Raptor (63 page)

“You slew one of our own!”

“Ja,” he grunted. “The man was disobeying orders, and disobedience must be instantly punished. This creature he was about to kill can only be the legatus Camundus.”

The creature was abjectly babbling thanks for his deliverance, again in various languages, and might have thrown himself upon both of us in grateful embrace. But Daila leaned down behind him and, with a sudden, shallow, slicing stroke of his sword, severed the hamstrings at the back of the old man’s knees. Camundus shrieked and toppled as if his legs had been totally cut out from under him.

“That will keep him where we know where to find him,” growled the optio. “Little beetle, you stay and guard him from further molestation until Theodoric is ready for—Look
out!”

Daila had glimpsed the lurking rooftop archer, and leapt aside even as he shouted, but the shout came too late for me. An arrow struck me like a mallet blow in the right side of my back. The impact threw me forward and to one side, and I fell prone on the cobblestones, my helmet hitting with such a crash that I was knocked nearly unconscious.

Dimly I heard Daila say, “Too bad, little beetle. But I will get him for that.” And I dimly heard his boots pounding off into the distance. Well, he was only obeying orders. Theodoric had commanded, “Succor no wounded.”

I could also hear the hamstrung legatus whining and blubbering, lying somewhere near me, but I was too dazed and aching to open my eyes to see where he was. I felt absolutely drained and flaccid, just from the shock of having been struck down, but I found that my right hand still clutched my sword, so I tried with that to lever myself over onto my back. However, the arrow that had pierced my leather armor was still embedded there, and the protruding shaft prevented me from turning more than partway supine. I might have squirmed and twisted to break the shaft, but I lay still, to recover and conserve my strength, because I heard other bootsteps. The injured legatus again began loudly pleading, not for mercy this time, but for help, and only in Greek: “Boé! Boethéos!”

A hoarse voice answered him, in heavily accented Greek, “Be easy, Camundus. First let me make sure your assailant is indeed dead.”

I opened my eyes just enough of a slit to see a cone-helmeted, scale-armored warrior approaching me, apparently one of those who had earlier been guarding the legatus and had been routed. He glared down at my motionless body in its arrow-pierced, oversized armor, and muttered, “By Ares, are the Goths sending their children to war now?” Then he lifted his sword high with both hands to deliver my deathblow.

Summoning all my strength, I drove my blade upward between his legs, under his corselet’s skirts, deep into his body there. The man uttered the loudest and most hair-raising scream I had ever heard in my life. He fell over backward, away from me, gushing blood from his crotch, and he scuttled and scrabbled on the pavement like a frenzied crab, not trying to get up or to get at me, but only to get away from his pain, which must have been agonizing.

I slowly and groggily climbed to my own feet, and had to stand for a moment, choking back nausea and waiting for my head to cease whirling. Then I stepped over to the fallen man and knelt on his chest to stop his flapping about. Because I could not breach his armor, I forced his head back to bare his throat and, as mercifully quickly as I could, sawed through his neck until my sword was stopped by the bone at the back.

That was the only hand-to-hand action in which I personally engaged during the battle for Singidunum, and I came out of it without so much as a scar for a memento. I was well slathered with blood, but it was all Sarmatian blood. Both that warrior and Daila had thought me impaled by the arrow that had felled me. But I was giving thanks to Mars, Ares, Tiw and whatever other war gods might exist, for my having been on this occasion “a hazelnut in a walnut shell.” The arrow had pierced only my ill-fitting corselet and slid past my rib cage without even scratching me.

By dint of some contortion, I reached around behind me and managed to snap off the protruding shaft. Then I strode over to the legatus, who flinched away from my gory sword and bleated, “Armahaírtei! Clementia!”

“Akh, slaváith!” I snarled at him, and he kept his mouth shut while I used the gold-bordered hem of his fine toga to wipe my sword. I grabbed Camundus under the arms and dragged him away from the scene of carnage—his own injured legs leaving blood smears on the cobbles—to a deep-set doorway on the farther edge of the square.

We sheltered in there all the rest of that day, during which occasional bands of warriors—Sarmatae being chased by Ostrogoths or vice versa—either pounded through the square or paused to turn and fight there. By midafternoon, the passersby in the square were no longer pursuing, being pursued or stopping to fight, because they were all Ostrogoths, occupied with the final details of the city’s purgation. Most of them were scouting for any Sarmatae in hiding, and making sure that all the fallen ones were thoroughly lifeless. Others were searching out and carrying or helping our own salvageable wounded to wherever the lekeis was working. I learned later that our warriors had combed every last building in Singidunum, and every room in every building, even to the rere-dorters, but had come upon very few Sarmatae cowering in hiding; almost every one had stood bravely in the open and fought until he died.

Toward sundown, two men came walking leisurely into the square where Camundus and I still sat in the doorway. They were both in scuffed and bloodstained armor, but unhelmeted—though one of them seemed to be carrying his helmet, or something like it, in a leather bag. They were Theodoric and Daila. The optio was bringing the king to show him where the legatus had been left for safekeeping—and evidently also to show Theodoric the corpse of his friend Thorn, because both the men exclaimed in surprise at finding me alive and still attending to my assigned duty of guarding Camundus.

“I might have known that Daila was mistaken!” Theodoric said with relief, clapping me on the shoulder instead of returning my salute. “The Thorn who could so dashingly play a clarissimus could as convincingly play dead.”

“By the hammer of Thor, little beetle,” Daila said with heavy humor, “you ought always to wear outsized armor! Maybe we all ought.”

“It would have been a pity,” Theodoric went on, “if you had got yourself killed before seeing us complete the conquest of the city, since you helped so greatly to get us in here. I am happy to report that every man of the nine thousand Sarmatae has been exterminated.”

“And their King Babai?” I inquired.

“He did the proper thing. He waited for me, and then fought as bravely and fiercely as any of his warriors. He might even have bested me had he been younger. So, in due respect, I accorded him a clean, swift death.” He gestured to Daila, who was carrying the leather bag. “Thorn, meet the late King Babai.”

The optio, grinning, opened the bag and held up by the hair Babai’s severed head. Though it dripped blood and other substances from its neck, its eyes were still open, glaring, and its mouth was fixed in a rictus of rage. It might have been the head of any Sarmatian warrior, except that it was banded by a gold circlet.

Camundus, who had been whinnying behind us and trying to interpose a word, now fell suddenly silent, horrified. At that, we all three turned to stare at him. He had to open and shut his mouth several times before he could speak.

“Babai,” he said in a creaky voice. “Babai
tricked
me into letting him take the city.”

“The creature speaks ill of the dead, who cannot defend themselves,” said Daila. “Also he lies. When we found this creature, he had an accompanying bodyguard of Sarmatae, ready to kill on his behalf.”

“Of course he lies,” said Theodoric. “If he spoke the truth, he would by now be decently dead. After losing the city, he would, like any good Roman, have fallen on his own sword. Instead, he must employ mine.”

Theodoric drew his blade and, without any ceremony, with one stroke, sliced open both Camundus’s fine toga and his abdomen. The legatus did not cry out—the cut must have been too quick and keen to pain him immediately—but he gasped and clutched the gaping wound to keep his intestines inside.

“You did not behead him,” Daila said casually.

“A traitor does not merit the same death as an honorable enemy,” said Theodoric. “That belly wound will give him hours of intolerable agony before he dies. Post a man to watch here until he expires, then to bring me his head. Be it so!”

“Ja, Theodoric,” said Daila, with a crisp salute.

“Thorn, you no doubt are starving and thirsting. Come along. We are having a celebratory feast in the central square.”

As he and I walked there, I said to Theodoric, “You spoke of the nine thousand vanquished. What of our own men?”

He said cheerfully, “We did very well, but of course I was certain that we would. Perhaps two thousand dead and another thousand or so wounded. Most of those will recover, though some may never fight again.”

I had to agree that the Ostrogoths had done very well, considering the odds against them. But I also had to say, “You sound rather offhand about it. After all… those thousands
are
dead or crippled.”

He gave me a sidelong look. “If you mean that I should be weeping for them, ne, I do not weep. I should not weep if all my highest officers were among the fallen—if you and all my other friends were—and I should expect no one to weep if I were. It is a warrior’s vocation and duty and pleasure to fight. And to die, if need be. This day I rejoice—and so do the dead men, I am sure, in heaven or in Walis-Halla or wherever they may be—that, in this case, what they fought and died for was
won.”

“Ja, I cannot gainsay that. Still, as the optio Daila must already have reported to you, at least one of those men was slain by a fellow Ostrogoth—by Daila himself.”

“The optio did right. As I did when I finally gave Camundus his mortal wound back yonder. Disobedience of a superior officer’s order is a crime, just as the indisputable treachery of the legatus was a crime, and a criminal must be punished on the spot.”

“But I think a fair trial might have shown Daila’s victim to have been more impulsive than disobedient. Acting rashly, ja, but in the heat of battle…”

“A fair trial?” Theodoric said blankly, as if I had proposed unconditional forgiveness for all evildoers. “Vái, Thorn, you speak of Roman law. We abide by the ancient
Gothic
laws, which are much more sensible. When a criminal is caught in the act or is otherwise unquestionably guilty, a trial would be superfluous. Only if the crime is done in secret or if, for some other reason, there is doubt as to the guilty party, only then is a trial held. There is seldom occasion for that.” He paused and smiled sunnily. “That is because we Goths tend to be as open and forthright in our sins as in our good deeds. Now, here is the square and the banquet. Let us forthrightly indulge in the sin of gluttony.”

Theodoric’s decuriones and signiferi and optiones had mustered every inhabitant of the inner city, except the smallest children, and given all of them work to do, and none of those looked very happy about that. To the upper-class and better-fed cityfolk, the liberation of Singidunum clearly meant nothing more than an exchange of masters. The men and boys had all been put to the dirty work of picking up the dead bodies, stripping them of armor, weapons and any other valuables, and then getting rid of them. Given the number of corpses, that task would likely occupy them for many days. As I later discovered, they were bidden simply to drop the cadavers from the top of the city’s landward wall, down the cliff to the plain below, where other workers added oil and pitch and made of the pile a tremendous cremation pyre.

The inner city’s women and girls had all been commanded to break out the hoarded stores of food, and to cook and serve them—to both the famished Ostrogoth troops and the equally starved people from the outer city. So there were cooking fires blazing in that central square and hearth smoke rising from the flues of houses all about. The women bustled back and forth with their household trays and platters heaped high, and with loaves of cheese and bread, and with tankards and pitchers and jugs. The square and every side street leading to it teemed with our warriors and the folk from beyond the wall—I saw Aurora and her parents among them—either reaching and grabbing for a portion of food, or clutching close an elegant tableware dish or bowl and wolfing from it without benefit of utensils.

The crowd parted respectfully to let Theodoric through and I sidled along with him. But once he and I had meat, bread and wine, we found an unoccupied spot on the street cobblestones, and Theodoric sat down there to eat just as unroyally (and as ravenously) as myself and every least ranker and urchin sharing the feast.

When our pangs of hunger and thirst had been blunted a bit, I asked Theodoric, “What happens next?”

“Nothing, I hope. At least not here, not for a while. These people of Singidunum are no more glad to see us than they were to see the Sarmatae. However, in the main, they have not been too much inconvenienced. The Sarmatae had no opportunity to carry off any plunder, and I have forbidden my own men to do any looting. Or any raping. Let them find their own Auroras, if they can. I want the city left intact and unviolated, or it will be of no use to me as a hostage in my bargaining with the empire.”

“So you must occupy and hold it for some time.”

“Ja, and with only about three thousand of my men still whole and hale. North of that river Danuvius, in Old Dacia, there are many more of Babai’s Sarmatae—and their allies, the Scyrri. But, because King Babai decided personally to lead the occupation of Singidunum and to plant himself here, those others of his forces are leaderless and lacking direction. Unless and until they get word from some spy that this city has fallen and Babai has perished, they are not likely to mount a massive counterattack.”

“But surely they are awaiting
some
word from here,” I said. “It was hardly any secret that this city and their king were under siege.”