Raptor (27 page)

“What? The female Huns will likewise use him so?”

“Ne, ne. They will take their pleasure in putting him to death, and they have a unique way of doing that. The Hun men do not allow their women to wield knives—probably for good reasons of self-protection. So the women will use sharp shards of broken pottery to nick and chip and mince the prisoner to death. That takes quite a while. Fabius will be glad when it is over.”

“And Becga, what of him?”

Wyrd shrugged. “Akh, the charismatics are bred and broken to be basely used, and are corrupted in their minds to accept such usage passively. But that one—I think Becga is safe even from molestation, for a time at least.”

I could not see why, if the Huns would so eagerly take turns at raping a ruggedly masculine Roman man, they would restrain themselves with a compliant little eunuch in their grasp. But before I could inquire about that, Wyrd said, “I believe we have sneaked far enough. Let us mount now and gallop. Atgadjats!”

I stood upon a stump to get into my saddle, and Calidius moved to the pillow behind, and held me tightly about the waist, as Becga had done. Wyrd again vaulted from the ground to his horse’s back, and, scraggy though this one was in appearance, it answered the kick of his heels with an instant burst of speed, and tirelessly kept up that pace.

So, while all about us the dawn brightened to full daylight, I did two more things for the first time in my life. For one, I rode a fine horse at full gallop, which is among the most breathtakingly exhilarating experiences a person can ever have. My juika-bloth also seemed to find it so; the bird remained on my shoulder and did not take to the air, but frequently spread its wings just to rejoice in the wind of our speed. During that ride, though, I repeatedly gave silent thanks to old Wyrd for his having earlier made me travel afoot as rigorously as he had made me do. If those forest journeys had not so strengthened my thighs, I could never have kept my seat on Velox throughout that morning’s long gallop. As it was, the inside of my thighs got so painfully chafed that I might well have been moaning if I had not been so deliriously enjoying the ride.

We saw no more Huns. And eventually we came to the river Rhenus at a place where the bank shelved very gradually down to and under the water, and that water was very little roiled by the gentle current there. So we rested and watered the horses and ourselves, and let the animals browse on some of the dry foliage roundabout. None of us humans ate anything, because there was nothing to eat—and also because, in my case at least, the long ride had made my belly muscles so stiff and tight that I could not feel any emptiness in the stomach behind them. That must have been true for Calidius as well, because he made no complaint of hunger, and of course Wyrd was never much troubled by missing any number of meals.

When we moved on, I did that day’s other first-time thing, which was to cross a river not in a boat. Though I had paddled often in the cascade pools of the Balsan Hrinkhen, and was not afraid of water, I would never have been capable of swimming across the Rhenus, which here I judged to be at least two stadia in breadth. Wyrd showed me how to do it. He set Calidius on my saddle, and bade him hold fast to it, and put my juika-bloth on the boy’s shoulder. Then, following Wyrd’s example, I led my horse by his bridle into the water. Neither Velox nor the Zhmud nag balked at that; it was evidently not a first time for either of them.

As we and the horses gradually submerged, Wyrd and I shifted our hold from the bridles to their tails. My juika-bloth, once it perceived our intent—and not to get water splashed on itself—soared off Calidius’s shoulder and circled companionably above us as we more clumsily made the crossing. Holding tight to the horses’ tails, Wyrd and I let the animals tow us, and they did the swimming more strongly and steadfastly than any man could have done. Just the biting cold of that water, let alone the daunting expanse of it, would have been enough to discourage and drown a man before he got halfway across. Being towed as we were, though, I personally found the passage almost pleasurable. Where the river shallowed on the other side, the horses even picked a convenient place to find their footing, and Wyrd and I likewise easily followed them out of the water. There, we and the animals shook ourselves as dogs do, and, while the horses rested, Wyrd and Calidius and I jogged up and down the bank to restore our body warmth. When at last we remounted and turned upstream again toward Basilea, we went in no hurry, for we were safe now from the hideous Huns.

After the legatus Calidius had embraced and fondled his namesake grandson, and then had sent him away with his nurse slaves to be cleaned and fed and cared for, Wyrd told the legatus a kindly lie:

“Your son Fabius died standing, clarissimus, a Roman soldier to the last.” And then he told the truth. “His wife, Placidia, died bravely, as a Roman matron should.” And then he mentioned something of which, at the time, I had not realized the significance: “I saw the Huns take care to spare the life of that unhappy charismatic, which means they believe they still hold your grandson captive. Therefore they think they still have a hold upon you.”

The legatus said thoughtfully, “So they will not yet have dispersed and fled away.”

“No. They will suppose that a few of us made a desperate foray—perhaps even without your sanction—and that we failed. Tell me, Calidius, in your negotiations with the Hun messenger, when and whither did you agree to send ransom?”

“This very afternoon. To a certain bend of the river Birsus, south of here.”

“Toward the Hrau Albos,” said Wyrd, nodding. “And on this side of the river Rhenus. Very well. I suggest that, without delay, without waiting for any renewed demand, you
send
that ransom there—as if you have no knowledge of the failed rescue mission, as if you have no knowledge that the Huns are really camped north of the Rhenus, as if you truly expect to receive the hostages in exchange for the ransom.”

“You mean, of course, send a seeming ransom.”

“Of course. The specified number of horses, bearing the specified packs of weapons, provender, whatever, all herded by—I presume—the specified few slaves. But, of course, on arrival, the Trojan packs turn out to contain well-armed and angry soldiers. And then, I trust, a well-deserved slaughter ensues.”

I presumed to interpose a question: “Perhaps, if the innocent victim Becga is encountered there, he might be exempted from the slaughter?”

Both men ignored me, and Wyrd went on, “Meanwhile, Calidius, you will send another and bigger troop to the Huns’ encampment and—”

“You will lead them, Decurio Uiridus?”

“Begging your indulgence, clarissimus,” Wyrd said, with some vexation, “I am rather weary of riding and very empty of belly and extremely sick of the sight and smell of Huns. So is my impudent apprentice here. I can give your men adequate directions, and I recommend that my old acquaintance Paccius lead them. It is time he earned a promotion from signifer.”

“Yes, yes. I am sorry, Uiridus. You have earned your rest, and more,” said the legatus, with evident sincerity. “I was so overjoyed at having my grandson safely back—my family line restored—and equally joyful in the prospect of annihilating those Hun vermin, that I spoke without thinking. I shall give the orders instanter, and also order food for—”

“Thank you, no. I am not hungry for dainty viands and resinous urine. I want gut-filling food and drunk-making wine. We are going down the hill to the cabanae, to the taberna of old Dylas. Send Paccius to me there when he is ready for my instructions.”

“Very well. I will have a herald accompany you, to make official announcement to the people that they may again unbar their doors and freely move about the streets. Uiridus, you have lifted a heavy weight from Basilea. I thank you most heartily—and you, too, Thorn.”

So this time we did not have to hammer at Dylas’s taberna door. The caupo flung it hospitably wide, and I got my first look at more than his bleary red eye. Dylas was at least as old as Wyrd, and equally gray of hair and beard, but considerably taller and barrel-stout, with a face like a slab of raw beef. He and Wyrd rushed into one another’s arms, and ferociously pounded their fists on one another’s back, and called one another affectionately filthy names in both Latin and Gothic. Dylas bawled to someone in a back room to “fetch meat and cheese and bread!” and then himself lifted down a wineskin and some horns hanging from a low rafter, and motioned us to sit at one of the four tables in the room.

Wyrd introduced me to Dylas, who grunted and nodded amiably, and handed me one of the horns. I held it with my thumb over the hole in the small end while Dylas filled it. When we each had a brimming horn, he laid down the wineskin, raised his own horn to Wyrd and me and said, “Iwch fy nghar, Caer Wyrd, Caer Thorn.” It was clearly a salutation, but I did not recognize the language. We held up the horns, tilted back our heads, unstopped the small ends and let the wine pour into our mouths. As Wyrd had said, this was not watered or flavored, but strong, ripe, red Oglasa. Since one cannot put down a horn until it is empty, we all soon emptied ours, and I was made quite giddy, so I politely declined when Dylas refilled the other two.

“The word preceded you, old Wyrd,” said Dylas, “that the easing of Basilea’s plight was somehow your doing. How did you manage it?”

Wyrd told him—or so I assumed, for he spoke in the alien tongue that Dylas had previously used.

“Akh, remindful of the good old days,” Dylas said admiringly, and the conversation resumed in a mixture of Gothic and Latin. “But you are no longer a legionary in line for promotion. What did that risky adventure profit you?”

“A very good price for my furs, and the gift of a fine horse and gear. I had to abandon the first steed Calidius gave me, but I will choose another. Those are better wages for a single day’s work than I ever was paid as a decurio.”

“By all the heifers of Hertha, that is the truth! Do you know, when once I had learned to count, I calculated that my thirty years of service earned me my discharge pay at less than half a denarius a day. But are you not getting somewhat antiquated, Wyrd, for such caperings and posturings?”

“Speak for yourself, lard-belly.”

“Good times or bad, a caupo eats well,” Dylas said complacently, patting that belly of his, “and without having to prowl the woods to catch his food before it can be cooked. I always said that you and Juhiza should have set up in a taberna, as we did. My old woman, Magdalan, was never beautiful, like Juhiza, and she may have the brains of a hitching post and the graces of an úrus, but she knows how to cook.”

As if she had been summoned by those words, an old, fat and slatternly woman emerged from the back room, in a cloud of steam of delicious aroma. She brought each of us a trencher of bread on which was mounded boiled sour cabbage and, on top of that, racks of boiled pork ribs. After those were set before us, she also brought a platter of the region’s cheeses: wedges of Greyerz and Emmen and loaves of creamy white Novum Castellum. For drink, besides the wine, we had tall tankards of a dark beer that Dylas proudly told us he brewed himself.

Dylas and Wyrd repeatedly interrupted their two-fisted eating to draw with a finger, in the puddles of spilled wine on the table, diagrams of long-ago battles in which they had seen action. They spoke of comrades who had fallen in this or that fray, and Wyrd would correct Dylas, or vice versa, when he misremembered some detail of those engagements—and in general the two old warriors appeared to be having a good time reliving their young days. But all the battles had been fought years before my birth, and in places of which I had never heard. And since the two men frequently used words of that alien language, I could not really make out what the battles had been about, or who had won or lost them, or even who had fought whom.

We were finishing our trenchers—the bread now delectably soaked with the good juices—when we heard a clashing of metal and creaking of leather, and Paccius entered the taberna, dressed in full battle armor. Wyrd, with a hiccup, excused himself from our company and, staggering slightly, went to sit with the signifer at a clean table, to give him directions to the Hun encampment and instructions on the assault of it.

Just to have a topic on which to converse with Dylas, I asked, “Who is or was Juhiza?”

He drained another horn of wine and shook his big head. “I should not have mentioned her. You saw how old Wyrd’s face went stiff. Do not you mention her either.”

So I changed the subject: “It is obvious that you and Wyrd have known one another for a very long time.”

He wiped grease from his beard—or, rather, he absentmindedly rubbed the grease well into it. “Ever since he and I were rank recruits in the Twentieth Legion, at Deva. I remember when he first acquired the name Wyrd the Friend of Wolves.”

“Now he calls himself Wyrd the Forest-Stalker,” I said. “But I know he has a fondness for wolves.”

Dylas again shook his head. “The name did not refer to any sentimentality. It meant that he slew a great many of the enemy and left their cadavers for the scavenger animals. He was also sometimes called Wyrd the Carrion-Maker. He was very popular with the wolves—and the worms—around Deva.”

“I do not know where Deva is.”

“In the Cornovian region of the province of Britannia. In the Tin Islands, as you of this continent call them. Wyrd and I are Roman citizens by dint of our military service, but we were Brythons by birth, so we sometimes still speak the Brythonic for old times’ sake.”

“I never knew
what
he was, until now. Why did you and he leave those islands?”

“A soldier goes where he is bidden. We were only two men of the many thousands that Rome gradually withdrew from Britannia when the outlanders here in Europe began to threaten the colonies closer to Rome’s heart. Wyrd and I finished our service in the auxiliaries of the Eleventh Legion, fighting the Huns.”

He gestured toward one wall of the taberna, and I saw a metal tablet hanging there, so I went over to examine it. There displayed was Dylas’s diplomata, two linked bronze plates, each about the size of a man’s hand. On them was engraved his name (or a Latin rendition of it: Diligens Britannus), his retirement rank and unit (Optio Aquilifer, Cohors IV Auxiliarum, Legio XI, Claudia Pia Fidelis), the name of his last commanding officer, the date of his discharge (sixteen years before), the names of witnesses and the province where he had been discharged: Gallia Lugdunensis.