Raptor (140 page)

I had rather, at Ravenna,

Own a fountain than a vine,

For I could sell fresh water there

Much dearer than good wine.”

Still mildly, Theodoric said, “This has been the capital city ever since Emperor Honorius made it so.”

“All he cared about was its invulnerability as a hiding place. Neither he nor his successors in the ninety years since then ever lifted a finger to make Ravenna more fit for human habitation. They never even repaired the ruined aqueduct, to get decent water. I know
you
do not need a hiding place. You could locate your capital in any of a score of more salubrious—”

“You are right, of course. Thags izvis, Thorn, for thinking of Audefleda.”

“What?” That stopped me in mid-stride. “Audefleda?”

“She has already remarked—not complained, mind you—that this humid air loosens the curl of her tresses. But she also says—she is ever cheerful—that such humid air is good for the feminine complexion. Still, it is thoughtful of you, Thorn, to worry that I am being unfair to Audefleda in keeping her here. No need to worry. She is more than willing to share the discomforts of Ravenna while I strive to ameliorate them. I have already discussed with her my plans for draining the marshes, rebuilding the aqueduct, making of this a fair city.”

“Discussed the plans with her,” I repeated testily. “Your generals and your other marshals and I have heard nothing of such plans.”

“You will, you will. In the meantime, while a loving wife is happy to abide with her husband wherever he chooses to be, I hardly expect you to behave like a devoted wife.”

That remark may have nettled me more than anything else he could have said. But I only muttered that I would go—and remain—wherever he cared to send me.

“Ne, I know your vagabond nature. I have now appointed enough other marshals that I can put one permanently in every community of any consequence. Soas, for example, will serve as my resident deputy in Mediolanum. But you, Thorn, I will ask to be my roving surrogate, just as you used to be. Go about Italia, go to lands beyond, go wherever you please, and either bring or send word of anything that would be of interest to me. Such a wayfaring commission would be to your taste, would it not?”

Of course it would, and was, but I said a little stiffly, “I ask only to be commanded by my king, not indulged.”

“Very well. Then I would like you to go first to Rome, since I have not yet decided what deputy I shall settle there, and it will be some while before I shall go there myself. Come back and tell me… well… tell me everything I ought to know about Rome.”

I saluted and said, “I go at once.”

I had said I would go “at once” only so I would have a legitimate excuse for being absent from Ravenna on the wedding day. The herizogo Thorn, staunch marshal and good friend to the king, would otherwise have been expected to stand prominently among the happy day’s participants and guests. Having been ordered abroad, Thorn did not attend the nuptial mass. But Veleda did. This is the primordial female way of dealing with an unassuageable itch: since it cannot be relieved by scratching, then scratch it until it hurts and hurts and hurts.

I stood among the many other women of all ages and degrees, on the left side of the Arian Baptistery, and I joined in the responses to the service, but not in the women’s muted comments among themselves—mostly concerning the bride and how beautiful she was. Yes, Princess Audefleda was that, and King Theodoric was a model of kingliness, and old Bishop Neon heroically resisted the temptation to make such a noteworthy mass an excruciatingly long one. The duller stretches of it I whiled away by admiring the Baptistery’s radiant mosaics. Obviously they had been put in during the building’s conversion from the Roman therma, because these were all of Christian subjects, not pagan. For example, the entire ceiling represented the baptism of Jesus, attended by all his apostles as he stood naked in a river clearly labeled the IORDANN. What was so admirable, almost incredible, was that the depiction—done just in chips of colored stone and glass—rendered the water with such limpidity that Jesus’s legs and private parts were visible under the water’s surface.

Private parts, hovering over a wedding ceremony—
liufs Guth!
—what a thought to be thinking in church! I snatched my vagrant mind to order and scolded it guiltily, angrily, and I wrenched my gaze down from the ceiling mosaic, and I know I must have been blushing bright red, and my eyes as they lowered met those of a tall and comely young man on the opposite side of the chamber, and his eyes were smiling at me.

When we lay together, I recognized him as an optio of one of Ibba’s turmae whom I had occasionally encountered as Thorn, but I did not care about that. If I ever had known the young soldier’s name, I had forgotten it, and I did not care what his name was. My name he did not even ask, but I did not care about that, either. When he tried, rather breathlessly, to compliment me on the avid ardency with which I was embracing him, I bade him hush, for I did not care to hear talk. As I repeatedly convulsed and cried out in rapture and uttered another’s name over and over again, and glimpsed the young man’s wondering face above mine, I did not care what he was thinking of me. And, after a long while, when he pleaded for a respite, I gave him none, for I wanted to go on and on. And I did, until there was simply no more to go on with. Then the young man tore himself loose from me, as if he had decided that he was in the raptorial grip of a haliuruns hag, and he fled away in shame and terror.

It was shortly after sunset on a summer day when I and the few escorts I had brought rode into the northern outskirts of Rome on the Via Nomentana. I halted our troop at a wayside taberna that had a sizable yard and stables, to put up for the night. When I entered the taberna’s main room, I was surprised to be jovially greeted by a cry from the caupo, “Háils, Saio Thorn!”

I stood puzzled as he lumbered toward me with hand outstretched, saying, “I have long been wondering when some more of my comrades would start to arrive!” Now I recognized him, though he had grown very stout. He was the cavalryman Ewig whom I had last seen when I sent him trailing Tufa southward from Bononia. And I was momentarily confused, because at that time Ewig had known me as Veleda. But then I realized that he had, of course, known the marshal Thorn by sight long before then.

As we shook hands in the Roman manner, he prattled on. “I rejoiced when I heard that the evil Tufa was dead, and I knew it was your doing, Saio Thorn, just as the lady Veleda promised. And how fares that gallant lady, by the way?”

I assured him that she was well, and commented that he also seemed to be doing very well, for a common soldier presumably still on speculator duty.

“Ja, the lady Veleda bade me stay in these parts and keep watch. Which I have been doing, right here, all this long time since. But there seemed no harm in my essaying other endeavors. When the caupo of this establishment died, I made haste to woo and wed his widow. And ja, as you see, she and the taberna and I”—he happily patted his paunch—“have prospered handsomely.”

So the taberna became, for the time being, the quarters of myself and my little company. And Ewig, nowadays quite fluent in Latin and also well acquainted with the city—or at least with those parts of it accessible to a commoner—became my enthusiastic, informative, loquacious guide to Rome. In his company, I got to see all the notable monuments and landmarks that every visitor to Rome is eager to ogle, and also a good many places that I imagine not many visitors ever know exist—such as the Subura quarter, where all the lupanares are congregated, according to law.

“As you will notice,” said Ewig, “every house has its license number prominently displayed, and every ipsitilla is fair-haired. That is also the law: they must either bleach their hair or wear a yellow wig. No one objects to that, neither the women nor their customers. Most Romans being dark-haired, they
like
a change. Some of the whores—if I may express it in cavalry language—even bleach their tails as well as their manes.”

I will not trouble to describe the innumerable sights and scenes of Rome that are familiar to people everywhere, even people who have never been there. For example, everybody in the world must know of the Flavian Amphitheater—popularly called the Colosseum because of the towering Colossus of Nero that looms just outside its walls—wherein are held the games, exhibitions, spectacles, contests between wrestlers, between pugiles, between armed men and wild beasts. But I doubt that any casual visitor, merely standing and admiring that immense edifice, would notice one thing that the soldierly and bawdy Ewig pointed out to me:

“Observe, Saio Thorn, the many yellow-haired women lurking about the doorways as the throng comes pouring out. Whores, of course, and they always converge here at the hour the performances end. They do a brisk business, soliciting the men who have been roused to lubricity while watching all the sweat and blood and manly exertion inside.”

The single most exciting spectacle I saw (though it did not rouse me to lubricity) was the fighting of a nighttime fire in the city by the special vigiles who perform this function. Other cities have destructive fires, God knows, but a blaze this awesome could only happen in Rome, because only Rome, on its Caelian Hill, has so many residential buildings that are five and six stories high, and it was one of those that was on fire. So the vigiles came swarming, carrying rag-stuffed mattresses soaked in cheap wine, and they held those protective shields in front of them as they dashed inside the building to rescue the occupants. Meanwhile, others were using catapults to fling grappling hooks to the building’s high roof and from those grapples depended ropes, enabling persons trapped on upper stories to slither down onto cushioning mattresses laid in the street under them. Meanwhile, too, other vigiles were assaulting the fire itself, using cart-borne machines called Ctesibian siphones. Two men at either side of each cart alternated at ramming down and drawing up stout handles, and that action somehow forced water from a tank through a nozzle which another man was directing at the flames. With the water, pumped as high as the building’s roof, and with wine-sodden mattresses and wine-soaked brooms, the vigiles quenched the conflagration of that whole building as thoroughly and almost as quickly as I could put out a campfire by urinating on it.

Ewig several times took me along when he went to market, in a little ass-drawn cart, to procure things he needed for his taberna. However, we almost never went near any of the city’s market squares, and I was soon aware that the persons to whom he introduced me were hardly of the highest respectability. We went often to the Street of Janus, where are all the usurers and money-changers and pawnbrokers. And we went often into the district of warehouses called the Pepper Barns, though they store many other commodities besides pepper. Once in a while, we even visited the Via Nova, where are situated Rome’s most elegant shops selling the most expensive goods, but all of Ewig’s business there seemed to be done at the back doors. We went oftenest to the Emporium docks along the river. When one day Ewig sidled off to a dockside shed, and then slunk back with some leather bags to pile into the cart, I remarked, but not accusingly:

“Caupo, do you provision your taberna entirely by theft?”

“Ne, Saio Thorn, I never steal anything. I merely buy from those who do. These skins of fine Campanian oils and wines I acquired from a seaman on that craft yonder, just in from Neapolis with barrels and barrels full. During the voyage, you see, a seaman slips the hoop of a barrel only a
little,
and with a gimlet bores a hole through a stave, and draws off some of the contents, and slips the hoop back over the hole. And when the freight is delivered, such losses are attributed to ‘leakage.’ I hope you do not object, Marshal—any more than you object when
drinking
my taberna’s wine, or paying the modest prices I am thus enabled to charge for it.”

“Ne, ne,” I said, laughing, “I have always admired initiative and enterprise.”

Every time our wanderings took us near the center of the city, I made sure to go to the Capitoline corner of the Forum to read the
Diurnal
posted at the Temple of Concordia. Ewig seldom bothered to accompany me, because he could not read. Tacked onto the temple wall each noontime by the Forum’s accensus (who also bellowed “Meridies!” for the edification of any passersby who did not know what time it was), the
Diurnal
is a written summary of all the previous day’s noteworthy occurrences in and around Rome. It lists births and deaths in distinguished families, significant business transactions, accidents and disasters—such as the fire on the Caelian Hill—notices of runaway slaves, announcements of coming games and plays and the like.

And on other occasions I ambled alone in places that held no attraction (or booty) for Ewig, such as the Argiletum, the street of booksellers. And I was interested to find those dealers, ordinarily the most inexcitable of men, in extremely bad humor. I learned that they were nowadays being repeatedly pestered by the Bishop of Rome—or, rather, by his consultores inquisitionis, priests who descended on the shops to ransack their shelves and inspect their wares. While those consultores had no authority to confiscate any books that were forbidden by Gelasius’s Index Vetitae, they did insist on affixing labels to the wares, so that a Christian customer browsing through the scrolls and codices could easily tell which were permissible for him to buy and read and which were “pernicious” on either doctrinal or moral grounds.

I made note of such things as those, and of information I culled from the
Diurnal
that I thought might be useful to Theodoric, and also wrote some observations of my own on the state of Rome, and I periodically sent a rider bearing those writings north to Ravenna. One of my observations, I knew, would be of particular interest to Theodoric.

He and I had seen how the city of Verona had been weakened by the vanity of past emperors, when they erected triumphal monuments in place of stout defensive walls. We had seen how numerous other cities had suffered when indifferent rulers and torpid administrators allowed the destruction of life-sustaining aqueducts. We had seen how the Via Popilia and many other roads had fallen into decay—and bridges too and causeways and canals. Now it was my sad duty to inform Theodoric that Rome itself, the Eternal City, had long been shamefully ill used, and might not for much longer deserve the name Eternal.