Raptor (40 page)

I had never met Gudinand’s invalid mother, and did not even know whether she could read. But the widow would welcome the money, and surely some kind neighbor could translate for her the two documents. The certificate would inform the twice-bereaved old woman that she now owned a slave, who would take Gudinand’s place in providing and caring for her. And the other document would remind her of what, if she was a devout Christian, she must already know: “Greater love than this no man can have, that he lay down his life for a friend.”

I was back at the deversorium, and dressed as Thorn, and taking a well-earned rest in my room, when Wyrd came in, more than a little drunk, his hair and beard all bristly. He glared red-eyed at me and said, “No doubt you will already have heard that the bitch-dragon Robeya and her dragon-worm Jaeirus both are dead.”

“Ne, fráuja, I had not heard, but I had hoped to.”

“They died while bathing, but not by drowning. And they seemed to have died almost simultaneously, though in separate thermae.”

“I had expected to hear that.”

“They died under most curious circumstances. Most curiously
similar
circumstances.”

“I am gratified to hear that.”

“It is said that Jaeirus’s face wore a grimace almost unbearable to behold, that his body was hideously contorted and lying in a puddle of his own skeit. It is said that Robeya’s face wore an equally ghastly rictus, that her body was also convulsed into a knot, that she was floating in a balineum pool stained brown with her own skeit.”

“I could not be more happy to hear that.”

“Oddly, in view of everything else that has occurred today, the priest Tiburnius is still alive.”

“I am sorry about that. But I thought it might be imprudent of me to rid Constantia of
all
its evildoers at one stroke. I shall leave the priest’s judgment to the God he professes to serve.”

“He may do little serving from now on. At least, not in public. I daresay he will cower for the rest of his life behind bolted and guarded doors.”

When I did not remark on that, but only grinned, Wyrd scratched meditatively in his beard and said:

“So this is why you needed all our money. But, by the vengeful stone statue of Mitys, urchin, what did you
buy
with that money?”

“A slave.”

“What?
What kind of slave? A gladiator? A killer sicarius? But there was not a single mark of violence, they say, on either of those corpses.”

“I bought a venefica.”

“What?!”
He was shocked almost to sobriety. “What would you know of a venefica?
How
would you know?”

“I have an inquisitive nature, fráuja. I inquired. I learned that certain girl slaves are, from their infancy, fed certain poisons. First in minute amounts, then in increasing doses throughout their upbringing. By the time they are grown to maidenhood, their own bodies are accustomed to those substances and unharmed by them. However, so virulent is the accumulated poison that a man who beds with a venefica—or anyone who partakes of any of her juices—dies on the instant.”

In a hushed voice, Wyrd said, “And you bought one. And you presented her—”

“Quite a
special
one. This girl, like most such girls, had been fed on aconite, because that poison has a not unpleasant flavor. But she had also, all her life long, been fed on elaterium. If you do not know, fráuja, that is a poison extracted from the weed-fruit called the squirting cucumber.”

“Iésus,” said Wyrd, regarding me with a sort of horrified awe. “No wonder they died so disgustingly—squirting like the cucumber.” Wyrd was not only sober now; he looked slightly ill at ease. “Tell me, urchin, are you going to
keep
this venefica creature?”

“Be not concerned, fráuja. Her work here is done, and so is mine. I suggest that now you and I get on with ours, and elsewhere. As soon as we can pack and prepare, I am ready to leave Constantia. Forever.”

During what was left of that autumn, and during the whole of the winter and well into the next spring, I worked harder than ever before—as I had promised Wyrd I would—to procure the pelts and hides and ibex horns and beavers’ castoreum sacs that would replenish our common fortune. Of course, it would have been difficult for anybody to hunt more skillfully and bring down more game than Wyrd himself could. He still far excelled me at woodcraft and keen observation. However, as I began to notice, and as Wyrd half peevishly, half dolefully admitted, his advancing age was adversely affecting his eyesight in any light dimmer than broadest day.

“By Allfather Wotan,” he growled, “I wonder how many people would wish and hope and pray to live long, if they fully realized it would mean getting
old.”

So, as each day deepened to dusk, I would put away my sling and Wyrd would lend me his Hunnish bow, and I could go on hunting longer than he could have done alone. With practice, wielding that weapon for a while every day, I became quite proficient with it—though never as expert as Wyrd at his best—and, for an hour or two after he would have had to abandon the hunt, I brought down additional game both for skinning and for our evening meal.

With either my sling or Wyrd’s bow—and once even with my short-sword, when I had stopped to relieve myself in a thicket, and an ibex, exceptionally curious or exceptionally stupid, came to investigate me—during those months I slew at least one specimen of every breed of fur-bearing animal… except two. Because I never attained Wyrd’s astonishing ability to nock and draw and let fly arrows, one almost directly behind another, it was always he who did that feat of waking and flushing a hibernating bear from its den and then, with one final arrow, felling it when it emerged. Also, though a wolf’s rich and heavy winter coat would fetch a price equal to that of a glutton, Wyrd the Friend of Wolves would not let me kill one.

I have to say that I, too, while not quite a
friend
to wolves, did begin to admire them, especially for their hardihood. There is an old country expression: “come winter and the wolf…” and it is an apt coupling. Wolves seem to love the winter best of all the seasons. Whenever I was wading through drifts of snow and was cold to the bone, and then would espy a wolf lying under a tree, I could only marvel at the fact that the wolf was every time—intentionally and apparently happily—lying on the
shady
side of that tree.

Long before springtime, Wyrd and I were walking alongside our horses, because their saddles were piled so high with pelts, and still we continued to collect more. So Wyrd and I built sledges of sturdy but pliant boughs, lashed together with strips of rawhide and with their runners’ front ends upcurved so they could be dragged fairly easily over obstacles in our path.

When we left Constantia and circled around the southern end of Lake Brigantinus and continued eastward, we had entered the Roman province called Rhaetia Secunda in Latin and Bajo-Varia in the Old Language. As we had done during the previous winter, we mostly made our way along the foothills of the Alpes. But, this winter being considerably more clement, we frequently went higher up the mountainsides in search of ibex or to investigate some cave that Wyrd knew of, and in several of those found bears.

Bajo-Varia is the least populated of the Western Empire’s remaining provinces. In our traverse of it, Wyrd and I came upon not a single Roman road, not a city or a village or a fortress, not even an outpost station of legionaries. The only inhabitants were nomad Alamanni, and several times we encountered one of those “nations,” so called—none really more than a very large tribe—either moving from one place to another or encamped for the winter. We accompanied one of the traveling tribes for as long as it was going in our direction. At the winter camp of another, we enjoyed its hospitality for a few days and nights.

Considering the bellicose reputation of the Alamanni, it might be supposed that they would have resented the presence of aliens on their lands. And true, if Wyrd and I had been a lengthy merchant train or a foreign army on the march, the Alamanni would have regarded us as intruders, and attacked and looted us, and either killed or enslaved us. But we were so obviously nomads like themselves that they warmly welcomed us into their company. The encampment where we stayed for a while was that of the most populous nation in the province. They called themselves the Baiuvarja, and said that the whole province had derived its Gothic name from theirs, because of their preeminence in it. The tribe’s chief, one Ediulf, of course called himself King of the Baiuvarja, but he was as hospitable as his “subjects,” and did not accuse us of trespassing on his domain. Well, no Germanic king ever would do such a thing, for none claimed to
have
a domain. Like this backwoods King Ediulf, even the most august Germanic rulers—such as Khilderic, King of the Franks, or Gaiseric, King of the Vandals—were, as they styled themselves, the kings of
peoples,
not of territories.

On the continents of Europe and Libya, only the emperors of Rome have regarded themselves as the rulers of
lands,
and have set boundaries about the portions of the earth they claim as their own, and have fortified those borders—or tried to—against the encroachment of other rulers and peoples. Ever since the time of Constantine, when the empire divided into western and eastern, even the two halves of itself have been squabbling over the location of the border line between them in Europe. And the eastern half has often had to fight to maintain its farthest eastern boundary—on the continent of Asia, where the Roman Empire abuts on Persia—because Persia’s “King of Kings,” so called, also regards himself as reigning over lands as well as the people on them.

The Baiuvarja were all unregenerate pagans, and almost every one of them wore the amulet representing Thor’s primitive hammer—made of carefully chipped stone or of iron or bronze, according to the person’s affluence or status in the tribe—hanging hammerhead down from a rawhide string around his or her neck.

“However,” King Ediulf told Wyrd and me, with a sly wink, “in our wanderings we are occasionally approached by a likewise wandering Christian missionary. And some of us do occasionally have to visit a Christian town, to buy tools or salt or some such thing that we cannot supply for ourselves. So, to keep from being preached at or prayed over or viciously reviled on those occasions, we simply hang Thor’s hammer upside down on our neck strings. See? It is easily mistaken for a Christian cross. That makes us look even more pious and devout than any genuine Christian, who only makes the gesture of the cross, but has never bethought himself to wear one. Believe me, it saves us a good deal of annoyance.”

With a small smile hidden behind his beard, Wyrd said, “It would seem rather less trouble for all of you to convert and
be
Christians.”

“Ne! Ni allis!” exclaimed Ediulf, taking him to be serious. “Our Old Religion is like a table well laden with every kind of viand, from strong beer to delicate sweets. One can choose whichever god or belief one likes best. Ne, we will be content with our Old Religion, and will have no priests dictating to us, and if we require counsel or guidance from our gods, our frodei-qithans will divine it for us.”

A frodei-qithans is a wise-sayer, but this one of the Baiuvarja nation would be called in Latin a sternutospex, for he did his divinations by the not very common method of interpreting
sneezes.
Whenever King Ediulf convened a council of the nation’s elders, he and they sitting in a circle, the aged wise-sayer, Winguric by name, would be among them. If the council deemed that it needed the gods’ advice about some decision it had to make—or worried that the gods might be displeased by some plan proposed—the elders would defer to Winguric. He would go around the circle, blowing from his hand some kind of flower pollen into each man’s face, including the king’s. Then he would sit back and listen to the number and frequency and rhythm of the resulting sneezes. When all present had had their sneeze-say, and were dashing the tears from their eyes and blowing their noses on the ground or on the hems of their tunics, Winguric would make his pronouncement as to the gods’ opinions or admonitions or objections regarding the matter under discussion. That might or might not alter the council’s decision, but it would always be weighed and considered before a final decision was made.

As Wyrd and I were preparing to leave the Baiuvarja and go on our way eastward, that ancient wise-sayer volunteered to divine our fortune along the way. Wyrd only grudgingly accepted the offer, but I did so rather eagerly, for I had never before had my sneezes interpreted. So we sat down before old Winguric, and he blew that pollen at us, and we sneezed indeed. It would have been impossible not to. But it was evident to me—and to the wise-sayer, for he frowned most disapprovingly—that Wyrd exaggerated and prolonged his sneezing spasm, out of sheer mischievous contrariety.

When Wyrd finally finished, and pinched one nostril, then the other, to blow his nose onto the ground, and then wiped quite another lot of snot out of his beard, old Winguric gave each of us a black look and said venomously, “Unbelievers cannot deceive the gods with pretense.”