Raptor (14 page)

I carried no certificate of manumission because, not having been a slave, I had been given none. And there is truly no other way for a person to
prove
that he or she is of genuinely free status. Of course, grown-up men and women seldom have to prove any such thing, unless they bear the scars and calluses of the slave’s iron collar or shackles, or unless they are unfortunate enough to fit the circulated description of a real fugitive. But a young person, wandering alone in the countryside, can easily be accosted and accused and apprehended by anyone wishing a slave of his own. The youngster’s most vociferous protestations or plausible explanations of his vagrant wayfaring would do him no good whatever, for the adult’s word would outweigh his even in a court of law.

Boys are especially prized catches because, even if they be of only toddling age, they are worth the cost of upbringing until they are big enough to work. However, I was already old enough to be useful and desirable as a slave, whether I was boy or girl. The garb I wore was common to both sexes in those rural lands. Still, even if I had worn a placard proclaiming me male or female, I should have been in danger of abduction. If I were taken for a boy, I should have been put to heavy drudgery; if for a girl, I might have been given lighter labors, but I should most certainly have been required also to share my “new” master’s bed.

So, whenever I spied another tramp or a horseman or teamster on the road, I dodged aside and crouched in a copse or hedgerow until he was safely past. Whenever I approached a village new to me, I skirted it at a discreet distance. I never appealed for shelter or sustenance at any wayside house. Even in the bitterest, snowy weather, I slept comfortably enough in farm hayricks or byres, and was up and away in the early morning before the farmer came out to do his chores, and for nourishment I foraged. Out of necessity, I was getting better at using my sling for a weapon, but, even so, I could only seldom bring down a rabbit or an edible bird. My raptor did much better at hunting, but I never got hungry enough to share any of its kills of snakes and mice and such. There was little to pluck from the winter-fallow farm fields except an occasional overlooked and frozen turnip. So, I confess, when I had no other recourse, I raided henhouses for their eggs and, now and again, a whole chicken. And one of those forays very nearly brought my journeying to an abrupt end.

At one farm, in the early morning, my juika-bloth went off to seek some fare with which to break its own night’s fast, and I slunk into the henhouse. I was filching from under the hens some of their warm, new-laid eggs—and I was doing it so deftly that the hens only mildly and sleepily clucked complaint—when a heavy hand gripped hard on my shoulder, yanked me out into the dawn light of the barnyard and threw me down on the iron-hard ground. The farmer, a huge man, as red of face and eyes as he was of beard, glared down at me, waved a heavy club and growled fiercely:

“Sai! Gafaífah thanna aiweino faihugairns thiufs!”

That explained his being awake and about even earlier than most farmers—“Behold! I have caught the everlastingly greedy thief!” Obviously his henhouse had been regularly plundered by another before me, and he had lain in wait. The earlier thief had probably been a fox or weasel, but I got no opportunity to suggest that, for now he had caught a human pilferer—and he went on to tell me how he would beat me bloody before he chained me up for a slave. He hit me in the ribs with his club before I could yell, “Juika-bloth!” I started to scramble to my feet, and caught another blow, this one right across my face, before the eagle could get back from wherever it had gone.

When it flapped between me and my assailant, and settled on my shoulder, and gazed curiously at the farmer, that man’s eyes widened and he froze with his club held aloft. The juika-bloth of course had no animosity toward the stranger, but a raptor does not have to gaze very hard at a person to look fearsomely raptorial indeed. The farmer backed away from us, and muttered wonderingly, “Unhultha skohl…” I gave him no chance to collect his wits, but ran away as fast as I could go. I even ran out from under my eagle, so it had to fly to keep up with me. That must have awed the farmer still more, for he did not give chase. And I would wager that for the rest of his life he awed other people by telling how he had once given battle, in his own barnyard, to an “unclean demon” and its winged evil spirit.

Not until I was well away from that farm and hiding in a clump of shrubbery did I stop to wipe off the blood that was streaming down my face. And not until then did my ribs begin to hurt. The pain was excruciating, and I could feel a wetness there, too, and I supposed it was blood. But it was not. I had tucked the eggs, as I stole them, inside my upper smock above my belt rope, and the farmer’s club had broken them. That made quite a mess inside my clothes, but I was able to scrape up enough of the mangled egg meat to allay my hunger a little. My ribs went on hurting for some days afterward, but, if any were broken, they knit of themselves.

For even longer, my face was also painful, swollen, black and blue. But the bleeding, though copious, had come from just one small cut, and that soon healed, leaving only a trivial scar, paler than my skin, that bisected my left eyebrow. Later, whenever I was a man, the scar was assumed by others to be an honorable memento of some manly combat. And whenever I was a woman, people remarked that the interestingly disjunct eyebrow made a striking addition to the beauty of my visage.

Shortly after that incident, the road brought me close beside the river Dubis, and for the first time in many days I was able to give myself a good washing. The water was bitingly cold—I had to break the bankside ice to get at it—but it helped to numb the pain of my ribs and to reduce the puffiness of my face. The river also enabled me to supplement my diet with fish, so that I had to make no more raids on henhouses from there on. There were many vineyards along the Dubis, and of course they bore no grapes in wintertime, but they were useful to me nonetheless. I stole several of the bits of twine with which the vines were tied to their stakes, and tied those together to make a fishing line, and improvised fishhooks from the spiny twigs of hawthorn shrubs.

Hawthorn is a very hard wood, and I owned no knife, but I induced my juika-bloth to bite off the twigs for me with its formidable beak. That took a great deal of imploring and encouraging, and patient trying and failing, before I could make the bird understand what I wanted. But once it had grasped the idea, it enthusiastically went on snipping off thorned twigs until I had many more than I could use. It was even the bird that provided bait for me; I took a fragment of mouse meat from one of its kills. In gratitude, I gave the eagle the first fish I caught, a small grayling. For several more days, every time the juika-bloth returned from one of its own foraging expeditions, it brought me a beakful more of hawthorn twigs. I think it must have thought I wanted to build myself a thorny nest.

Thereafter, and as long as I trudged upstream alongside the Dubis, I caught other grayling, trout and loach to cook for myself. (My primitive hooks and line were not stout enough to land any of the larger fish, like pike-perch.) Because almost every day a river barge or two floated past me, bearing loads of salt or timber downstream toward the great crossroads city of Lugdunum, I had to hide from them as I had hidden from passersby on the road. Bargemen would have been equally eager to snatch me from the shore and put me to slave labor on board. So I did most of my fishing by night, and it was actually easier then. I would make a torch of dead brush and set it afire, and that light would attract the fish closer to the bank.

My northeastward course led me always uphill, but so imperceptibly that I would not have realized it except that the Dubis gradually got constricted between higher and higher banks. Eventually I came to the river’s abrupt bend where it flows around the hill on which is set the city of Vesontio. The Dubis very nearly encircles that hill, making it a peninsula, and on the narrow neck of that peninsula, the highest part, stands the city’s cathedral. So the impressive brown-brick bulk of the Basilica of St. John was the first bit of Vesontio that I saw from afar.

For two or three miles before it passed through the city gate, the road was partially paved with four parallel rows of cobblestones, so that wheeled vehicles coming and going should not get mired in the muddy season, and the road was left uncobbled between those rows, to spare the hoofs of the vehicles’ draft horses, mules and oxen. Since there was so much traffic entering and leaving Vesontio—people afoot or on horseback, carts and wagons full of various sorts of goods—I could now leave the river and get back on that road and be inconspicuous among the multitude. Even the juika-bloth on my shoulder drew few glances, because many of the other travelers were peddlers, and some of them carried wicker cages of nightingales and other songbirds, and I suppose I was taken to be also a peddler of exotic birds.

Some folk cannot abide cities and city life, but I am not one of those, and that is probably because the first city I ever visited, Vesontio, is such a pleasant place. From the eminence of its peninsula, its citizens enjoy a scenic view of the Dubis’s great bend and the lesser hills all about. The riverside is fringed with innumerable quays, to and from which are constantly going freight barges, and the city’s entire circle of river frontage is lined with a broad, paved promenade for summertime strollers. Vesontio is a clean and quiet city, too. There are few smokes and no stinks in the air, no repellent colors or taints in the water, no overwhelming clangor of smithies and workshops, as are to be found in cities where cloth is made and dyed, or leather is tanned, or stone cut, or metals worked. Vesontio imports all such things as those, and pays for them by exporting the clean salt from the mines in the vicinity and the fragrant woods from the forests roundabout. The city’s other chief trade is the housing and feeding and entertaining of hordes of summer visitors from all over the Western Empire. They come to seek health and rejuvenation in the several elegant baths, fed by mineral and hot springs, in the city’s suburb of Paluster on the other side of the river, and that makes for Vesontio a cleanly business indeed.

The stone bridge crossing the Dubis from Vesontio to Paluster was the first bridge that ever I saw in my life, and, on first seeing it, I marveled that stone could be made to float upon water. But then I discerned that the bridge’s thick stone piers in fact went down through and under the water, and were planted firmly on the riverbed. Many other things, too, I saw for the first time in Vesontio. There is a grand triumphal arch spanning the entire width of the road at the entrance to the city. It was built by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, so it is much aged and weathered by now, but I could still make out the reliefs carved on it, commemorating that emperor’s victories. And there is an amphitheater, so immense that it looked to me—at first sight, anyway—as big as the whole Ring of Balsam. It is not, of course, but its high-soaring tiers of stone seats would certainly accommodate twenty times as many people as live in that valley.

The fine marble buildings housing the baths I admired only from the outside, for one must pay to luxuriate within, and I had no money to spare for that. But I did go into the cathedral, and this was the first time I had ever seen any church other than the chapel at St. Damian’s. The Basilica of St. John could have enclosed a score or more of such chapels, and its walls were splendidly decorated with mosaic murals of biblical scenes and personages.

However, what I found the most striking novelty in Vesontio was that city people dressed differently—not just differently from countryfolk, but differently according to whether they were men or women, boys or girls, even those as young as myself. There was considerable variance of costume among those of the same sex, but in general the females were all robed to the ankles in gowns adorned with much embroidery, and those who did not go bareheaded—proud of their long, freely streaming tresses—had gaily colored kerchiefs tied about their heads. The men wore short, belted leather tunics, and under them cloth coats that hung to their knees, and either ankle-length trousers or trousers that were wrapped from the knees down in leggings crisscrossed with leather thongs. Most men went bareheaded, but some wore leather caps of various fanciful shapes.

The wealth or social standing of both men and women could be discerned by the fabrics of their costumes—some flaunting sumptuous woolens from Baetica or Mutina and fine linens from Camaracum—and by the number and costliness of the ornaments they wore. Rich men wore a fibula on their right shoulder, rich women wore them on both shoulders. Men wore elaborate belt buckles, women wore bracelets or anklets or both. And much of that jewelry was fashioned of gold and set with gems—garnets, carbuncles or cut glass. Of course, this being wintertime, on the streets both men and women wore coats or cloaks of fur.

Well, I could hardly afford to buy clothing for the sake of sheer display, and there were enough other country people forever going in and out of Vesontio so that I was not conspicuous in my sheepskin and smock and hose. But I decided that it could eventually be to my advantage to acquire some additional apparel so that I could choose between dressing as a male or as a female. There was one other thing, though, that I needed to buy before clothing, as I had learned from experience while on the road and the river—a knife to cut with.

On my first day in Vesontio, I found a cutler’s shop, but did not immediately go in. I waited until, at midday, the man tending it was joined by a woman, and then he left the place and she remained. Clearly, the cutler’s wife had arrived to inform him that his prandium meal was ready. So then I entered and examined the knives laid out for sale. The world’s best blades are those forged and wrought by the swordsmiths of the Goths, but such a thing is understandably expensive. I thumbed the wares of lesser quality, selected a case knife that I deemed the best of a poor lot, and haggled with the smithwife over the price of it. When we had agreed on that, I handed her my silver solidus—at which she gasped and gave me a very sharp look. But I had the eagle on my shoulder, and it returned her look much more coldly than I could have done. The woman quailed, let me have the knife and the change from my solidus, and let me depart in peace.