Raptor (139 page)

“And you suggest that I enact a law or issue an injunction or publish a decree condemning this? I have already declared that I will not meddle in religion in any way.”

“This is a case of religion preparing to encroach on secular affairs and monarchical authority. You are certainly entitled to stop that before it goes any further.”

Theodoric sighed. “If I could, I would emulate Lycurgus. He was a ruler of antiquity—a very wise ruler—who made just one law for his land: that no laws should ever be made. Ne, Saio Soas, I believe Gelasius is only maliciously trying to goad me into a response, so he can decry my meddling. Let us ignore him and thereby make him
really
wrathful.”

I must, in honesty, say that not every high Catholic churchman laid obstacles in Theodoric’s way. The Bishop of Ticinum, a man named Epiphanius, came to him with a worthwhile proposal. I might cynically suspect that Epiphanius had in mind only an enhancement of his own standing with the people or with the Church, but it did redound to Theodoric’s benefit too. Epiphanius reminded him of the thousand or so Italian peasants who had been carried off by the marauding Burgunds of King Gundobad. The bishop suggested that their rescue and return to their homeland would earn Theodoric much goodwill, and he offered to go himself to do the negotiating for those captives’ release. Not only did Theodoric accept the proposal; he gave Epiphanius a cavalry century for an escort and ample gold to pay a ransom. He sent with the bishop, also, something even more precious than gold. He sent his daughter Arevagni, proffering her as bride to King Gundobad’s son and crown prince, Sigismund.

“How now, Theodoric?” I protested. “Gundobad took unworthy advantage of you, virtually insulted you, by ordering that foray into Italia while you were embroiled in war. You yourself called him a tetzte son of a fitchet bitch. You owe that man only rebuke, if not violent chastisement. Bad enough that you must pay him a bribe to return the captives. You will also invite him to become affinal father of your royal daughter?”

Theodoric only said patiently, “Arevagni makes no demur. Why should you? The girl must marry somebody, someday, and Sigismund will eventually be king of a stalwart people—a people resident right on Italia’s northwest border. Reflect, Saio Thorn. The more prosperous I make this land—as I hope to do—the more tempting a quarry it will be to every covetous outlander. By making other kings my kin,
especially
the sons of fitchet bitches, I lessen the likelihood that they will become my adversaries. Vái, I only wish I had
more
progeny for whom to arrange propitious marriages.”

Well, this was Theodoric’s domain to hold and defend, and Arevagni was his daughter to do with as he pleased. So I simply accepted the fact that expediency is one of the routine tools of statecraft, and that Theodoric, like every other ruler, had to wield such tools. In this case it worked as warranted. Bishop Epiphanius and his proposal and his sacks of gold were hospitably received in Lugdunum. He was even invited to assist the local Arian bishop in officiating at the wedding of Arevagni and Sigismund. And when in time he returned to Ravenna, he brought, among other things, King Gundobad’s avowal of everlasting amity and alliance with Theodoric. Epiphanius brought also every last one of the abducted peasants. And, as he had predicted, that humanitarian rescue made Theodoric even better liked by his Italia subjects—at least by the commonfolk, those who never would pay any heed to the Church’s urgings that Theodoric be detested and execrated.

However, if the goddess Fortune was being more or less benign to Theodoric at this time, she seemed not to be smiling much on me. I could almost believe that Bishop John had been right when he threatened that I would be punished for my disrespectful manhandling of the sainted Severinus. I could almost believe that I had been cursed with something like a Christian version of the Old Religion’s insandjis, a Sending. What happened was this:

Inasmuch as we never did find out who were the distant Odoacer partisans who had shipped those provisions to Ravenna by sea, I was smugly pleased with myself for having at least effected the capture of the expatriate responsible for the false salt trains. When Centurio Gudahals brought him to us from Haustaths, old Georgius Honoratus was intact, healthy and rightfully terrified. He had been gray of hair and skin and spirit when I first knew him; he was more so now, and I doubt that I would have known him again. He certainly failed to recognize me, so I did not even speak to him, but ordered him held in Ravenna’s carcer municipalis for interrogation at my leisure. I congratulated Gudahals, saying that his good work might well have atoned for his earlier lapse.

“I hope so, Saio Thorn,” he said earnestly. “We
also
found that traitor’s co-conspirators, whom you bade me look for along the way. Caught them in the act, almost—flagrante delicto, anyway. A merchant and his wife.”

He told me about it. Gudahals and his riders, after having easily taken old Georgius at the Haustaths mine, were hastening back across country. On this southern side of the Alpes, in a small city called Tridentum, they had been surprised to come upon a salt train just like those they had seen so frequently at their siege line. This train was headed north, as if returning from Ravenna, but its mules were inexplicably still full-laden.

“Then, of course, we recognized the train’s drovers as our fellow soldiers in disguise,” Gudahals said cheerfully. “And
you
know, Saio Thorn, what the mules were carrying now!”

The soldier-teamsters recounted how they, also sent by Saio Thorn to seek out conspirators, had pulled into Tridentum for the night and there had found cause for suspicion. The merchant and his wife had incriminated themselves, first by too obviously recognizing the mules and then by foolishly querying the drovers: whence came the train and why had it not delivered its freight?

“Naturally, those soldiers took the man and woman in charge,” Gudahals said with zest. “They had just done that when I and my riders arrived with our prisoner Georgius.”

The centurio went on to say that if any further proof of the Tridentum couple’s complicity was required, they and Georgius, though taking care not to speak, had exchanged glances of unmistakable significance. So, just for amusement, the gathered soldiers revealed to the prisoners what was now riding inside the salt bales. All three of the culprits had turned as pale as the salt, and the woman had tried to shout something to Georgius, but her husband had cuffed her to silence her words.

“The moment he moved, I cut him down,” said Gudahals. “And then the woman too. Both the conspirators executed on the spot, Saio Thorn, as you ordered.”

“As I ordered,” I repeated, with a sinking heart, because I remembered what Georgius’s son had told me. His sister had married a merchant… gone away from the Place of Echoes…

“Having no further use for the mules and their pickled freight,” Gudahals added, “we simply left them there, and all of us soldiers came back here together.”

“Those conspirators,” I said, “did they have names?”

“The merchant called himself Alypius. He was a man of some property—stores and stables and smithies to accommodate the many trains and teamsters that go back and forth through the Alpes. The prisoner Georgius later mentioned that Alypius’s wife was called Livia. I am sure Georgius can tell you much more, Saio Thorn, but we did not ply him with questions on the way hither, because you had ordered that we not trouble him in any manner.”

“Yes, yes,” I mumbled. “You have indeed followed orders this time, Gudahals, to the veriest syllable. I shall commend you to Theodoric.”

I was no longer feeling smugly pleased with myself. As had happened on so many other occasions, I was once again to blame for the death of a onetime friend of mine. I remembered how I had once carved Livia’s name and mine in the alpine ice river, and how I had wished the best for the pretty little girl in her later life. Even with the evidence that, in the war just concluded, Livia had been working for the wrong side—and was still, even as a grown woman, obeying the doltish demands of her lackluster father—I was dreadfully sorry for what had happened to her.

I was so downcast and dejected that I did not even visit Georgius in the carcer, either to gloat at the old nauthing or to inquire why he had committed his family to work on behalf of the outcast Odoacer. I did not even attend the hearing at which Theodoric sentenced Georgius to be “turpiter decalvatus, as a mark of perpetual infamy”—and directed that that marking be done “summo gaudio plebis”—and further ordered that Georgius should labor, for as long as life remained to him, alongside the other wretched convicts toiling in “the living hell,” the pistrinum of Ravenna’s grain mill. (“Turpiter decalvatus” means “foully scalped” and “summo gaudio plebis” meant that Georgius was to be thus mutilated in public, “to the great joy of the masses.” But I did not even go to be among those watching masses.)

As Gudahals later reported to me, the warders put onto Georgius’s gray head a metal bowl without a bottom, forcing it down as far as his ears and eyebrows, so that his scalp became the bowl’s bottom. Then the bowl was filled to the brim with live coals and was held firmly in place by the warders, while Georgius screamed and struggled and contorted, and while all the hair and skin and flesh of the top of his head was burned away to the bone. The crowd, said Gudahals, truly did enjoy the spectacle. A loud cheer had gone up when Georgius’s hair went up in flames, but after that there was not much to see except greasy smoke. Then Georgius was dragged off, by now unconscious, to wake up naked and chained to the millstone with the other half-dead slaves of the pistrinum.

Only belatedly did I think of some questions I would like to ask the old man. Perhaps because it was in large measure my fault that his daughter’s life had ended so untimely, I had some curiosity to know what kind of man Livia had wed and what their married life had been like. So then I hurried to the grain mill, fearing that old Georgius would not long survive in there. Well, I was right about that, so I did not get to ask him anything. He had died before I got there, and his dishonorable remains had been buried as Odoacer’s had been, in tainted ground—which is to say, in the burying ground adjoining the Jews’ synagogue.

My spirits were not much elevated by the fact that the Frankish Princess Audefleda was now resident in Ravenna. Her brother, King Clovis, had sent her and a considerable escort of guards and servants southward from his capital city of Durocortorum, and her train had come as far as Lugdunum while Epiphanius was there on his ransom mission. So the bishop had brought her with him when he brought the freed captives, and now she was here, and on that account I was feeling half melancholy, half resentful.

Akh, I tried my best not to feel so. I reminded myself that there was at least one thing to be said for the passing of time. I was not
twice
the princess’s age any more; I was now only nineteen years older than her twenty-one. And I had to concede that Audefleda was neither a frivolous little dotterel nor an overbearing young virago. She was undeniably handsome of face and figure—wide blue eyes, a cascade of golden curls, ivory skin, proud bosom—and well spoken and of regal bearing. And she did not flaunt her beauty either wheedlingly or demandingly. She was as gracious and pleasant to me as she was to every other member of the court—and, for that matter, even to servants and slaves. Audefleda would, in short, make a perfect queen for Theodoric.

And I did not (I told myself) resent my being neglected by Theodoric when, in addition to all his kingly concerns, he spent so much time in paying court to Audefleda and in making arrangements for a lavish royal wedding. All that bothered me (I told myself) was his behaving like a love-smitten suitor instead of a staid, stern king. For example, I thought he even degraded the dignity of his beard, which was by now of biblical-prophet magnificence, when he so frequently parted it with vapid smiles. And he did not
need
to dance attendance on the princess and cast moon eyes at her. She was, after all, committed to this marriage, even if he had been indifferent or cold or cruel toward her.

On the nowadays seldom occasions that I could gain audience with Theodoric, he would deal summarily with whatever I had come to discuss, so that he could inflict on me some new detail of his nuptial plans, and of those I was already weary. The last time we sat together prior to the wedding day, he said wistfully:

“The ceremony cannot be as elaborate as I should like to make it, simply because there is only the one Arian church in which to hold it. And that one, the Baptistery—did you know, Thorn?—used to be only a Roman bathhouse. It was all that poor Bishop Neon could acquire for Arian worship in a city dominated by the Church of Rome.”

“Only
a bathhouse?” I said, rather waspishly. “There was certainly never anything cramped or cheap about
any
Roman therma. And old Neon did a splendid job of converting this one for religious purposes. The Baptistery is quite big enough and grand enough even for this epochal event.”

“Nevertheless, I have promised Neon that I will build a much more sumptuous Arian church, to be his cathedral, and Neon is ecstatic at the prospect. Anyway, the city deserves such an edifice, and will require it, with Arian Christians rapidly outnumbering the Catholics here.”

I said, with petulance, “I do not understand why you insist on keeping Ravenna as your capital city. This is a dreary place. Damp, foggy, stinking of swamp. Frogs croaking all night long,
when
one can hear them over the vicious whine of the nasty blood-prickers. The only fresh air to be had is down at the Classis seafront, but one swoons before getting there, in the middle of the causeway, from the stench of the workers’ district.”

“I have improvements in mind,” Theodoric said mildly, but I railed on:

“And the water is worse than the fetid air. What the Padus brings into the canals is brackish, thick with marsh scum—and into that gets mixed the city’s rere-dorter offal. It is a ghastly porridge. The Romans here are the only Romans anywhere in the world who drink their wine undiluted, just as it comes from the amphora, because they know better than to mix it with Ravenna water. For ages now, they have been reciting Martial’s little verse: