Raptor (30 page)

“He is uttering the crows’ special call,” said Wyrd. “Warning of a storm approaching. Learn to recognize that call. But right now, keep an eye out for shelter. I am not eager to stay on this open ground in a thunderstorm.”

We found a shallow cave just before the storm broke, bringing blinding black gloom and blinding white flashes and an uproar of noise and a downpour of rain. It was fearsome enough, but not unnatural. However, after a time, our cave was suddenly—and steadily, not flickeringly—lighted by an eerie blue glow. We looked out, to find that every tree in sight was outlined by a blue fire that burned along every one of its limbs and streamed skyward from the tip of every branch.

“Iésus!” I cried, scrambling to my feet. “Let us save the horses! They are tied to one of those trees.”

“Be easy, urchin,” said Wyrd, staying placidly seated. “Those are the fires of the Gemini, a good omen.”

“A forest fire is a good
omen?!”

“Look closely. The fires are not consuming a single leaf of any tree. They are all light and no heat. The twin divinities Castor and Pollux are beloved by mariners because, when their fires are seen during a storm at sea, it means the tempest and the high waves will soon abate. Behold—our own storm is dying away even as the cold blue Gemini fires diminish.”

And that autumn, while I was chasing a doe, to herd it within the range of Wyrd, waiting with bow and arrow, I took a heavy bump against a tree. Had I not been riding with my feet securely tucked inside Velox’s rope girth, I would probably have been toppled from my saddle. As it was, I suffered no injury beyond a large bruise on my hip. What did get hurt was my handsome leather-and-tin water flask—a deep dent that bent it nearly double—and I was inconsolable at having clumsily damaged that gift of great value and utility. But Wyrd told me:

“Do not grieve so, urchin. While I am skinning and brittling this fine doe for our meal, you go and thresh the bushes and grasses roundabout for every kind of seed you can collect.”

When I returned, holding my smock hem up for a hamper, and with it full of assorted seeds, he said:

“Pour them into your dented flask, as full as it will hold. Now take this”—he handed me his own flask—“and pour water in, to the brim. Now cork the flask as tightly as you can and put it aside and forget it. Here, feed these entrails to your eagle. Then come and stir these good meats and juices, and keep up the fire under them, while I take a well-deserved rest. Wake me when the meal is ready.”

The fresh venison, boiled in the doe’s own well-fatted skin and lent a slight tanginess from Wyrd’s having made the fire of aromatic laurel, was so delicious as to distract me from any thought of my flask. But while Wyrd and I were still gobbling and slurping, I heard a distinct popping noise from the direction of my unrolled blankets. I went to look, and found that my flask was unbent and undented and, except for a slight scuff on the leather binding, as good as new.

“Seeds, grain, beans, anything of that sort,” said Wyrd. “Simply wet them, and their urge to grow will immediately start to exert an incredible amount of pressure. Now empty them out, urchin, before they blow your cork over the trees—or burst the metal flask itself.”

Of course, not all the colloquies between Wyrd and myself consisted of his teaching and my learning—or my quibbling, as he so frequently complained. More often than not, we conversed of less consequential things. I remember how, once, he asked me idly how I had come to have only an initial and not a proper name. I told him that it was because, when I was found by the monks of St. Damian’s, they discovered that single rune, þ, marked on my swaddling garments.

“I suppose,” I said, “it might have stood for Theodahad or Theudis or something of the sort.”

“More likely Theodoric,” said Wyrd. “That was a name often bestowed on the boys newborn in the west around that time, because Theodoric the Balthing, King of the Visigoths, had but recently died heroically on the plains of Catalauni, in combat against the Huns. And he was shortly succeeded by a son, also named Theodoric, who reigned wisely and kindly and was widely admired.”

I said nothing. I had heard of those Theodorics, but I doubted very much that my mother had named her mannamavi infant after a king.

“Nowadays, in the east somewhere,” Wyrd went on, “there is another Theodoric—Theodoric Strabo—a minor kinglet of some portion of the Ostrogoths. But since his name means Theodoric the Wall-Eyed, I wager that not many parents will name their sons in his honor. And there is yet another Theodoric, a lad about your own age, urchin—Theodoric the Amaling—whose father, uncle, grandfather and probably
all
his distant forebears have been kings among the Ostrogoths.”

That was the first time I had heard spoken the name of the Theodoric with whose life my own would eventually be so intertwined. However, since I was not a wise-sayer or a haliuruns of prophetic powers, I listened with only mild interest as Wyrd continued:

“Right now, that young Theodoric is a hostage at the imperial palace in Constantinople, as surety that his father-king and uncle-king will not disrupt the peace in the Eastern Empire. Happily for the boy, to be a hostage of the Emperor Leo is rather more pleasant than to be, say, a hostage of the Huns. I have heard that Theodoric is being brought up with all the privileges that would be accorded the son of a Roman gloriosissimus patricius. He is said to be a great favorite at court, and excels at learning, at languages and at athletic feats as well. So, no doubt, when he is of age, he will succeed to the kingship of the Ostrogoths. And probably be a nuisance to the Roman Empire. And his name—who knows?—may get bestowed on whole generations of infants.”

When Wyrd and I came to the city of Constantia, we were afoot and leading our horses, for their saddles were overslung and piled high with pelts. We had come upstream along the river Rhenus from Basilea, on the way taking whatever fur-bearing creatures presented themselves. Those were mostly small animals—stoat, marten, fitchet—and most of them slain by my sling stones, because an arrow would have torn them up so badly as to make their fur unmarketable. But Wyrd did use his Hunnish bow to bring down three or four gluttons and a single lynx. When, one twilight, we espied that large and handsome spotted gray lynx incautiously perched in a tree—it was eyeing
us,
perhaps hoping to pounce at the juika-bloth on my shoulder—I made a gesture for Wyrd to stay his arrow, but he was too quick for me, and shot it dead.

“You should have taken it alive,” I said, and told him what a peasant had told me long ago.

“An ignorant superstition,” said Wyrd, with one of his contemptuous snorts. “The lynx is no magical mongrel fox-wolf. Look for yourself. You can see it is a greater cousin to the wildcat. As for making lynx-stones or any other kind of precious gems, you would do as well to bottle the piss of that peasant who told you the story. Do not put your faith in fables, urchin, whether they are related by a booby or a bishop. Or even by wise old me. Use your own eyes, your own experience, your own reason to determine the truth of things.”

At intervals, when we had a good stock of freshly flayed skins, we would pause in our journey and make camp for a while. Wyrd showed me how to scrape the pelts clean of flesh, and how to stretch them on willow hoops, and then we would laze about while they dried and cured.

One of our stops was beside the falls of the Rhenus, a grandly high and tumultuous, three-tiered cataract across the whole breadth of the river. They made my remembered cascades of the Balsan Hrinkhen seem tame by comparison, and they were most gorgeously beautiful—rain bowed in daylight, moonbowed at night—but they were a nuisance much cursed by the watermen whose shallow skiffs plied up and down the stream. Coming from either direction, the boatmen had to unload their goods and manhandle them up or down the riverside around the falls, and then wait for another skiff to arrive from the other direction, when the two crews would exchange vessels to keep going. So there were permanent skiff houses built above and below the falls, to shelter men and freight if they had to wait for long. In a temporarily empty skiff house Wyrd and I resided in comfort for some days, taking our time with the fleshing and stretching of our pelts, meanwhile enjoying the spectacle and tumult of the cataract.

“A splendid sight, ja,” said Wyrd. “But yonder, on the other side of the river, that is the Black Forest. Akh, I know, I know, it is no blacker than any other dense forest, but that has been its name since time immemorial. And in there, some minor streams unite to become the beginning of a far mightier river than this Rhenus. That is the Danuvius, which flows all the way from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. If you continue on your quest to find your Gothic kinfolk, urchin, you will one day see the Danuvius.”

Farther upstream on the Rhenus, we stopped at a Roman army station called Gunodorum. It was no considerable garrison like that at Basilea, but we were hospitably received and housed, for Wyrd had some acquaintances there. We traded a few of our skins for a few traveling necessities—salt and rope and fishhooks—and the station’s coquus regaled us with the viands of the region. I ate my fill of broiled steaks of a giant fish called the wels, and of the delectable hard Sbrinz cheese that Romans consider the best of all cheeses, and drank my fill of white Staineins and red Rhenanus wine—and Wyrd had
more
than his fill of those.

During that journey, Wyrd and I did not exert ourselves to chase any game, except to get meat for the pot, until we came near the great lake from which the Rhenus flows. The lake Brigantinus is fed by innumerable small streams and, as Wyrd had told me at our first meeting, those lesser waters are the habitat of beavers. They were just then emerging from their burrows and working heroically to repair their winter-worn dams, to keep the stream waters at the level they prefer to live in. Wyrd wanted to gather as many of them as possible before they began to molt their rich, thick winter pelts, so now we hunted in earnest. Or, rather, Wyrd did, because beavers are too big to be felled by slung stones. Beavers are also very wary and alert, so he seldom had an opportunity to shoot more than one arrow at one target in any one day, but he seldom missed when he did. And when he skinned a beaver, he took more than its fur; he also cut away and kept the little sacs situated near the animal’s anus.

“Castoreum,” he explained. “I can sell it to the makers of medicinals.”

“Iésus,” I said, holding my nose. “Will they pay enough to make it worth the carrying? It smells worse than my fitchet skins.”

For a long time, we skirted the lake Brigantinus at a considerable distance, and I got not a glimpse of it. The lake is completely encircled by a broad, well-paved, heavily traveled Roman highway, and is set about with forts, garrisons, settlements and thriving towns. There is even one city, Constantia, and it is a busy center of commerce, because several other Roman roads merge there, including the roads leading directly to and from Rome itself, those that climb over the Alpis Poenina, the Alpis Graia and other passes through the high mountains. With all the traffic and bustle around the margins of the Brigantinus, Wyrd and I had to stay well away from it to find our prey, so we ranged the upper reaches of the streams running down to the lake from the west. Twice—one time with an arrow, one time with his battle-ax wielded from horseback and at a gallop—Wyrd slew a wild boar that had come to wallow in the streamside mud. A boar’s bristly and patchy pelt is worthless as a fur, but its meat is superbly good eating.

I did feel somewhat guilty about helping in the slaughter of the hardworking beavers, just to get their coats and castoreum, since the only edible part of a beaver is its tail meat—though that does make a most succulent dish. One night, as we dined on beaver tail, I said:

“I wonder why it is that I should feel more of a pang at the death of a wild creature than at that of a human being.”

“Perhaps it is because the animals make no cringing appeal or hand-wringing when they are threatened by an executioner or a disease or a god. They die nobly and unafraid and uncomplaining.” Wyrd sucked his teeth for a thoughtful moment, then said, “People used to be that way, too, long ago. The pagans and the Jews still are. They may not welcome death, but they know it to be natural and inevitable. Then along came Christianity. And, to make people obey its every you-shall-not in this life, Christianity had to invent something more terrible than death. It invented hell.”

I know there was one creature at whose death I actually shed tears, and I do not remember ever having wept in my whole life before that. For many weeks, my juika-bloth had gone off hunting reptiles only for sport, or to keep in practice, because it fed so well on the offal of our animal prey. When, after a while, the eagle seemed
never
to go hunting any more, and seldom even to go flying, but preferred to remain logily perched on my shoulder or on my saddle cantle or on a campsite tree limb, I thought it was only being fatly lazy. But then one day it did an unmannerly thing that it had never previously done to me. While riding on my shoulder, it dropped skeit on my tunic, and I noticed that its mute was not the usual white with a black dot, but a greenish-yellow.

I commented worriedly on that to Wyrd, and he took hold of the bird—it listlessly let him—and he examined it closely, and then shook his head.

“Its eyes are dull, and the winking membrane is reluctant to unwink. The flesh around the beak is dry and pale. I fear it may have contracted one of the swine fevers.”

“Swine fever?! This is an eagle.”

“An eagle that has been feeding on uncooked boar entrails. Some swine are infested with a parasite that can be transmitted to another host.”

“Like a louse? I can comb the bird’s feathers and—”

“Ne, urchin,” Wyrd said sadly. “This parasite is a kind of worm. It eats from the inside outward. It can kill a man. It will almost surely kill the bird. I can think of nothing to do but try feeding it a bit of castoreum now and then, as a stimulant.”

So he tried that, and the juika-bloth listlessly swallowed it, though formerly it would fastidiously have refused anything so malodorous. I continued to give the bird bits of the castoreum from time to time, but it had no apparent effect. I even, in secret, pried the heavy brass cap from the crystal phial I had never yet shown or mentioned to Wyrd, and shamelessly invited the eagle to take a taste of the precious milk of the Virgin. But it only gave me a look, half scornful, half pitying, from its membrane-filmed eyes, and disdained the offering.