Raptor (135 page)

All those things were going on, and surely Odoacer knew of them from his speculatores’ signals. Surely he realized that his onetime dominion was his no longer and never again would be. Surely, too, the living conditions inside Ravenna must be approaching the intolerable. Surely a rational man would by now have been suing for truce. But another winter went by, and no person, no word came out of there. Ravenna still did not surrender.

As the veterans of the conquest settled down to be men of property for much of the time, warriors only when summoned by necessity, many of them began—with Theodoric’s permission and assistance, and even encouragement—bringing to Italia their families from back in Moesia. The Danuvius and Savus barges that had earlier served to transport our military supplies now were coming up those rivers laden with women and children and old folks and household goods. From the Savus riverhead in Noricum Mediterraneum, the families came overland, in trains of wagons furnished by the army quartermasters, through Venetia and on to their several destinations.

Theodoric, early on, sent for his own family, but they naturally traveled hither in rather more comfortable conveyances. His two daughters came in company with two cousins, a young man and woman, all escorted and shepherded by the princesses’ aunt, the cousins’ mother, who was of course Theodoric’s surviving sister, Amalafrida. She, being some years older than Theodoric, might have been averse to leaving her longtime home estate in Moesia, except that she had been recently widowed by the death there of her husband, the herizogo Wulteric. This was the first time I had met the herizogin Amalafrida, and I found her appealingly auntish of aspect—tall, spare, stately, serene. Her daughter, Amalaberga, was fairly handsome, of a meek and retiring nature, likable enough. But the son, Theodahad, was a sullen, heavy-jawed, pimply youth for whom I did not care at all.

The princesses Arevagni and Thiudagotha flung themselves upon me with happy cries and warm embraces. They were both by now full-grown young ladies, very beautiful in their separate ways, and princessly in every degree. I had dreaded Thiudagotha’s having to be told of the demise of her intended husband, King Freidereikhs, who had been still the boy Prince Frido when she last saw him. But, as I should have realized, the word of that had been borne back to the Novae palace long before. If Thiudagotha had wept then over her bereavement, she was at least not making a lifelong sorrow of it. On the many occasions that she and I would recollect some mutual memory of Frido, she always regally refrained from tears or mawkishness.

Those members of his family Theodoric housed for a time in a fine Mediolanum mansion that had fallen to him in the spoils, because he had already ordered that a palace be built for himself there, and another in Verona, which would forever be his favorite Italian city. Also, at the beginning of his handing out parcels of Italia’s land, he had asked me what I would like—another country estate or a residence in some city or town. I had thanked him but declined taking anything, saying that I was more than satisfied with my farm outside Novae and did not wish to be encumbered with too many possessions.

All those things were going on, and surely Odoacer knew of them from his speculatores’ signals. What must have been his state of mind, now that the conqueror’s
family
was contentedly installed in what had been his domain? And what, by now, must life have been like inside that sealed city? But still Ravenna did not surrender.

There are other things I ought to mention in regard to those land allotments. No one would have seen anything remarkable in a conqueror’s seizing as his rightful plunder every last jugerum of the conquered land, and everyone would have expected the consequence to be an anguished outcry from the dispossessed landowners. But neither of those things happened here. All that Theodoric appropriated—and then shared with his officers and troops—was the same one-third of Italia’s estates that Odoacer had already impounded from the owners some years previous. Even what Theodoric kept for his own—the Mediolanum mansion in which he housed his royal relatives, the land on which he was having the new palaces built—even those he only took from what Odoacer had earlier taken from others. So, to say it simply, the former owners of those lands and properties were no worse off than before. Far from raising any complaint, they were pleasantly surprised and gratified by Theodoric’s benevolent restraint, and most were praiseful of it.

Well,
some
people were outraged. Odoacer had made gifts of those selfsame confiscated lands to his accomplices and followers, and those men bitterly resented Theodoric’s snatching the gifts away. Some of those held high administrative positions, everywhere from Rome to Ravenna to the outermost provinces, and, for one reason or another, had to be left in those positions. So they still wielded influence and were capable of using it to Theodoric’s disadvantage.

The members of the Roman Senate, I hasten to say, were not among the malcontents. True, many senators understandably detested outlanders on principle, but all had the best interests of Rome at heart, and some senators, like Festus, were willing to cooperate with Theodoric from the beginning of his rule. Anyway, none would have dreamed of seeming greedy or petty by sniveling about “dissipation of assets.” The Senate was, as it always had been, an assembly of old men from the oldest Roman families, and no patrician family would ever have stooped to such indignity. Anyway, many of those old Roman families could have been deprived of a third of their holdings without feeling much distress, some of them perhaps without even noticing it.

But there were others who, having benefited from Odoacer’s reign, had gladly supported it—most notably the Catholic Christian Church and its higher-ranking clerics, whose vast estates Odoacer had conspicuously exempted from his land confiscation. When Theodoric commenced the apportioning of land among his soldiers, the churchmen trembled in their liturgical shoes, certain that a “damnable Arian” would naturally, vindictively, gleefully seize upon the Church’s lands and their personal estates. Indeed, it was widely rumored that it was nervous apprehension that felled Rome’s Patriarch Bishop Felix III with an apoplexy. But Theodoric, like Odoacer, refrained from touching any least piece of Church property. That did not, however, lessen the clerics’ execration of him. The same bishops and priests who had lavished hosannahs on their fellow Catholic Odoacer for his having “respected the sanctity” of their holdings now asserted that the Arian Theodoric
dared
not lay a hand on them—that he was a contemptible weakling as well as a despicable enemy. At any rate, and from whatever cause, Papa Felix did drop dead. He was replaced by a fractious old man named Gelasius, and this new Patriarch Bishop brought with him another vexation for Theodoric.

“Bishop Gelasius, or the pontiff, if you prefer,” said Senator Festus, “is in extremely bad odor at Constantinople.” The senator had just returned from his mission there, and had just been ushered into Theodoric’s presence, and those were the first words he spoke. All of us in the room stared at him, mystified.

“What in the name of Pluto do I care about that?” Theodoric demanded. “You went to get the emperor’s acknowledgment of my regnancy here. Did you get it?”

“No,” Festus said. “I thought I would begin gently, by telling you why Anastasius refuses it.”

“Refuses it?!”

“Well, withholds it. He maintains that, if you cannot even curb the ill-mannered behavior of a disputatious bishop, you are obviously not yet in full control of your new subjects, and—”

“Senator,” Theodoric said icily. “Spare me the oration as well as the gentility. My temper is suddenly on a very short tether.”

Festus began to speak quite rapidly. “It seems that Gelasius’s first act as Patriarch Bishop of Rome was to denounce his brother prelate, the Patriarch Bishop Akakiós of Constantinople. News of this came while I was there. Papa Gelasius seems to feel that Bishop Akakiós has never been sufficiently severe in suppressing certain contumelious elements in the Eastern Church. The pontiff now demands that Akakiós’s name be stricken from the diptych list of Christian fathers deserving the prayers of the faithful. All his cardinal priests at Rome, I am told, are sending letters broadcast, forbidding such prayers all over western Christendom. As you can imagine, this has caused an uproar of indignation in Constantinople. Anastasius says he hesitates to ordain you Teodoricus Rex Romani while his own irate subjects are raging for Rome to be burned to the ground and for everybody even remotely Roman to be banished to Gehenna. That is what he
says.
Of course, it is only a convenient excuse for him to go on postponing your—”

“Skeit!” bellowed Theodoric, smashing down his fist on the arm of his chair, and nearly splintering it. “Does the old fool expect me to intercede between two bickering bishops? I have a whole nation waiting to be governed, and I am denied even the proper authority to govern it. I refuse to believe that a quarrel among ecclesiastics takes precedence.”

“As best I could gather,” Festus said warily, “the quarrel concerns the Monophysite party in the Eastern Church. Gelasius apparently considers it a divisive element, and considers Akakiós overly tolerant of it. The Monophysites, you see, prefer to believe that the divine and human natures manifested in the person of Jesus—”

“Iésus Xristus!
Another of those finical quibbles! Fighting over the shadow of an ass, the countryfolk call it. Skeit! Nearly five hundred years of Christianity, now, and still the Christian fathers ignore the real world around them while they pick at theological lint. They pretend to be sages settling weighty questions, when they do not even know how to choose fitting titles for themselves.
Pontiff,
indeed! Is Gelasius ignorant that a pontifex was a
pagan
high priest? And
cardinal
deacons! Are they ignorant that Cardea was the pagan goddess of doorways? By the Styx, if Anastasius wants the Christian Church improved, let him begin by enlightening the stygian ignorance of Christians!”

“Ja, ja,” rumbled Saio Soas, when Theodoric had momentarily subsided. “Also,
every
patriarch bishop yearns to be the one and only called Papa, hence to be the only one ranked with the sainted Leo of fifty years ago. And
he
was adoringly called Papa because the Roman Christians credited him with the miracle of having turned back Attila and his Huns from invading Italia. But the truth is that the Huns, being creatures of the cold northern climes, feared fevers and pestilences in these hotter southern lands.
That
is why Attila spared the Italia peninsula. Papa Leo may have been saintly, but he had nothing to do with it.”

“Let us get back to the matters of today,” said the senator. “Theodoric, if Anastasius will not cede you Rome, let Rome do it. Everyone knows that you are truly the new king, imperial sanction or no. Although Rome is not truly the capital city, I am sure I can persuade the Senate to accord you a triumph there, and—”

“No,” Theodoric said gruffly.

“Why not?” Festus asked, in some exasperation. “Rome is yours—the Eternal City—but I am told that you have not yet gone to look at it even from a distance.”

“And I will not now,” said Theodoric. “I swore to myself that I would not set foot in Rome until I am King of Rome. King I cannot be until I first march into Ravenna, and am accorded the triumph
there.
If Anastasius had given me my due, I would be satisfied to go on waiting for Odoacer to wither on the vine. But now I will wait no longer.” He turned to me. “Saio Thorn, you know that region better than any of us here. Go back to Ravenna. Find out how that skulking Odoacer has survived for so long. Then devise a sure way for me to get him out of there. Habái ita swe!”

What can I say?” Lentinus shrugged. “Perhaps they are subsisting by eating each other in there. I can only tell you that the blockaders report not a single breach of the lines, not once, not by land, not by sea.”

“And the men on the river are still nipping at them with the crab-claws?”

He nodded, without his former vivacity. “Even after all this time, though, there is no telling whether the eruptions of wet fire have much unnerved the people inside the walls. Outside the wall, I have to say, that little diversion has lost much of its enjoyability. The soldiers building the khelaí are about as weary and bored as the ones manning the floating boxes. So am I, to tell the truth. I can barely remember what it felt like to have a ship’s deck beneath my feet.”

I left him glooming there at Ariminum’s harborside, and went away to ponder the situation. I sat on a marble bench and unseeingly eyed the city’s proudest monument, the triumphal arch of Augustus, while I tried to ascertain—by thought alone—how a community the size of Ravenna could possibly have endured for so long without the benefit of provision. There were only three things going unimpeded into that city. One was the Padus River, but our khelaí builders would have intercepted anything attempting that ingress. Then there were the birds of the sea and marshes, but I doubted that Odoacer was, like Elijah, being fed by the birds. Finally, there were the torch signals. They were probably eagerly received by the Ravenna folk so isolated from the rest of the world, but they could not transmit nutriment…

Meanwhile, Theodoric was marching determinedly in this direction, leading a substantial attack force and expecting me to tell him, when he got here, how best to employ it. What advice could I proffer? I had no ideas at all, clever or otherwise…

Well, I said to myself, there was one aspect of the blockade that I had not yet personally inspected. I had not yet gone to take a look at the
other
end of our siege line, where it terminated at the seashore north of Ravenna.

Neither had Lentinus, it turned out, when I rejoined him. So he insisted, with a resurgence of his former enthusiasm, that we go there by sea. He gave commands, and rounded up a crew of navy men, and they slid a raven down the ways from a shed to the water, and they rowed us away with a will. It was the first time I had been aboard any seagoing vessel since my travels in the Eastern Empire—and the first time for Lentinus, he claimed, in almost as long—so we both thoroughly enjoyed the voyage. From Ariminum, the raven stayed close to the coast until we approached Ravenna, then veered far enough offshore to pass outside the harbor’s barrier islands, so we would not risk being mistakenly attacked by our own patrolling troop boxes. We made landfall several miles north of there, where another of the many delta branches of the Padus empties into the Hadriatic, and where a community of butterfly tents lining the Via Popilia marked the siege soldiers’ northern command camp.