Raptor (146 page)

On my first journey, I took along a sizable force of cavalry—not legionaries but Ostrogothic and other Germanic warriors. If we had resembled a Roman invasion, we would have encountered much more opposition than we did. But I was able to convince the petty kings and tribal chiefs along the way that we were their kinsmen, representatives of their
great
kinsman Theodoric (or Dieterikh af Bern, as many of them now called him), whose only intent was to make a peaceable highway through their lands, as much to their benefit as to his. Only three or four of those rustic rulers made any objection, and only one or two threatened active resistance, in which cases we simply made a circuitous way around their little patches of territory. At intervals, I dropped off detachments of my troops, instructing them to set up guard posts and enlist native warriors to help man them. On a second journey along the same route—a much, much slower journey—I took with me not only another troop of cavalry but also a considerable population of town and country men and their families, all of whom desired to seek their fortunes in far and uncrowded places. Those I dropped off—one or two or three families at a time—to start the building of roadside tabernae and stables, each establishment perhaps to be the nucleus of a future community of some size.

Before the first of those journeys northward brought me again to Pomore on the Wendic Gulf, I had already heard from other travelers that the Rugii were no longer ruled by Queen Giso. She had been dead almost as long as had her royal husband, and had been succeeded by a young man named Eraric, a nephew of the late Feva-called-Feletheus. This new King Eraric, having got word of my approach, was waiting to welcome me with open arms, because he was as eager as Theodoric to have an overland, all-year trade route between their two countries. As I already knew, the Viswa River, the Rugians’ main avenue to the interior of Europe, was useless during the long northern winter and, in the best of weather, enabled only a tediously slow voyage for travelers going south against its strong current.

So Eraric gladly dispatched numbers of his Rugian soldiers and Kashube and Wilzi peasants from his end of the trail to supplement those I had posted. The soldiers would occupy the guard posts, the Slovene peasants would clear and grade the path to make it more easily travelable, and would build lodging places along it. The Slovenes being good only for hard labor, they would return to Pomore when their work was done, and higher-grade Rugian peasant families would be sent out to manage those establishments.

As soon as Eraric and I had completed our arrangements, I hurried off to find my old companion Maghib, and found him living in a very grand stone house. The Armenian was nowadays almost as fat as his partner Meirus, of equally elegant dress, even oilier of complexion, and as loquacious as he had always been.

“Ja, Saio Thorn, Queen Giso is long gone from among us. When the word came that both her husband and her son had fallen in battle, she flew into a frenzy that ended with the rupture of a blood vessel in her head. Perhaps she severed it by gnashing her extraordinary teeth. Giso was not mourning her menfolk, you understand, she was enraged to realize that her dreams of greater queenship had been dashed. Well, it happened none too soon for me, I can tell you. That tiresome woman had been intolerably tiring my—er, my nose, as you will recall. Later I married a maiden of nearer my own humble station in life, and side by side we have been improving our station ever since.” He broke off to introduce me to the wife, a broad-faced, broad-beamed woman of the local Wilzi Slovenes. “As you can see, Hujek and I have richly prospered from the flourishing amber trade.”

“It should flourish even more with the new and quicker route of transport southward,” I said. “Many years ago, Maghib, I promised that Theodoric would reward you for your gallant surrender of your nose to that Giso creature. I would now like to offer you the post of the king’s praefectus here at this end of the new route. It pays only a modest stipendium, but of course you will know ways to profit from the office. Charge the merchants for the affixing of your official seal, or—”

“Ne, ne,” he said virtuously. “This is such a high honor for a mere maggot of an Armenian that I would not sully it for any amount of money. Tell the king that I gratefully accept that post, and that his praefectus here will never graft so much as a nummus onto the prices of the wares that he and his people receive from Pomore.”

So, eventually, both the north-south and the east-west trade routes were as heavily and profitably traveled as they had been in the empire’s palmiest days. And various lesser trails and sea lanes brought to those main routes the products of nations distant from Europe, those lands on the farther shores of the Germanic Ocean and the Sarmatic Ocean and the Black Sea—merchandise from Britannia, Scotia, Skandza, Colchis, the Chersonesus, even silk and other rare treasures from the land of the Seres. Meanwhile, the new ships built at Theodoric’s instigation were doing a brisk trade all around the Mediterranean: with the Vandals in Africa, the Suevians in Hispania, the Roman colonies in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Arabia Petraea.

Of course, as always throughout history, the prosperous and beneficent foreign trade was sometimes interrupted by wars or uprisings. Several of those occurred in countries too far away for Theodoric or Emperor Anastasius or any of their allies to do anything about them. But some flared up close enough to Theodoric’s domain so that he sent armies to quell them. Neither he nor I rode with those troops, and even their commanders were not the men who had led when he and I were active warriors. Old Saio Soas, the generals Ibba and Pitzias and Herduic had all died or retired from service by this time. The generals now were Thulwin and Odoin, whom I had not met at all, and Witigis and Tulum, whom I had briefly known when they held the ranks only of optio and signifer at the time of the siege of Verona.

One of the insurgents they went to fight, however, was an old familiar. It was the Gepid tribe that had vainly tried to impede our advance toward Italia those many years ago. Their ambush of us at Vadum on the river Savus had cost them many men and their king, Thrausila, and cost us our Rugian ally King Feletheus. Now it seemed the Gepids were again brashly testing our mettle, and not far away from the first place they had tried it. Under their new king, Thrasaric, son of the dead Thrausila, they besieged, overwhelmed and occupied Sirmium, that pig-producing city in Pannonia where our army had wintered on the way west from Novae.

Remembering how Sirmium smelled, I personally might have been inclined to let the Gepids keep it, but of course that was out of the question. For one thing, the Gepids there could put a permanent squeeze on the river traffic. But more important, the city of Sirmium marked the easternmost extent of Theodoric’s lands. Notwithstanding the official amity existing between him and Anastasius, that province of Pannonia still was the place where east and west never had quite settled the border between them, and where neither would tolerate any encroachment by anybody.

Thus, when our army swept through Pannonia, Anastasius angrily declared that it trespassed on the soil of the Eastern Empire. That may have been true, because our troops very easily flushed the Gepids out of Sirmium, and then chased them some distance eastward before turning around to march home to Italia. Anyway, the incursion gave Anastasius an excuse to declare war on Theodoric to punish his “presumption and insubordination.” Actually, the emperor was only making a gesture to assert his supremacy, because the war never amounted to more than harassment. Since he could not spare any of his land forces from their perpetual entanglement with the Persian Empire, he sent only some war galleys to attack Italia. And all they did was sail to several of our southern seaports and drop anchor in the harbor mouths, with a view to cutting off our trade with other Mediterranean countries. But the warships did not squat there for long.

The Roman navy’s commander, Lentinus, boyishly gleeful at having the opportunity again, ordered the building of some more of the khelé boats, and sent them out by night on the ebb tide. When three or four of the blockading galleys, in three or four separate harbors, had thus been mysteriously burned to the waterline, the rest of them upped anchor and scuttled back to their bases in the Propontís. That war was never officially declared over, and never officially declared won or lost by either side. But, for many years afterward, Theodoric and the eastern emperor—Anastasius, then Justin—stayed on the best of terms, and worked to their peoples’ and their own mutual advantage.

The next war took place in the west, and it was of more consequence. Theodoric’s having made himself related by marriage to so many neighboring monarchs had secured lasting concord between them and him, but those marital connections had not made all of them friendly toward
each other.
So, after some time, a friction and a dispute developed between one of Theodoric’s affinal
brothers
and one of his affinal sons.

King Clovis of the Franks and King Alaric of the Visigoths both laid claim to certain lands along the river Liger, which was the boundary separating their respective domains of Gallia and Aquitania. For some years, it caused only border affrays between their peoples settled thereabout—skirmishes that were repeatedly conciliated by truces and treaties that never lasted for long. But finally the two kings began mobilizing and arming in earnest for a full-scale war over those lands. Theodoric did his best to play the neutral peacemaker between his kingly kinfolk, sending numerous embassies to arbitrate with Alaric at Tolosa and with Clovis at his new capital city of Lutetia. But nothing could pacify the two fretful kings, and when it became clear that war was inevitable, Theodoric chose to ally himself with Alaric. It must have cost him a pang, siding against the brother and the people of his own queen, Audefleda. But of course the Baking Alaric and his Visigoths had more than just a marital bond with us Ostrogoths.

As things turned out, though, our warriors had to do very little fighting at all in Aquitania. Before they could join the Visigoth forces, King Alaric had fallen in battle near a town called Pictavus, and it appeared that the Visigoths had lost the war. But as soon as our army made its first assault upon the Frankish lines, King Clovis downed weapons and sued for peace. In exchange for keeping what ground he had already won—those disputed lands along the Liger—he would pledge a new and lasting alliance with the Visigoths’ new king, Amalaric. When our generals Tulum and Odoin accepted the terms and the pledge, Clovis and his Franks withdrew, and so did the Visigoth forces, and our own came back to Italia practically un-bloodied.

Now, what was most consequential in this was the fact that the Visigoths’ new king, the dead Alaric’s son Amalaric, was still an infant in arms. Since he was too young to reign, his mother, Queen Thiudagotha, would be regent in his stead. And further—the boy being Theodoric’s grandson and his mother being Theodoric’s daughter—the practical result was that
Theodoric
now ruled the Visigoths. They and we Ostrogoths, for the first time in centuries, were subjects of a single king. Now Theodoric reigned over all the lands bordering the Mediterranean from Pannonia and Dalmatia through Italia and Aquitania to Hispania. His domain need no longer be referred to as the once Roman Empire of the West. From this time on, it was more accurately—and proudly—the Gothic Kingdom.

Let me illustrate how tranquil and contented was the kingdom during the halcyon days of Theodoric’s reign.

I was in residence at the king’s Mediolanum palace on one of the days regularly appointed for his hearing in person the pleas and grievances of any of his subjects who felt they had not properly been dealt with by lesser authorities or inferior magistrates. I accompanied Theodoric and his several attending counselors to the audience chamber, and we were all greatly surprised to find not one single citizen waiting to be heard. The counselors and I did some temperate jesting at the king, suggesting that he ruled a people so sunk in hebetude that they were no longer even litigious.

As Boethius put it: “Plebecula inerte, inerudite, inexcita.”

“No, no, no,” said Theodoric, with good-humored toleration. “A quiet people constitutes a monarch’s highest praise.”

I asked, “Why do you suppose the citizens seem more content under your rule than they did under their previous lords, who were not—as they deem us—uncouth aliens and base heretics?”

He pondered the question before replying. “Perhaps it is because I try to keep in mind one thing that all people should, but seldom do. It is that every person—king, commoner, slave—man, woman, eunuch, child—every dog and cat too, for all I know—is the center of the universe. That fact ought to be self-evident to each of us. But we—being
each
the center of the universe—we do not often pause to realize that so
is everyone else.”

Cassiodorus Filius looked slightly incredulous. “How can a slave or a dog be master of the universe?” he asked, as if
he
might be, but no one else.

“I did not say master of anything. A man may defer to a god, or to several gods, to an overlord, to family elders, to any number of acknowledged superiors. And I was not speaking of self-love or self-importance. A man may love, say, his children more than himself. And he may never feel important at all. Very few people ever do have any legitimate reason for feeling important.”

Now Cassiodorus looked slightly offended, as if taking that for personal criticism. Theodoric went on:

“Nevertheless, to any man’s sight and hearing and understanding, every other thing in the universe revolves about him. How could it seem otherwise? From inside his head, he regards everything else as
outside,
existing only insofar as it affects himself. Thus his own interest must be paramount. What he believes is, to him, the only necessary truth. What he does not know is not worth knowing. What things he does not love or hate are, to him, matters of no concern whatever. His own needs and wants and complaints deserve the most immediate attention. His own rheumatism is of more moment than another’s dying of the carrion worm. His own impending death means the veritable end of the world.”