Raptor (22 page)

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

Then I spoke. For the first time, and unbidden, and most reluctantly, and in a very small voice, I spoke one word: “Substitutus.”

Both men turned to stare at me in astonishment, as if I had abruptly sprouted up from between the flagstones at their feet. They continued to stare silently at me, and not because, like them, I spoke in Latin, or because of my presumption in speaking at all, but because they were agog at what I said next:

“Substitute one of the charismatics.”

After another long interval, the men ceased staring at me and turned to look at one another.

“By Mithras, an ingenious idea,” the legatus said to Wyrd, and then, with as much humor as he could muster, asked him, “Which of you two did you say is the apprentice?”

“By Mithras, Jupiter
and
Guth, the urchin learns quickly,” Wyrd said with pride. “Already the apprentice has absorbed much of the misanthropy of the master. Substitution is an ingenious idea, indeed, and of a charismatic. You could hardly appropriate one of your garrison or town children, Calidius.”

The legatus said, and this time to me, “I have not seen that slavemonger’s flock of capons. Is there one that might serve?”

I said, “Two or three seem to be of a suitable age, clarissimus. You yourself would have to decide whether there is one of sufficient resemblance to your grandson. The Syrian took them all to the baths, but, if you wish to inspect them, they are probably back at the barrack by now.”

The legatus said, “No, I will wager that they are still doing their bathing.” He added, though not unkindly, “You are evidently unfamiliar with Roman baths, lad, if in fact you have ever been acquainted with any baths at all.”

Wyrd snorted loudly. “Ill manners, Calidius, to repay a favor with an insult. This is an uncommonly cleanly youngster. Like myself, Thorn has been
trying
to get a bath ever since we arrived here.”

“My apologies, Torn,” said the legatus. “I, too, would like an extra bath today, after being near that unspeakably foul slave. Let us all three go to the bath this instant. Signifer Paccius will know which of them the Syrian went to.”

As we walked there, I was thinking that Calidius had misheard and misspoken my name. But I would eventually learn that Rome-born Romans are constitutionally unable to pronounce the “th” sound, even though a great many of their words, derived from the Greek or the Gothic, are spelled that way. By every native Roman, I would be always addressed as Torn, and mine was not the only name thus elided. The Romans habitually referred to both of their onetime emperors Theodosius as Teodosius. And when, in time, the entire Western Empire came to be ruled by Theodoric, he would be known to every one of his Roman-born subjects as Teodoric.

At the bathhouse, I realized why Calidius had been so certain that the Syrian and his young eunuchs would still be occupied with their bathing, for I found that a Roman bath is a long and leisurely and luxurious ritual. A garrison bathhouse is, of course, nowhere near as opulent as any of the thermae in any real Roman city, but even this one was furnished with pools and basins and fountains of water of varying temperatures, from icy cold to tepid to comfortably warm to near-scalding hot. It was also equipped with other conveniences: an indoor court for athletic exercising or games-playing, couches for lounging, reading or holding converse, and ornaments of sculpture and mosaic for contemplation. Numerous off-duty soldiers were enjoying the accommodations: two of them were wrestling nude while their fellows cheered or jeered, others were rolling dice, a group lay listening as one of their number read a poem aloud. And everywhere about were the loinclothed slaves who did the actual bathing of the bathers and attended to their other wants or demands.

Calidius, Wyrd and I undressed in the room called the apodyterium, with a slave assisting each of us. Before we commenced to bathe, however, we hurried first to the farthest room, the balineum. There the charismatics, as naked and supple and glossy as newts—and as sexually featureless—were frolicking in the after-bath swimming pool. On the other side of the pool from us, the Syrian, still fully clothed, sat on a marble bench, possessively watching his wares. Some soldiers on other benches were also ogling them, and making, comments variously comical, scornful or lecherous.

After surveying the scene only briefly, the legatus murmured to Wyrd, “That child yonder, trying to splash water up on the Syrian. That one is of an age and size like enough to my grandson. Only he is dark, and young Calidius is fair of hair. Also, his features are not very close of resemblance.”

“The features do not matter,” said Wyrd. “All westerners look alike to the oriental Huns, as all of them do to us. Right now, while the boy is here, have one of the slaves bleach his hair with struthium ashes. That is all that will be necessary.”

When the legatus raised an arm to beckon a slave, the gesture caught the Syrian’s eye. He came scurrying around the pool, to bow and scrape before us, and say:

“Ah, clarissimus magister, you waited to view my young charmers until you could see them as they
should
be seen. Naked and alluring and irresistible. Do I perceive that one of them has already taken your magisterial fancy?”

“Yes,” the legatus said curtly, and then, to the slave who knelt before him, “That one,” and he pointed. The slave went to fetch the child from the pool.

“Ashtaret!” exclaimed Natquin, ecstatically clasping his hands together. “The legatus has a magisterial eye, to be sure! Little Becga, the very one I might have decided to keep for myself. Almost pass for a genuine female, that one, eh? Well, clarissimus, it will nigh break my heart to part with pretty Becga. However, your humble servant would not dare to protest your selection. Instead, in admiration of your good taste, I will set a specially low price and—”

“Silence, you vile pandered” snarled the legatus. “I am not buying, I am taking.”

The trader gasped and stammered, “Quid?… Quidnam?…”

“Under the jus belli, I am empowered to seize private property by the rule of eminent dominion. I am seizing this one.”

The small charismatic now stood before us, dripping wet, and it was clear that the operation of mutilation had been most expertly performed on him. There was nothing but a dimple to mark where his private parts had been. I wondered what sort of “plaything” such a totally sexless creature could possibly be for any sort of master. The young eunuch must have been wondering the same thing, because his eyes were fearful as they flicked from one to another of us. In his fright, the child involuntarily added to the water that was dripping off him, for a sudden slight trickle of amber liquid issued from that dimple between his thighs.

“Take him away,” Wyrd said to the slave who had brought him. “Bleach his hair with struthium. The legatus will tell you when it is pale enough.”

“Ger-qatleh!” bleated the trader, whatever that meant in his Syrian language.

“Please, magisters, struthium is for bleaching linen. After such treatment, dear Becga’s hair will eventually all fall out.”

“I am aware of that,” said Wyrd. “But it will not until after we have made the use of him that we intend.”

“Magisters!” Natquin pleaded. “If you desire to have sport with a fair-haired charismatic, why not Blara yonder? Or Buffa? They are even prettier and more tender than Becga.”

“Swine!” The legatus slapped the Syrian so hard that the man’s head swiveled on his neck. “No Roman or decent outlander would ever wallow in the obscene vices of you easterners. This one of your suckling swinelets will have the honor of doing something heroic, not perverted and disgusting. Now you and the rest of them, get out of my sight!” He turned to the waiting slave. “Start treating the boy’s hair while we three bathe. I will then see how the work is progressing.”

So the legatus, Wyrd and I went back to the first of the bathing rooms, the unctuarium, where our attending slaves rubbed us all over with olive oil—Wyrd’s slave and mine wrinkling their noses in disapproval of our exceedingly grubby condition. We went next to the athletic court, and the slaves produced for each of us a sort of paddle, its handle supporting a round and open wooden frame, the open part of it crisscrossed by strings of gut. With those paddles, we batted a round ball of felt back and forth among us until we had mixed considerable perspiration with the oil on our bodies.

Then we went to the sudatorium, a room full of steam, more dense than any Hrau Albos fog, and we sat on marble benches until the commingled oil and sweat streamed down off us. Then we lay at full length on slatted wooden tables in a room called the laconicum, while our slaves scraped the ooze off every part of us, using an assortment of different-sized, curved, spoonlike things called strigiles. Only when my slave brought his strigiles near my private parts did I push his hand away, indicating that I would do my own cleansing there. Neither Calidius nor Wyrd took any notice of that, and the slave merely shrugged, evidently supposing me to be a typically prudish country lout.

Next we immersed ourselves in the very hot pool of the calidarium, and bobbed and ducked and splashed about in that for as long as we could endure it. When we emerged, the slaves washed our hair, and Wyrd’s beard, with fragrant soaps. Then we went to the tepidarium and splashed about in pools of gradually decreasing warmth, until we were able, without too great a shock, to plunge into the chilly pool of the frigidarium. When we came out of that, I felt frozen stiff, but the slaves briskly rubbed us down with thick towels, and very soon I felt wonderfully tingly, alert and alive all over—and also extremely hungry. Finally the slaves dusted us with delicately scented talcus, and we returned to the apodyterium to get dressed again.

We had not been overlong in our bathing—having omitted the after-bath swim and any lounging about—but somehow the therma slaves had, in that time, beautifully laundered and dried all our clothes. Even my sheepskin and Wyrd’s massive bearskin cloak had been cleansed of their clotted mud and blood and their accumulation of dead leaves and twigs. My sheepskin was again white and springy, Wyrd’s bearskin was shiny and fluffy—and, above it, his formerly matted gray hair and beard were as feathered-out as dandelion down, so he looked bristly all over, as quite befitted his prickly personality.

The signifer Paccius was waiting for us outside the apodyterium, and so was the slave attendant on the charismatic Becga. The little eunuch was still naked, but no longer looked frightened. In fact, he was holding a speculum and smiling at his new reflection, for his hair that had been a dark brown was now a pale gold in color, much the same hue as my own.

The legatus would not touch the creature, but had the slave tilt Becga’s head this way and that. After studying the child, he said, “Yes, that is about the color I remember. Well done, slave. Paccius take the boy to Fabius’s chambers. Dress him in young Calidius’s garments—they should fit nearly perfectly—and bring him again to me.”

The signifer saluted, but before he could turn away, Wyrd demanded, “Paccius, what has the garrison coquus prepared for the convivium? I could eat an entire úrus, horns and hoofs and all.”

“Come, come, Uiridus,” said the legatus. “You will not eat of the soldiers’ common convivium. You and your apprentice—now that you both look and smell human—will dine with me.”

And so it was that, in the sumptuous triclinium of Calidius’s mansion, I dined for the first time in the Roman fashion. That is to say, it was also the first time I had ever eaten a meal while lying down and supporting myself on one elbow. We all reclined that way, on a trio of soft couches set rather in the shape of a letter C laid flat, with the table in the middle, and the servitor slaves coming and going through the open side of the C. It was clearly not the first time that Wyrd had dined so, for he sprawled out most comfortably and ate without giving any hint of being ill at ease. I still knew nothing of Wyrd’s origins, but I did know, now, that he had not always been just an outlander woodsman, and I was beginning to suspect that the rough and gruff old Forest-Stalker had also, at some time, enjoyed a social status somewhat higher than that of a decurio commanding ten auxiliaries in some Roman legion.

I myself felt extremely out of place in these surroundings, but, as young people will, I of course tried to pretend utter equanimity, and Calidius and Wyrd—and even the servants—had the good grace not to snicker at my many awkwardnesses. I was well accustomed to eating with a knife, and frequently in both of the abbeys had employed a spoon, but even those were difficult for me to use in my reclining position. Worse, there was at this table a third implement for each of us—a metal thing of two pointed tines, to be used for spearing one’s cutoff bits of food and conveying them to one’s mouth—and that thing really caused me some fumbling.

I took so much care to appear not uncomfortable in this setting that I ate slowly, but I ate voraciously. I was hungry enough, after that invigorating bath, to have eaten my own sheepskin. But this food, needless to remark, was much more elegant than would have been served in the soldiers’ cenaculum, and also much more elegant than had ever been served to me anywhere else.

“I apologize for the wine,” said the legatus, pouring a goblet of it for each of us. “A merely decent Formian. I wish I had a Campanian or a Lesbian with which to drink to the success of your venture, Uiridus.”

Wyrd made a face, because the wine was not only watered, it was also flavored with resin. But I personally thought it more than decent.

The meal began with a soup of mashed chestnuts and lentils. The main dish was ham cooked inside an envelope of pastry crust and served in slices, with stewed figs roundabout. There was a side dish of beets and leeks cooked in raisin wine and dressed with oil and vinegar, and another side dish of something like pastry, drawn out and cut into very long, very narrow strips, dressed with garlic-flavored oil. That dish caused me the most difficulty in eating, for it was supposed to be conveyed to the mouth (I watched the others do it) by coiling the strings with the two-tined implement into knots of bite size. Even by the close of the meal, I was not managing that very well. Happily for my pretense of composure and competence, the dinner concluded with sweets easy to eat—an airy and delicate cheesecake topped with preserved Damascene plums, accompanied by tiny cups of violet wine.