Raptor (133 page)

I will confidently assert that no other conquered people, before these of Italia, ever had been shown such care and concern by the man who conquered them. I know for a fact that no other conqueror ever has been given the trust and respect and burgeoning affection with which the people of Italia soon were regarding Theodoric. I do not mean merely the long-downtrodden commonfolk, either. The high-ranking Lentinus, navarchus of the Roman navy’s Hadriatic Fleet, rode all the way from his station at Aquileia to call on Theodoric, and to make a friendly proposal that was to prove very helpful to our cause.

While Theodoric had been busy with the deployment of his occupation troops and the imposition of the jus belli and all the other matters of martial administration, General Herduic had been given the mission of laying siege to Odoacer’s Ravenna—or, rather, laying it under partial blockade. As I had warned, the marshlands thereabout gave no firm purchase for the setting up of catapults or the massing of dense ranks of archers. So Herduic could only dispose his infantry in a long thin line about the city’s landward outskirts, from the seashore north of it around to the shore to the south. And those men could do nothing but stay there to prevent any supplies being brought into the city along the marsh road, or across the marshes themselves, or down the branch of the river Padus that flows seaward through those marshes, or along the Via Popilia, which goes north and south from Ravenna along the seashore. Except for the occasions when the bored archers dashed up close to the walls to shoot arrows or fire-arrows, just to break the tedium, there was little semblance of a siege. And as I had also warned, even the blockade was as futile—and probably made our enemies inside Ravenna smirk as derisively—as the peevish arrow attacks. Herduic’s seaside speculatores reported that, at least once a week, a merchant vessel or a galley-towed string of barges came over the Hadriatic into Ravenna’s Classis docks, and there leisurely unloaded a considerable cargo. There was nothing we could do about that, and we could not even be sure where those supply ships came from.

“Not from any of the Hadriatic bases under my command,” Lentinus told us officers convened in the Mediolanum praitoriaún. He went on, in his quaint Venetian accent, “I give you my word, Theozoric, those ships are not from Aquileia or Altinum or Ariminum. Just as I will not lend naval vessels to help your conquest, neither will I lend them for Odoacer’s last-expedient defenses.”

“I know that,” said Theodoric, “and I respect your stand of neutrality.”

I said, “We are forced to assume that even a failed and discredited ex-ruler must have at least a handful of diehard supporters. We suspect that the supplies are being provided by some Odoacer faction already fled into snug exile, perhaps over the sea in Dalmatia, or even as far away as Sicilia.”

“Or,” said the bearish old Saio Soas, “Odoacer’s supporters may be expatriates wanting, for some reason, to preserve the status quo ante. It is surprising how many people who have long lived outside their native country can be so zealous about meddling into its affairs from a safe distance.”

“Well, I am morally barred from meddling,” said Lentinus. “However, while my neutrality prevents me from offering you any Roman vessels, Theozoric, nothing forbids my suggesting that you build some of your own.”

“The suggestion is kindly taken,” said Theodoric with a smile. “But I wager there is not a single man in my ranks who knows anything about shipbuilding.”

“Probably not,” Lentinus said easily. “But I do.”

Theodoric’s smile broadened. “You would help us build war craft?”

“Not war craft. That would be a violation of neutrality. And a fleet of those would take years to build, anyway. But all you need, really, are large boxes that can be rowed and steered about the Classis harbor of Ravenna. Enough of them to float enough armed warriors to discourage any approaching supply ships. Surely you have capable wainwrights and ironsmiths in your ranks. Gather them for me, let me lead them down the Via Aemilia to the shipyards at Ariminum and show them what to do.”

“Be it so!” Theodoric exclaimed, right gaily, and sent Generals Pitzias and Ibba scurrying off to collect the workmen.

Those preparations for a tighter blockade of Ravenna were not yet completed when spring came. And there came then also one of Lentinus’s speedy dolphin vessels from Constantinople, with a Greek messenger on board, bearing the latest news of the Eastern Empire. Zeno had at last succumbed, and his successor in the Purple Palace was a man named Anastasius. He was almost as old as Zeno had been at his death, and he had formerly been only a minor functionary in the imperial treasury, winning no particular distinction in that service. But he had been personally selected for the emperorship by Zeno’s widow, the Basílissa Ariadne. Then she exacted payment for what she had done for him; she married Anastasius immediately after his accession.

“Take back to the emperor my congratulations—and my condolences,” Theodoric told the messenger. “But did he send any word for me? Any acknowledgment of
my
accession?”

“Oukh, nothing, I regret to say.” The messenger shrugged. “And if you will permit me the irreverence, I will also say that you had better not expect Anastasius to proffer any worthwhile endowment of his own free will. Like all men who have had the management of much money, he is a tightfisted, cheeseparing old miser. Ouá, do not hope to get anything out of Anastasius without having to pry and dig for it.”

So Theodoric was still ruling in Italia with no imperial aegis, only by dint of the jus belli and his own growing esteem among the people. And then, shortly after our getting that indifferent news from the far east, we got word of an occurrence in the nearer north that threatened to tarnish what popularity Theodoric had gained.

The report was that another body of foreign troops had come over the Alpes border, this time through the Poenina Pass—and this time Burgund warriors, sent by King Gundobad. However, it was not another cousin-king’s welcome gesture of Germanic solidarity. It proved to be Gundobad’s taking greedy advantage of Italia’s current unsettled conditions. His troops came down from the mountains only as far as the pasture and cropland valleys on the Italia side. This was ground that our Visigoth allies had already won for us on their way hither during the previous spring, and the people there had since been pacific and content with their lot. Theodoric had seen no need to post occupying forces in a region of nothing but farms and tiny farm villages, nor even a judex-and-marshal tribunal anywhere nearer than the Ligurian town of Novaria. So the Burgund troops, unopposed, did some brisk but probably not very profitable sacking and looting in those valleys. And then, worse, they took about a thousand of the local peasants captive, and marched them back across the Alpis Poenina to become slaves in the lands of King Gundobad.

“That son of a fitchet bitch!” Theodoric raged. “Here am I, hoping to band together
all
us outlanders in a new pride and purpose and dignity and respectability. And that tetzte Gundobad decides he will emulate the brute Attila, all on his own, just to run off a herd of slave cattle. May the devil take him napping! May he fry and freeze in hell!”

But there was nothing we could do to repair the damage, short of haring off across the northern Alpes in pursuit of the Burgund raiders. And that was out of the question, because there was all the rest of Italia to be brought under our governance before winter came again. That process took time, but caused us not much exertion, since the cities and towns and legion garrisons were even less inclined to put up a resistance now than they had been a year ago. Several of them, even before we got close enough to send a messenger demanding “tributum aut bellum,” had emissaries waiting on the road to meet us and greet us and offer their surrender.

And, as we moved south along the peninsula, we noticed that a good many communities, which
could
have been located on easily defensible high terrain, were instead seated on low ground almost pathetically open to assault or siege. That circumstance baffled us, and at town after town we commented wonderingly on it, until at last we learned the reason for it. The elderly urbis praefectus of one such community—I forget which—said dolefully, as he surrendered it to Theodoric:

“Had my poor town still stood on the high ground yonder, where it once did, instead of down here on the plain, you would not have walked into it uncontested.”

“Well?” Theodoric asked. “Why
is
it here? Why would an entire community pick up and move, to its own detriment?”

“Eheu, because thieves stole the aqueduct. Water could no longer be conveyed to the heights, so the town had to move down here by the riverside.”

“Thieves stole the aqueduct?!
Why, man, an aqueduct is as immovable as an amphitheater!”

“I meant the pipes of it. The pipes were made of lead. Thieves stole the lead to sell.”

Theodoric looked at him in astonishment. “I take it you are not speaking of foreign marauders.”

“No, no. Native thieves.”

“And you people just let them do it? The stealing could hardly have been done overnight. Miles and miles of heavy lead pipe.”

“Eheu, we people had been too long peaceable and comfortable. Our town had not enough cohortes vigilum to apprehend the thieves. And Rome seemed uncaring; Rome sent no assistance and took no action. Eheu, our town was not alone in being so helpless. Many others have had their aqueducts similarly ruined over the years, and had to move from secure hilltop to vulnerable low ground.”

“So that is why,” murmured Theodoric. Then he said, sounding very like my old mentor Wyrd, “By Murtia, the goddess of indolence, but Rome really
had
gone senile and toothless and impotent. It was high time we came.”

At the mountain town of Corfinium, a crossing place of several major Roman roads, we camped for a few days while Theodoric accepted the town’s submission to him, acquainted its urbis praefectus with the rules he was to follow under martial law, appointed the usual judex-and-marshal tribunal and detached a mere five contubernia of infantry to be the occupying force. We left town on the Via Salaria, and I happened to be riding and idly conversing with Theodoric at the head of our columns when, just south of Corfinium, we met another, much smaller column approaching: a score of riders escorting a handsome, mule-drawn carruca. When we all stopped, a white-haired, clean-shaven, distinguished-looking man stepped from the carriage and saluted. His red sandals and the broad stripe on his tunic were unmistakable insignia of his rank, and his pronunciation of Theodoric’s name was unmistakably Roman:

“Salve, Teodoricus. I am the senator Festus, and I beg a word with you.”

“Salve, patricius,” Theodoric said politely but not obsequiously. I might have been a trifle awed by the very first Roman senator I had ever seen, but Theodoric was not. After all, he had been a Consul of the Eastern Empire.

“I have come from Rome to seek you out,” Festus went on. “But I had expected to meet you nearer there, and now I find you not marching toward Rome at all.”

“I am saving Rome for last,” Theodoric said carelessly. “Or are you bringing its surrender betimes and unbidden?”

“That is what I would discuss with you. Might we get off the road and sit a while in comfort?”

“This is an army. It does not carry seats and senatorial comforts.”

“But I do, of course.”

Festus motioned to his men, and while Theodoric summoned forward his other officers and made introductions all around, the senator’s escorts speedily erected a very splendid pavilion, laid out cushions in it and even produced skins of Falernian wine and crystal goblets in which to serve it. Festus would have commenced with easy loquacity, but Theodoric remarked crisply that he hoped to reach the next town, Aufidena, by nightfall, so the senator got straight to the point.

“With our former king in obscurity, with a new emperor on the throne in the east, with yourself unquestionably if unofficially our new overlord, the Roman Senate is, like every Roman citizen, in a state of perplexity and uncertainty. I myself should like to see the transfer of title and power done as soon and as smoothly as possible—to make de jure the de facto kingship of Teodoric. Now, I cannot pretend to represent the thinking of all the Senate—”

“The Roman Senate,” Theodoric blandly interrupted, “since the days of Diocletian, has not been
required
to do any thinking.”

“True. Too true. And over the last century, it has been reduced to little more than a ratifier of the deeds and actions of whatever strongman held preeminence.”

“You mean whatever
barbarian
held preeminence. You may use the word without embarrassment, Senator. Ever since Stilikho, the first outlander to wield real influence in the empire, the Roman Senate has had no function except to affirm and assent.”

“Come, come,” said Festus, seeming unoffended. “A function not entirely superfluous. Regard the very word ‘Senate,’ derived from ‘senex,’ and meaning ‘an assembly of old men.’ From the earliest times, one function of a tribe’s old men has been that of giving their blessing to the endeavors of the younger. Just so, Teodoric, you wish your exploits recognized and your claim to kingship made legitimate.”

“Only the emperor can make it so. Not the Senate.”

“Which is why I am here. As I say, I represent no senatorial majority. I hardly need tell you that the
majority
would rejoice if you and every other barbarus were back lurking deep in the forests of Germania and themselves again the rightful choosers of their rulers. However, I do represent a faction that would very much like to see Italia returned to peace and stability. And we of the Senate are aware, from our own dealings with Anastasius when he was a mere treasury steward, that he is a man inclined to dither and temporize. Therefore, I propose this. If you can provide me transportation and safe-conduct, I will go to Constantinople. I will urge Anastasius to make immediate proclamation that Odoacer is ousted, that you are henceforth Teodoricus Rex Romani Imperii Occidentalis.”