Raptor (85 page)

Strabo languidly waved a white cloth and the doors in the arena’s perimeter walls opened. Herded out by their numerous armed warders, the Herulian captives emerged onto the sand. Every man was stark naked, except for a blotch of blue or green paint daubed on his chest—to indicate which of the two tribes he belonged to—and the separate tribes were bunched on opposite sides of the arena. Each of the men carried a Roman gladius short-sword, meaning that the fighting would have to be done at very close quarters, with no protection at all, for the captives had not been issued shields.

Strabo signaled again. The guards went back inside the arena doors and stoutly bolted those portals behind them, so that none of the contestants could flee or hide. The Heruli on either side of the arena were milling about, apparently discussing the situation among themselves, other were pointing at the men across the way, smeared with a different color. But after a few moments they all turned and looked toward the podium. So did the cityfolk in the seats, and those shouted,
“Let faírweitl gaggan!”
—urging Strabo to “let the entertainment commence!” I turned also, but to steal a glance at Odwulf. He nodded that he had done as I had instructed, and then made a wry face of “we can but wait and see.”

Strabo smiled and dallied for a mischievous little while, teasing his eager subjects. Then he lazily got up from the couch and stepped forward to the parapet of the podium to address the gladiators. If those men had never seen Strabo in person before, they must have marveled at how he was able to stare simultaneously at both companies of them. His declamation consisted of pretty much what I had said to him earlier: that these rebellious tribesmen, having flouted their king’s authority by trying to butcher each other, would now be given the opportunity to do just that, Blues versus Greens. In the event that one last man should be left alive on each side, those two would not only be granted the keeping of their lives, they also would be enlisted as honored warriors in the king’s own palace guard.

“Haífsts sleideis háifstjandáu!” Strabo concluded: “Fight a fierce fight!” Then he lazily returned to his couch and disposed himself upon it so his beaded feet could be seen by all, before he waved and let drop the white cloth for the combat to begin.

It did begin, but not in the way that Strabo and the other spectators had expected. It began in the way that I had planned and Odwulf had fomented, and we both had been hoping for. At the drop of the cloth the Blues and Greens did not rush forward upon one another. They turned the other way, toward the arena’s side walls. Some of the men, holding their swords in their teeth, leapt and grasped the parapet above them, and hefted themselves up and over it. Others stepped into the cupped hands of their fellows and were boosted over the wall. Then those above leaned down and hauled still others up. The spectators, finding naked and armed men tumbling headfirst into their laps, scrambled to get out of their way. But everyone else in the amphitheater—Strabo included—was so thunderstruck as only to sit forward and stare at the unprecedented disorder, and murmur in a chorus of astonishment.

But those murmurs turned to shrieks and bellows when the naked Heruli began wielding their swords. They struck indiscriminately, and the men, women and children tightly packed in the seats were helpless against them. Some of the spectators flung up their arms as shields, and the arms were severed and sent flying. So were fingers and hands and ears and noses and more than a few entire heads—mostly those of children, being the more easily sheared off—and also unrecognizable gobbets of flesh, and sprays and gouts and gushes and jets and spates of bright red blood.

The noise became a deafening cacophony. The Heruli yelled and laughed insanely as they slashed and stabbed. The victims who could scream did so, others only burbled through the gashes in their necks or elsewhere, and those yet unassailed were bawling and bleating and trampling each other, trying to swarm higher along the tiers as the Blues hacked their way up one side of the amphitheater and the Greens up the other. There were of course many of Strabo’s warriors posted as guards in the aisles and on the staircases, and they strove to close with the attackers, but they were impeded and shoved backward, some of them toppled by the surge of the people they were trying to defend. Meanwhile, there were many more guards who could have been helping—those who had herded the Heruli into the arena—but those were now idling uselessly
under
the amphitheater, inside the doors they had shut and bolted behind them. No doubt they could hear the commotion that was going on outside, but no doubt they supposed it to be merely the noise of the Blues and Greens slaughtering each other.

Even before Strabo himself had fully grasped what was happening, my own personal guard came unstuck from his paralysis of stupefaction and reached his left hand across his body to seize his sword. But I yanked my manacled right arm at the same time, and prevented that. Leaning sideways on the chain, I had strength enough to draw his arm outstretched between us, and Odwulf’s snake blade flashed down from behind us, chopping through the guard’s forearm, a little way beyond the manacle. As I have said, because of that man’s fatness, the iron bracelet was well embedded in his wrist flesh. So I was left with not just the chain and two manacles hung from my own wrist, but his heavy, bleeding, twitching hand as well. And I must give the guard credit for valor. Though grievously wounded, he managed somehow with his right hand to draw his sword, and fought desperately to ward off Odwulf’s succeeding blows.

By then, Strabo was on his feet, roaring at me, “You fitchet bitch, this was
your
doing.”

He had a sword, too, and he swung at me and, by rights, I should have died there at that moment. However, since I was merely an unarmed female, he had not troubled to take proper stance and careful aim, or even to swing with all his might. His sword only struck and glanced off the coiled bronze breast guard I wore. The blow alone was terribly painful and knocked the breath from my body and sent me staggering. But before Strabo could position himself and swing again, this time more lethally, Odwulf had felled the guard—and now lashed out with his sword once more, and Strabo dropped at our feet. Oddly, as I could notice even in my stunned condition, Strabo did not bleed.

“I hit him… with the flat… of my blade,” Odwulf explained, panting. “You had not instructed… I did not know… whether you wished him dead… just yet.”

“I… think… not…” I wheezed, struggling to get my breath, while I looked about the amphitheater.

The guards who had locked themselves inside the arena dens had finally emerged, seen what was occurring, and were scaling the walls and pursuing the Heruli. Everywhere on both sides of the amphitheater were bodies—limp bodies, writhing bodies, segments and bits of bodies—some lying where they had fallen, some slowly toppling off ledges or rolling down staircases. And, probably for the first time in the history of gladiatorial contests, the sand of the arena was spotless, while the great bowl of Parian white marble was running with red.

However, the Heruli had confined their depredations to the two longer sides of the amphitheater. They and their pursuers had not yet swerved toward either of the curved ends of the edifice. The people who had been sitting on those ends—including everybody seated about and above our central podium—had been able to flee unmolested to the exit-ways. But there they funneled into such a crush—shoving, elbowing, butting, biting, squirming, tearing at each other—that they were doing as much crying and screaming as anybody being actively slain. And obviously some of those people fighting to get through the doors were dying, too—women and children, certainly—being beaten on and trodden on by the bigger and more terrified and more ruthless among them. At any rate, not another person in the amphitheater was paying the least attention to us few in the podium.

I said to Odwulf, “I do not wish Strabo dead… yet. I only wish
him
to wish he were. Here, unscrew the bolt and free me of this manacle. I have no need of three hands. Now give me the dead guard’s blade. And lend your own sword and strength to assist me.” I told him what we would do, and where. “The knees and elbows. It is easier to separate joints than to hack through bones.”

Strabo was still unconscious when we commenced the cutting of him, but he instantly came wide awake. Of course he struggled like a madman, and he was an immense and powerful brute. But he had been somewhat weakened by Odwulf’s having knocked him senseless, and he was quickly weakened even further as his blood began to stream out of him. Also, he was clad only in cloth, and Odwulf was heavy with armor, and I was not any
puny
female. So, toward the last, Strabo was only screaming and pleading for mercy, as pitifully and as uselessly as every one of his unfortunate Constantiana subjects.

The amputations did not take us long. The rest of the amphitheater was still in tumult and chaos—the dead and dying now included many Heruli and numerous guards—when I finally stood up and stood over the supine remains of Thiudareikhs Triarius. But I did not address him by that name.

“Swine-man,” I called him, panting again, this time from exertion. “Until you bleed to death… you can walk about… on all fours. On your four stumps. Verily, a swine-man. Niu?”

He was silent now, but his sidewise eyes were weeping runnels of tears sidewise down his head, down his temples, to mingle with the pool of blood that was gradually covering the floor of the podium. I picked up one of his severed limbs—a calf and foot, the foot still wearing its beaded slipper—and propped that against the couch so it stood upright. Then I picked up another piece of limb—a forearm and hand—and leaned that across the other so that together they had the semblance of the crooked rune called nauths.

“And here with you I leave my nauthing-stake,” I said. “You can gaze upon it while you slowly die. Gaze upon it with whichever eye you choose. As you yourself told me, the nauthing-stake will go on uttering my revilement of you until your swine heart beats its last.”

“Come, Swanilda,” said Odwulf. “The crowd has pushed on through that doorway yonder. We can mingle with them on the stairs, and get to the street unnoticed.”

“Ja,” I said, glancing where he pointed. “Our horses, Thorn’s armor, where are they?”

“Well hidden and well housed,” he said with a laugh. “Actually inside a house, I mean. Directly across the street from this podium’s private entrance. The family were all absent—over here, to see the spectacle—so I thought: why not?”

“Well done. Go, then. I will be right behind you.” I leaned again over Strabo, saying, “Just two things more.”

His truncated limbs jerked and lifted as if to fend off a blow. But all I did was unclasp my reliquary phial from my neck chain, unstopper it and jam the crystal between Strabo’s lips, which were now a pale blue in color.

“Here,” I said. “This is the only shriving you will have. You sneered often enough at the Virgin’s milk. Now, perhaps, you may care to suckle on it while you say your last prayers.”

I stood up and looked about, to make sure that Odwulf was out of sight and hearing.

“The other thing,” I said. “I give you one small consolation in your dying. Be not ashamed that you were slain by a mere woman. I am not the Princess Amalamena.” Now I deliberately told him a lie, though I hoped that only half of it was a lie. “Amalamena is safe with her brother Theodoric—and so is the genuine pactum written and signed by the Emperor Zeno. My being captured and staying this long in captivity was only to keep you from knowing those things until too late.”

He uttered a dismal groan, then croaked, froglike, “But who… you bitch… are you?”

I said airily, “No bitch at all, not even a female predator. I am a raptor. And you hoped to breed a human son of me, niu?” I laughed. “It was not with a woman that you lay those many times, and it is not a woman who now has branded you a nauthing.”

I raised my blood-sodden skirt and undid my hip band and whisked it off. Strabo’s eyeballs bulged so very much that I thought the irises of them would slide away, like his tears, down his temples, to dissolve in the pool of blood. Then he clenched his eyes tight shut, as I spoke my last words to him:

“You were deceived and you were derided and you were outwitted and you were cut down to a swine-man and you were slain by a raptor named Thorn the Mannamavi.”

I wish I could say that everything I had planned to happen that day happened exactly as I had planned it, but that was not to be.

Concealing my confiscated, bloodied sword in a fold of my bloodied gown, I ran in the direction that Odwulf had gone, through the exit-way and down some stairs—having to leap over various trampled bodies as I went. But at a landing of the staircase my way was blocked, and I saw that Odwulf had gone no farther either. A crowd of the just escaped spectators, enraged to frenzy, had surrounded him and seized him there, and were yanking and shoving him this way and that, and were screeching imprecations at him. “One of Strabo’s cowardly guards! Running away!”

“Why is he not back there fighting those demons?”

“My beautiful daughter was killed! But he lives!”

“Not for long!”

Odwulf was trying to expostulate with them, but could not be heard above their uproar. Of course he, a professional soldier, would not draw his sword against innocent cityfolk. I might have done that, simply to save his life, but the mob was too dense and surging for me to force my way to his side in time. The man who had shouted “Not for long!” had, in the same instant, snatched Odwulf’s sword from its scabbard. Odwulf again tried to say something, and the man plunged the blade into his open mouth, so fiercely that its point emerged at the back of Odwulf’s neck.

When the blameless Odwulf fell, with his sword standing upright from his mouth, like a cross already placed as his grave marker, the crowd seemed to come to its collective senses. Realizing what a horrendous crime they had just been party to—and not knowing that Strabo was beyond inflicting any punishment for it—they scurried guiltily on down the stairs and dispersed in the street beyond. I followed more slowly, pausing to give Odwulf the Gothic salute before I left him.