Raptor (148 page)

Not only the Gothic Kingdom had reason for apprehension of the future; so did the Eastern Roman Empire, because, about this same time, Emperor Anastasius also died. The man had had a lifelong fear of thunderstorms; he had gone to hide from one of those, in a closet of the Purple Palace, and his stewards next morning found him dead in there. The general opinion was that he had succumbed to stark terror, but he was, after all, eighty-seven years old, and a man must die of
something.

Anastasius may not have been one of the outstanding emperors of all time, but his successor at Constantinople was very near being a cipher, a blank, a nothing. He was named Justin, and he had been a common foot soldier who, through battlefield valor, had risen through the ranks to become commander of Anastasius’s imperial palace guard. So his accession to the purple was owing to his having been, as the saying goes, “raised on the shields” of his admiring fellow officers. The attribute of bravery and the honor of acclamation are fine things, but Justin had numerous balancing deficiencies—most notable among them his total inability to read and write. Merely to sign his name to an imperial pronouncement, he had to brush an inked stylus over a cutout thin metal stencil of his monogram. And he was thus signing into law commands and edicts and statutes that, for all he could read of them, might as well have been bawdy taberna songs.

What most worried Justin’s subjects (and brother monarchs) was not his appalling incapacity for his high office—many a nation has enjoyed its best years under a featureless cipher of a ruler—but the fact that he brought with him to the Purple Palace his much more capable, strong-minded and ambitious nephew Justinian. This young noble was officially the emperor’s quaestor and exceptor, what Cassiodorus was to Theodoric, and assuredly Justin
needed
a literate and educated assistant. But where Cassiodorus merely performed, so to speak, as Theodoric’s amplifying trumpeter, it soon became obvious that Justinian composed the notes for his uncle’s trumpet, and not everybody liked the music that now began to be played. Since Justinian was the real ruler, and at the fairly tender age of thirty-five, and since Uncle Justin was already sixty-six, the Eastern Empire and its neighbor nations faced the unappealing likelihood of having to deal with an Emperor Justinian—today de facto, tomorrow de jure—for a long time to come.

Bad enough, people muttered, that old Justin relied on his upstart nephew; what was really horrific, people agreed, was that Justinian in turn relied on a person absolutely unspeakable. This was a young woman who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been snubbed in the street even by folk of the working class. Theodora was her name; her father had been a bear-keeper at the Hippodrome, and she herself had since childhood been a stage mima. Her origin and her trade would have sufficed for obloquy, but Theodora had managed to achieve infamy. As she traveled and performed everywhere from Constantinople to Cyprus to Alexandria and back, she became notorious for pleasing her male admirers in private as well as in public. And those private performances were so much to her taste that, according to rumor, she once
complained
because “a woman has not enough orifices to admit more than a mere three lovers at one time.”

Somewhere during her travels, she met the patrician Justinian, and he was smitten with her. Now Theodora, at the ripe age of nineteen, had “retired” and become “respectable”—meaning that she was concubine to Justinian alone. And even those who most virulently detested her had to concede that she was bright and shrewd and calculating—in short, that her hand was discernible in many of the decrees and edicts that Justinian published to the empire as the proclamations of Emperor Justin.

Theodora wanted to marry Justinian; she saw empressdom in it. He wanted to marry her; as a devout Orthodox Christian, he was anxious to make their union legitimate. But one of the Roman Empire’s oldest laws forbade noblemen to marry “mulieres scenicae, libertinae, tabernariae”—women of the stage, the streets or the drinking houses. The lovers wanted to have that law amended, so that a tainted woman, by making a “glorious repentance,” would be legally washed clean, reviresced, even revirginated, enabled to marry whomever she might. To have the new law look anything but farcical, the repentance would have to be made to look passably believable, and who else could validate a repentance as “glorious” except the Church? Small wonder that Justinian and Theodora did everything possible to conciliate the Christian clergy.

Their labors early bore fruit. One of the loudest-praised achievements of Justin’s reign was the “diplomatic exploit” of healing the schism that had for so many years divided the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople. Indubitably, to the faithful of those sister churches, that was a commendable action. However, having so overtly allied himself with those two sects of Christianity, Justin had tacitly declared himself
against
every other religion existing in the empire—including the Christian “heresy” of Arianism. In other words, the Emperor of the East was now an avowed religious enemy of his co-ruler in the West. That lent some weight and impetus to the Roman Church’s vilification of Theodoric.

For many years, the churchmen’s ill-humored sniping only occasionally annoyed Theodoric, and more frequently amused him, but their implacable resistance to his reign did have some troublesome aspects. It kept Romans and outlanders from ever having the complete and amicable integration that the king had envisioned for his diverse peoples. It made Romans distrustful and unappreciative of his best efforts in that direction, and at the same time caused his fellow Goths to grumble that he was too propitiatory of the ungrateful natives. Theodoric was not a worrying kind of man, but he did have to stay on the alert for enemies both without and within his realm. Had any Christian foreign ruler aspired to invade the Gothic Kingdom, or had any disaffected Christian inhabitant aspired to insurgency, either aggressor might have been emboldened by the knowledge that the Church of Rome could incite its faithful to side with “the Christian liberator” and take up arms against the incumbent “heretic.” It was partly for that reason that Theodoric early dismissed all the higher-ranking Romans from his standing army, and later decreed that no persons not in military service would be allowed to own weapons of any sort.

Not since the quick defeat of the Gepids at Sirmium and the running off of Anastasius’s war galleys from the southern seaports had Theodoric’s domain been harried from abroad. But there came, not long ago, a menace from an unexpected direction. I heard the first murmur of it when a train of new slaves from my academy arrived in Rome, accompanied by the slavemaster Artemidorus. I was surprised that the Greek had brought the slaves in person, because he almost never left the Novae farm. He was no longer young and no longer boasted a classic Greek profile, having become, as eunuchs do, very corpulent and therefore unsuited to hard travel. But his presence was explained when he immediately took me aside to say:

“Saio Thorn, I bring this word directly to your ear. It could be entrusted to no messenger. Within the ranks of King Theodoric’s most trusted men, there is treachery stirring.”

When Artemidorus had explained, I said rather frostily, “I became a slave dealer to provide a valuable service for people of the better classes, not to put an ear inside their households.”

Just as frostily, the Greek said, “I also, Saio Thorn. My students are cautioned most severely against eavesdropping and tattling. Even the females manage to learn reticence and decent behavior. But this case seems to involve more than idle gossip.”

“Indeed, yes. It involves the reputation of the Ostrogoth Odoin, who boasts the status of herizogo, as I do, and whose rank of general is equivalent to mine of marshal. Against such a man, you would believe the word of a slave?”

“Of
my
slave,” Artemidorus said, really icily now. “A product of my school. And young Hakat is of the Cherkess, a people renowned for their ingrained honesty.”

“I remember the lad. I sold him to Odoin to be his exceptor. For all his titles and honors, the general cannot read or write. But his residence is right here in Rome. If this is a matter of such moment, why did the slave Hakat not come to me? Why send a slow message to you, away off there in Novae?”

“The Cherkesses have one racial peculiarity—an exaggerated reverence for the superiority of their immediate elders. Even a younger brother, if his elder enters a room, will jump to his feet, respectfully at attention, and never speak until his brother has spoken. To my Cherkess students, it seems, I stand in loco frateri as a surrogate elder. They bring their concerns to me.”

“Very well. Then I shall provide young Hakat with an elder
sister,
to help ascertain the truths of this matter. Get word to him that, at his earliest opportunity, he is to go across the Tiber and seek out the house of a lady named Veleda…”

General Odoin and I had never been close acquaintances, but we had been frequently in company at Theodoric’s court. So, since I intended now to insinuate myself as a speculator inside his residence, I wished to be someone he would not recognize. When Hakat presented himself at my Transtiber house, I said:

“Your master cannot possibly know or care how many slaves he owns. You have only to put me among them for some little while. And the slaves themselves will not question the authority of their master’s exceptor to do that. Tell them I am your widowed and impoverished elder sister, seeking to work for mere sustenance.”

“Excuse me, Caia Veleda,” and the young man coughed discreetly. He was of the comeliness for which all the Cherkesses are noted, male as well as female, and he was trying now to exhibit the good manners Artemidorus taught all his charges. “The thing is… there are not many slaves—anywhere—of my lady’s obvious gentility and, er, distinguished age.”

That stung me enough that I snapped, “Hakat, I am not yet ready to be propped useless in a hearth corner. And I can simulate slave humility with sufficient abjection to deceive even your sharp and knowing eyes.”

“I meant no disrespect,” he said hastily. “And of course my lady is more than handsome enough to pass as my Cherkess sister. Only command me, Caia Veleda. In what capacity would you prefer to serve?”

“Vái, introduce me to the household kitchen, the pantry, the scullery, I do not care. I wish only to be in a position to observe your master’s visitors and take heed of his converse with them.”

And so, some fifty years after my kitchen youthtime, and very much to my wry amusement, I found myself again doing duty as a lowly scullion. While, this time, I was doing it to worthwhile purpose, and while it did soon accomplish the ends I sought, I must report that playing the spy turned out to be rather easier than playing the servant slave. What I remembered of menial tasks from my St. Damian days did not greatly avail me here, because a noble Roman household is much more efficiently and formally managed than any Christian abbey. I was constantly being rebuked, scolded and berated by my fellow slaves. I was not even accorded the small dignity of being chastised by name.

“Imbecile old woman, that is no way to carry a salver! Hold it underneath, not with your thumbs in the gravy!”

“Filthy old sloven! You may have scrubbed your own hovel so carelessly, but in this kitchen you clean also between the floor stones! Use your old gray tongue, if necessary!”

“Shambling old slattern! When you cross the threshold into the triclinium, you cease that shuffling and pick up your feet. In the master’s presence, you walk noiselessly, no matter how weary you may be!”

The other slaves pretended that they chided me only because they took pride in their communal giving of good service, so they were distressed to have it marred by my many clumsinesses and derelictions. But it became evident to me that they took pleasure in having me to heap scorn on, and took self-importance from doing so. Among slaves, obviously, there is as much of a pecking order as there is in any poultry yard, and rather less of mutual respect. Slaves have none but each other to look down on, and that they do, that they do. Artemidorus might assert that a good slave is innately superior to any man free-born, but I now perceived the one really demeaning aspect of being a slave. It is not in
being
a slave, but in having to live one’s life in consort with none but
other
slaves. As the lowliest in this household, I had to bear the contumely of every other one of us slaves. Even Hakat, in his ostensibly higher status as exceptor, felt constrained to carp at me occasionally:

“Old woman! You call these pinfeathers good enough for me to cut pens from? Go back to the yard and pluck some proper quills!”

Our master, Odoin, probably never appreciated his servants’ meticulous service and probably never would have noticed any small lapses in it. He was a burly, bearded, rough-hewn military man, more accustomed to life in the field than in a refined Roman residence. Anyway, as I soon learned, he had weightier things on his mind than a concern for housekeeping. Nevertheless, he too was younger than myself and, on the one occasion when he took the trouble of correcting me, addressed me by what had become my new name:

“Old woman! Vái, can you not clear the tables without clattering things? My guests and I cannot hear ourselves speak!”

True, that night I was being inattentive to my duty, because my attention was all on the identity of those triclinium guests and the import of the words spoken. In the course of a fortnight or so, I was able to lurk on the fringes of several such gatherings and, after each, I recorded what I had seen and heard. Of course, to preserve my imposture, I could not let the other slaves see me
writing,
so, late each night, Hakat would join me while I took my meager nahtamats of manchet crusts and table scraps, and he would set down what I repeated to him.

There finally came a night when I said, “We have ample evidence to convict and condemn the man. You did well, younger brother, in confiding your suspicions to Artemidorus.”