Raptor (42 page)

At first sight, Haustaths looked precariously perched, but there was no doubting that it had been there for a long, long time. All the buildings were solidly constructed of stone or stout timbers, with roofs of slate or tiles or thick shingles. Almost every one had its front plastered white and then brightly decorated, some with scrollwork designs painted in many colors, some with a flowering vine, or even a flowering
tree,
artfully trained to grow up flat against the housefront and around its door and window openings. The market square had in the middle a fountain with four spouts continuously gushing water, piped from the stream we had followed. And all the shops around that square were gaily adorned with tubs or boxes of flowers set about their sills.

I had never seen a community, from smallest hamlet to biggest city, that went to so much effort to put such a cheerful face on itself. I believe it must have been the heart-lifting loveliness of its surroundings that inspired the people to make their town worthy of its setting. Also, they could well afford those nonessential but comely embellishments of their buildings. On one of the Alpes high above Haustaths is a vast salt mine that, I was told, is the oldest in the world. The modern-day miners have found in there crude primitive tools and the salt-preserved corpses of men evidently killed by cave-ins aeons ago—creatures so ugly and dwarfish but massively muscled that they might have been skohls of the sort that live always underground, except that they wore the same kind of leather garments that salt miners still wear. So, say the folk of Haustaths, that mine must have been worked since the time Noah’s children dispersed about the earth.

Anyway, the mine is still inexhaustibly rich in the purest grade of salt, and it keeps the townspeople rich in purse. All of them have lived here for generations, and they are of such mingled blood—descendants of settlers from just about every Germanic tribe, who long ago intermarried with Roman colonists come from Italia—that it would be difficult to say today what their nationality is, beyond their being, of course, citizens of the Roman province of Noricum.

Wyrd and I came down to lake level at the outskirts of the town, where its only stables are situated. In one of them we left our horses, and paid for their keep and care. Then we hefted our packs of personal belongings and strolled along Haustaths’s one wide street, the lakeside promenade, whence I could now make out what the objects on the water were. Those closest inshore were gray herons and purple herons wading in the shallows or standing meditatively on one leg. A little farther out were gorgeous white swans drifting serenely about. And farthest out were fishing boats, of a sort that I have never seen elsewhere. The local fishers call them the faúrda, which would mean roughly “the goers,” though the boats have no need to go anywhere at speed. Each is shaped exactly like a slice of melon chopped in half at the middle. Its prow curves high out of the water and its stern, where the boatman stands to row it, is flat and abrupt. The reason for the shape—or the name—no one could tell me, bur I do not think such a boat could be a speedy goer.

Wyrd and I dined that first evening on delicious grilled slabs of pike-perch, caught only an hour or so earlier. The taberna in which we took our meal was one of those facing on the town square, its caupo, a burly man named Andraías, being yet another of Wyrd’s longtime acquaintances. The building’s front was all painted with curlicues and its door was flanked by flower boxes, but its rear wall, right at lakeside, was made of panels which the caupo laid away during fine weather. So, as we ate and drank, we had a fine full view of the Haustaths-Saiws at twilight, and the still sun-tipped mountains beyond; and we tossed bits of bread to the swans that glided by below our terrace; and we several times shouted loudly over the water to hear the nymph Echo shout faintly and ever more faintly back to us from one far black peak after another; and when we were done with our meal we retired to our quilted bed upstairs; and I lay long awake with my head turned to the window, watching the moon come over a mountain to frost that blue, blue lake with glints of silver; and when my eyes closed at last they closed on what I still remember as one of the most peacefully happy days of all my life.

I awoke the next morning to find Wyrd already up, washed and getting dressed. He paused before wrapping on his leggings to examine a small red lesion on one of his bare shanks.

“Have you hurt yourself?” I inquired sleepily.

“That wolf,” he muttered. “She gave me a nip before I slew her. I was worried about that, but it is healing nicely.”

“Why should such a tiny wound worry you? I have seen you agonize more after slaying the contents of a wine jug.”

“Be not impudent to your elders, urchin. That she-wolf was suffering from the hundswoths, and that awful affliction can be communicated by a bite. But I hoped that her fang, having to pierce my thick legging, would have been wiped clean of its venomous saliva… and so it seems to have been. Believe me, that is a great relief, to see the puncture healthily scabbed over. Now I think I shall stagger downstairs and seek the tail of that other wolf that bit me just last evening.”

I had heard of the hundswoths—it means “dog-madness”—and had heard that it meant certain death, but I had never seen any animal afflicted with it. I would have worried as much as Wyrd had I known of his injury, but now that he so airily dismissed it, I was glad he had not told me of it before.

I joined Wyrd in the taberna, where he was breaking his fast with nothing but black bread and some more wine, and appeared likely to go on drinking with his friend the caupo for the rest of the day. I hastily gobbled a sausage, a boiled duck egg and a tumbler of milk, for I was eager to be out in the pearly early sunshine, exploring Haustaths.

It might seem that so small and isolated a town would hold few attractions for a young man, but I found much to charm me, on that and succeeding days, and I looked forward to spending the whole summer here. That first morning, I decided to explore the region from the top down, so to speak, and set off up the streamside trail that Wyrd and I had descended the day before. It was a rigorous climb on foot, but that gave me excuse to pause at intervals. While I regained my wind and relaxed my muscles, I could leisurely examine and admire the view from increasingly higher altitudes. I went on past the place where Wyrd and I had come around the shoulder of the mountain, and took a fork in the trail that kept me going upward, and I came at last to the saltwaúrstwa—the mine that was the reason for Haustaths’s existence.

The miners hobbled out of the arched entrance bearing on their backs long cone-shaped baskets filled with lumps of gray rock salt, while their fellows, having emptied their baskets, slouched back in. The mine itself was the center of a whole community and a considerable manufactory. There was quite a grand house for the mine’s director, less grand ones for his supervisors and foremen, and an entire village of rude huts and small gardens for the workers. On the mountain slopes roundabout, wherever there was one of those shelf-like meadows, its borders were diked and the meadow filled with water. The rock salt was dissolved in those pools, leached of any impurities and discoloration, then dried and re-created as granular pure-white salt ready for use. There was a shed for bagging the salt, and an immense shed for storing the bags, and stockades for the mules used to haul the bags over the Alpes to their various destinations.

The miners who worked underground and the teamsters were all men, of course, but the aboveground work was mostly done by their wives and children. There must have been as many people up here as there were in Haustaths below. Some of them, I would learn later, were slaves recently conscripted to this drudgery, but most were descendants of slaves who had ages ago saved their meager wages to buy their liberty—and these, their great-grandsons and -daughters, though freemen, continued in the same drudgery because it was the only work they knew how to do.

I was standing apart, scanning the scene, when an authoritative but youthful voice spoke from behind me: “Are you seeking work, stranger? Are you a free laborer or someone’s slave?”

I turned and beheld the girl who would be my friend and companion for as long as I stayed in Haustaths. I hasten to say that this never became an amorous attachment, for she was only a child, about half my age, Romanly brown-haired, doe-eyed, fawn-skinned and very pretty.

“I am neither,” I said. “And I do not seek work. I merely came up from the town to see what the saltwaúrtswa looks like.”

“Then you must be a traveler from beyond these mountains. Everyone hereabouts is wearily familiar with this place.” She sighed dramatically. “The liufs Guth knows I am.”

“And what would you be?” I asked, smiling, because she was finely dressed in alicula and cloak, like a little lady. “Laborer or slave?”

“I,” she said loftily, “am the only daughter of the mine’s director, Georgius Honoratus. My name is Livia. Who are you?”

I told her my name, and we chatted for some time—she seemed pleased to have someone new to talk to—and she pointed out to me various features of the workings, told me the names of the various alpine peaks around the lake, advised me as to which merchants in town were the least likely to cheat strangers making purchases. Finally she asked:

“Have you ever seen the inside of a salt mine?” When I confessed that I had not, she went on, “The inside of this one is much more worth seeing than everything outside. Come and meet my father, and I will ask his permission to let me escort you.”

She introduced me to him thus: “Father, this is Thorn, a newcomer to our neighborhood and a new friend of mine. Thorn, give respectful greeting to the director of this eminent and ancient enterprise, Georgius Honoratus.”

He was a slight man, gray-white of hair, and obviously he took his responsibilities seriously, spending much of his own time underground, for his skin was as colorless as his hair. I would later be told, by Livia and others, that Georgius was one of the few citizens of Haustaths whose family had descended from Roman colonists
without,
as yet, any admixture of other blood, and he never let anybody forget that. When he signed any least document, he always added the Roman numeral designating his generation of the family. As I remember, he was the XIIIth or XIVth of his line. He had even imported from Rome a woman to be his wife; she had died giving birth to Livia, and he showed no lingering signs of bereavement; he was married to the mine.

Georgius affected the agnomen of Honoratus, usually reserved for public officials of at least the rank of magistrate, because he, like his XII or XIII forefathers, had been appointed to this directorship by the Haustaths council of elders. Like those forebears—and, in my opinion, exactly like the wretched menials who drudged for him—Georgius had never traveled beyond the nearest horizon, never raised his eyes or his aspirations above it, and knew nothing whatever of the outside world except its voracious appetite for salt. He was rearing his two sons to be just as provincial and limited of outlook as he was himself. In fact, they were so reclusive that it was some while before I discovered that Georgius
had
sons, respectively two and four years older than Livia. If I ever saw those boys, I did not recognize them, for their father was teaching them his trade literally from the underground up, and they were currently among the leather-clad, sweaty, dusty miners lugging baskets of rock salt.

I wondered sometimes if perhaps Georgius’s late wife
had
contrived to introduce some alien blood into the family line. I could think of no other explanation for Livia’s being so unlike her lackluster father and docile brothers, because I found her to be a bright, perceptive, vivacious child, and rightly discontented with her prospects.

Whether Livia was really Georgius’s daughter or not, he clearly treasured her more than he did his sons, and maybe almost as much as he did his mine. He could not have been too pleased to have her befriending a Germanic-looking stranger, but at least, given the difference in our ages, he did not have to worry about the hazard of my becoming a son-in-law. So he merely asked me a few questions about my lineage, occupation and reason for being in Haustaths. I avoided being too specific about my origins, but answered truthfully enough that I was the partner of a fur merchant, that in summer we had little business to occupy us and that he and I were simply here on holiday. That seemed to satisfy Georgius, for he indulgently gave Livia leave to take me underground, and said he hoped I would enjoy touring the establishment of which he was so proud.

Inside the great dark entrance, the ingoing and outcoming miners deferentially made way for Livia and me, as she picked from a stack of leather aprons one for each of us. I started to tie mine about my waist, but she laughed and said:

“Not that way. Put it on hindside to. Here, turn around.”

Puzzled, I turned my back to her, so I was facing the blackness of the mine’s interior, and she arranged the apron to drape its long flap over my backside.

“Now tie the thongs in front,” she said. “Now pull the flap up between your legs and hold on to it with both hands.”

I did so, and Livia dealt me a surprise. With a giggle, she gave me a violent shove that propelled me into the darkness, where my feet instantly slid out from under me. I found myself breathlessly hurtling on my apron down a steep chute worn in the solid salt, polished by maybe millions of such slidings so that it was as slippery as ice. For what seemed a long time, but was probably only a few heartbeats, I plunged through utter blackness into the bowels of the earth. But then the chute’s incline became less and less acute, until it was almost level, and I saw light ahead of me. I was still moving at a great rate, however, when the chute abruptly ended, so I was briefly airborne before I landed on a cushioning pile of springy pine sprigs. I sat stunned for a moment, then I was
really
knocked breathless, as Livia’s feet slammed into my back and we both tumbled off the pile of pine.