Raptor (154 page)

We, Theodoric’s closest friends and counselors, were rather desperately casting about for someone fit to succeed the monarch we loved, to be ruler of the kingdom he and we had fought to win, then had worked to make great. The ideal replacement, a worthy Ostrogoth of Amal lineage, was simply nonexistent. The military men among us proposed an appealing alternative, General Tulum. He had no familial claim, but he
was
an Ostrogoth, and we all agreed that he possessed the attributes of a king. We were all disappointed when he gruffly refused the honor, on the ground that he and his every forebear had loyally served the Amaling kings, and he would not presume to break the long-standing traditions of succession.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Empire—that is to say, the trinity of Justin, Justinian and Theodora—was not exactly menacing the Gothic Kingdom, but was certainly making gestures of asserting its power and authority in the world. The intent appeared to be not to provoke Theodoric to belligerence, but to give his subjects unmistakable notice that, once his domain was bereft of his strong presence, it could be easily annexed by Constantinople. No doubt the rulers of other nations roundabout our borders entertained similar ideas. And they may not even have worried about having to fight each other over the carcass of the Gothic Kingdom. Considering that so many of our neighbors now shared the bond of Catholic or Orthodox Christianity, they may already have been peaceably agreeing on which of them were to get which scraps. As long as Theodoric lived, and did not visibly succumb to total senility, those surrounding neighbors had not the courage to be raptors, but they we’re avidly waiting to be scavengers.

Meanwhile, too, the Church of Rome, after thirty years of trying but failing to make any significant trouble for Theodoric, had not lessened by one iota in its loathing of him. Almost every Catholic Christian in the kingdom, from Rome’s Patriarch Bishop John down to cave-dwelling hermits, would have rejoiced to see
any
non-Arian usurp the throne. I say “almost” because there were, of course, men and women high and low who, even though their vows bound them to uphold the Church’s views and forbade them to reason for themselves, yet were sensible enough to realize what disaster the land would suffer from an overthrow of the Gothic Kingdom.

The senators at Rome realized that too. Although most of them were Catholic Christians, therefore required to abhor Arians—and although almost all of them were Italia-born Romans, who would naturally have preferred to be ruled again by a Roman—they were pragmatic men. They recognized that Rome and Italia and everything else that had once been the Western Roman Empire had enjoyed, under Theodoric, a reprieve from the brink of oblivion, and then an enduring security, peace and prosperity unequaled in more than four centuries. Also, they realized the threat posed by the surrounding Franks and Vandals—even by lesser peoples, once subdued or allied or negligible, like the Gepids and Rugii and Langobardi—should the Gothic Kingdom find itself ruled by a lesser man than Theodoric. The senators took the attitude of “better the barbarians we know than those we do not.” Like us of Theodoric’s court, they debated and argued the merits of this and that candidate for the kingship—and did not count it a demerit if the candidate was of Gothic nationality and Arian faith. But, like us, the senators found no one suitable.

However, while those senators were justifiably wary of every outland nation, they were most apprehensive of a nation that was not barbarian at all—their old rival and contender for supremacy, the Eastern Roman Empire. And the Senate’s mood of apprehension caused the most lamentable of all the events that occurred in that year of the daytime star.

One senator, named Cyprianus, accused another, named Albinus, of having engaged in treasonous correspondence with Constantinople. This could have been mere windy calumniating; there was nothing novel in any senator’s ascribing to another the most disgusting depravities; it has always been an accepted manner of playing for political advantage. Or, for all I know, Senator Albinus really
had
been secretly conspiring with alien enemies of the state. That hardly matters now.

What caused such grievous consequences was that the accused Albinus was a close friend of Magister Officiorum Boethius. Perhaps, if Boethius had stayed aloof from the commotion, nothing much would have come of it. But he was a good man, not one to stand aside while a friend was defamed, and treason is, after all, a capital offense. So when the Senate convened a formal court to try Albinus on that charge, Boethius came to stand before the judges and plead for the defense, concluding with these words:

“If Albinus be guilty, then so am I.”

“I was made to study rhetoric in my youth,” I said to Livia, mournfully shaking my head. “That peroration by Boethius came straight from the classic texts. Any schoolboy would have shrugged it off for what it was. An elenctic argument on the topic of reasonable probability. But the Senate court…”

“Surely they are reasonable men.” She made it more of a question than a statement.

I sighed. “One can reason from the facts presented or one can reason from the testimony offered. I do not know the facts, and I did not attend the trial. There were letters produced in evidence. They may or may not have been genuine. I cannot say. Anyway, it was apparently on the basis of the facts that the judges found Albinus guilty. Then, since Boethius had said
so am I,
they took him at his word.”

“That is preposterous! The king’s master of the offices—a traitor?”

“He freely offered that testimony. Rhetorical, yes, but there it is.” I sighed again. “Let me be charitable and give the judges their due. They are well aware of Theodoric’s altered nature—his inclination nowadays to doubt and suspect all around him. They could hardly help being infected by the same suspicion. And if the evidence convinced them of Albinus’s guilt…”

“But Boethius! Why, Rome honored him as its Consul Ordinarius when he was just thirty! One of the youngest ever—”

“And now, in his forties, by his own admission, guilty of treason to Rome.”

“Inconceivable. Ridiculous.”

“The court concurred in his admission. That was the verdict.”

“And the sentence?”

“For high treason, Livia, there is only one sentence.”

She gasped, “Death…”

“The sentence must be ratified by the full Senate, then confirmed by the king. I devoutly hope and trust that it will be overturned. Boethius’s affinal father, old Symmachus, still is princeps senatus. He will assuredly influence the Senate vote. Meanwhile, at Ravenna, Cassiodorus Filius has been appointed to Boethius’s vacant office. Those two were friends, so Cassiodorus will be pleading his case to Theodoric. And if anyone has a wealth of words for persuasion, it is Cassiodorus.”

“You must go and plead as well.”

“I was traveling north in any case,” I said gloomily. “I am the king’s marshal, so I have a duty to perform. I am escorting poor Boethius, under heavy guard, to the Calventianus prison at Ticinum. At least he does not have to rot in the Tullianum here. I was able to arrange for him a more comfortable imprisonment while he awaits his deliverance.”

Livia smiled an equivocal smile and murmured, “You have always been kind to your captives.”

It was during the twelve months that Boethius languished in the Calventianus prison, while every rational man outside it entreated for his release, that he wrote a book entitled
The Consolation of Philosophy
—and that book, I believe, is what determined the outcome of all the appeals for mercy. I well remember one of the passages in it:

“Mortal, it was you yourself who cast your lot not with Security but with Fortune. Never rejoice overmuch when she leads you to great victories; never repine when she leads you into sad adversity.”

While the legal processes in Rome did their ponderously slow progression, Theodoric in Ravenna listened attentively to me and Cassiodorus and Symmachus and Boethius’s brave wife, Rusticiana, and many other persons who argued on the prisoner’s behalf. But to none of us did Theodoric give any sign of his own feelings in the matter. Surely, I thought, he realized what a gross travesty of justice had occurred. Surely he took into account all the years of Boethius’s irreproachable service to himself and the kingdom. Surely he knew that Boethius was innocent, blameless, unfairly imprisoned, cruelly kept in anxiety by the sentence hanging over him like the sword of Damocles, probably even more cruelly tormented by his inability to ease the anguish of his wife and children. Still, Theodoric was the king, and he had to show at least the semblance of abiding by the laws of his realm. So, to me and every other appellant, he said only:

“I cannot anticipate the Senate of Rome. I must await its vote to ratify the sentence or not, before I can address the question of clemency.”

I visited Boethius occasionally, and I saw his hair turn gray during that year. But he endured, evidently sustained by his unquenchably active mind. As I have mentioned, he had written many books during his life, on a variety of subjects, but they had been appreciated mainly by persons concerned with those specific subjects—arithmeticians, astronomers, musicians and so on. His
De Consolatione Philosophiae
had much more universal appeal, because it dealt with despair and the overcoming of despair, and there are few persons in the world who have never known despair. There are few who could not echo Boethius’s sigh of resignation:

“Remember, mortal, if Fortune ever should stand still, she is no longer Fortune.”

When the book was completed, the governor of the prison was uncertain whether it should be allowed to see the light of day. So I personally
commanded
him to make sure it was delivered, safe and intact, to Boethius’s wife. The gallant Rusticiana then made it available to every person who could read and who cared to have a copy made of it. The copies multiplied, proliferated. The book was much discussed and praised and quoted. Eventually, inevitably, it came to the attention of the Church.

Now, mind you, Boethius could have made that book his own plea for pardon, but he did not. Only briefly did it deplore the grim situation in which its author found himself. Not once did it lay blame for that on any person or persons. It personified Philosophy as a sort of goddess who visited the author in his prison cell and, whenever his spirits sank to melancholy, prescribed one or another source of consolation. Those included natural theology, Platonist and Stoic concepts, simple meditation and, over and over again, the saving grace of God.

But nowhere did Philosophy, nowhere did Boethius, nowhere did the book suggest that solace could be found in any Christian belief. So the Church decried the book, called it “pernicious” and, under the Decretum Gelasianum, forbade its reading by the faithful. It could hardly have been coincidental, then, that the Senate finally voted, by a plurimum almost exactly reflecting its Catholic Christian majority of membership, to ratify Boethius’s death sentence and remand it to the king for final review.

I daresay that Boethius’s book will survive the Church’s ban and live for a long, long time to come. Boethius did not.

“Your strong right hand, Theodoric,” I said bitterly, “has chopped off your left. How could you allow such a thing?”

“The Senate court found him guilty. The full Senate confirmed that verdict.”

I sneered, “By a majority of old-womanish old men, overfearful of the Eastern Empire, jealous of their authority
and
bullied by the Church. You know Boethius was guilty of nothing.”

Theodoric said, enunciating carefully, as if to convince himself more than me, “If Boethius could be suspected of treason and accused of treason and charged with treason, then he was clearly capable of treason, and it follows—”

“By the Styx!” I interrupted recklessly. “Now you are reasoning like a Christian churchman. Only in an ecclesiastical court is defamation accepted as evidence, and accusation as conviction.”

“Have a care, Saio Thorn,” he growled. “You remember that I was given cause to wonder about Boethius’s loyalty and motives as long ago as the Sigismund affair.”

Undeterred, I went on angrily, “I hear Boethius was killed with a cord tightened around his skull. They say his eyeballs crept out upon his cheeks long before he died. To have done that work with such needless cruelty, the prison executioner must be a Christian too, I assume.”

“Be still. You know I am indifferent in regard to all religions, and I assuredly have no love for Athanasian Christians. Especially now. This document just arrived from Constantinople. Read it. You will see that the senators may not have been
over
fearful of the Eastern Empire.”

It was written in both Greek and Latin, and signed both with Emperor Justin’s crudely stenciled monogram and with the recognizably more literate signature of Patriarch Bishop Ibas. As was customary, the text was prolix with fulsome greetings and regards and good wishes, but the content could be summed up in a single sentence. It decreed that all Arian Christian churches throughout the empire were immediately to be confiscated, then consecrated anew for Catholic Christian worship.

I said, marveling, “This is as much unwarranted presumption as it is a flagrant personal insult to you. Justin and his influencers must realize that you will not obey—that they are inviting a war. Will you oblige them?”

“Not just yet. I have another war I wish to fight first, to expunge an even
more
personal insult—the Vandals’ treatment of my royal sister. Lentinus’s fleets of warships are very nearly ready, in every southern port of Italia, to be boarded by our armies and sail against Carthage.”

I asked, “Is it wise, at this time, to commit such a mass of our forces to such a distant—?”

“I have already committed myself,” he said impatiently. “A king cannot renege on his decisions.”

I sighed and was silent. Theodoric would never have maintained such inflexible haughtiness in former days.

“As for this,” he said, contemptuously flicking the document, “for the time being, I shall simply fight priest with priest. I have sent a troop to Rome to fetch hither our patriarch bishop, either escorted in dignity or dragged by his tonsure fringe of hair, whichever he chooses. I shall dispatch him from here to Constantinople, by fast dromo, to demand the rescission of this decree.”