Raptor (24 page)

“Ignorant Torn. That is a mark much to be valued on a horse. It is called ‘the prophet’s thumbprint.’ Of what prophet, I know not, but it promises a good steed, and one of good omen. Anyway, all our horses here are of the unsurpassable Kehailan breed, from the land of Arabia Deserta. It is said that the Kehailans date from the time of Baz, the great-great-grandson of Noah.”

I was properly awed to have been given a mount of such ancient lineage, and I was about to say so, but Wyrd made a sudden gesture for us to be quiet. We joined him where he stood, crouched and peering through a chink in the wattles of the stableyard wall. There, we could hear the distant but approaching
thwock-thwock
of a horse plodding along the slushy road. It came into view, a very shaggy horse considerably smaller than our three. “One of the scruffy Zhmud breed,” muttered Fabius, and Wyrd again motioned for him to hush.

I was more interested to see the rider, for this was my first glimpse of a Hun. He rather resembled his horse, in being smaller than the average, for he was shorter even than myself, and exceedingly ugly. He was of a dirty yellowish-brown complexion, with long, stringy, greasy black hair, eyes that were only slitted pouches, and no beard, but some straggly wisps of mustache. Unprepossessing though he was, he sat his horse superbly, and he might have been born to do that, for his legs were so bowed as to clasp tightly his horse’s barrel body. The Hun was dressed about as raggedly as the boy Becga had earlier been, and his horse was winter-worn and ribby. The man carried the same sort of bow as did Wyrd, but his was unstrung, and he held it high to display a scrap of dirty white cloth tied to its tip.

Fabius was beside me, and I could feel him twitching during the long minutes it took the Hun to pass beyond our vision. The charismatic Becga, though—because no one had yet suggested to him that this or some other Hun would probably be his new master—peered only incuriously through the wattles. As soon as the rider was well out of earshot, Wyrd stood erect and said:

“I shall creep along after him, and make sure that he does enter the garrison, and that the legatus welcomes him—with no trickery on either part. Now, it is midday, and the ferrarius here has been ordered to provide a meal for us. So you go, Thorn, and tell him his wife can commence cooking. When I return, we will all eat—and eat to bursting, for not even Mithras knows when we may get another chance.”

I duly went and told the ferrarius to see that his wife supplied ample provender. She was setting it out for us—a hearty fish stew ladled onto large round trenchers of bread, which served both as our plates and as part of the meal—when Wyrd came back. He reported that the messenger and the legatus were not killing or even assailing one another, and that Calidius was, as requested, obviously going to draw out the negotiations and keep the Hun there as late in the day as possible.

“But eat quickly,” he told us. “At any instant, the little fiend may suspect something amiss and make a dash for the forest. If he does not, then let us go on eating for as long as we can stuff ourselves.”

Wyrd also said, and to me only, out of Fabius’s hearing, “I presume the hostages are still alive. At any rate, the villain brought another of the Lady Placidia’s fingers, and, as best I could see from concealment, it appeared freshly cut.”

Evidently nothing untoward occurred up at the garrison to alarm the visiting Hun, or to arouse his suspicion. And the legatus must have kept him pleasantly plied with wine and viands, while arguing over the details of delivering Roman army property—how much and when and where—in exchange for the Huns’ captives, because that day dragged uneventfully but suspensefully on and on. The agitated Fabius cursed and paced about the stableyard, and the placid Becga simply sat impassively waiting. I passed the time in befriending my new horse, Velox, as the ferrarius suggested I do. The man gave me some calamint, and I rubbed and crumbled that fragrant herb between my hands, then carressed Velox’s muzzle and neck and chest and withers, an attention the horse obviously enjoyed. Meanwhile, Wyrd, to the vexation of the smithwife, kept demanding additional food from her, and kept making the rest of us gorge on it, to repletion and beyond.

But finally Wyrd cocked an ear in the direction of the town’s center, then put an abrupt halt to all our noise and activity by waving his arms violently. Again we all stole close to the yard wall to watch through the cracks. The Hun was now in more of a hurry, or his nag had been refreshed by its long rest, or both, for it was coming at a brisk trot through the early dusk. Horse and rider crossed our vision again, going the other way, and were no sooner past the yard than Fabius hissed, “Let us hasten! Before he is out of sight!”

“I
want
him out of sight!” snapped Wyrd, but not loudly. “The Huns have eyes in their anuses. Anyway, his tracks will be fresh and distinct enough. There has been little traffic on these roads in recent days.”

So we had to wait some more, until Wyrd at last gave the word to mount. I set my juika-bloth on my shoulder, then led Velox by his reins to a mounting block. From that eminence, I clambered awkwardly into the saddle, then reached down to hoist Becga to the pillow fastened behind me. My saddle and bridle and reins were not, of course, bedizened with medallions and pendants and inlays, as were those of Optio Fabius, but they were genuine military gear. The saddle was of leather stiffened inside with bronze plates, and had projections molded into it to help a rider keep his seat. I was not surprised to see Fabius mount his horse more dashingly than I had done—vaulting clear from the ground to the saddle—and not too surprised to see old Wyrd just as lithely make the same leap.

The ferrarius opened a gate for us, and we filed out into the road. We proceeded at only a slow walk, Wyrd in the lead, bent over in his saddle to scan the road’s churned mud and slush, and Fabius crowded close behind him, doing the same. I was at first excited to be on the trail of a hellion Hun, but after a while the plodding nature of the chase got tiresome, and I thrilled more to the simple fact of being astride a fine horse. Even at a walk, and even with a saddle between us, Velox communicated to me a feeling of coiled tension, of muscles charged with unleashed energy, of the fire and might of a horse-sized volcano just waiting for permission to erupt. I do not know whether little Becga, behind me, could feel that, too, but he kept his arms clasped tight about my waist, as if fearful that I might urge Velox into a gallop that would take the horse right out from under him.

Then, suddenly, Wyrd halted his own horse and said, in some puzzlement, “The Hun turned off the road here. Why so soon?”

Fabius, from sitting on his saddle, gave another athletic bound and was standing on it. He peered through the trees bordering the road on the left, the direction Wyrd had indicated, and after a moment said, “He is out of sight. But the tracks are not.”

So, Wyrd still leading, we too turned off the road there and continued on, through stands of trees and open pastures and farmlands. We went even more slowly than before, lest we should get too close and come within our quarry’s sight. Then Wyrd again halted suddenly, and growled:

“By the self-castrated priests of Cybele, but the Hun has turned again! Turned
back
toward Basilea.”

Fabius asked, “Could he be seeking to discover if he is being followed?”

“Perhaps. Still, we have no choice but to stay on his trail.”

And we did, though now very, very slowly, and after a long, long while—by which time the twilight had deepened almost to darkness—Wyrd halted yet again, and loudly bellowed a string of curses that must have jarred every god and saint in every heaven of every religion. I should have thought the noise would have alerted the Hun ahead of us, but apparently that was no matter, because Wyrd concluded, his profanity thus:

“By the bloat and bursting of Judas Iscariot, the creature did not head for Basilea at all! He has circled around it to the riverside well above the town. He would have had some kind of scow waiting for him and his horse, and he is probably across the Rhenus by now. Optio Fabius! Ride like the wind—to the Basilea docks. Get barges and bargemen, enough to ferry all of us. Bring them, rush them—whip them if necessary—upstream to where you find us waiting. Go!”

The optio was off like an arrow, and my Velox seemed to await only a nudge to lunge away just as fast, but Wyrd said:

“No need for us to hurry, urchin. Oh vái, if that traitor slave told the truth—and I believe he did—that the Huns had gestured south toward the Hrau Albos as their lurking place, then they were deliberately deceiving even him. And now me. They are somewhere to the north of the river Rhenus, and perhaps not very far from it, for who would think to look for mountain bandits there in the lowlands?”

So we kept on following the tracks, neither hurrying nor dawdling, and the darkness came down so that I could not even see the trail in the snow, but Wyrd seemed to have no difficulty. Eventually that led us to a shelving gravel bank of the river and, as Wyrd had predicted, there were discernible scrapes and gouges in the shingle to indicate that a flat-bottomed vessel of some sort had first landed, then been shoved off from there. Wyrd cursed some more, but there was little else we could do, so we dismounted and topped up our flasks with river water, and waited.

We did not have to wait for too long. A chronic complainer Fabius might have been, but he was a decisive man of action when action was called for. The night was not far along when Wyrd and Becga and I saw the darkness begin to lighten a little in the west, and then the light became separate lanterns, three of them, casting long, contorted, zigzagging reflections on the turbulent river waters. As I have said, the Rhenus upstream of Basilea is of very rapid current, so the three barges, although they were poled by many men in each, had indeed made good time in reaching us. I should have not been surprised to see Fabius actually flailing and lashing the bargemen as they approached. But the boats were out in the water, and he of course came riding along the bank. When he found us, Fabius did not shout to the bargemen, but hooted like an owl—evidently a prearranged signal—to summon them to turn toward shore.

“Good work, Optio,” Wyrd said as Fabius dismounted. “If the Huns left a watchman on the opposite bank, he will have seen nothing but three lanterns. So do not extinguish those lights. Detach three of the bargemen to carry one lantern apiece, and to continue afoot along this bank. They are to stay beside the water, and keep on until morning, or until they drop, whichever happens first. The remaining men will have to ferry us across in the dark—and in silence.”

Accordingly, three of the newcomers, at slightly staggered intervals, trudged upriver carrying the lanterns. Any Hun spying from the other side would have supposed the barges to have gone past him without stopping. Meanwhile, as quietly as possible, we trackers boarded for the crossing. I might have expected our horses to balk at what must have seemed to them an unnatural mode of transport, but they were evidently veterans at the practice and made no demur. Neither did Becga, who must have crossed other waters on his way from the Frankish lands. The only hesitant and awkward boarder was myself—“Vái, you step like a mincing woman!” sneered one of the bargemen, who had to grab my elbow to steady me—because this was the first time in my life I had ever got into a boat of any sort.

Wyrd said there was no way of guessing how far the river’s swift current might have carried the Hun’s barge downstream during its crossing, so he commanded our bargemen to pole as strongly as they could, to take us as straight across the Rhenus as possible. Once we were on the other side, he said, we could make our own way down along the bank and find where the Hun had landed. So the men at the poles did their strenuous best, but, in the darkness, I doubt that any of our party could tell—certainly I could not—whether we made the passage in a direct line or on a long diagonal. All I knew for sure was that the river raged and foamed against the upstream side of our barge, and repeatedly lapped and splashed over its edge. Not to get totally soaked by the frigid water, we passengers in the three boats, like the polers, all stood during the crossing. And, for fear that the river might get even rowdier and come pouring in to sink us, I clung protectively to Becga with my one arm and hooked my other securely about the neck of the imperturbable and solid-standing Velox. The juika-bloth, as if it was being protective of
me,
clung tight to my shoulder, though it could have winged its way across with ease.

We were a long time upon the cold, black river—or so it seemed to me—and the black air was much colder than it had been on land, chilling us first to discomfort, then to misery, then to near numbness. But suddenly there were branches clawing at my coat’s cowl and my horse’s mane. Either the river was high enough to have overflowed the roots of the bankside trees or we had come to shore in a grove of some kind of water-growing trees. Anyway, the water gurgled and swashed so loudly among those trees as to cover all the noises of our disembarking. And we did make noise, because even the horses were stiff with cold, and clumsy as they clambered overboard and scrabbled from the shallows up to dry ground. Wyrd bade Becga hold the horses’ reins, and drew me and Fabius aside and told us, “From here, to find the spot where the Hun landed, we must go quietly. That means we go afoot.”

“Why?” demanded Fabius. “That could take until morning, or even all of tomorrow. The Hun and his boatmen may have been swept many miles downstream, perhaps far beyond Basilea itself.”

“And they may not, so keep your voice down. They may have come ashore just a few stadia from this spot. That is why we go on foot and in silence—my apprentice, the eunuch and myself. Optio, you will stay here with the horses, the barges and their men.”

“What?! Gerrae! For how long?”

“I said keep your voice down. And you said you would obey my commands. You will remain here until Thorn and I return—bringing that which we came for, I devoutly hope.”

“What?!”
Fabius fairly roared it this time, and Wyrd slapped him across the face with the back of his hand. That did not silence the irate soldier, but it made him argue less loudly. “You and two children will make the chase and the assault without me? And I am to play nursemaid to horses and dockside drudges? I will be damned by Mithras if I do!”