Raptor (78 page)

“Splendidly,” she said, as chipper and merry as ever I had seen her. “Another whole day without any need of taking the drug.”

“Your recovery seems miraculous, indeed. And far be it from me to play the doubting Thomas. I must remember to recommend the Pautalia waters to any invalids I may ever meet hereafter.”

“Also I am as hungry as a she-wolf,” she said, laughing. “I have been munching on fruits the entire way. But now I should very much like some heartier provender.”

“The men are cooking now. Let me but change your dressing and, by then, the meal should be ready.”

When she opened for me the Swanilda clothes she wore, and the ulcer was uncovered, she did not get downcast, as formerly, but said buoyantly, “See? It is smaller yet than it was this morning!” I could not be sure of that, but I said it was. “So this bothersome chore,” she went on, “will not much longer be necessary. Go now and fetch our nahtamats. Then let us be early to bed and, after another good night’s sleep, good Veleda, I should be in even better health yet.”

As I walked back to the company, I was thinking that the cheerful cooking fires, shining their warm light upward along the cliffsides, made our encampment look like a lofty, roofless but snug and reposeful room, islanded in the black night. The men not working or on watch were already in line at the fires where the camp coquus and his helpers were serving, but they of course made room for me. One server gave me a full wineskin, and I slung its strap over my shoulder. Another handed me two wooden bowls, and the coquus was ladling into them a rich-looking stew, when we all started at a sudden bellow from the darkness up the road:

“Hiri! Anaslaúhts!”

It was the road sentry yonder, frantically warning us, “Here! Onslaught!” He managed to shout one more word before he must have been cut down:
“Thusundi!”

Well, there were not a thousand of them. But from the approaching thunder of hoofs on the hard-packed road, it was evident that they far outnumbered us. Next instant, they were upon us, and everywhere, but only briefly visible in the firelight—armed and mounted men, in Gothic armor and helmets like our own—before their horses’ hoofs tore the fires apart, into flying embers and drifting sparks. But the attackers did not wield their weapons; that first assault seemed intended only to shock us and put out our fires, for the horses wheeled away again. As it turned out, those assailants were slashing the picket ropes of our mounts and stampeding them to deprive us of them.

Everyone of our company, myself included, had dropped his food or utensils and whipped out his sword. All the others now went running to where they had left their heavier weapons, but I paused, indecisive as to where best I should make a stand. Then, abruptly, Optio Daila was beside me, dimly visible in what was left of the fires, shouting commands:

“Men! Prepare to defend on foot! Butt your spears and impale their horses!” Then he turned to me and barked, “Go! Get the princess and—”

“She is guarded, Daila.”

“Ne, she is not. That sentry had orders. If we were attacked. Slay the other traitor, then rally with us. Here he comes running now. You go and—”

“Slay?” I echoed, perplexed. “What other traitor?”

“It is obvious. Knew we decided to take this road. Must have sent word somehow. The Khazar maidservant.”

I said, or probably wailed, “Akh, Daila, Daila… misguided man…”

“Do you hear me? Go! If the princess is captured, she is hostage. Get her to the river. Try to make it downstream, away from—”

But the attackers were on us again, this time furiously flailing their swords, battle-axes and spiked maces. Daila threw up his shield to parry one horseman’s ax blow that would certainly have brained me, because I was standing stunned and paralyzed until that
crunch!
of heavy steel biting into leather woke me from my daze. I made a swing at the foeman with my own sword, and then went scampering as Daila had commanded.

It was very hard to run, with my heart so heavy that I might have been weighted by a millstone inside my breast, but I ran. And, as I ran, I reflected that Daila could not rightly be reprehended for his mistaken assumption. After all, one Khazar maid
had
tried to disrupt our plans; why not another? Of course, it was just as likely that any enemy eager to confiscate our pactum would, when our own treacherous man failed to deliver it, deduce that we had found him out—and that we, now being alerted to an enemy presence, would leave Pautalia by an alternate road. Still, even if it had been practical, in the middle of a thunderclap attack, for me to explain that to Daila, what point in it? I had gone to great lengths to make Daila believe that there
was
another Khazar servant in our company. So the grievous error was not so much to be blamed on him as on me. Once more, on me.

Inside the carruca, I found Amalamena as I had dreaded but expected. She had lighted only a single wick lamp in there; its dim glow would not have been sufficient for the sentry to see who “the Khazar” really was. But it had given him light enough to kill her with one sure stab of his blade—into her pale maidenly breast, just below the place where hung the Virgin’s-milk phial. There was not much blood from the single puncture; my beloved sister had not contained much blood to spill.

Well, I thought, it had been a quicker, cleaner, more merciful death than the two physicians had predicted for her. And she had died with pride, neither trying desperately to hold on to her last flicker of life nor pleading for surcease from the terrible slow dwindling of it. She had been happy this day, and carefree, and she had died while still being so. There was still a trace of that dimple-wreathed smile on her face, and her open eyes, though they had lost their brilliance, were yet of the winsome color of the Gemini fires.

I gently closed the ivory lids over those blue eyes, and just as gently kissed her pink-pearl lips; they were still warm. Then, with a sigh, I turned to go and join my fellows in what could only be
their
dying, too. Even from this distance, I could hear the clangor of the combat, but I knew that would not last for long. Our enemy—and I assumed it was Theodoric Strabo—having failed at taking the parchment by subterfuge, was clearly now going to seize it by brute force, and had come with forces enough to annihilate all of us. I sighed again, because it had been only this morning that I had wielded my snake blade for the first time; now I would be wielding it for the last. And Strabo’s men, though they might be detestable renegades, were yet Ostrogoths. So the only blood my sword would ever have tasted would all be that of my kinsmen.

But then I paused. I had no fear about dying, and no reluctance to do it; that was a warrior’s expectable and most honorable end. Still, it would be wasteful to die if I might possibly be of more value to my king and my people alive. Daila had wanted me to get Amalamena away to safety because, if she were not killed in this fray, she would have been Strabo’s hostage. By holding her to ransom, he could demand from her brother any kind of concession, even the giving up of all that the Emperor Zeno’s pactum granted to him. Well, Strabo could not now use the princess for that extortionate purpose. But… suppose he were made to
believe
that he had captured her. Might not a counterfeit princess—a captive, yes, but a captive held inside the enemy’s highest ranks and innermost stronghold—might she not prove a more valuable warrior than whole armies outside?

Hastily, I doffed my armor and boots and other trappings, and flung them into the bushes in the darkness beyond the carriage. I started to throw away even my precious snake blade, then thought better of that. I discarded its belt and scabbard, but I gave the sword one more blooding, though only a pretended and pathetic one. I carefully put its point into the wound the sentry had made in Amalamena’s breast, silently mouthed some words of farewell to her, rammed the sword as deep as the other had gone, and left it there, its hilt an upright cross.

I stripped down to the hip band that I still wore, then got out from their storage chest the princess’s best garments and appurtenances. With a strophion of hers, I bound my breasts so they were high and rounded and with a shadowed cleft between them. I put on one of Amalamena’s gowns, a wispy white amiculum, and found a gilded leather belt to go around my waist, and a genuine gold fibula to pin at each shoulder, and some gilded leather sandals. My hair had been pressed down by my helmet, so I fluffed that out as femininely as I could make it. I would have liked to prettify my face with some cosmetics, but the distant clamor of battle had now quietened, so I merely dabbed some of the princess’s rose-essence scent at my throat, behind my ears, at my wrists and between my breasts, just to mask the brómos musarós that clung to Amalamena’s garments. Then I knelt beside her body and, with a murmured apology, unclasped the gold chain with its three bangles, took it from her neck and fastened it around my own. Last of all, I tucked the imitation pactum down inside the blousing of my gown—and I had barely done that when my captor came for me.

With a noise like that of lightning cleaving the sky, the curtains of the carruca were suddenly, violently thrown asunder and, simultaneously, the man who did it gave a roar of triumphant discovery. He was standing outside on the ground between the carriage’s front and rear wheels, his thick-muscled arms holding the curtains wide apart, but so massive was he that his helmet nearly brushed the roof. He continued to utter that bestial roar as I instinctively—not pretending—shied away from him as would a real and fearful maiden. Because he wore a Gothic helmet, I could see nothing of his face except his beard, his mouth and his eyes. The beard was yellow-gray, chest length, disheveled, bristling like the spines of a hedgehog. The roaring mouth was open, strung from lip to lip with strands of saliva, and behind them were long, almost equine yellow teeth. The red-lidded and red-veined eyes might have been those of a freakishly giant frog; they seemed to scan the carruca’s entire interior from wall to wall without even swiveling, because each eyeball was unalterably skewed outward.

Theodoric Strabo—or, as his sycophants obediently called him, Theodoric Triarius—ceased roaring at his discovery of me, and, in a voice that grated like tombstones rubbing together, demanded, “Ist jus Amalamena, niu?”

I nodded, as if unnerved to speechlessness, and lifted the gold chain to show him its hanging adornments. He leaned forward to peer at them in the dim light, first with one eye, then the other, and grunted contemptuously.

“Ja. As described to me. An imbecile female who wears, right next to a holy symbol, the monogram of her tetzte brother. Ja, you are she.” He jerked his spiky beard toward the sword-impaled body of the princess. “And who is that, then?”

I said, with pretended difficulty, “She… was Swanilda. My cosmeta. She begged me… to do that. She was terrified of being… raped… or worse.”

He laughed coarsely. “And you are not, niu?”

“I am well protected,” I said, trying to sound as if I believed that, and I again showed him the chain’s bangles.

“Protected? By which protector, niu? The pagan Thor? The Christ? Your nauthing brother?”

“Ne, by this third amulet.” I held it up apart from the hammer-cross and the monogram. “My phial of Virgin’s milk.”

“Akh! Your milk, wretched maiden?” He guffawed so loudly as to make the closed curtains on the opposite side of the carruca tremble. “Why, virginity is a quality even more tempting to a ravisher than is your inviolable royalness. I shall greatly enjoy plucking the kernel from your—”

“The milk of the Virgin Mary,” I interrupted. “A genuine relic.” I cast my eyes aloft, put on a simpering devout expression and, with my free hand, sketched a cross on my forehead.

He instantly stopped laughing and dropped his voice from its loud grating to a hoarse whisper. “Say you so?” He leaned forward again and brought one of his eyes so close that it almost touched the phial, and he too made the sign of the cross. “Well, now,” he said in the same hushed rasping, sounding both awed and disappointed. “A man cannot insult the Virgin Mary by despoiling a maiden wearing her holy relic, now, can he?”

I silently gave thanks—not to any sanctified virgin or to her improbably brimming breasts, but to my own quick thinking—for having revealed Strabo to be so superstitious and so easily subdued. But then he reached out one big hand and seized my wrist not very respectfully, and spoke my title with even less respect.

“Come, Princess, and join us at the campfires. We have matters to discuss.”

He yanked me from the carriage so hard that I might have landed face first on the ground, but he had two warriors accompanying him, and they caught me and set me upright and held me pinioned by both arms. They also took the opportunity to fondle me in various places, while Strabo leaned again into the carruca and plucked my sword out of Amalamena’s body.

“A good blade,” he muttered, stroking some of her blood off it so he could see its pattern and try its edge. “But far too small for any of
my
soldiers. Here, Optio Ocer, you have an infant son.” He tossed the sword to one of the men holding me. “Give him a proper start on his life’s career.”