Raptor (149 page)

And on the next day, without leave, we departed from Odoin’s house and went to Veleda’s. I set Hakat to making a fair copy of the papyri we had compiled, while I took a very long bath to rid myself of kitchen grime and grease. When the copy was done, I gave it to a messenger and sent him off at a gallop, and bade Hakat, “Remain here, younger brother, until I return. You would not be safe today outside these doors.”

I went again to my Thorn house, donned my boar-ornamented marshal costume, gave orders to various of my guardsmen, then proceeded once more to Odoin’s residence. At his door, I made polite request—to a steward who had yesterday been reviling me as “old woman,” but was now unrecognizing and obsequious—for private audience with the general. When Odoin and I sat at ease, over an amphora of Falernian, I produced my papyri and said without preamble:

“These documents accuse you of fomenting treason against our King Theodoric, and of plotting his overthrow.”

Odoin looked surprised, but tried for cool indifference. “Say you so? I will summon my exceptor Hakat to read them to me.”

“He is not here. It was your exceptor who wrote these pages, and that is why he is not here. I have Hakat in my keeping, to give witness, if necessary, that these words he recorded are words that were uttered by you and your fellow conspirators.”

The general’s face darkened and his beard bristled, and he growled, “By Allfather Wotan, it was
you,
Thorn, who sold me that overpretty and overeducated little foreigner. If we are to speak of plotting and conspiracy and betrayal…”

I ignored that and said, “Your reader being absent, allow me to do the reading to you.”

As I did so, Odoin’s color ebbed from livid to ashen. Some of the things he and his guests had discussed I had been aware of even before Artemidorus came calling on me. For instance, it was public knowledge that Odoin believed he had been cheated in some kind of land transaction, at which he took the matter to court, and was ruled against, and appealed the judgment upward through higher courts, each time unsuccessfully, and finally was ruled against by Theodoric himself. Well, that was very similar to what had once happened with Theodoric’s own nephew Theodahad. But where the sullen Theodahad had only retired to sulk over his frustration, Odoin—it was now clear—had determined to requite the “injustice” done to him.

“You recruited everyone else you could find who bore a grievance or a grudge,” I said. “These documents attest your meeting with them here under your own roof. The names are those of other malcontent Goths like yourself, and of dissident Roman citizens, and of numerous Catholic Christians inimical to Theodoric—including two cardinal deacons of the Patriarch Bishop’s own retinue.”

Odoin made a movement that splashed some wine out of his goblet, as if he would like either to dash that in my face or to snatch the papyri from my hands, so I said:

“A copy of these pages is already on its way to Ravenna. At this moment, also, every one of your conspirators is being taken into custody.”

“And I?” he asked hoarsely.

“Let me conclude by reading these words of your own. ‘In his old age, Theodoric has become as spineless and boneless as the deposed Odoacer. It is time Theodoric was supplanted by a better man.’ Tell me, Odoin, would that better man have been you? And what do you suppose will be Theodoric’s emotion when he reads those words?”

Odoin made no reply to that, but said, “You did not come here, Thorn, alone and unarmed, to take me into custody.”

I gave him a level look. “You were a valiant warrior, a capable general and, until now, a faithful follower of the king. Because of what you were, I came to afford you the opportunity of anticipating and avoiding your public disgrace.”

Cassiodorus’s
Historia Gothorum
records that Herizogo Odoin, together with his numerous accomplices, was three days later beheaded in the Forum Romanorum. And so he was. But only Artemidorus, Hakat and I—and my two trusted guardsmen who supported the traitor’s trudge to the block—know that Odoin had already been three days dead. In the manner of a noble Roman, in my presence, that day I confronted him, he had unsheathed his sword, pressed its point to his breast and its pommel to the mosaic floor, and leaned his weight against it until it pierced him and let him fall.

For me personally, there were two consequences of those events. One was a conversation between myself and Artemidorus before his departure from Rome.

“Saio Thorn,” he said, “our venerable slave supplier, old Meirus the Mudman, has achieved an age to rival his ancestor Methushelach, and he desires to retire from commerce. I would ask your permission to consult with him regarding our appointment of a new factor in Noviodunum.”

“I give you that leave and more,” I said. “I have amassed more than fortune enough to last me the rest of my life, even if I should outlive Meirus and Methushelach both, and I have lately become disenchanted with the slave trade. I would not myself wish to be a slave, therefore I no longer wish to be responsible for the creation of slaves. Here, Artemidorus—I have already prepared and signed it—I give you title to my Novae estate.” He reeled in astonishment and was momentarily stricken most un-Greekly mute. “Take good care of the place, Artemidorus, and its people and its livestock. They all were very good to me.”

The other thing affecting me personally had happened earlier, on the day I left Odoin dead on his mosaic floor, when I went from his house to Veleda’s and changed into my most fetching feminine garb, and sought out the handsome young Hakat.

For some years now, just as travel and trade and far horizons have gradually lost their appeal for me, so have certain other things in my life, once urgent and irresistible, become less so. Akh, I know that I shall never be entirely glutted and finished with sexual enjoyments, but, over the course of time, I found that I required fewer of those and less frequently. That is not to be attributed to any dearth of available partners. Even today, even as Veleda, and certainly as Thorn, I could take my pick of the opposite sex, if I wanted a partner
of my own age.
But what man or woman past the prime of youth and beauty
wants
to bed a woman or man who is equally worn and weathered?

Long ago, at the Mouths of the Danuvius, I had observed that the aged husband and wife Fillein and Baúhts looked almost exactly alike. Now, eyeing the men and women growing old about me, I saw that
so did they.
Except for their dress, they showed almost no sexual distinctness. Some men were bald, some women were hairy about the face, some of each were scrawny, some obese, some were more wrinkled than others, but they all had the identical bland, medium, tepid look of neuterdom. I have been not at all tempted to investigate beneath the clothes of any of them, but I think I do not have to. It is obvious that every once normal man and woman, if he or she lives long enough, turns at last into something very like a eunuch. I suppose I will too. But evidently because I never have been normal, I am blessedly taking longer to get there.

It has not been difficult for me, as Thorn, to avail myself of partners younger and ever younger than myself. That is not difficult for even the oldest and most repulsive of men; there are plenty of lupanares and street-corner noctilucae. But I was in the fortunate position of not having to resort to those. Everywhere I went, there were attractive young women (young men and boys as well) eager to oblige a man of status in exchange for a small official favor, or a letter of reference, or just to earn his continuing good regard—or, often, simply to be able to boast of having been so honored.

But even my most harmonious encounters—whether as Thorn or as Veleda—began to make me aware of one unbridgeable rift between me and my young lovers. Those youths so desirable as sexual partners proved rather less appealing in the aftermath of our frolics. As Thorn, I would be unutterably bored by a young woman lying beside me and chattering of the latest Rome fashion in hairstyles or house pets. As Veleda, I would lie yawning while the young man beside me prattled of his wagers on the Greens or the Blues contending in the Circus games. By the same token, if Thorn chanced to mention the siege of Verona, or if Veleda spoke of the squint-eyed Strabo, the bedmates would regard me with amused amazement, as if I were senilely discoursing on ancient history. More and more often, just to preclude our parting in absolute contempt of each other, I would get rid of those young persons as early as possible the next morning.

I must make mention of another thing, and I can put it most succinctly in kitchen terms. There are only so many ways of cooking pork and beans. The most expert and ingenious coquus, in the best-equipped kitchen, can devise only so many ways and no more. After my lifetime of experiencing every sexual combination possible to men and women, including the extraordinary variations introduced by my brother-sister mannamavi Thor, there cannot now be for me any thrill of discovery or surprise, only familiarity and sameness. There is no such thing as a
bad
sexual coupling, but even the good and the better and the best, after innumerable repetitions, tend to lose their onetime savor.

Also, in these latter years, conquests came not so easily to Veleda as to Thorn. While I did indeed, as I had hoped, keep my youthful female features and firm figure for many more years than most women do—until I was fifty, or near it—I imagine even Venus herself, after some centuries, must have begun to show signs of wear and tear. The graying hair that made Herizogo Thorn look (as others said) “dignified and wise,” the facial lines that made him look “experienced and wise,” the eye folds that made him look “pensive and wise”—oh vái!—ask any woman seeing those things in her speculum what they mean to
her.

However, I made good use of those years of grace that
were
allotted to me. As had happened with that young optio in the Ravenna Baptistery, I often would lock glances with a personable young stranger among a convivium crowd, or across my own dining table, or in a public garden, and with pleasant consequences. But in time the room’s lamps or the table’s candles had to be fewer, the garden had to be deeper in dusk, as I came to know what all women come to know: that the dark is kinder than the light. And inevitably there came the time…

It came the day I said to that beauteous young Cherkess slave Hakat, “For your services to King Theodoric, in helping to expose the traitor Odoin, you are granted manumission. You are a free man henceforth. Furthermore, for your help in her imposture in Odoin’s household, your elder sister Veleda would like to grant you a reward of another sort.”

During the hours thereafter, Hakat several times said very Cherkessly respectful things like “A younger brother can deny nothing to an elder sister…” and “An elder sister’s every entreaty is her younger brother’s command…” and I tried hard not to realize that he was every time averting his face or clenching his eyes closed or stifling a sigh of resignation.

But I did realize those things. That is why Hakat was the last man ever to couple with Veleda. That is why I closed the house in the Transtiber, and gave away all but the most precious of my Veleda garments and trappings, and sold or liberated all the slaves that had attended Veleda.

And Veleda’s virtual retirement from the world seemed further to diminish Thorn’s enterprisingness in that particular field of endeavor. Although, as Thorn, I still can heartily enjoy a coupling—and do, whenever one offers, and hope I shall on my very deathbed—I no longer go avidly seeking such enjoyments. To the act itself I am less and less impelled; young lovers I find ultimately unsatisfactory, and old ones pathetically impossible. Nevertheless, the men and women of my own age, albeit unthinkable as amative partners, do at least have other interests and ideas and memories in common with myself. That is why I gradually have come to accept the sedate pleasures of convivial company around a bounteous table in place of the more frivolous pleasures of the bedchamber.

Having said that, however, I must ironically reflect that it was a sexual adventure—of a sort—that tempested the serene weather I had supposed would last to the end of my days.

That had its beginning only in rumors, and the first was brought to me by that onetime soldier and longtime taberna caupo Ewig. Ever since my earliest arrival in Rome, he has been my personal speculator among the city’s commonfolk, keeping me apprised of their doings and opinions and attitudes—contentment, complaint, murmurs of unrest, whatever—so that I might in turn help Theodoric keep in touch with his subject masses. One day, reporting to me, Ewig chanced to mention that a Caia Melania, a widow newly come to Rome, had purchased a fine old house on the Esquiline Hill and had hired a goodly number of artisans to renovate it. Gratifying, I thought, a new resident providing employment for the local folk, but nothing particularly noteworthy in the tidings.

When, over succeeding weeks, I heard other friends of other classes speak of Caia Melania—generally with approving or even awed comment on the money she was spending—I still took little note. I remembered having heard of a woman by that name in Vindobona, long ago, and idly wondered if it might possibly be the same person. But then, Melania is no uncommon feminine name.

It really first engaged my attention when I heard it bruited about the triclinium during a feast at the villa of Rome’s princeps senatus, old Senator Symmachus. There were many notable personages around the tables that evenings—various other senators and their wives; Theodoric’s magister officiorum, Boethius, and his wife; Rome’s current urbis praefectus, Liberius; perhaps another score of the city’s leading citizens—and all of them seemed better informed about the widow Melania than I was. At any rate, there was considerable comment on the woman’s extravagant spending, and gossipy speculation as to what sort of establishment her new house was turning into.

Then, when the ladies of the company had withdrawn from the triclinium, to allow us men to talk freely, Senator Symmachus told us what
he
knew of the mystery woman. And, old and respectable though he was, Symmachus obviously took a wicked delight in making the revelation. (Well, old and respectable though he was, he still had standing in his dooryard that little statue of Bacchus with the massively erect fascinum, which some of his guests preferred to walk past with averted eyes.)