Raptor (76 page)

For a moment, I floundered, trying to frame a response that would cause her the least distress. At last I said, choosing my words most carefully:

“If I had been Veleda when I first met your brother, ja, I might very well have fallen in love with him. And perhaps he with me. And perhaps by now you would have real reason to suppose… However, Theodoric has known me always as Thorn. If I were now to reveal my… my true self to him, he would banish me from his sight forever. I would lose not only any chance of loving him as a woman, I would also lose his friendship for Thorn. And with it the marshalcy, the rank of herizogo—heights impossible to a woman—that I have achieved by being Thorn. So…” I spread my hands. “As a matter of cold practicality, I have refused, I still refuse, I
will
refuse to let myself love Theodoric, or to entertain any smallest wishful thoughts of him. If I may speak even more frankly, Amalamena, let me say this. Were I really a man, or were I the mannish woman you may suspect Veleda of being, then it would be
you
that I would—”

She said abruptly, “That will do. I regret that I asked the question. This is ridiculous. Here I am, quarreling over a man who is my own brother, and with a woman who prefers to be a man, and who now professes to—
vái!”
She gulped the last of her wine, and said sorrowfully, “My parents had prescience in naming me Moon. This is a situation fraught with lunacy, if ever there was one.”

“Ne, my dear Amalamena,” I said gently. “There is nothing lunatic about loving. And if you can love a brother, surely you can let a sister love you.” I waited, then said, “You have but to tell me how.”

She made herself small in the bed, and pulled the covers almost up to her eyes, and trembled visibly, and finally said, in the voice of a tiny child, “Hold me. Only hold me, Veleda. I am so very frightened by my dying.”

I did that. I doffed my robe and slid under the covers and slipped my parchment package under the pallet, beneath my body, and clasped Amalamena to me. Except for her ever present gold chain bearing the gold miniature of Theodoric’s seal, the gold hammer of Thor and my Virgin’s-milk phial, the princess wore only a hip band like my own, to keep the bandage pressed upon her abdomen. And, as I had noticed at our first meeting, her breasts were maidenly, no bigger than my own. So I was able to hold her close, safe, warm. And all the night I held her so, and during all the nights left to us thereafter, and that is all the loving we ever did, or ever needed to do.

Though I was early up and dressed the next morning, the oikonómos Myros came calling before I had a chance to have a word with Daila. With a sniff, he said that Zeno was well satisfied with my document ceding Singidunum to him. Myros added, with another sniff, that the Sebastós even sent his compliments on my having dictated the covenant with such “legalistic” perfection. The chamberlain was not being eunuchally sarcastic or supercilious; he continued to sniff and wrinkle his nose, and I knew why. Amalamena’s brómos musarós had permeated my own clothing, or perhaps my hair or even my skin. But Myros did not inquire about the smell, and I did not volunteer anything, so he concluded his message by saying:

“Therefore, Presbeutés Akantha, you and your company may depart whenever you are ready, and the emperor trusts that you will be doing so without delay.”

“We are ready to leave,” I said, “as soon as we all have broken our fast. And as soon as you can organize your marchers and musicians, and get them here to escort our column to the Golden Gate.”

He stopped sniffing and blinked. “What? Another formal escort? Well, now…”

“Please do not tell me it is unheard of. I believe this is a most significant pact that your master and mine have agreed on. It deserves some public fanfare, would you not say so?”

He sighed, said, “The escort will be provided,” and went away.

I immediately sought out Daila, who told me, before I could even ask, “The little cosmeta departed at the midnight hour, Saio Thorn, unobserved by any of the cohortes vigilum or, I think, by any secret spies or anyone else at all. I took her out through the Rhegium Gate, which is not much frequented even in daytime. From there, she will have had no trouble in finding her way around the city walls to the Via Egnatia. And she is a bright little wench; she will have no trouble, either, in finding the roads that will take her west and north to Singidunum.”

“Good,” I said. “But if any misadventure does befall her on the way, we ought to hear of it, because the rest of us will be traveling those same roads behind her.”

“To Singidunum?” asked Daila in some surprise. “I thought, since you entrusted the pactum to the cosmeta, you would have other plans for us.”

“She is carrying the document secretly. I hope to convince all and sundry that
we
are carrying it.” I showed him the imitation I had made, and told him why I suspected that Zeno had no intention of its ever reaching Theodoric. “I shall have this on my person the whole way, and I fully expect an attempt will be made to snatch it from me. I do not know what kind of attempt—a sneak thief, a skulking slayer, an open attack by seeming road bandits…”

“Or something unpredictable,” growled the optio. “An apparently fortuitous landslide, a forest fire, anything.”

“Ja. Meanwhile, we are transporting to Theodoric one thing more precious even than the pactum—his royal sister. So I am going to stay always as close to the princess as her new maidservant does. During every day’s journey, I will ride beside her carruca. Every night, whether we make camp or find lodging indoors, I will sleep at the foot of her bed, with one eye open and with my sword unsheathed. Since I will be thus occupied and frequently out of your sight, Daila, I am laying a heavy responsibility on you. I will do my best to protect Amalamena, but I am relying on you and your command of our men to protect her
and
me
and
the false document I will be carrying.”

He said, a little frostily, “You could have relied on that in any case, Saio Thorn. What need for the second parchment and the ruse and the secret messenger?”

“A precaution only, old warrior, no reflection on your fighting ability. Remember, I have seen you in action. Still, if we
should
be overwhelmed, we can die knowing that our death has not furthered the perfidious aims of Zeno and his myrmidons Strabo and Rekitakh, but actually has thwarted them. Theodoric
will
have his pactum and everything it promises to him and our people.”

Not much thawed, Daila said, “Better yet for us not to die at all. My every effort—and that of every man—will be devoted to that end.”

“As you say, better yet. Now see that you and they break fast, and do it most gluttonously. One last good feed at Zeno’s expense.”

I ate voraciously myself, and personally carried a heaped tray to Amalamena, and—after she had downed a dose of mandragoras—demanded that she eat some food, though I could not force her to eat a great deal. Then, for the first time, doing as Swanilda had instructed me, I changed the dressing of the princess’s ulcerated scirrhus. I had to do that over her objections that she was still capable of doing it herself—and while I did it, she turned her head away and gnawed at a fist and squeezed her eyes tight shut and trembled all over, consumed by embarrassment and shame.

I tried to ignore the fact that I was intimately touching the quivering bare belly of a beautiful young princess, that I was seeing her naked from her navel to her pudendal crease, it being not much concealed by its silver-gilt fluff of pubescence. I sternly reminded myself that she was now my beloved sister, that her body was not greatly different from my own, except that it was ailing and needed my sisterly attentions.

Peeling off the old bandage released the lesion’s stench and—I repeat—there are no words for that. The appearance of the open sore I will not try to describe, for I have no wish to recall what it looked like. I will only say that I was heartily glad that both the princess and I had already eaten. So, whatever had been my feelings when I began the task, they were all replaced by a sick horror—and that was replaced as swiftly by a surge of pity. Thereafter, at every subsequent change of Amalamena’s dressing, I had to suppress—not any lust or salacity, not prurient curiosity, not
even
nausea at the dreadfulness of the job—only my impulse, every time, to weep for the poor girl, decaying before she was yet dead.

That morning, after my attentions, Amalamena was so weak and woebegone that I had to assist her to put on her traveling clothes, and then I had to call one of my bowmen to carry the princess’s belongings while I and a Khazar maid helped her to the courtyard and into her waiting carruca. Then and later, I noticed that Amalamena seemed to wilt a little more each time her bandages were changed. I do not know whether it was the natural progression of her disease, or whether some of her vital spirit drained out with each released effluvium of odor, or whether, with each new reminder of her condition, she simply lost another degree of her will to live—but she was perceptibly fading, day by day and hour by hour. And every day, too, she required bigger and more frequent doses of mandragoras to keep the pain at bay.

That morning, though, the princess did seem to enjoy our festive traverse of the city, from the xenodokheíon to the Golden Gate, with palace attendants marching fore and aft of our column and making cheerfully loud music. She kept the curtains open on her side of the carriage, so she could see the sights and could wave to the people who watched us pass, but she kept the curtains closed on the other side, where ostensibly her servant was riding. Daila led the procession and, as I had instructed him, made sure it wound its way up and down many streets and avenues, and through many marketplaces and monumental squares.

I rode beside the carruca, again wearing all my finest and most martial and most marshalish regalia, now beaming broadly and flaunting the folded, purple-splotched parchment like a captured flag. The noise of our parade made the people on the streets stop and stare, and others came running from their houses or their work. They surely had no earthly notion of who we were, or what we represented, or what was the package I waved, but they cordially returned our waving and they cheered
íde!
and
blépo!
and
níke!
as if we were going off to war on their behalf. Should I ever need them, I thought, I could call several thousand inhabitants of Constantinople to testify that I had left their city carrying an official, emperor-sealed document. But I mainly hoped that Zeno was again eyeing us—along with everyone else in the Purple Palace—and was being equally deluded by my mummery.

The marchers and musicians stopped at the Golden Gate, but the music continued to play as our column went on, and only gradually faded behind us, and the high city walls even more gradually sank below the horizon, and we were again among the traffic of walkers and riders and carts and livestock on the Via Egnatia. Two days out from Constantinople, we again hastened past the obscene Daniel the Stylite, and for two or three nights we still could see behind us the glow of the pháros, but it was not discernibly sending any signals. We kept to the Via Egnatia, camping by the wayside each night, until we reached the port of Perinthus. There the princess and I (and, I told Daila, the princess’s Khazar maid) lodged in the same harborside pandokheíon that had been such a pleasant place on our earlier stop in that city.

When our company left Perinthus, though, we did not take the road that had originally brought us south to it. We went more west than north, now, up the valleys of the Rhodope Mountains, across a corner of the province of Macedonia Secunda, to the town of Pautalia in the province of Dardania. That town, we were informed, was noted for its curative mineral springs, to which many ill and crippled persons resorted from all over the empire. So, in hope that Amalamena might get some benefit from those waters, I broke our journey there for three days and three nights, and the princess and I took lodging in another well-appointed pandokheíon. During the third night we spent there, something totally unexpected did happen—something that would indeed relieve Amalamena of that wasting and agonizing and killing carrion worm. But, before it did, it would very nearly put an end to the existence of both Veleda and Thorn.

We had not yet seen or suspected anything against which to defend ourselves. But Daila, as he had done at every stopping place so far, both posted sentries and set a mounted patrol roving randomly about. Our lodgings at Pautalia were as easy to guard as any camp we had made in the open, because Pautalia is not so much a town as a loose collection of hamlets. The numerous hot springs are scattered at some distance apart, so there has grown up around each of them a separate cluster of buildings. Each spring has a pandokheíon that consists of a central inn and a group of small cottages combining sleeping quarters and a private bathhouse. And each has accreted the shops of blacksmiths, suppliers of travel goods, cartwrights and the like. At the pandokheíon we chose, I engaged a cottage for myself and another for Amalamena “and her maidservant,” and our men bedded down in courtyards and stableyards and in the fields round about. So we made a compact community around which the sentries and patrols could guard all the approaches.

Since we were all more or less within sight of each other, I instructed the princess to make occasional appearances in daylight outside her quarters, but dressed in Swanilda’s clothes and with a kerchief hiding her fair hair, to maintain the pretense that a cosmeta shared the cottage with her. And, at each sundown, I strolled conspicuously from my quarters to hers, wearing sword and armor and helmet, so all could assume that I was sleeping across her doorsill or at the foot of her bed.

As I have said, I slept in her bed, and held her close each night until she was fast asleep. I also helped her with her bathing, because the warm and astringent mineral waters sapped her strength more than any exertion did. At first, she was reluctant to make use of the therma, insisting that a piecemeal sponge bath would be adequate.