Raptor (143 page)

I was so cordially received by my farm people that I soon felt as if I had never been away. Of course, there were some differences denoting the time that had gone by. One of the slave women whom I had favored in the past, the Alan woman Naranj, wife to my mill steward, no longer had hair as black as moonshade. But their daughter did, and the steward was as proud and honored to lend her to the master as he had once been to lend Naranj. My other favored wench at the farm, the Suevian woman Renata, was rather vexed at that, because she and her husband had only sons, and I politely declined the offer of any of those.

Inasmuch as Theodoric had abdicated his capital of Novae when he took the throne of Rome, this province of Moesia Secunda, lately the mandated Land of the Ostrogoths, had reverted to being again just another province of the Eastern Roman Empire. But that had caused few physical changes in the area. Not every Ostrogoth family had uprooted itself to move west after Theodoric, and many of the men who had fought beside him in Italia had chosen to return here, and Emperor Anastasius was respecting those people’s rights to their holdings. Also, there had always been other nationalities resident here besides the Ostrogoths—Greeks, Slovenes, Rumani, various of the Germanic peoples. So there was no noticeable diminution of the population. Some of the farmsteads and workshops and homes (including the town house Veleda had once occupied) had changed owners, but not all, and both the city and the province were flourishing in peace.

This trip back to my farm—and other visits I would make here over the years—I made for a particular purpose. Needless to say, since the farm had been my first real home, I was eager to see it and enjoy it again. But, sentimentality aside, I had a pragmatic aim in view.

I had trusted that I would find my estate still well kept and productive and prosperous, and I did find it so. My free tenants and slaves had not gone lazy or careless for lack of a resident lord. The farm and everyone on it was thriving, and I was pleased to see so many gains, so few losses recorded in the accounts my stewards showed me. It was precisely because I
did
have such capable managers and workers that I had come back here. I had decided to make a business of raising and selling slaves—slaves that were as capable as my own.

I do not mean that I intended to
breed
them, in the way that my farm bred Kehailan horses and earned much profit from the sale of them. (Though I have to remark that my own slave holdings had very much increased in value over the years, simply through their increase in numbers, they having multiplied in the normal human way.) No, what I intended was to found a sort of slave academy—to buy new ones in quantity, young and raw and cheap, and put them to school under my own expert servants, and eventually to sell the finished product at a price much higher than it cost me.

Mind you, I was hardly in need of income. From the Ravenna coffers, Comes Cassiodorus Pater paid me regular stipendia and mercedes commensurate with my office of marshal, and those wages alone would have kept me in ease and comfort. Now, according to my stewards’ accounts, I had amassed considerable gold and silver from my Kehailan herd and my farm’s other produce. In fact, the stewards had deposited the bulk of that coin with moneylenders in Novae and Prista and Durostorum, with the result that every eight of my invested solidi earned me one additional solidus in interest every year. So I was more than solvent, if nowhere near as rich as, say, Comes Cassiodorus. I was not avaricious to pile up wealth, and I had no loved ones on whom to squander it, and none to bequeath it to when I died. However, in just the first few days of my first visit to Rome, I had discerned there a lack of a certain commodity, and had realized that I could fill that lack by turning slave dealer. So why not try my hand at that? If it earned me an estimable fortune, I would not spurn it.

I hasten to say that Rome suffered no paucity of slave men, women and children; it had multitudes. What it lacked was really good slaves. In times past, Roman households might have contained the finest quality of bondsmen—physicians, artists, accountants—but they no longer did. In times past, many Roman slaves had been such able men that they earned the money to buy their freedom, or were so much admired that they were freely manumitted, and then went on to become luminaries of Roman civilization—Phaedrus, Terence, Publilius Syrus—but no slaves did that nowadays.

In most of the rest of the world, as on my Novae farm, bondsmen were regarded as tools and implements, and it made sense to have one’s tools sharp, capable, efficient. But in modern Rome and in the other Roman cities of Italia, those tools were being deliberately kept as blunt and clumsy as possible. That is to say, the slave men and women were denied any education or training or encouragement to improve their natural talents. Very few were employed in any positions higher than yard laborer and kitchen trull. The ones of foreign nationality were even discouraged from learning more than enough Latin to understand the commands given them.

There were two reasons for this. Both reasons were as ancient as the institution of slavery itself, but only in these modern times were they being so seriously, solemnly, even
morbidly
regarded by the Romans. Those who owned slaves were naturally accustomed to make sexual use of the attractive females among them. And that naturally provoked in those freemen a dread that their free
women
might take similar liberties in the slave quarters. So they exerted every effort to keep the bondsmen bestial, ignorant, ill favored and unappealing. The other reason was equally inherent in the institution. The slaves in Italia outnumbered the free folk, and the apprehension was that—if the bondsmen were educated above the level of domestic animals—they would soon
realize
their numerical superiority and would unite in uprising against their masters.

It was not long ago that the Roman Senate debated a proposal to make all bondsmen dress in a uniform costume, rather in the same way that all prostitutes are made to wear yellow wigs. That would have averted the possibility of a free woman’s mistaking a good-looking, well-spoken slave for a freeman, hence the possibility of her yielding to his embrace. But the proposal was voted down because it conflicted with the other reason for fearing slaves. If they all dressed alike, they could easily see how many they were, and how comparatively few were their masters. There was already one kind of uniformity among the bondsmen that no one had thought to prevent—their widespread adherence to Christianity—and that very much worried the senators and every other Roman.

(I must here qualify an earlier statement of mine. True, Rome’s upper and lower classes of freemen—as I have said—are blithely pagan, heretic or totally irreligious. But I erred in saying that Rome is Christian “only in the middle.” I neglected to mention the slaves. One does tend to overlook slaves.)

As everyone is aware, Christianity got its first toehold in Rome among just that hapless and despised underclass, and it has been the favored religion of slaves ever since. Nowadays, even those bondsmen imported from abroad—even Nubians and Ethiopes who must have worshipped unimaginably odd gods in their savage Libyan lands—have converted wholeheartedly to Christianity. Slaves, like tradesmen, adopt that faith because they see it as a profitable transaction. For good behavior in this mortal life, they are promised a rich reward in the hereafter, and that is about the only kind of reward the average slave can hope for. But the free Romans, of whatever faith, were forever fretting that the bondsmen’s Christianity might somehow prove a unifying force, and someday impel them to revolt in mass.

Well, I knew that to be a baseless apprehension. Christianity teaches that the worse a man’s lot here on earth, the better it will be in heaven. So Christianity preaches that slaves should
be
slaves—content, meek, abject, never aspiring above their humble station. “Servants, obey in all things your masters.” Clearly, the more Christian the bondsmen, the less chance of their
ever
being unruly. As for the other abiding fear—that free women would make free use of male slaves—I knew that no law, nobody,
nothing
could ensure against that. I was a woman. I could have told the Roman Senate and all of Rome’s other freemen that they were flailing at the shadow of an ass. Any woman desiring to disport herself with any man will do so. Let a slave wear an identifying costume, or put on a frightful wig, or be Nubian black and ugly—or even be tightly manacled to a cell wall in Rome’s dread Tullianum prison—if a woman wants him, she will have him.

“So, when I commence peddling my slaves there,” I said, “I may find myself accused of perverting the morals of Rome.”

Meirus laughed coarsely. “What morals are those?”

He was the same old Mudman. He must be
very
old by now, I thought, but his vast beard was as glossy black as ever, and his vinegar temperament had not at all sweetened with age. If he was changed in the least, it was only in his having got rather stouter yet, and in wearing regal raiment and many rings on his fingers. That was thanks to his increased wealth, he said, and
that
was thanks to his success in the amber trade, and that was thanks to his partner Maghib (his
partner
now!) on the Amber Coast.

At the slave mart in Novae I had found only a very few young slaves that met my requirements and were worth buying. It was the same in Prista and Durostorum; the port cities on the lower Danuvius simply do not have sizable slave stocks from which to choose. So I had come all the way downriver to Noviodunum again, because there is a brisk slave trade in the ports around the Black Sea, and of course I had come calling on old Meirus.

“What you must do,” he went on, as he poured more wine for us both, “you must make your slaves so
very
competent at their occupations that, if one is sometime caught in bed with his master’s wife, the master will discharge the
wife.”

“I hope to make them so. The boys and girls that I have already bought, I put immediately to apprentice under my own flawless servants—my cellarer, my house steward, my notary and so on—put each child to whichever calling seemed best suited to what I could perceive of its aptitudes. But I would like to have every tutor working with several at once. And in the river cities I found not many to select from.”

“You have come now to the right place. Noviodunum gets all sizes, shapes, ages and colors. Males, females, eunuchs, charismatics. Persians, Khazars, Mysians, Cherkesses, everything else you ever heard of, and some you probably never did. Have you any particular preferences? The Cherkess people are the handsomest, I think.”

“I care only that they be young—none older than adolescent—bright, sturdy, untrained and therefore
cheap.
I am not dealing in concubines or toys or love-boys. All I want is good raw material that my academy can mill and refine and forge and polish.”

“Understood. We will cast about the marts tomorrow, and I imagine you will net a whole bargeful to take back upriver. Allow me to be your nose here in Noviodunum from now on, as Maghib is mine in Pomore. I will continue supplying your farm, and with only the best stock. Speaking of races and colors, there lately came to the market here two or three young women of the far-eastern people called Seres. Exquisite, tiny, fine-boned and
yellow
of skin—all over. I marvel that such fragile beauties came safely all the way from there to here. And cheap, those were not. Only one is still here. She was bought by Apostolides, leno of the best lupanar in Noviodunum. After our nahtamats, I shall introduce you there. You must try the young lady.
That
will not come cheap, either, but worth the cost, I am assured.”

As we dined, on oysters, asparagus and hare jugged with tart plums, accompanied by a Cephalene wine, I asked Meirus how Theodoric’s rule in the formerly Western Empire was being regarded here in the Eastern.

“Vái, the same way it is being regarded, I should suppose, by every ruler and noble and commoner and slave from here to the Tin Islands. It is universally said that his reign bids fair to be Rome’s most contented and peaceful and prosperous since the time of ‘the five good emperors.’ That is to say, the period from Nerva the Kindly to Marcus the Golden, and that was four centuries ago.”

I said, “I am pleased to hear that so many approve of him.”

“Well, they approve of his ability at governing, not necessarily of
him.
No one forgets the treacherous way in which he slew Odoacer. The general opinion is that every one of Theodoric’s close advisers must be walking on tiptoe, not to chance a sudden sword stroke.”

“Balgs-daddja,” I growled. “I am one of the closest. I do not walk on tiptoe.”

“And there are others who are openly envious of his skill at kingship. Our Emperor Anastasius, for one, does not like Theodoric. Of course, the crabbed Anastasius has never liked anything much. But it naturally chafes him to see a ruler of a lesser title outshining him in statecraft.”

“Do you think Anastasius will cause trouble?”

“Not any time soon. He has more pressing things to worry about—a renewal of the eternal contention with the Persians on his eastern borders. Ne, Theodoric’s problems will not come from abroad, but from right under his nose. When I said he is admired from here to the Tin Islands, that is because the Catholic Christian Church holds no sway here or in the Tin Islands. In Italia and the other provinces where it does wield influence, it will do its best to belittle and beleaguer Theodoric.”

“I know. It is despicable. Why cannot the Church clerics treat him with the same innocuous indifference he accords them?”

“You have just said why.
Because
he pays them no mind at all. They would be genuinely happy if he persecuted them, oppressed them, banished them. To them, his indifference is a much more hateful attack than forthright molestation would be. He begrudges them the pleasure and honor of martyrdom. He makes them suffer not suffering for the sake of their Mother Church.”