Raptor (16 page)

I went on, as commanded. But I pondered on that epitaph as I went. It contained no reference to God or Jesus or the angels, no unctuous sentiment like “rest in peace,” not even any supplication that the pagan Manes protect the grave from desecration. Whoever was the bereaved husband who carved that crude marker, he had not been a Christian, either Catholic or Arian, and apparently had worshipped no gods of any other faith. A barbarus and a nomad he certainly would have been, and he doubtless would have been regarded by civilized folk as a
savage
outlander. But in doing that labor of love—and just in plain, unaffected words, nothing fancy or flowery—he had displayed a sensitive and deep feeling, a tenderness that was anything but barbaric. I am sure that any woman, even a Christian woman, even the most patrician Roman Christian woman—and I speak as a woman myself—instead of being honored after death with a grandiose marble monument and fulsomely pious platitudes, would test more contentedly under those simple words: “She walked nobly and spoke kindly.”

I had been journeying for weeks before I came upon the first live human being I found in the Hrau Albos. It happened toward twilight one snowy day, when I was bone-weary, famished, thirsty and numb with cold. Because the forest was fast darkening, I was rather desperately seeking some source of water where I could get my first drink of the day, and near which I might find some hibernating creature’s den, and beside which I could roll myself in my sheepskin for the night. It was then that the juika-bloth on my shoulder gave a slight flutter of its wings to catch my attention. I raised my head, squinted through the falling snow and saw, some distance ahead of me, a ruddy light.

I approached it cautiously, and saw that it was a modest campfire with a hunched figure seated to one side of it. Still cautiously and quietly, I circled around to the back of that creature and crept closer. All I could make out was that it was a person with a great deal of unkempt gray hair, for the rest of it was bundled in a heavy fur. It was probably a man, I decided, but there was no horse tethered anywhere about, and no other people or campfires in sight. Would any Alaman, I wondered, be roaming the Hrau Albos all by himself and without a mount? I stood shivering, debating whether I should announce my presence or back off and go safely far away—when suddenly the hunched person said, without turning its head or raising its voice:

“Galithans faúr nehu. Jau anagimis hirjith and fon uh thraftsjan thusis.”

It was a man’s voice, and gruff, and he spoke the Old Language with an accent unfamiliar to me, but I could easily comprehend what he had said:

“You have come this close. You might as well approach the fire and warm yourself.”

But I had taken such pains to steal upon him slowly and in silence. Was this some kind of forest skohl with eyes in the back of his head? I might yet have crept away and taken to my heels, but the cheerfully flickering fire was too strong a temptation. I sidled around to the far side of it, and hunkered down close to it, and asked somewhat sheepishly:

“How did you know I was here?”

“Iésus!” the man grunted disgustedly. It was the first time I had ever heard the Lord’s name used as an expletive. “You stupid urchin, I have known for at least a week that you were stumbling and blundering along behind me.”

If he
was
a skohl with supernatural senses, he at least looked like an ordinary mortal, shaggy of hair and long of beard. He was an old man—not feeble-old but sturdy-old, in the way good leather is when it has been long suppled and limbered. In fact, what I could see of his skin behind all the hair resembled well-tanned leather. His eyes were not dim or rheumy but a sharp and piercing blue. He seemed to have all his teeth, and they were not yellow but brightly white, as if he nourished himself by
chewing
leather.

He went on grumbling, “All kinds of forest animals have come galloping past me, fleeing from the noise and commotion you made. Iésus! As a woodsman, you are a damnable bumbler, and obviously new to the woods. I have occasionally halted just to get a look at you, and to marvel at how clumsily you trudge along, and how unskilfully you wield your sling, and how you so often fail to see good meaty animals that stand still while you pass. You are not fit to kiss the backside of the hunting goddess Diana. Finally, when it became painfully obvious that you would soon entirely spoil my own hunting—that you might even awaken sleeping bears untimely early—I decided to wait and let you catch up to me. Who are you, imbecile?”

Even more sheepishly than before, I said, “I am called Thorn.”

He laughed, but without amusement. “Well named, you are. A thorn in my side, you are. Interfering with my work and my livelihood, you are. What brings you here, urchin Thorn? You do not hunt game, except to eat, and you hunt ineptly. By the cuckold horns of St. Joseph, but I am amazed that you have not starved to death before now. Since you possess so pitifully little of woodcraft, how did you ever catch and man that eagle you carry, niu? Are you alive only because it lets you share its kills of serpents? Are you hungry now, urchin?”

“And thirsty,” I mumbled.

“There is a brook trickling just behind those bushes yonder, if you are still robust enough to crack the ice on it.”

He kept on talking while I went and gratefully took a long drink. I was rather awed by the old man’s loquacity—and by the unabashed impiety and blasphemy of many of the expressions he used. But I had to admit that at least he was impartial in the gods and venerable personages he chose to profane with his figures of speech.

“There are other raptors in these woods besides that bird of yours, urchin. And hellishly worse ones. They would strip you of bag and baggage, scrip and scrippage, and then what they would do to your stripped body is beyond imagining. I am astounded that you have not yet fallen prey to some one of those skulking sons of haliuruns bitches. If you are hungry… here, take this.”

As I hunkered down again, he tossed across the fire a raw, brown and flabby something that splashed blood when I caught it.

“Elk’s liver. I was saving it as a delicacy for myself, but I have had many a one before. And, by the seven sorrows of the Virgin, you behave as if you lack a stout liver of your own. Get a stick and roast it in the flames.”

“Thags izvis, fráuja,” I murmured, respectfully calling him by the Gothic word meaning “master.”

“Vái, you do not talk much, do you, urchin? Another mark of a newcomer to the woods. When you have lived in them as long as I have, and talked and damned and blasphemed at nobody but yourself,
you
will talk, too, whenever you have an audience, even if it be only a vulture.”

And talk he did, incessantly, while I ate. I was so avid for the meat that I gave it only the merest crisping of fire, and then—using not my knife but my teeth—voraciously began tearing and gnawing at it. The shreds that fell from my lips I held up to the juika-bloth on my shoulder.

“The snow is thickening,” said the old man. “That is good. It will make a warmer blanket when it covers us. You have not yet said, urchin, what brought you to these Hrau Albos. If you are, as I suppose, a runagate slave, why did you run to these inhospitable forests, niu? In this solitude you are as conspicuously out of place as a crocodilus of the torrid lands. Why did you not run to a city, where you could mingle and be invisible in the multitudes?”

“I am not a slave, fráuja,” I said thickly, my mouth full and blood running down my chin. “I never have been a slave. Until recently, I was a postulant in a monastery. But I was—I decided I had no true calling to take the tonsure and the cowl.”

“Did you now?” he said, eyeing me shrewdly. “A boy about to become a monk, were you? Then why have I seen you sometimes relieving yourself retromingently?”

I gaped at him, now with my mouth open and speechless, for I had no idea of what he was talking about. So he loudly repeated the query, putting it in more vulgar but more comprehensible words:

“Why have I seen you sometimes squatting to piss like a girl?”

The blunt question caught me unprepared. Anyway, how could I explain that I did it either upright or squatting depending on whether—at the moment I found urination necessary—I was thinking of myself as male or female?

I stammered, “Well, because… because I was less vulnerable that way… than if I stood with my… my urinary organ hanging out… in case I were to be suddenly attacked…”

“Akh, balgs-daddja! Cease your witless lying,” he said, but not unkindly. “I must declare, when you do talk, you use some mincing words to skirt indecency.” He snorted a laugh.
“Urinary organ,
by the kunte of the lewd goddess Cotytto! What you mean is your
svans.
Listen, urchin, I do not care if you be girl or boy, nymph or faun, or both. I am an old man and, these many years, there has been no marrow in my bone. Were you as beautiful as the fabled Lady Poppaea or the legendary lad Hyacinthus, you would need fear no molesting from me.”

I stared at him. After my years among monks and nuns constantly inquiring and interrogating and catechizing—especially on the subject of sex—it was a refreshing surprise to come upon a person totally
uninterested
in another’s most private concerns.

He added, “Nor do I care, one tord’s worth, from what or from whom you are running away, or why.”

The meal of good meat had considerably invigorated me. I said with some spirit, “I am not running
away,
fráuja, I am running to. I am traveling eastward in search of my own people among the Goths.”

“Are you now? To the eastern lands of the Ostrogoths? What makes you think you have been going eastward, niu?”

“Do you mean I have not?” I asked, dismayed. “When I left Vesontio, I know I headed due east. But all the time I have been in these accursed mountains, the heavy clouds have hidden both the sun and the north star Phoenice. Still, I thought, as long as I followed these forelands of the high Alpes in the south…”

The old man shook his shaggy gray head. “There has been a wind in your face all the way, has there not? That is Aquilo, the northeast wind. Akh,
eventually
these forelands will veer and lead you eastward. But right now you are headed toward the Roman garrison town of Basilea, where I am going.”

“Iésus,” I muttered, the first time I myself ever had used the Lord’s name profanely. And for the first time, I did not sign the cross upon my forehead at mention of the Holy Name. “How does one find direction, then, when both the sun and the north star are not to be seen?”

“Ignorant urchin, one uses a sun-stone.” He took something from inside his voluminous swaddling of furs and held it out to me. It was only a piece of that common stone called glitmuns in Gothic, mica in Latin—the opaline and blurrily transparent stone composed of many overlaid flaky leaves.

“It will not show you the star Phoenice,” he said, “for it works only in daylight. But, no matter how dark and cloudy the day, hold that to your eye and scan the heavens. Seen through the stone, most of the sky will look pink. But in the place where the sun stands unseen, the stone makes the sky look pale blue. Thus you easily determine your direction.”

“I have much to learn,” I said with a sigh.

“If you would be a woodsman and a hunter, ja.”

“But, fráuja, you yourself are an experienced woodsman and hunter. You said you have lived long in these forests. Why are you now going to a town?”

“Woods-addled I may be,” he said crossly, “but I am not yet totally insane or senile. I do not hunt from force of habit or for frivolity or to satisfy a mad blood-lust or even just to feed my gut. I hunt to acquire pelts, skins, furs. Those are all bearskins.”

He pointed to a great thong-tied bale of them, which I had not earlier noticed, safely lodged in the crotch of a tree.

“I sell them to the Roman colonists at Basilea and other places who are too timid and effete to venture out of their fortified towns and collect their own. Iésus, small wonder the empire is in such sad state. Did you know, urchin, that many of the insipid Romans nowadays—even the colonials—are so preciously refined that they will dine only on fish and fowl? They deem good red flesh-meat fit only for laborers, peasants and us uncultivated outlanders.”

“I did not know that. But it makes me glad to be an outlander Goth if that entitles me to eat those meats spurned by the overcivilized. And you, fráuja, are you of the Alaman outlanders?”

He did not answer directly, but said, “The Alamanni have not been up in these Hrau Albos for some years past. They have lately confined their peregrinations to the lower lands, between the rivers Rhenus and Danuvius. I told you, these upper forests are haunted by evil outlaws.”

“If not the Alamanni, then who?”

“Akh, the Alamanni are nomads and fierce of temper and fond of combat, but they do have laws and they do abide by them. Urchin, I speak of Huns. Stragglers, deserters, outcasts and dregs who stayed behind when the rest went back to whatever hell they came from.”

“From Sarmatia, I have heard.”

“Perhaps,” he grunted. “It is said that, long ago, among the Goths were haliuruns women of such despicably wicked ways that their own tribes expelled them. And those outcast witches, wandering in exile, met and mated with wilderness demons, and consequently gave birth to the Huns. By the seventeen teats of the Ephesian Diana, I believe that tale! Only the black blood of witches and demons commingled could account for the fiendish ferocity of the Huns. Most of them are gone now, but those remaining have gathered into bands, complete with mates and offspring—of their own foul race or abducted from other nations—and those women and children, let me tell you, are as unspeakably vicious as their menfolk. The bands lurk here in the Hrau Albos, and dash out on forays against the lowland villages and farmsteads, then withdraw again into these woods. No Roman garrison’s legatus would be foolish enough to send a legion in pursuit of them. Legionaries are accustomed to fighting in open terrain; they would be slaughtered in here. And the native Alamanni, though fond of combat, are disinclined to suicide. So, rather than contend with the terrible Huns, they have abandoned these highlands that were once their own.”