Raptor (67 page)

“Lekeis, why do you say ‘unfortunately’ and ‘oh vái’?”

“Because… if I had found it sooner…” He wagged his head and sighed. “It is a cacoëthic scirrhus. An occult scirrhus, since it has not yet bulged or broken the skin. An indolent scirrhus, since it took so long in making itself known, and still is giving her no pain. As well as I can determine, it is not in her womb or in her intestines, but in the mesenteries. So it must be of that category that we lekjos call—in detestation—kreps. But I cannot be sure of that until I can see whether the veins around it have turgesced to the shape of crab claws. And that I cannot see until I cut open the princess’s abdomen.”

“Cut her open!?” I cried, aghast.

“Akh, not while she lives, certainly not.”

“While
she lives?”

He demanded angrily, “How can you keep on repeating me, young man, when you apparently have not heard a word I have said? The princess has kreps, a consumptive scirrhus growing in her mesenteries. The carrion worm, as some call it. In time, it will infiltrate her other organs. Amalamena is not just ill, she is dying.”

“Dying!?”

“Is not even
that
plain enough language for you to understand, niu? Akh, marshal, you are dying. I am dying; The princess is dying
young.
I cannot predict how much time she has, but let us pray that it be brief.”

“Brief!?”

“Iésus,” he grunted, and threw up his hands. But then, with strained patience, he explained, “If the liufs Guth is merciful, she will die soon and painlessly and with her body unblemished. If the dying takes too long, the scirrhus will eventually erupt through the skin as a gruesomely gaping and suppurating abscess. Also, as that kreps clutches with its claws at her other organs, it will make her body bloated in some parts, skeletal in others, hideous in all. Such a prolonged death would entail an interminable suffering that I would not wish inflicted on the devil himself.”

I too said, “Iésus,” then asked, “Is there no medicine… or perhaps syrurgery…?”

Again he wagged his head and sighed. “This is not a combat wound that I could heal with a simple vulnerary. And she is not a dim-witted slattern, believing in demons, whom I could delude by prescribing amuletics. And syrurgery would simply irritate the scirrhus into spreading faster. Akh, sometimes I wish we all still lived in the good old simple days. Back then, if a lekeis was confronted by a baffling and incurable disease, he would set his patient at a public crossroads, in hope that some passerby—perhaps a foreigner—would recognize the ailment and tell how he had seen it cured elsewhere.”

“Is there nothing to be done?”

“Only desperate resorts. Some of the ancients prescribed the drinking of ass’s milk and the bathing in water in which wheat bran has been boiled. So now I have the princess doing those things, though there is no record of their ever having done anything in the least remedial for anyone in history. Also, assuming that the scirrhus is the kreps, I am giving her powders of the calcareous substance called crab’s-eye, for whatever homoeomeric good that may do. Beyond that, I can give her only a discutient and a lenitive—bryony, in hope of dissolving the morbific matter, and oil of the anchusa berries to calm her nerves. If and when the pain begins, I shall give her bits of the bark of the mandragoras root. But I do not wish to commence that lenitive until it is necessary, because she will need increasingly heavier doses.”

I said disbelievingly, “And yet you would give her leave to travel?”

“Why not? Between here and Constantinople, there are plenty of milkable jenny asses, and much wheat to be sieved for its bran. Of the medicines, I can give her a supply to take along. To you I can give the mandragoras bark, to administer should it become necessary. A journey might be more beneficial for Amalamena than any amount of medicaments. I have already recommended that she seek diversion and cheerful company. Are you cheerful company, niu?”

“She seems to find me so,” I murmured, and asked, but could not complete the question, “Have you told her…?”

“Ne. But Amalamena is not stupid, and she knows what discutients and lenitives are for. If nothing else, her eagerness to seize on an opportunity for travel would indicate that she is cognizant of her fate. She evidently wishes to see something of the world before she dies. I doubt that she has ever been far from this city since she was born here. And if she prefers to die elsewhere than her birthplace, well… at least I will not have to watch her do it.”

I said bitingly, “You seem to take lightly the fate of what is probably your most distinguished patient.”

“Lightly!?”
He whirled on me and jabbed his bony forefinger right against my nose. “You contumelious whelp! I will have you know that I attended at the birth of the child Amalamena. And a sweeter, happier, merrier babe I never birthed. Every other newborn infant, when held aloft and spanked, has seized its first breath of life with a wailing cry. But Amalamena? She did that with a
laugh!”

While he railed at me, the old man had begun to weep.

“That is why I tell her now: try to laugh again, child, try to find things that will make you laugh. And she is only one of the many reasons why I have long cursed my ever having adopted a profession that can foresee death, can foretell all its horrible details, yet can do so little to prevent it.” He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and said, to himself, “Youth passes… beauty fades… perfection fails…” Then he snarled again at me, “And I curse all the complacent fools like yourself, who sneer at the physician because he is only a man and not a god!”

“Be easy, Lekeis Frithila,” I said, chastened and ashamed and near weeping myself. “I will let the princess go with me, as she desires, and I promise to take good care of her. As you desire, I will exert myself—even continue making a fool of myself—to be her cheerful companion, to give her cause for laughter, to help her enjoy the journey. And let me have the mandragoras medicine. If I am with Amalamena when her end comes, I will do my best to make it easy for her.”

When I rejoined old Costula outside, it was still full day, so I asked him to accompany me to some other places. We first went down to the dockside shed where I had left my belongings. I abstracted three things from among them, to carry myself, and the steward had his porters load the rest onto the poles of his chair. Next, I had him lead me to the workshop of the city’s best gulthsmitha, or aurifex, and introduce me there. I gave to the jeweler one of the things I was carrying and asked if he could devise some way to mount it, with a touch of goldwork about it, to make it handsomely impressive for presentation as a gift.

He said, “I have never had
quite
such a commission before, Saio Thorn. But I will give careful thought to its design. And ja, I will have it ready before you depart the city.”

Finally, I had Costula show me which street would take me up and over the hill to the army encampment beyond. Then I let him and his porters and my packs go on to the palace, and I continued alone. The sentries at the camp had evidently been told to expect me, for they neither challenged my identification of myself nor showed any least surprise at such an unlikely and young person’s being a marshal of the king. They quite readily obeyed my request that a runner be sent for the optio Daila. And he, when he came to meet me, had already anticipated my next request.

“I have had our fillsmitha lay aside all his other work, Saio Thorn, to take the measurements for your armor. And our hairusmitha has commenced the forging of what will be your new sword’s blade, when you have also been measured for that.”

So he led me to the workshop of the armorer, and I handed to that man another of the things I had been carrying, the helmet made for me at Singidunum, and asked him to embellish it according to my rank. He said he would do that, and would add the same ornamentation to my corselet, for the making of which he now proceeded to take all my body measurements.

“Please try also, custos,” I instructed him, facetiously, “to make me, when I am armed, look like something better than a little beetle.” The fillsmitha only looked puzzled at that, but Daila had the grace to shuffle his feet and chuckle at my making jape of him.

Then he led me to the sword-smithy, where I was given the privilege—not accorded to many, even of the Ostrogoth warriors themselves—of seeing how the far-famed and highly esteemed “snake pattern” blades are made. Of course, the hairusmitha was already well along in the making of mine, but he cordially explained the entire process. Or almost the entire process.

A smith, he said, began that work by heating eight slender rods of iron to red-hotness, packing them in charcoal and keeping them red-hot until the iron’s surface absorbed enough carbon to turn to steel, while the core of each rod remained pure iron. Those rods were then, while hot and flexible, twisted together rather in the way that a woman plaits her hair. When that plait cooled, it was reheated, hacksawed into pieces, reforged into eight new rods, those again heated in a charcoal packing and again twisted together. That procedure was repeated several times, the new rods each time being plaited in a different order, until the smith was satisfied that he had the proper composition for the blade’s central portion.

On his anvil, he hammered that into a rough sword shape, then forged onto either side of it a strip of the very finest tempered steel, to be the cutting edges. The whole was next put to the grindstone, and ground to more finished shape, then was filed, burnished and polished to near-completion. During these stages the distinctive, bluish, shimmering pattern emerged along the central section, according to the several ways the central rods had been woven and rewoven, and not even the smith could say what the pattern would look like until he saw it begin to appear. Most often, as in the case of the sword he made for me, it looked like intercoiled snakes, but it might resemble a sheaf of grain, curly tresses of hair or eddying waves of water.

“And besides the blade’s beauty,” he said proudly, “it has flexibility. In battle it is three times less likely to be broken or bent awry than a sword made of a single piece of metal. The snake blade is incomparably superior to the weapons of the Romans or of any other nation. However, the one real secret to its manufacture is the last step of all.”

He was now holding the finished blade—or what I supposed was the finished blade—in a pincers over his forge, while his apprentices labored at the bellows, making the wood coals and the metal glow the same pulsating red.

“And for this step, Saio Thorn,” he went on, “I must ask you please to leave my smithy while I accomplish it.”

I and Daila obediently went outside, and from there we heard a loud hissing, seething, boiling noise. After a moment, the smith came out, too, bearing the bluish-silvery blade still steaming from its bath, and said:

“It is done. Now I must measure the length of your arm, Saio Thorn, and the arc of your swing, in order to saw this blade to the proper length for you. Then we must choose a grip, a cross guard, a pommel, and must weight that hilt for the correct balance, and then—”

“But what was so secret about the last step of making it?” I asked. “The optio and I both heard. Clearly you quenched the hot blade in cold water.”

“Quenched it, ja,” he said slyly, “but not in water.
Other
smiths may do that, but not we makers of the snake swords. We long ago learned that to plunge hot metal into cold water instantly creates steam. We learned also that the steam makes a barrier between the metal and the water. That prevents the metal’s being quenched suddenly enough to acquire the temper we desire and demand.”

“May I make a guess then, fráuja hairusmitha, as to what you do use for that purpose? Cold oil? Cold honey? Perhaps cold wet clay?”

He only shook his head and grinned. “I fear, Saio Thorn, that you must be of far higher rank than a marshal—or even a king—to be told that. You must be a master smith, like myself. Only
we
know that secret, and have jealously guarded it for centuries. That is why only
we
can make the snake blades.”

The third thing that I had been carrying I handed across the table to Amalamena when we ate nahtamats in the palace dining hall that night.

“I have decided,” I said, “that I will take you with me to Constantinople only if you agree to wear this, somewhere on your person, the whole way there and back.”

“Gladly,” she said, admiring the object of crystal and brass. “It is pretty. But what is it?”

“That phial until recently contained a drop of the milk of the Virgin Mary.”

“Gudisks Himins! Could that be true? It is nearly five hundred years since the Virgin suckled the infant Jesus.” At the name, Amalamena sketched the sign of the cross on her forehead.

“Well, the phial once belonged to an abbess, and she declared it genuine. My hope is that it will help to keep you safe while you are my responsibility. It certainly cannot hurt to wear it.”

“Ne. And to lend it added efficacy, I too shall believe it genuine.” She took off a thin gold chain that she wore around her neck, and showed me the two baubles that already dangled from it. “My brother gave me these on my last birthday.” She smiled, in the mischievous way that I had often seen him do “So I ought to be well protected against harm. Niu?”

I had to agree. One of the ornaments, hanging as it did, was a tiny gold cross, slightly truncated at the top. And that was the reason for her mischievous smile—because that trinket could as well be hung upside down from the chain, when it would be the rough-hewn hammer of Thor. And the other ornament was a gold filigree tracing in miniature of Theodoric’s monogram. Now that she was threading my Virgin’s-milk phial on the same chain, the princess could he said to be
quadruply
guarded against harm. Truth to tell, though, I was secretly wishing for the phial to fend off worse things than misadventure. The lekeis Frithila had scoffed at “amuletic” medicines, and perhaps I was being just another of the “dim-witted slatterns” he had also contemned, but I hoped the phial might prove a
real
amulet and dispel Amalamena’s dire affliction.