Raptor (69 page)

Indeed, I found almost all the
words
in the Slovene language ugly, because most of them combine a disagreeable harshness and a repellent juiciness. We Ostrogoths were unable easily to pronounce any of those people’s personal names, so we avoided even inquiring what they were. We arbitrarily addressed every one of them, man or woman, as “kak, syedlónos!”—because that raspy-mushy series of sounds is their own way of hailing “you, saddle-nose!”

I think it may be the peculiar shape of their noses that accounts for one other unloveliness of the Slovenes: their air of woeful and eternal melancholy, apparent even among the youngest children. And I will tell shortly why I think that.

It was in the Slovenes’ part of Midland Dacia that we came to the only difficult stretch of our road, the incline leading up to and over the Thorny Pass—the Shipka, as it is called (or slurp-coughed) in the Slovene language. We had to hitch a double team to Amalamena’s carruca to draw it up, over and gently down that pass, but it was not intolerably hard work. The Shipka took us across the same Haemus Mountains that I had earlier seen, because those mountains, after making a great arc down from the Danuvius, here run from west to east. And when we descended from the Shipka, we were in a broad, long, unwooded, fertile valley between that range and another parallel mountain chain which, because it is much less lofty than the Haemus, is called the Shadow Range.

The valley, of which I had previously heard mention, the Valley of Roses,
is
the world’s most extensive garden of rosebushes. The oil extracted from the rose petals is avidly sought after by every myropola in both the Western and the Eastern Empire for the making of rose-scented perfumes. Since it takes nearly five thousand Roman
pounds
of rose petals to fill a single tiny hemina flask with their liquid essence, that oil sells for a higher price than the purest gold or the rarest spice.

During our company’s whole journey so far, I had been trying at every opportunity—as I had promised the lekeis Frithila—to make the princess laugh, and to keep her in good cheer. I regaled her with nonsensical jocularia that I had heard in Vindobona, and bits of humorous gossip about the denizens of that and other places I had been. My prating caused her frequently to smile, occasionally to chuckle, sometimes to laugh aloud. But it was not I, it was the Valley of Roses that made her laugh more uproariously than I had ever yet heard her do.

We arrived in the valley in very late summer, so the rose harvesting season was some months past. But the valley was still abundantly flowered with countless millions of the more mature blossoms, and their voluptuous aroma was all about us at every hour, so intense that it seemed to tinge the very air a rose hue. We broke our journey briefly in the town of Beroea, so Amalamena and Swanilda could put up for a night in the town’s one taberna—what the Slovenes somehow manage to call a krchma—and there have their clothes laundered, and replenish and refresh their sundries.

So, while at the krchma, the princess bought, among other things, two cosmetics compounded nowhere else but in that valley: a face powder ground from rose pollen and a pomade compounded from the rose petals. I was present when the princess graciously remarked to the proprietor that she envied his being able to dwell in such a sweet-scented place. The man grunted, in genuine surprise, “Sweet scent? Sladak miris?” Then he made a sour face and growled viciously, “Okh, taj prljav miris! Nosovi li neprestano blejo mnogo!” Translated from his barbarous language, it meant “Akh, that filthy stench! It gives all of us here a perpetual nose-ache!”

And that sent Amalamena off into peals of laughter, the notion that any people could be so obtuse as to disprize their privilege of living always surrounded by blissful beauty and fragrance. The incongruity of it must have been especially poignant to one who knew that she herself had little time to go on seeing and inhaling and admiring and enjoying the bounties of this world. But, as Frithila had said, the princess was ever inclined to laugh where others might have wept. And that occurrence at the krchma is what makes me believe that it must be the Slovenes’ squashed-in noses, hence a deficient sense of smell, hence an inability to appreciate aromas and probably many other good things as well, that makes those people so incurably morose and unhappy.

We went on, crossing the Shadow Range of mountains—no arduous feat—then proceeded southeastward through the Hebrus River valleys of Rhodope and Europa, the provinces that had anciently been the land called Thracia. Most of its inhabitants are as dark-haired as the Slovenes, but swarthy of skin instead of ruddy, and all speak the mellifluous Greek tongue and have comprehensible, pronounceable names for themselves and for everything else. Also, they all have unremarkable noses and dispositions much sunnier than the Slovenes’.

Throughout the journey, and notwithstanding the gossip and jocularia I told to Amalamena, she never found anything so hilariously funny as that episode in Beroea. However, she did seem pleased when I asked her to tell
me
things of which I was ignorant. So, whenever we rode side by side, she talked most entertainingly and instructively about her royal family, the Goths in general and the countries through which we traveled. Of course, those lands were as foreign to her as they were to me, but she had rather more deeply studied their annals than I had done. For example, at one place along the way, she told me:

“Not far west of here, two hundred years ago, the Roman Emperor Decius won a battle with the Goths. But thirty thousand Roman soldiers and Decius himself died doing it. Victory or defeat, no matter, it has always cost the Romans dearly when they have fought the Goths. So you see why the empire has long feared and hated us, but had to accommodate us, and has tried every other means than war to divide and fragment and exterminate us.”

I muttered, “I hope to persuade the eastern court that
that
can be risky, too.”

But I was less interested in remote history than in hearing Amalamena’s more immediate and personal accounts of herself and her family. She told me of her late father’s many kingly virtues and martial exploits, and she even more enthusiastically recounted his many beneficent deeds that had led his people to call him Thiudamer the Affectionate. “And my uncle was much the same,” she said. “So he was fondly known by all as Walamer the Faithful.”

She told me of her royal mother, Hereleuva—and her voice choked a little when she related how that queen died “of the dread disease called kreps” while still a comparatively young woman. Furthermore, said Amalamena, her mother had much distressed the family because, on her deathbed, she had renounced her lifelong Arianism and converted to Catholic Christianity. “Of course,” said the princess, “she was in terrible agony, grasping for any slightest hope of relief, but that desperate measure gave her none. So we, her children, have forgiven her, and we trust God will. Or all the gods.” Then, as was her wont, Amalamena brightened again. She fingered the three talismans on the chain about her slender throat, and said lightly, “No doubt it was because of my mother’s inconstancy that I do not now give my full devotion to any one religion. I am quite willing to accept whatever good
any
of them can vouchsafe. Does that make me despicable, Thorn?”

“I think not,” I said. “It seems a very prudent course. But then, I am no slave to any religion myself. I have not yet found one that seems to me right and true.”

The princess also told me of her sister Amalafrida, older than both herself and Theodoric, who was already married “to a herizogo named Wulteric the Worthy, much older even than she is.”

“And you, Amalamena?” I asked. “When and whom do you plan to wed?”

She gave me such a sad look that I was ashamed of my jesting remark. But, after a moment’s silence, she too spoke jestingly. She waved a hand at the land around us and said, “For that, I should have been born hereabouts, and a long time ago.”

“What has the time and terrain got to do with marriage?”

“I have read that once, somewhere in these parts, there was a king who decreed that, on a certain day each year, every maiden, widow and other marriageable woman of whatever age should be herded inside an unwindowed dark hall. Then all the marriageable men of the kingdom were likewise herded in. Each man had to choose a woman—in the dark, only by sense of touch—and marry her. It was the law.”

“Liufs Guth! Are you suggesting that you are an ugly woman? Or an old or an undesirable—?”

“How like a man to say that!” she interrupted, laughing. “Why do you instantly assume that only the women in that dark hall were ugly?”

“Well… now that you put it that way…” I mumbled, and I think I was blushing—not because she had caught me up, but because she had said of me, “How like a man…” Probably also I was blushing because I had made her laugh, and that pleased me, for I was eager to give Amalamena cause to be fond of Thorn: as a man, as a cheerful companion, as a congenial fool, as anything at all.

“Anyway,” she went on, “I am certain that my sister Amalafrida married Wulteric only because she thought him very like our father. I have found no man that resembles our brother.”

“Eh?”

“I was but a child, and so was he, when Theodoric went away to live in Constantinople. I had only a dim memory of him as a boy. And then, just months ago, he came back, a man grown, a young king—a man to catch the eye and fire the desire and inspire the adulation of any woman. Even his own silly sister.” She laughed again, but with scant humor this time. “Akh, I need not tell you, Thorn. You know him. Although, of course, you would not regard him as a woman does.”

Oh vái, I thought ruefully, would I not?
Had
I not? In one breath, the princess called me a man. In the next, though inadvertently, she reminded me of what I really was. It made me wonder: did I find Amalamena so attractive, even adorable, simply because she was blood sister to Theodoric? In any case, she had also made it plain that, in her eyes,
Thorn
was not at all comparable to him.

And she continued, albeit unwittingly, to twist the knife in my heart, saying, “Even if, like the Queen Artemisia of olden time, I could wed my own brother, he would not have me. During the brief time he was in Novae, and captivating all the maidens there, I could tell that he prefers women more… robust than I am.” I remembered the sturdy peasant girl Aurora and silently agreed. Amalamena sighed and added, “So, since I am not likely to meet such another as he, perhaps it is just as well that I am… I mean to say, I am getting rather tired, Thorn. Would you help me down, and beckon Swanilda to attend me? I shall ride in the carruca for a while.”

The princess was less and less often now riding her mule beside me, and was spending more of each day reclining in the carruca, as if it had been a sickbed. When she was at my side, she less and less often laughed aloud at my sallies of humor and my valiant attempts at playing the droll. Amalamena smiled only tolerantly, for instance, at the story I had heard in Vindobona: about the man with the two lady lovers who gradually plucked him bald. Still, the princess made no complaint of any distress. She did not appear drawn or haggard, and I never once saw her wince with pain. I did not know if she had been managing, during the journey, to continue drinking ass’s milk and bathing in bran-water. But when, one day, I noticed on her the faint scent of a woman’s monthly indisposition, though on her face no look of it, I took Swanilda aside to make discreet inquiry about Amalamena’s condition. The cosmeta affirmed that “the princess has some slight bleeding,” and, when pressed, would only add modestly that “it is not of the debilitating sort to interfere with her traveling.” Whether as a result of the bleeding or of the mere progress of her disease, Amalamena became still more pale and frail than when I had first met her, and I would hardly have believed that possible. I could now literally watch her pulse beating at her temples and at the side of her neck and at her slim wrists. Indeed, I almost fancied that I could see through her, so very nearly transparent had she become. Nevertheless, in my view at least, the princess looked not sickly or wasted, but increasingly more beautiful.

Partly because she had made it clear that I was not the man for her—and partly, I suppose, because I had always secretly known that I was not—my feminine feelings now came to the fore. I regarded Amalamena no longer as someone to be desired or sought, but as a dear sister to be cosseted and cared for. I stayed close by her whenever possible, tried to do every least thing for her that I could, often rode far off the road to pick flowers for her. In truth, I appropriated so many of Swanilda’s less intimate duties that the cosmeta could scarcely hide her amusement. And Daila did not even try to hide his scowls, so I realized that I was behaving most unlike a marshal, and moderated my attentions to the princess. Anyway, we were getting close to our destination, and I intended there to entrust her care to Constantinople’s foremost physician.

Near the southern coast of the province of Europa, we came to the Via Egnatia, the wide, well-paved and fairly thronged Roman road that carries commerce and travelers west to east, all the way from the port of Dyrrachium on the Hadriatic Sea to the port of Thessalonika on the Aegean to the port of Perinthus on the Propontís, and to various lesser ports along its route, the road finally terminating at the great metropolitan port of Constantinople on the Bósporos. Our column joined the traffic on that thoroughfare and followed it into Perinthus, where we paused again for a day and a night, just to allow Amalamena rest and refreshment in the well-appointed sort of hospitium that is called in Greek a pandokheíon.

The princess told me that this port of Perinthus had once, long ago, rivaled Byzantium (as Constantinople was known then) in its harbor traffic, its prosperity and grandeur. Perinthus had much declined from that eminence in recent centuries, but still I was thrilled to be visiting it, because its view out over the seemingly limitless blue-green Propontís was my first-ever look at any sea anywhere. The city occupies a small peninsula, so on three sides there were piers and moorings where vessels were being loaded or unloaded and, out in the harbor roads, many more ships were waiting their turn.