Raptor (147 page)

Theodoric paused and looked at each of us in turn. “Can any of you, worthy men, conceive of even the grass growing when you can no longer feel it springy underfoot? When you can no longer smell its sweet aroma after rain? When you can no longer loose your faithful horse to graze upon it? When the grass has no other reason for growing but to mantle your grave—and you not able even to look and admire that?”

None of us said anything. There seemed a sudden touch of chill in the empty, echoing audience chamber.

“So,” Theodoric concluded, “when any person requires my attention—senator, swineherd, prostitute—I try to remind myself: the grass grows, the world exists, only because this person lives. His or her concerns are the most pressing ever brought before me. And then, in addressing those concerns, I try to bear in mind that the disposition I make of them will inexorably affect
other
centers of the universe.” He smiled at our faces of concentrated attention. “Perhaps I make it sound either fatuously simplistic or confoundingly tangled. But I believe my attempt at perspective enables me to judge and pronounce and rule more providently.” He gave a small deprecating shrug. “Anyway, the people seem satisfied.”

And still none of the rest of us said anything. We stood in silent admiration of a king who could regard his people, great and small, from such a compassionate point of view. It may have been, also, that we all were remembering persons, named or nameless, whom we—indifferent to that perspective—in the past had wronged or slighted or even loved too lightly.

I, like senators and swineherds and prostitutes and almost every other human center of the universe here in Theodoric’s domains, have lived my centripetal life very comfortably, through all the years of his reign. My trade in slaves proved profitable, and required not much of my personal attention—which, of course, I could not have given it, what with all my traveling and my frequent necessary attendance at court. My own farm workers at Novae produced the first two or three crops of well-enough-trained, educated, mannerly slaves, and they were so superior to the common kind found in the Roman cities that they sold for good-enough prices. But then Meirus sent to Novae, in one of his consignments from Noviodunum, a young Greek—not a youth, but a grown eunuch—and a letter suggesting that I take special note of this particular slave.

“He is Artemidorus,” said the letter, “formerly slavemaster to the minor court of a certain Prince Balash of Persia. You will find him
really
knowledgeable in the arts and practices of manufacturing the finest grade of servants.”

I asked Artemidorus a number of questions about his methods of teaching, concluding with this one: “How do you determine when a student has finished the schooling—when he or she is fully trained and ready to be sold into service?”

The eunuch’s classic Greek nose sniffed rather haughtily and he said, “A student is
never
finished with my schooling. All my charges, of course, learn to read and write in one language or another. Then, when they go forth into the world, they remain in communication with me, to benefit from my continued instruction. They may seek advice on small matters or large—on new fashions for their lady’s hair-setting or on concerns of great confidentiality. They never cease their learning and I never cease their refining.”

I thought the answer eminently satisfactory, and so put him in full authority, and thereafter the Novae farm truly did become an academy. Many of Artemidorus’s early products I took into my own household, there at the farm and at both Thorn’s and Veleda’s residences in Rome. Even when each of my houses had more of a complement of servants than most rich Roman villas owned, Artemidorus kept sending on such elegant young men and women, boys and girls, that I was honestly loath to part with them. But I did sell them, and I asked staggering prices, and I got them.

There was only one person to whom I refused ever to sell one of my slaves. That was Crown Princess Amalaswintha, grown now and married and living in a palace of her own, newly built by Theodoric for her and her consort. On my first visit there, when Amalaswintha bade me come and admire its sumptuousness, I saw her again go into a rage at one of her own servants, a young maid who had misheard a command. The house steward was angrily bidden to drag the girl away and “wash out her ears.” Curious to see how that would be done, I tagged surreptitiously along. The washing consisted of boiling water being poured into each of the maid’s ears, leaving her both totally deaf and lamentably scarred. Thereafter, whenever the crown princess came to wheedle from “Uncle Thorn” a well-trained tonstrix or cosmeta, I always found that I was out of stock.

I could afford to be selective of my customers because I soon had so many of them, mostly the Romans who had for so long lacked
any
decent servants. I might have expected that I would have to preach to change the Romans’ way of thinking about slaves in general, but I found that unnecessary. I did not have to persuade them to cease fearing that male slaves would despoil their free women or would unite in uprising. All I had to do was let some of the leading Romans see my own slaves in service at the Saio Thorn’s mansion on the Vicus Jugarius.

Whenever I was in residence there, I kept the place alive and lively with feasts and convivia, and invited all the best people. They had only to be attended by my servants—skilled coqui preparing superb meals that were served by punctilious bearers; fastidious chambermaids and cosmetae and ornatrices of talent and dedication; gardeners working wonders in my little plot of dooryard; stewards who could address foreign visitors in their own tongues and exceptores who could write their correspondence for them; even chore boys and scullions and other menials doing their lowly work with earnest devotion in hope of rising higher—and my guests would plead to own the like of them.

I never even had to mention the extreme unlikelihood that my male slaves would overstep their station, either in a free woman’s chamber or in a militant bid for freedom. That was obvious from the servants’ demeanor. Artemidorus, naturally believing that Greeks are superior to every other human, imbued his students with a similar notion: that they, being of eastern races, were superior to all the western. So the graduates of his academy would have deemed it
beneath
them to seek intimacy with a Roman (or a Goth). And they were given a genuine respect for their calling that inhibited any tendency to rebellion. Artemidorus taught them that “a man must work hard to be a good slave; there is nothing hard in being born a free man, and nothing particularly praiseworthy about it.” Artemidorus, himself a Platonist, also inclined his students to look askance at every religion. Anyway, they all being intelligent and eventually well educated, none of them ever succumbed to the blandishments of Rome’s Christian clerics or Christian neighbor slaves.

Indeed, so very sapient and alert were all the graduates of Artemidorus’s academy that it required some effort for me to find the
duller
among them, to be servants in my Veleda house in the Transcriber. I wanted eyes and minds not sharp enough to discern anything amiss if perhaps I should sometime absentmindedly do something unfeminine in the presence of an attendant. Also I took only boys to serve me there, because even dull and very young females would have been likelier to notice any lapse of feminine behavior or mannerisms. And of course I made sure to take only boys who had never laid eyes on their owner Thorn, and made sure never to let them mingle with the slaves of Thorn’s house across the river. I kept the households as separate as I kept my identities—and as I kept Thorn’s and Veleda’s circles of close friends, and our invitation lists, and the markets and shops in which we traded, and the arenas and theaters we attended, and even the public fora and gardens in which we strolled at evening.

The slaves at all three of my residences, besides being so numerous that none was overworked, lived very well and in luxurious surroundings—as I did too, of course—because the slave trade brought me money far exceeding my marshal’s stipendium and mercedes, and I spent it freely on the things that money can buy.

In each of my houses I had couches stuffed with real down, and furniture made of Taenarian marble and Capuan bronze and citrus wood from Libya, and in the two town houses mosaic walls done by the same artists who had decorated the Apollinaris cathedral. In Thorn’s house I and my guests dined from a table service of pure silver, every vessel having for its handle a sculptured swan. In Veleda’s house every bedchamber contained an Etruscan speculum, a real looking
glass
that, when one looked into it, reflected also a floral design that was etched on the
back
of the glass. In both town houses my drinking ware was also of glass—this from Egypt, and as expensive as gemstones, because it was what is called the “singing glass.” In use upon the table or just sitting on the shelf, every goblet and bowl and tumbler would
ring
in harmony with the conversing voices in the room.

At my Novae house I hung a musical instrument that I had found in a remote Bajo-Varia village, of a sort that I never saw in any other house anywhere. The peasant who sold it to me had no idea who had made the thing, or how many aeons ago, but it was clearly of ancient origin. It consisted of stones of graduated sizes, every one laboriously hollowed out to make a sort of upside-down cup. They were of weights ranging from perhaps four unciae to four librae, and each was hung on a separate rope (though I rehung them on silver chains), and when tapped or struck they gave out different sounds, every sound as pure and melodious as human song. One of my Novae domestics proved to have musical talent and learned to play that contrivance with little mallets as artfully and tunefully as if it had been a cithara.

At any of my tables, my guests and I ate viands redolent of the ripest garon sauce and Mosylon-flavored oil, and drank seven-year-aged Peparethus wine, and dipped freely from saucers of sacchari imported from Farther India or pale honey brought from the Plains of Enna. While we dined, we heard soft music played by a pretty slave on—depending on which mood I wished to convey—the amorous beech flute or the nostalgic bone flute or the lively elder flute. In the thermae of my houses, the guests found every nicety of appointment, right down to Magaleion unguent for the skin and rose-and-cinnamon pastilli for the breath. All the fine trappings notwithstanding, I flattered myself that, when I held a convivium in any of my houses, the real worth was to be found in the conversation, not the setting.

But sometimes, when I was alone, I would remember that I had not always been much concerned with correctness and uniqueness. I might be sitting and gloating over some ornament I owned, something that was one of a kind, turning it over to observe the maker’s mark—“Kheirosophos” or whoever the proud artisan might have been—and I would suddenly laugh at myself, recalling how I had gone often into battle wielding a borrowed, battered weapon, or even one snatched from a dead man’s hand, without the least regard for the appearance or value or provenience of it.

Well, those were days long gone. As I grew older, my age more and more insisted on its right to be indulged and treated with solicitude—by me as well as by my peers and my juniors and my servitors. In time, my journeys became less frequent and shorter of extent, and I made longer stays at one of my residences or at one of Theodoric’s palaces. Still, I have never yet become infirm. I have never got too stiff of sinew or too soft of bone to straddle a horse and ride. This very day, I could mount my stallion—he is Velox V, almost indistinguishable from his great-great-grandsire—and ride to any far place that I might care to go. I just cannot, at the moment of this writing, think of any place that urgently and irresistibly calls me to come there.

But I have not been preoccupied during all these years with my own negligible doings and feelings. There did occur many happenings of more general interest, even of genuine historical interest. I was at least vicariously involved in one of them, since it was my written compilation of the Amal family lineage that Theodoric, his queen, his quaestor and other counselors consulted and pored over when they were seeking a suitable Gothic husband for Crown Princess Amalaswintha. The one they decided on was named Eutharic, and he was of the right age, and he was the son of a Herizogo Veteric, who had settled in the Visigoth lands of Hispania, and he was of better than just acceptable blood. He was a descendant of the same branch of the Amal line that had produced both Queen Giso and Theodoric Strabo, so the uniting of him with Amalaswintha would finally knit together those long-divided and frequently dissentient branches of the family. I am glad to record that young Eutharic was nothing like Giso or Strabo. He was of presentable appearance, pleasing manner and alert intelligence.

The royal wedding was celebrated by the Arian Bishop of Ravenna in the Apollinaris cathedral (reportedly making the Catholic Patriarch Bishop of Rome seethe with outrage and chagrin at being able neither to officiate at the ceremony nor to prevent it). The occasion was one of grand pomp and magnificence, and it inspired Cassiodorus to write a poem. It combined a hymeneal to the beautiful bride, an epithalamium to the loving couple and a panegyric to Theodoric on his wisdom in uniting the pair. And the poem was what one would expect from Cassiodorus. When it was copied out for
Diurnal
publication in Rome, it ran to so many pages that the papyri quite covered the front of the Concordia temple. Guests came to the celebration from every corner of the Gothic Kingdom and beyond (and stayed for weeks afterward, enjoying Roman-Ostrogothic hospitality). Emperor Anastasius sent congratulatory envoys and rich gifts from Constantinople. The bride’s royal relations and her father’s allies sent—from Carthage, from Tolosa, from Lugdunum, Genava, Lutetia, Pomore, Isenacum, from every capital city—congratulatory envoys and rich gifts and cordial wishes that the young couple live happily ever after.

But they did not, for Eutharic took sick and died shortly after he and his bride moved into their new-built Ravenna palace. I had not been alone in wondering how happily any man could have lived with the overbearing Amalaswintha for
any
length of time, and some averred that he died just to get away from her. However, he and the marriage did endure long enough to produce a child, and Theodoric was overjoyed that this latest addition to the family line was a
male
child. So were we of his court and counsel, but our joy was severely diminished by Eutharic’s untimely death. That must have much tempered Theodoric’s pride in his grandson too, though he manfully refrained from ever dwelling on it. What troubled everybody was that the king, like myself, was past sixty years of age when the new Prince Athalaric was born. If Theodoric should die before the boy reached his majority, as was almost certain, then Amalaswintha would rule as regent, and everyone in the realm dreaded that prospect.