Raptor (49 page)

I mumbled, “I feel as weak as a baby.”

“I wondered if perhaps you
always
did,” Thiuda said mockingly.

“Eh?”

“Why else would you ride
tied
to your horse?”

I blinked at the unexpected question, then realized what he meant. “Akh, my foot-rope?” I explained how I had come to invent that contrivance, and how it served to brace me more securely in my saddle.

“Say you so?” murmured Thiuda, as if he, like Wyrd, mistrusted new notions. “I prefer to rely on the grip of my own two thighs. However, if you have found the rope of help, then you will find it even more so while you are regaining your strength. And you should be fully fit again by the time you get to Vindobona. Shall we ride there together?”

“Ja, I should like that. And, no offense to your dignity as an Ostrogoth, but will you permit me to buy you a sumptuous banquet at the best gasts-razn in the city?”

He grinned broadly and said, “Only if it includes a Dionysian indulgence in wine-guzzling.” Then, even more mischievously: “Since you persist in playing the profligate young rich man, I shall play your abjectly fawning servant, and ride before you into the city, crying to all, ‘Way for my fráuja Thornareikhs!’ “

That Gothic dignification of my name would mean something like “Thorn the Ruler” or, in Latin, “Thorn Rex.”

I scoffed, “Oh vái, I am nothing of the sort. I began life as a doorstep foundling, and was raised in an abbey.”

“No matter. Be not humble,” Thiuda said earnestly. “If you go into a city, or a gathering, or
any
encounter, thinking of yourself as a nobody, that is how you will be received. In Vindobona, for example, the landlord of the meanest gasts-razn would demand to see your money before he served you a meal or allotted you a room. But go in there trumpeting yourself as a personage—
believing
yourself truly to be one—and you will be warmly greeted, expansively welcomed, treated with reverence and deference and subservience. The choicest of everything—viands, wines, women, attendants—will be pressed upon you, and you can fastidiously pick and choose, and you can disdain paying so much as a nummus for as long as you like.”

“Akh, come now, Thiuda!”

“I do not exaggerate. A rich personage is allowed always to owe and is never importuned to settle. Only little people owe little debts, and few of them, and must pay them promptly. The more and the bigger the debts of a personage, and the longer outstanding, the greater distinction he confers on all his creditors. They would be dismayed if he were to pay, for they could no longer boast of Lord So-and-So’s being obligated to them.”

“I think you have become woods-addled, Thiuda. Do I
look
like a personage?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Rich youths are known to be often eccentric in their dress and comportment. The fact that I, your slave, will be sitting a saddle more ornate than your own will even add to that impression. I told you, cease
thinking
of yourself as anything less than noble. If I precede you into the city, exuberantly heralding the approach of my illustrious young lord and master, that is what you will be taken to be. Thereafter, you have only to behave arrogantly, imperiously, overbearingly, and thus live up to people’s expectations of a personage. Khaîre! You will genuinely
be
one!”

His enthusiastic prankishness was irresistibly infectious. And so, some days later, that is how we entered through the main gate of Vindobona. I slouched indolently in my saddle, not even deigning to look about me at the fine city and its finely appareled inhabitants, and trying hard not to break into laughter. Thiuda rode a little way before me, flinging his arms about, turning in his saddle this way and that, to shout in all directions, variously in Latin and in the Old Language and even in Greek:

“Way! Make way for my lordly fráuja Thornareikhs, who comes from his distant palace to spend some time and much gold in Vindobona! Way for the illustrissimus Thornareikhs, who comes unpretentiously, without his retinue of courtiers, to honor Vindobona with his august presence! Make way for Thornareikhs, all you lesser folk, and bid him
háils!”

The people on that crowded thoroughfare, afoot or mounted or riding in slave-carried cars, stopped and craned their necks and turned their heads to gawk at my approach. And, as I passed them, contemptuously indifferent to their interest, all the heads respectfully bowed.

Vindobona is, like Basilea, a community that has grown up around a garrison that guards the Roman Empire’s frontier. But it is many times larger and busier and more populous and more grand than Basilea, because it stands where several Roman roads converge and also alongside the swift, broad, brown Danuvius River, the most heavily traveled of all Europe’s waterways.

On this mighty river, there are more than just barges and scows and fishing boats; there are freighting craft nearly as big as seagoing ships. The heavy Danuvius trading vessels are propelled by many oarsmen, sometimes two or three banks of them, aided, when the wind is right, by square sails held aloft on masts. Those freighting craft travel safely, without fear of being intercepted and plundered by pirates or war parties, because well-armed, beak-prowed dromo vessels of the Roman navy’s Pannonian Fleet constantly patrol between their bases upriver at Lentia and downstream at Mursa.

Vindobona’s fortress, manned by the Legio X Gemina, could contain at least six garrisons of the size of that at Basilea, and its surrounding defenses of ramparts, trapfalls, ditches, stakes and spikes are proportionately more numerous and more stoutly constructed. The fortress sprawls atop a slight eminence of ground that overlooks a narrow arm of the Danuvius, but the city around the fortress long ago spread clear to the banks of the river’s main channel and far over the level land in every other direction.

It is not, like Basilea, a community of merely modest houses, cabanae and workshops. Most of its buildings are of stone or brick, many of them immense in area and three or four stories high. They include luxurious residences and thermae and lupanares, travelers’ deversoria and gasts-razna, riverside warehouses and extensive market arcades housing shops and smiths and tradesmen of every kind of wares. However, tucked among the more imposing edifices are also snug neighborhood tabernae and exquisite small shops vending jewels, silks, perfumes and other precious sorts of merchandise. Vindobona even has a number of temples dedicated to the worship of various pagan gods, because the population includes people of so many different races and nations and religions. It would appear that not many of those are Christians, or at least not very devout Christians. In the whole city I saw only one Catholic and one Arian church, and both were small, of humble aspect and in some disrepair, while the temples were elegant, well attended and well maintained. Otherwise, Vindobona is as modern and civilized and refined in its culture as is Rome, though on a lesser scale, of course. And it claims to be of an age second only to Rome itself in all the empire. Its historians say that, about the time Remus and Romulus were founding
their
city (and quarreling over the street plans of it), a primitive and now long-departed tribe of Celtic people made permanent camp where Vindobona now stands. That settlement endured until, some three centuries ago, Marcus Aurelius fortified the empire’s entire northern boundary—meaning the whole length of the south and west banks of the Rhenus and the Danuvius—with watchtowers and castella and burgi and outpost stations, and set one of those here.

Thiuda did not commence his shouted extolling of me and my splendiferousness until we had made our way through Vindobona’s suburbs and outskirts and had entered the city proper. Then, while he ranted and I feigned utter boredom and the passersby made bewildered but solicitous salute, we proceeded along a wide avenue, at the distant end of which was visible the high palisade of the fortress. After a while, Thiuda halted his bellowed panegyric, and our two-man procession, to shout a demand at every person within our hearing:

“Tell me, people! Tell me the most excellent, most palatial
and most costly
lodging place in this city, for my princely fráuja will tolerate none but the finest of accommodations!”

Various of the folk about us obligingly suggested various places, but most of them seemed to agree that “the deversorium of Amalric the Dumpling-Plump” would best meet our requirements. So Thiuda pointed at one of the men who had said that, and commanded:

“Lead us there, then!” He stabbed his finger at another man who had recommended the same place. “And you, good fellow, run ahead to announce our coming to Amalric the Dumpling-Plump! That will give ample time for him and all his family and servitors to assemble before his door and make appropriate greeting to Thornareikhs, the most distinguished guest ever to honor Amalric’s establishment with a visit.”

Thiuda’s outrageous high-handedness made me blush and mutter “Iésus” to myself. But, astonishingly, he was obeyed. The one man instantly set off at a run, and the other not only walked ahead of our horses but joined Thiuda in bawling, “Way! Make way for Thornareikhs!” So I subdued that one flush of embarrassment at our imposture, and only shook my head in wonderment. Evidently Thiuda was right. Proclaim that you are Somebody, and believe that you are, and you
are.

The deversorium was indeed a fine one, of brick, three stories high, its front and doorway decorated almost as colorfully as those in Haustaths. And its proprietor was indeed plump, and so was the woman I took to be his wife, and the two adolescents I took to be his sons. They all had obviously put on their best clothes, and obviously had done so hastily, for some of their garments were fastened awry. The deversorium’s broad and hospitable forecourt was quite filled with all those servitors who, like the family, had come forth to greet me, some of them wearing aprons, some with cooking ladles or goose-wing brooms in hand. From several windows in the upper stories, the establishment’s already resident guests peered curiously down.

Plump though he was, the proprietor managed a deep bow and said in Latin, in Gothic, in Greek, “Salve! Háils! Khaîre! I bid welcome to Your Worship.” That is not the address prescribed for anyone of royal, noble, governmental, clerical or any other rank, but inasmuch as Thiuda, in all his shouting, had cannily avoided saying exactly
what
I was supposed to be, the man had to do the best he could.

I looked aloofly down at him from my mount and asked, “Ist jus Amalric, niu?” but as if it mattered little to me whether he was or not.

“I am, Your Worship. Your inadequate servant Amalric, if it please Your Worship to command me in the Old Language. The Greek-speakers make of my name Eméra, and the Celtic-speakers Amerigo, and the Latin-speakers Americus.”

“I believe,” I said languidly, “I shall call you… Dumpling.” Someone in the courtyard tittered, and Thiuda threw me an amused nod of approving my rudeness, but Amalric only bowed the deeper. “Then what are you waiting for, Dumpling? Summon a groom to take our horses.”

As Dumpling and his wife escorted me indoors, he said, “I regret that I was not apprised of your visit before now, Your Worship.” And he wrung his hands. “I would have offered you the very best quarters in our house. As it is…”

“As it is,” I said, “you may offer them to me now that I am here.” I was finding incivility an attitude very easy to assume.

“Oh vái!” the man moaned. “But I am expecting, this very afternoon, the exceptionally rich merchant who
always
occupies those rooms and who—”

“Say you so? How much is this rich man worth?” I asked, and saw Thiuda laughing gleefully but silently behind the Dumplings. “When he arrives, I will buy him. I can always use an extra slave.”

“Ne, ne, Your Worship,” Dumpling pleaded, beginning to sweat slightly. “I will put him off with some excuse that might not offend him quite so much as… I mean to say,
of course
the rooms are yours. You boys, bring in His Worship’s belongings. And may I inquire, Your Worship, will you be wishing a room also for your, er, your herald? Your servant? Your slave? Or does he customarily sleep with your horses?”

I might have said something else obnoxious, befitting my new station, but Thiuda spoke first.

“Ne, good landlord Dumpling. If you will but direct me to the nearest, cheapest, most vermin-ridden house of lodging, I shall be satisfied with a pallet there. I am staying but this one night in Vindobona, you see, for I must be off at dawn on important and far-flung errands for my fráuja Thornareikhs.” He leaned close to the man and, behind a. raised hand, whispered confidingly, “Urgent and secret messages, you understand.”

“Of course, of course,” said Dumpling, impressed. “Well… the nearest… um, let me see.” He scratched his sweat-shiny bald head. “That would be the lowly hovel of the widuwo Dengla. She sometimes inveigles unwary strangers into taking board and lodging there, but no one ever stays for long, because she steals from their belongings.”

“I will sleep on my belongings,” said Thiuda. “Now… I shall linger here only long enough, landlord, to take a sample taste of each of the many excellent hot dishes and cold wines of the elaborate meal that I am sure you will momentarily be setting before my master. Thornareikhs naturally will not condescend to eat the least morsel of a meal until I have declared every dish wholesome, pure, nourishing and prepared
precisely
to his liking.”

“Naturally, naturally,” said the poor man, now sweating so much that he looked as boiled as a real dumpling. “By the time His Worship has washed and refreshed himself, the board will be laid with all the most delectable treats from our larder and our cellar.” To me he said, with something like desperation, “If Your Worship would be pleased to follow me, I will personally show you to your chambers.”

Thiuda trailed us upstairs, along with the two Dumpling sons bearing my modest pack and saddlebags. The quarters were most comfortable, well furnished, clean and light and airy. But of course I peered about me and sniffed as if I had been led into a sty, and dismissed the Dumplings with a contemptuous flick of my hand. As soon as they were out of hearing, Thiuda and I collapsed against one another, roaring with hilarity and pounding on one another’s back.