Raptor (47 page)

I had not really left Wyrd behind. Every day for months thereafter, from cat-gray morning to matron-gray evening, the old Forest-Stalker seemed still to be stalking at my side. Whenever I woke, I could almost see him waking nearby, scratching in his tousled hair and beard, being his usual surly old self until he had broken his fast. In the heat of noonday, when even the lizards slept in their rock crannies and even the larks were silent, I could almost hear Wyrd’s gruff voice, telling some long and many-skeined story. Whenever I made camp, I dutifully heeded his imagined criticisms of the way I laid the fire or brittled the day’s game into pieces of cooking size.

There were many times, too, that I would absentmindedly speak to
him.
If in my journeying I espied a peculiarly shaped mountain, I might inquire, “Which of the Oreades is the nymph of that particular peak, fráuja?” Or, of an especially refreshing spring, I would ask, “What is the name of the Naiad who is nymph of this sweet water, fráuja?” Or, of a lush forest, “Which of the Dryades…?” Of a still and dreaming pond, “Which of the Limniades…?” I never heard an answer, or expected to, any more than I ever glimpsed one of those elusive nymphs, or expected to.

However, during the nights, I often did see and hear old Wyrd. Perhaps the pagans are right in their saying that Night is the mother of both Sleep and the thousand Dreams—and that her cleverest Dream-child is Morpheus, the one who can impersonate any human, alive or dead. If that pagan belief is true, then Morpheus came to me many nights in the guise of Wyrd, to give me advice and instruction and helpful bits of woods lore. But I do not know if he communicated any of those from the afterworld, because the only dream-counsels that I could recall when I awoke were those that Wyrd had already imparted to me while he was still of this world.

Anyway, I was glad to retain that sense of Wyrd’s continued and constant company. It made me feel less alone as I ventured on, and it helped gradually to diminish my grief at having lost the man who had verily been my foster father. That I have for so long remembered all of Wyrd’s teachings, even the most cynical of them—and have so frequently employed them for the guidance of my later life—is evidence that I never totally dismissed him as dead and gone, and probably never will, to the end of my own days.

Since I still had no compelling reason to hurry to find my presumed Gothic kindred, I proceeded only leisurely across the rest of the province of Noricum. Since I had no need or greed for additional wealth, I did not hunt to secure pelts or horns or anything else to sell, but slew only small game with which to feed myself. And since I had by this time attained my full adult stature—and was well mounted and well armed, besides—I no longer had to fear being apprehended as a slave. Nevertheless, I was in a territory and among peoples unknown to me, and I had no Wyrd to warn me where hazards might lurk. So, as I rode, I stayed ever alert and wary, and at night I slept as Wyrd had done, with a pebble clenched in my fist and the brass basin for it to fall into in case I should, however deep in sleep, sense anything untoward.

I was again traversing a region where there were no Roman roads, and only an occasional cart track or cattle trail or trodden footpath. I would follow one of those whenever it tended in the eastward direction I was going. But if I became aware of another traveler anywhere near, or discerned that the track was leading me toward a settlement, I would ride well to one side of the trail or halt invisible in the woods, at least until I could ascertain that the wayfaring person or the settled body of people posed no danger to me.

Velox knew, as well as I did, how to travel quietly, so either of us could hear from afar the noise made by a teamster’s wagon or a herder and his animals or just an incautious walker on the trail. And even a bumbling newcomer to the forest—such as I had used to be—can tell when a settlement is nearby, simply by watching the birds. As long as there were black storks about, and the blue-and-buff magpies, I knew that I was in the wild. Whenever I began to see the white storks that nest on rooftops, and the black-and-white magpies that live by theft, I of course knew that I was approaching some place of human habitation.

I gradually learned that the population hereabout comprised only scattered groups of people of the lesser Germanic nations—Heruli, Warni, Langobardi—most of whom lived by herding cattle. So the terrain consisted of great stretches of dense forest, interrupted at distant intervals by cleared pastures and the huts in which the herders and their families lived, clustered together for mutual protection as much as for sociability. Those settlements were sometimes mere hamlets, sometimes large enough to be called villages, but none was big enough to rank as a town. A hamlet would be inhabited only by a sibja, a group of people all related to each other, the oldest or wisest or strongest among them being the sibja’s headman. A village would be inhabited by a gau, an agglomeration of several sibja groups, combined into a subtribe and headed by a hereditary petty chieftain.

Besides watching the birds, I soon recognized another sign that told me when I was nearing the habitation of a sibja or a gau, and whether I wished to visit it or more prudently ride wide around it. I discovered that each settlement in this region judged its self-importance and its inviolability according to the extent of the solitude it could make and maintain around itself. Therefore, if I came upon cleared land in the forest—and if it was a considerably vast clearing, with its settlement too distant to be visible from the forest’s edge—I could assume that the people there were probably inhospitable to strangers and possibly would even repel one by force.

In any event, I was not much tempted to stop at even the least forbidding of those places, except when I was in need of something like salt, or had a yearning for a good drink of milk, provisions I could not acquire on my own. The villages and hamlets offered little other attraction to a wayfarer, for they were all squalid and impoverished and their residents were uniformly peasant-ignorant, peasant-slovenly and peasant-ugly.

Now and again, when I was riding on one of the trodden trails and encountered an obviously inoffensive teamster or herdsman, I would go a way with him, just for the sake of conversing with someone other than the gáis of Wyrd. The peasant and I would converse, I should say, if I could comprehend his backcountry dialect of the Old Language—Herulian or Langobard or whatever—sufficiently to make conversation possible at all.

Most of the peasants I encountered did not know much about the world beyond their immediate homeplaces, and did not care to know. When I begged one man for news of happenings more momentous than the marriage of local nonentities, he spoke vaguely of having heard rumors of wars and battles “somewhere yonder”—whereabouts he could not say, except that nothing of the sort had lately happened hereabouts. When I inquired of another man whither the trail we were traveling led to—besides his home village—he could say only:

“I have heard,” as if it were a rumor he did not wholly believe, “that eventually it takes one from this province into another, and that there is a great river somewhere there, and on that river a city of substantial size.”

“So—what is the next province? What is the river? What is the city?”

“Their names? Akh, stranger, if they have names, I could not tell them to you.”

One day, when I was riding unaccompanied along a broad and well-beaten cart track, Velox suddenly pricked his ears up and forward. Almost as soon as he, I heard from far ahead of us the sound of many hoofs pounding the ground at the trot. I halted Velox and listened harder. After some moments, I could also hear the jingle and creak—and of more than just saddles and harness—the noises made by jouncing armor and weapons. So I reined Velox off the track, and a healthy distance away from it, because a mounted military troop would certainly have speculators—outriding scouts—ranging ahead and well to either flank.

Deep in the forest, I found a small eminence of ground where, by climbing some way up a tree, I could see a fragment of that trail without being seen myself, unless a speculator should chance to ride right under me and find Velox tethered there. None did, and, after a long while, I watched the mounted men pass by, below and far away from me. There must have been more than two hundred of them, and they were a curious assortment. The leaders were recognizably uniformed, armored and helmeted Roman cavalrymen, perhaps one turma of them altogether. But the remainder of the column, the majority, wore an incongruous variety of headgear and costumes, none familiar to me, and they all wore beards, which the Romans did not. They could hardly be prisoners of war, I thought, or the turma would have been divided in half—fifteen cavalrymen riding before the captives and fifteen behind. So the bearded foreigners had to be allies or hired warriors under the Romans’ command.

I toyed briefly with the notion of intercepting the band and introducing myself. They appeared to be riding on some combative errand, and I had never witnessed a war. The Romans would probably welcome my joining them, seeing me caparisoned like themselves, especially when I told them how I had earned my steed and weapons as a gift from the legatus Calidius and the Legio XI Claudia. But then I dismissed the idea. For one reason, the troop was headed in a direction opposite to my eventual destination. For all I knew, my kinfolk Ostrogoths might at present be engaged in a war against the Roman Empire. It would not do for me to take sides until I knew which side I belonged on. So I waited until a good while after the long column had passed and its hoofbeats had become inaudible—because a troop on the move often has singulares trailing along as a rear guard—and then remounted Velox and continued on my journey.

It was not until some time later, after I had crossed the imperceptible boundary line in the forest that meant I was now in the province of Pannonia, that I learned the identity of that oddly mixed troop of cavalry. I learned it from the first man I had met in months who had
anything
interesting to tell—indeed, it was he who told me that I was in Pannonia—and who introduced me to the first settlement in those forests that was in any way out of the ordinary.

I espied the man from far off, and, as usual, I watched him until I made sure he was alone and looked harmless. He was merely gathering windfall branches for firewood, and piling them on a rack set on a swaybacked old horse, and even that simple chore he seemed to be doing extremely slowly and awkwardly. When I rode up to him, I could see why. He had no hands, and was having to do the job with arms that ended in blunt stumps at the wrists.

“Háils, frijonds,” I greeted him. “Might I be of assistance?”

“Health to you, stranger,” he responded, speaking with the Langobard accent. “Only collecting wood for the village against the coming of winter and the wolf.” He squinted up at the bright blue September sky. “No hurry about it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Still,” I said, “your village might have sent a man better equipped for picking up sticks. Let me help.”

“Thags izvis,” he said as I got down from Velox. Then he muttered, “Our village is sadly lacking in capable hands.”

In minutes, I had collected more wood than he had done the whole while I had been watching him. I stacked his old horse high, then collected more, and tied it into bundles and slung those over Velox’s saddle. Then I took the reins of both horses and, the man leading the way, went on with him through the forest to the clearing in which stood his hamlet. As we crossed the clearing, I noticed that it had not been kept very well cleared; grass and weeds stood high in it, and many sizable saplings were growing up.

The residents came out to stare, curious at seeing a stranger approach, and I realized the real import of the wood-gatherer’s muttered last remark.
Nobody
in the hamlet had hands. Men, women, boys and girls, all had only wrist stumps. No, that was not quite true, I saw, as I looked around in horrified amazement. There were some infants crawling or toddling about, playing in the dirt, and they had hands to play with. For a moment I had thought—knowing these people to be a sibja, all interrelated—that I had stumbled upon a freak family that bred only handless progeny. But if the very youngest among them were normal, evidently all the children of two years or so and younger, surely they did not shed those hands when they grew older. So the hands of every person in this hamlet had been
chopped
off, about two years before.

“In the name of the liufs Guth,” I gasped, too shocked to be tactful. “What happened here?”

“Edika,” said the wood-gatherer, and those people near enough to hear him appeared to tremble. “Edika happened here.”

“What or who was Edika?” I asked, as someone handlessly took the horses’ reins from me and some others handlessly began to unload the wood.

“Edika is a periodic calamity,” the man said with a sigh. “He is King of the Scyrri. They are a very terrible people.”

Possibly the man’s handlessness, hence his inability to do manual labor like peasants elsewhere, had made him more meditative and articulate than all those louts I had lately met. At any rate, he went on, with commendable fluency and much angry fervor, to tell me some things that I already knew and some that I did not.