Raptor (152 page)

It had not been difficult for me to reveal to Livia the fact of my dual nature. I knew, when I kissed her that one time, that she sensed something of the truth about me—if, indeed, she had not divined it years ago, when she was a little girl. The revelation did not shock, scandalize, horrify or amuse her. She took it calmly, which would hardly have been the case if she and I had been younger. Happily for both of us, we were past the age when every woman and every man regards one another with speculation, as a possible lover—when even a woman as sensible as Livia would receive such a disclosure with amazement, perhaps with disappointment, possibly with some perverse interest in “experimenting,” but certainly not with equanimity.

When I told her, “I am a mannamavi, an androgynus, a creature of both sexes in one,” Livia made no exclamation, asked no questions, only waited with composure to be told whatever else I might care to tell her. Not once since then has she ever hinted that she might be curious to see the physical evidence of my abnormity. Not once has she ever pried to know what the life and loves of a mannamavi must have been like. Over time, though, I have freely told her much about myself—my selves—because nowadays, whenever I am in Rome, I go more and more often to see her.

We are comfortable together—all three of us, I might say. Of course, I go always dressed as Thorn, but, once indoors, I can talk easily to Livia either as man to woman or as woman to woman. And I do talk of many things that I cannot or care not to discuss with other people. After all, I made Livia’s acquaintance long before that of any other person in my life at present. I met her even before I met Theodoric. And, here lately, it is of Theodoric that I oftenest come to talk to her.

“I spoke only partly in jest,” she said now. “Why not tell the king the truth about yourself?”

“Liufs Guth!” I said. “Tell him I have been deluding him for nearly half a century? If he did not drop dead of an apoplexy, Theodoric would assuredly see that I got dead of something worse.”

“I doubt it,” said Livia. She delicately refrained from pointing out the obvious: that no one was likely to care
what
sex an old relic like myself used to be. “Try it. Tell him.”

“To what end? We of the court are already concerned that the king’s mind and memory seem to be clouding. It might be calamitous to startle him with—”

“You said yourself that his lapses began during the queen’s illness and worsened with her departure. You said yourself that the only woman near him now is his daughter, and that she is only an affliction to him. Theodoric might be much improved by the companionship of a new woman. One of his own age. One who knows him well. One who turns out, however surprisingly, to have been his friend all his life long. Veleda might be just what he needs.”

“As you are for me?” I said, smiling, but shaking my head. “I thank you for the suggestion, Livia, but…
eheu!
Before I could bring myself to break my long silence, Theodoric would have to be in dire need indeed.”

“And then,” she said, “it may be too late.”

Not even the Christian priests and Roman augurs and Gothic wise-sayers, all of whom pretend to know the wiles of every kind of demon, have ever been able to fend off those that can prey on a man’s mind as it ages and lets down its defenses. If there
is
such a thing as a demon of forgetfulness, and if that one first crept upon Theodoric while he was disarmed by his grief for Audefleda, then other demons were waiting their chances to find chinks in his armor. And they found them, because each year since that time has brought some event that, like a siege ram, has further battered at Theodoric’s defenses.

His queen died in the year 520 by the Christian count. In the year 521 came word from Lugdunum that his eldest daughter, Arevagni, was dead. Theodoric should have found that bereavement not too unbearable, because it was reported that she died easily, in her sleep, and Arevagni’s life had been a good one. For the five years before her death she had gloried in being Queen of the Burgunds, her husband, Sigismund, having succeeded to his father’s crown in the year 516. Also, Arevagni had attained to motherhood; she was survived by a young son, Segeric, another grandson to Theodoric and heir apparent to the regnancy of the Burgunds.

However, less than a year later, in 522, came further news from Lugdunum, really appalling news. The widowed King Sigismund had remarried, and his new wife, of course intending to bear children of her own and wanting them to have no impediment to their royal inheritance, had persuaded Sigismund to slay his own firstborn, that young Crown Prince Segeric. I suppose it will never be known whether King Sigismund, to have done such a horrendous thing, was overweening of his own almightiness, or was the most weakling husband in the history of henpeckery, or was out-and-out insane. If he was cognizant of Theodoric’s tendency to forgetfulness, and counted on that to make Theodoric overlook this atrocious filicide—or if he thought that
any
Goth would let such an insult go unavenged—then Sigismund was much mistaken.

Theodoric convened all of us, his advisers, in his throne room, and we perceived him to be, in his fulminating rage, again the man we all remembered. His eyes had lost their slaty dullness and blazed blue, like the Gemini fires. His beard no longer hung limp and lank, but bristled like a patch of stinging nettles. When Magister Boethius counseled that the king postpone any retaliatory action “until you are more composed, my lord,” Theodoric roared at him, “That is a tradesman’s suggestion, if not a traitor’s!” and Boethius prudently sidled out of his sight. When Exceptor Cassiodorus recommended scolding the Burgunds with a stern missive, Theodoric bellowed,
“Words?
Words be damned to Gehenna! Get me General Thulwin!” He would have gone charging off himself, I think, except that he knew he could not ride at a flat-out gallop over that distance, and he wanted his army there
now.
So, led by Thulwin, a hastily assembled but formidable and angry army thundered westward.

However, Fortune, in her whimsical but implacable way, had already avenged the filicide. Before Thulwin could arrive at Lugdunum, the Burgunds had got embroiled in a war with the Franks, and in an early battle Sigismund was slain. Since he had eliminated his own lineal successor, Sigismund’s crown went to a cousin named Godemar. And that man, impelled so abruptly into both the responsibilities of kingship and the throes of a war with the Franks, was disinclined to cross swords as well with the Gothic army that came pounding up to the walls of Lugdunum. King Godemar abjectly offered to recompense King Theodoric for the loss of his grandson by ceding to him the entire southern half of the Burgund lands, and General Thulwin readily accepted that concession. Thus, with no cost in Gothic lives lost—except that of the hapless little Prince Segeric—the Gothic Kingdom made a great gain in territory, its western borders now extending to the river Isara on that side of the Alpes.

So Theodoric’s pride and puissance had been upheld, and his domain unexpectedly enlarged besides, but none of that assuaged his grief at having been deprived of two generations of his own family. When the pinnacle of his rage subsided, it let him down into a gully of despondency, and subsequent events only deepened that. The next bad news came from Carthage, and involved not only another insult to one of Theodoric’s family but also a threat to the stability of his reign.

The news was that Thrasamund, King of the Vandals and husband to Theodoric’s sister Amalafrida, was dead and had been succeeded by a cousin, Hilderic. As I have mentioned, the Vandals always were predominantly of the Arian Christian faith, and their kings had been not even
tolerant
of Catholic Christianity, but always antagonistic to it. However, this Hilderic was an anomaly among Vandals, a devout, even rabid Catholic Christian, and now he was king. Thrasamund, on his deathbed, had exacted a solemn promise from this cousin that he would preserve Arianism as the state religion, but Hilderic broke that promise as soon as Thrasamund expired.

The first thing he did was to imprison Thrasamund’s widow, Theodoric’s sister, in a remote palace, because she was an Arian, was much respected by the people and so might be able to hinder his plans. Second, Hilderic took possession of every Arian church in his African lands, expelled their bishops and priests and solicited “good, godly, heretic-hating” replacements from both the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople. Third, because Theodoric’s Gothic Kingdom was Arian, therefore detestable, Hilderic forbade any further Vandal trade with that former ally, and he began fawning on Emperor Justin, seeking closer ties with the Empire of the East.

Theodoric was again infuriated, but this time he had no way of venting his fury. He could not just utter a command and send an army galloping across the Mediterranean waters. All he could do was order the immediate start of construction of a naval fleet adequate to attack Carthage and bring Hilderic to his knees.

“A thousand ships!” the king barked at the navarchus of the Roman navy. “I want a thousand ships, half of them armed with seagoing weapons, the other half to carry armored troops and horses. And I want those ships in a hurry.”

“You shall have them,” said Lentinus, unruffled. “And in a hurry. But for an undertaking of this magnitude, Theodoric, I must advise you that a
hurry
means perhaps three years.”

Even a king, with all the suasions and incentives and threats and goads and penalties at his disposal, cannot do much about the intransigency of time. Theodoric could only wait for the ships to be built. So, frustrated by his impotence, depressed by his frustration, made vulnerable by his depression, he was even more frequently fretted by that demon of forgetfulness, and now also by the demons of suspicion and distrust and anxiety.

He might give a trifling order—do this or do that—to some palace servant, and have the servant say meekly, “But I attended to that yesterday, King Theodoric.”

“What? How dare you do something like that until I tell you to?”

“But you did tell me to, my lord. Yesterday.”

“I never did! Impudent nauthing, first you presume to anticipate my wishes, then you lie about it. Steward, take this wretch away and give him fitting punishment.”

Since the steward, like everyone else, was growing accustomed to such episodes, the servant’s only “punishment” would consist of his being kept out of the king’s sight until the king forgot the incident.

I should remark, though, that not all of Theodoric’s suspicions of persecution and conspiracy were entirely baseless delusions. In a very real sense, he
was
now ringed about by persons—by whole nations of people—inimical to his Arian religion, hence to himself, his reign and the existence of his Gothic Kingdom. In the east, Emperor Justin, Justinian and Theodora were in such cozy affinity with the Church of Constantinople that the Eastern Empire was, in effect, an Orthodox Christian theocracy. In the northwest, the formerly pagan King Clovis of the Franks had, some while previous, become a Catholic Christian. (Indeed, he had made a mass spectacle of his baptism, requiring some four thousand of his Lutetia citizens to get baptized in the same ceremony.) Now, in the south, King Hilderic had decreed Catholic Christianity the state religion of Vandal Africa. So Theodoric’s domain was literally surrounded by anti-Arians. Granted, none of those was yet being overtly bellicose, and only Carthage had broken off trading. But the Church of Rome, of course, had its agents busy in all those places, urging every
genuine
Christian to pray and tithe and strive for the overthrow of the heretic Theodoric, and then for the conversion or utter extirpation of all his heretic subjects.

Yes, our king had real vexations to be anxious about, and they were of a nature that would have absorbed the full attention of even a Caesar or an Alexander, and Theodoric certainly should have bent his whole concern on them. But those weevil demons infesting his mind were more and more frequently making him ignore the problems abroad to swat imaginary pests closer at hand.

Unlike the palace servants, we of Theodoric’s court and counsel could not easily hide, and did not so easily escape chastisement. Boethius, Cassiodorus Pater and Filius, myself and other marshals, nobles and officials of every degree were continually being accused by Theodoric of having misheard his orders, misread his decrees or misinterpreted his intentions. Partly out of our prudent self-concern, but mostly out of our fondness and pity for the king, we did our best to pretend that his lapses did not happen, and quietly tried to repair whatever damage they caused. But sometimes the episodes were un-concealable, and even Theodoric had to be aware of them. I think, to his other woes, that added the terror that he might be losing his mind. And I think he was trying to deny that more to himself than to us when, even in his lucid intervals, he sought to blame others for his own derelictions.

I was present once when, some minor endeavor of his having gone awry—no one’s fault but his—Theodoric castigated Boethius for it, as fiercely as ever Amalaswintha had railed at one of her slaves. Boethius bore it manfully, without protest or rebuttal or even a hurt look, then took himself wearily from the room. Again presuming on our long friendship, I told Theodoric, “That was unjust, uncalled for and unlike you.”

He snarled, “Ineptitude deserves rebuke!”

I dared to retort, “You appointed that man your magister officiorum, more than twenty years ago. Are you now saying that
you
were inept?”

“Vái! If he is not guilty of ineptitude, then perhaps he is of perfidy. Boethius may have held his office for so long that he now entertains insidious ambitions. You remember, Thorn—you were present—how he urged cowardly caution when I wanted to smite the murderer Sigismund.”

“Come, come, Theodoric. There is an old saying—that the right hand is the smiter, because it is the stronger. Therefore the gentler, slower left hand is for dispensing justice and mercy and tolerance. You appointed Boethius to
be
your left hand. To temper your impulsiveness. To save you from acting rashly…”