Raptor (61 page)

“Let us see what else you will need. Show me your sword.” I unsheathed it, and the armorer sniffed disdainfully on seeing that it was the standard Roman army gladius. “Have you ever fought with that?” he asked. “Slain with it?”

“Once, ja, and it slew well enough.” I did not tell him that its only victim had been an old and unarmed Hun woman.

He grunted. “Best keep it, then, for this battle. You will, of course, eventually want a Gothic snake-pattern blade. But that must be made of a weight and length and grip especially fitted to your own weight and arm length and hand size and style of fighting. For now, use the sword you are accustomed to, inferior though it is. And here, take any one of these bucklers. They do not have to be suited to the individual. They are all alike.”

I lifted one down from an overlapping row of them hung on a rafter. It was not the large, heavy, rectangular Roman scutum shield, designed to hide and protect a man’s whole body. It was round, made only of tight-woven wicker, except for its central boss and rim of iron, and it was no bigger than a basket cover, because its intended use was only to parry an enemy’s blows or fend off his missiles. I took hold of the handgrip behind the hollowed-out iron boss, and thrashed the buckler about for a bit to get the feel of it.

“Now,” the custos went on, “you must also wait a while to have your personal corselet made, because that will likewise have to be specially fitted to you, and the making of it is a long process. The heavy leather is first boiled, then carefully molded to your torso while it is soft, then pounded into final shape, then baked to nearly iron-hardness. However, for the coming battle, you will need
some
kind of corselet. Here in this corner are a number of spares. Find the one that fits you best.”

I could see why they were spares. All were much scuffed, many were gashed or pierced with holes or scorched by fire, and several still bore the stains of their former wearers’ blood. I also saw that every corselet, besides having been molded to fit a particular warrior’s body, had also been artfully shaped to exaggerate his shoulder breadth and his chest and stomach and back muscles. To make a choice for myself from among the heap of castoffs was easy. Since I was considerably shorter and slighter than even the smallest adult male Goth I had yet seen, I picked out the littlest corselet—which was not very little—and Ansila helped me hold up the front and back segments of it while I tightened the thongs on either side that bound them together.

Then he stepped back and looked me over, rather skeptically, and muttered, “A hazelnut in a walnut’s shell.”

I did feel somewhat ridiculous, with my slender neck protruding from a leather torso that was muscled like that of Hercules, and with the quilted leather skirts hanging below my knees. Still, this was the only armor available to me, so I said:

“It is commodious, ja, but it does not impede my movements. It will serve.”

The custos shrugged. “Then you lack only the heavy leggings, and those you can procure for yourself. Here, the faber has your helmet ready. Try it on and see if it requires any adjustments.”

It did not. Heavy though it was in my hands, it did not feel so on my head. The soft leather padding inside fitted snugly, and the straps depending from it buckled neither too tightly nor too loosely under my chin. The nosepiece properly covered my nose, but did not touch it. The lappets hung from in front of my ears exactly to my cheek-bones and down to my jawlines. The neck guard was deep enough to ward off any blows there, but not so low as to scrape against the back of my corselet. I fancied that I must look as formidable as Theodoric had looked when he approached me on the field. I was beginning to feel quite the genuine Ostrogoth warrior, until the faber said gruffly:

“I advise you, young man, to start growing a good Gothic beard. It will protect that exposed and skinny throat of yours.”

I made no reply to that, but said of the helmet, “It does not have a top slot for the attachment of a parade plume.”

Ansila all but roared:
“Vái!
Goths do not parade like preening Romans! When a Goth moves his legs, it is to march forward against some foe! When a Goth dons a helmet, it is to go into combat, not for ceremonial review by some effeminate Roman consul!”

The faber said, “Neither did I give the helmet any other embellishment. No raised or etched decorative figures. For one reason, I did not have time. For another, I cannot know what ornamentation might be appropriate, because I do not know what rank Theodoric has accorded you.”

“None at all, that I know of,” I said cheerfully. “But I thank you, comrades both—and your apprentices—for all your good work. Thags izei. I will return when the time comes to put the finishing caps on our trumpets of Jaíriko.”

Those men that Theodoric sent to chop down a suitable tree, he sent well upriver of the city, so the Sarmatae would not hear the noise of their activity. The men picked a tall, straight, strong cypress to fell, because that tree has many but not immense branches growing horizontally from the trunk. When the tree was on the ground, the men lopped some of those branches entirely off, but others along the length of the trunk they only shortened, so the stumps would serve as carrying handles for the warriors who would wield the ram. Then they whittled one end of the trunk to a blunt point, and hardened that in a hot fire. Then they floated the great thing downstream along the Savus, snaked it ashore and, under cover of darkness, hauled it uphill and dropped it at a place that was concealed but convenient for the assault.

“Very well, Thorn,” said Theodoric. “The next move is yours.”

“I have never stormed a city before,” I said. “What is the best time? Daylight or darkness?”

“In this case, daylight, because the cityfolk are in there among the Sarmatae. I should prefer that we be able to tell them apart, so that we do not slay too many noncombatants.”

“Then I suggest,” I said, but with some hesitancy, “that we prepare the oat containers and hasten to get them placed just before dawn. I have no way of predicting how long they will take to burst, but I should
suppose
it would be sometime during the daylight hours. Perhaps not, though.”

“In that event,” Theodoric said indifferently, “the citizens must take their chances. Noon or midnight, if and when the gate comes down, we go in. As you say, then, start the preparations shortly before dawn.”

He assigned six men to go with me, because the armory had by now constructed twenty-eight of the “trumpets of Jaíriko”—as everyone was now calling the things—and I had calculated that a man could carry four of them, plus a mallet, and still run fast. It took us seven not long to fill all the trumpets with oats. Because it was necessary to get them sealed as nearly simultaneously as possible, the faber’s assistants put their twenty-eight iron caps on the forge all together, and heated them to red-hotness. Then I and my six helpers poured water into the containers, the faber did whatever it was that he did with his brazing spelter, clamped the cap on one trumpet after another, and he, Ansila and their apprentices all frantically did the hammering to seal them.

As soon as the trumpets had cooled enough to touch, I and my men each tucked four of them under our arms and picked up a wooden mallet apiece. We hurried uphill to the last row of houses before the open space in front of the gate, and there Theodoric and a host of archers were waiting in concealment.

“Ready?” said Theodoric, evincing no excitement at all. He pointed eastward. “The dawn is just beginning to blush, rather like that serving girl of mine. I think, from now on, I shall call the wench Aurora.”

I perceived that he was being deliberately casual, to put all his men at ease—or me, anyway, since that sunrise yonder was heralding the first day of my life as an Ostrogoth warrior.

“When I give the signal,” he said, “my bowmen will rain arrows over the ramparts. Under that cover, Thorn, you and your trumpeters should be safe to make the run. Let us commence, then. Be it so! Warriors, to position!” He led the archers as they poured out into the open, into the street that led to the gate. “Take stance! Take aim! Let fly!”

There was a noise like the sudden gust of a mighty gale as those many shafts flew together. Instantly, Theodoric and his archers were nocking new ones to their bows, and thereafter discharged them quite as rapidly as old Wyrd had used to do.

I cried, “My men! Follow me!” and we pelted for the entryway. The Sarmatian sentries above must have been so taken by surprise by Theodoric’s flocks of arrows that they did not even notice us in the predawn dusk, for none of their answering missiles came our way, and all seven of us got in under the arch without a scratch.

I had already demonstrated to the men what we were to do, so there was no time wasted. I and one other began wedging our containers, end to end, in the gap between the bottom of the gate panels and the paving stones, and hammering them in and under there as far as we could. Other men attended to the cracks at the side jambs, and the crack where the panels met in the middle, and the cracks around the wicket door. One man stood on another’s shoulders, so he could place the things even higher up the vertical gaps than I had earlier been able to reach.

The Sarmatae inside surely heard the noise of our labors, and I could imagine their bewilderment. For defenders who might have been dreading to hear the powerful thuds of a battering ram, we must have sounded as if we were only politely knocking for admittance. When I and my six men were done, one of them had a single container left over, and was looking anxiously for some unoccupied place in which to jam it, but I said:

“Keep it. Bring it back with us. If we watch it, we will know how these others are behaving. It ought to tell us when—or if—they swell and burst, and whether that bursting appears likely to accomplish what we hope it will. Now, all together, let us make the run back to shelter. Go!”

Again we arrived unscathed, and Theodoric ordered his own men to cease that storm of arrows and to fall back behind the protecting row of houses. He and I had debated as to what the Ostrogoths should do while waiting for the trumpets of Jaíriko to do their work, and we had decided that there was not much
to
be done. Keeping up the harassment by missiles would not prevent the Sarmatae from going to see what had been done to their gate, and would only waste our arrows and energy. Anyway, even if the defenders came right up to the inside of that gate, they could not discern what we had done to it, and they certainly would not open it to examine the outside.

So Theodoric merely mustered his centuriones and decuriones and told them what their various bodies of warriors were to do, when and if the gate was weakened. First, of course, the biggest, heaviest and strongest men were immediately to dash forward from concealment with our makeshift, hand-carried battering ram. If, when the first gate was smashed, we found another gate tight shut inside the arch, the men with the ram would back out, and all our other men would stand in place, just as they were standing now, for however long it took us to prepare and place another set of Jaíriko trumpets, and wait for them to do their work. Then the ram would go in again. Whenever it finally
did
break through into the city, a turma of mounted men bearing contus lances would gallop in—these to be led by Theodoric himself—to mow down any close-packed crowd of defenders waiting right inside the gate. Next four contubernia of archers would surge in, to pick off any defenders perched high atop the wall or on the rooftops. Finally, all the rest of us six thousand, myself included, were to go in on foot with only swords and bucklers.

“The men are to commit slaughter,” Theodoric flatly told the officers. “To confront and slay every foeman who stands against us, to seek out and slay everyone who tries to hide or flee. Take no prisoners. Succor no wounded. Only have your men try to avoid, insofar as possible, killing the hapless cityfolk. A warrior should be able to recognize the women and children, at least, and spare those. Habái ita swe!”

The centuriones and decuriones silently snapped their arms up, iron-rigid, in the Ostrogoth salute. Theodoric went on:

“Also hear this, and impress it on every man of your command. If any among them should encounter a foeman who might conceivably be King Babai or the legatus Camundus, he is to refrain from striking a blow. Those two are mine. If for some reason I fail to find and slay them, they are to be let to live until the city is taken, and then I will arrange for their execution. But remember—if during the battle I do not kill Babai and Camundus, no one does. Be it so!”

The officers again snapped the salute, and this time Theodoric returned it. Then the officers went to march their separate bodies of troops into the sidehill streets, where they would remain invisible to the Sarmatian sentries, and there disposed the various columns in the order in which they would storm the city. As the men dispersed, I remarked to Theodoric:

“Are you not making two very brash assumptions? First, that my simple weapons will work? And, if they do, that we will so surely take the city?”

“Akh, friend Thorn,” he said jovially, clapping an arm around my shoulders. “Of the many saggwasteis fram aldrs that are sung about the hero Jalk the Giant-Killer, one old saggws relates that he somehow bested a giant by means of a beanstalk. I forget how that was done, but I shall have faith that Thorn’s oats will somehow serve as heroically. As for the rest, well… I try to emulate my royal father. He used to say that he never doubted of victory, and that was why he never failed to achieve it. But tell me, friend, when did you eat last? Come and break your fast with me. My wench newly named Aurora is cooking a brisket of meat newly named venison. That is to say, part of the remains of a defunct war-horse.”

“I must keep an eye on this thing,” I said, and showed him the metal container, and told him why.

“Bring it along. We can watch it while we eat.”

Well, it did nothing during the brief time that we were at table; we could hardly have expected it to. I thanked Theodoric for the meal—and thanked Aurora, too, making her blush—and took the container and myself off to the side street where waited the turma to which I had been assigned.