I will do my best to make a coherent history of it, and accurately to trace your lineage right on down to your new daughter, Thiudagotha. She of the Gothic people.”

“Hardly new any longer,” said Theodoric, chuckling. “She of the Gothic people is old enough to be walking quite capably and talking most loquaciously.”

“Then I must compile for her a lineage worth talking about. And you did say that you desired a genealogy that would enable marital alliances with the most distinguished of other royal houses. I can draw the stemma in such a way that you and your daughters are direct descendants of that Ermanareikhs who was the equal of Alexander the Great.”

“That should improve the marriage prospects, ja,” Theodoric said approvingly. Then, with a solemnity rare for him, he added, “Before I die, though, I shall hope to have earned some honorable auknamo of my own. I should hate to be one of those frayed-out remnants of a once estimable family who accomplish nothing themselves, who have nothing to boast of
but
their ancestry.”

I said, just as solemnly, for I think I had foreseen it long before then, “You will be honoring Ermanareikhs to count him among your ancestors. In time, in the afterworld, he will surely be boasting of having the great Theodoric among his
posterity.”

“Guth wiljis, habái ita swe,” said my king, bestowing on me a fond smile. “God willing, be it so.”

At that, I took my leave, and went back to my farm to wait until he should summon me and Frido for the parley with Strabo. I could have stayed at the palace, but I wished to sleep under my own roof—for the reason that I regarded my quest as not yet quite over and done with. Since the night I had slipped away from the Walis-karja, leaving in their hands the remains of my mannamavi lover, I had been wondering about something. Would I ever again, after Thor and Genovefa, find satisfaction in the embrace of any mere man or woman? On this, my first night back home, I would seek the answer to at least half of that question, with the collaboration of one of my slave women.

Well, I was told that the fair-haired Suevian girl Renata had, during my long absence, married one of my young slave men, so I graciously forbore from exercising my proprietorial rights to her. I availed myself of the dark-haired Alan woman Naranj, whose mill-steward husband had always been proud to lend her to his fráuja. To my delight, and thanks to Naranj’s wholehearted collaboration, I rediscovered that one does not really need—all at one time and in one bed—
every
variety of probings and claspings and couplings. I rejoiced to rediscover that, while there are physical limits to the ways a female lover can give enjoyment and be enjoyed and take enjoyment, those ways are wonderfully numerous and assorted and enjoyable indeed. Then, the next night—when, as Veleda, I took to my Novae house a handsome young traveling trader whom I had met in the marketplace—I had the delight of rediscovering that the same can truthfully be said of coupling with a male lover, too.

Five or six days later, not far from the village called Romula, I sat my saddle on Velox, wearing full armor and weaponry, looking out over a narrow, shallow river. Prince Frido, unarmed and unarmored, sat his bay gelding beside me, and some way behind us waited a formidable piece of Theodoric’s army. At a distance beyond the farther bank of the river, Strabo’s troops also waited. Their attention, like ours, was fixed on the bare little islet in midriver, where Strabo had stipulated that the leaders’ parley take place. There were eight men occupying it, though only seven were really visible.

From our side, King Theodoric and Saio Soas had ridden over there through the shallow water. From the other side, King Feva had ridden, and four bearers had carried Strabo’s litter, a curtained box on poles. It was clear why the swine-man had insisted that the meeting take place on the islet—so that he would be as far as possible from the sight of both his men and ours—because he could let nothing of himself be seen except his head, sticking out through the litter curtains, and that was hardly a dignified posture for an army’s leader.

I leaned to ask Frido, “Do you recognize your father over there?”

“Ja, ja!” he said, and bounced happily in his saddle.

Quickly I bade him, “Ne, do not call or wave. You will be joining him shortly. For the time being, let us keep silent, like everyone else.”

The boy obediently subsided, but he looked faintly bewildered, as he had looked ever since our arrival in Novae, and that was understandable. Not I nor any of my servants had yet told Frido that I was Theodoric’s man, or that he himself was a hostage in Theodoric’s keeping. On the way hither to Romula, I had kept him and myself in the rear of Theodoric’s columns of centuries, so Frido did not even know that he had ridden here in company with the army marching to oppose his father. And right now, he did not know the circumstances of the parley being held on the islet yonder, or which of the participants in it were on which side.

All the men in both of the ranked armies were keeping silent, and were doing their best to keep horses from whinnying, and arms and armor and harness from clanking or creaking. We were listening to Theodoric and Strabo doing their conferring, because Strabo’s part in it was being done at the full volume of that hoarse, coarse voice I well remembered. Evidently he hoped to inspirit his forces and dispirit ours by letting everyone hear the accusations and invective he bellowed at Theodoric.

“Renegade cousin! Reprobate Amaling! You have made toadies of the once proud Ostrogoths! Under your limp banner, they are only imitation Romans! They have become lickspittles of the Emperor Zeno, trading their independence for a few crumbs from the imperial table!”

Frido leaned to whisper a question to me: “The man in the box, doing the shouting, is that my father’s ally Triarius?” I nodded that it was, and the boy subsided again, looking less bewildered but not very happy about King Feva’s choice of a brother-in-arms.

“Kinsmen!” Strabo bawled. “I invite all of you, I urge you, I charge you! Join me and throw off the Roman yoke! Put an end to the false kingship of our traitor cousin!”

For a while longer, Theodoric only sat his horse patiently, and let that head poking out from the curtains rant on unchallenged, so Strabo could see what little effect his harangue was having on his kinsmen on our side of the river. Gradually, the swine-man’s voice got strained with shouting and began to weaken, but he kept on:

“Brother Ostrogoths! Fellow Rugii! Friends and allies! Follow me into battle and—” And there Theodoric interrupted, in a voice that all could hear:

“Slaváith, nithjis! Be silent, cousin! It is my turn to speak!” But he spoke not to Strabo or the waiting armies; he turned to the horseman who had accompanied the litter and shouted, “Feva, is your eyesight keen?” That man rocked slightly in his saddle, as if surprised, and nodded his helmeted head. “Then look yonder!” commanded Theodoric, raising an arm and pointing.

“Sit tall in the saddle, Frido,” I instructed the prince, as his father’s head swiveled toward us. The boy did better than that. With the foot-rope I had helped him make, he could literally
stand
tall and visible—and he cheerily waved and called a “Háils, Fadar!” as loudly as his piping child’s voice was able.

King Feva’s horse took a step backward, seeming as startled as its rider had to have been. Then the islet became the scene of much agitation and hurried confabulation, though now we spectators could not hear the words. All three of the horsemen—Theodoric, Soas and Feva—did a good deal of pointing, toward me and Frido, toward Strabo, toward Strabo’s troops. Feva rode back and forth in the little space of that islet—close to Theodoric and Soas, to speak to them with eloquent gestures, back to the litter to lean and speak with Strabo. The swine-man would certainly also have been gesturing if he had been able, for his whole litter shook with the frantic bouncing of his body.