Raptor (91 page)

It was on a beautifully sunny, mild May morning that I rode away from my farm, hoping that I looked more like an aimless vagabond than like a king’s marshal. There was no way I could disguise the quality of my Velox II, but I had deliberately bidden my stable grooms to refrain from currying or combing him during the past two days. Also, my outer garments were of the roughest, and though I had personally honed and polished my fine snake blade, I was wearing it in a scuffed old scabbard.

I went first into Novae and to the palace, to let Theodoric know that I was on my way. We made no great ceremony of our leave-taking, but he cordially wished me “raítos stáigos uh baírtos dagos”—straight ways and bright days—and, as he had done at another time, he gave me a mandatum identifying me and bearing his monogram seal. Then, when I emerged again into the palace yard, I found that the steward Costula, whom I had left holding the reins of my horse, was now holding the reins of two. On the second sat the cosmeta Swanilda, dressed for the road and with a pack behind her saddle.

“Gods dags, Swanilda,” I greeted her. “Are you also traveling today?”

“Ja, if you will let me join you,” she said, in a slightly wavery voice. As I approached, I saw that her face was puffy and her eyes red, and I judged that she must have been weeping ever since her mistress died.

I took the horses’ reins, waved Costula away and said politely, “Of course, Swanilda, you are welcome to ride a way with me, until our ways diverge. Where are you going?”

“I wish to ride
all
the way with you,” she said, her voice more firm. “I have heard of the long journey you are undertaking. I wish to be your shield-bearer, your servant, your companion, your… everything else you would like me to be.”

“Come now. Hold a moment—” I began, but she talked on, eagerly, anxiously, even urgently.

“I have wept for two beloved mistresses, and now I have none, so now I beg to have a master. To have
you
for my master, Saio Thorn. Please do not refuse me. You know that I am a good rider and that I have traveled much. It was with you that I traveled from here to Constantinople. And later it was at your command that I traveled a greater distance—all alone—and dressed in your clothes. Do you remember? You taught me how to pass for a man. How I was never, in view of other persons, to run anywhere or throw anything…”

In the years that I had known Swanilda, I had never heard her speak so many words. But now she had run out of breath before she ran out of words, so I interposed a few of my own.

“Very true, good Swanilda. But on those journeys we were at least traversing the more or less civilized lands of the Roman Empire. This time I am venturing into terra incognita, among hostile peoples, possibly
savage
peoples, and—”

“Which is good reason to take me with you. A man alone is viewed with suspicion, seen as a menace. But a man with a woman close by his side appears tame and harmless.”

“Tame, eh?” I said, and chuckled.

“Or, if you prefer, I can again wear some of your clothes. It might be equally advantageous if I am taken to be your apprentice. Or even”—she looked away in embarrassment—“your love-boy.”

I said sternly, “See here, Swanilda, you must be aware that I have for all these years—partly in memory of your dear mistress Amalamena—forborne from taking wife or consort, although many choices were offered me. Vái, the lady Aurora even offered me
you.”

“Akh, I can understand your not having wanted to take me formally for wife or consort. I am no Amalamena in any respect, and I am not even a virgin, but neither have I had experience enough to be very competent in the ways of a woman with a man. However, if you will accept me informally, only for the span of our journey together, I will promise to do my best in that regard, and I will strive to learn whatever you care to teach. But I do not ask any promise in return, Saio Thorn. When the journey is over, or at any other time, you have only to say, ‘Swanilda, enough.’ I will uncomplainingly cease to be your loving companion and thenceforth will be only your humble servant.” She held out a trembling hand, and her mouth trembled too when she said again, “Please do not refuse me, Saio Thorn. Without a mistress or a master, I am a forlorn and outcast orphan.”

That touched me. I had myself once been an outcast orphan. So I said, “If you are to pretend to be my wife or my consort, you must try from now on not to address me as Saio or master, but simply as Thorn.”

She brightened on the instant and, even with red eyes and puffy face, looked almost radiantly pretty again. “Then you
will
take me along?”

And I did. To my eventual and everlasting sorrow, I did.

Again I relied on the Danuvius as my guide, and Swanilda and I followed it downstream, retracing the route I had taken when I fled from Strabo’s Scythia. Although, as I have said, I have ever been disinclined to do the same thing twice, I now took a rather proprietorial pride and pleasure in pointing out to Swanilda various landmarks and sights worth seeing, things I remembered from my earlier journey, and my doing that made this excursion seem quite new and different.

From having traveled with Swanilda before, I had not at all doubted that she would be a capable and congenial companion, and so she proved. She had not always been a dainty domestic, she told me; she had grown up in a forest clan of hunters and herders. She was as proficient as I at bringing down small game with the sling—and she was definitely better at the cooking of it. (She had even brought along a little iron cooking pot, which I would never have thought of doing.) In fact, she taught me some expedients of cookery and of eating that I think the old master woodsman Wyrd had not known. I learned that, when one cooked meat, a few birch twigs in the pot would prevent its burning or sticking. I learned that frogs are easy to spear at night, using just a reed torch and a sharp stick, and that their hind legs are meaty and delicious to eat—something else I would never have thought of—when boiled together with lion’s-tooth greens.

I had always thought highly of Swanilda. Now I came to treasure her, not just for her practical comradely capacities, but also for her appealing feminine traits. I remember how, on our first night out from Novae, she almost magically transformed herself from the day’s rough-dressed wayfarer to a soft, sleek and fetching young woman.

At twilight, we stopped at a wide, sun-warmed, grassy clearing beside the river, and cooked and dined on a hare I had taken along the way. Then I went down to bathe in the shallows, dressed again and returned, and got under my sleeping fur before I undressed for sleep. Not until then, when the night was full dark, did Swanilda likewise go to bathe. She splashed about down there for a good while, and I wondered why she was dawdling. As it turned out, she had only been waiting for the moon to rise. She left her coarse traveling garments beside the river and came up the clearing—walking slowly, tantalizingly, visible to me the whole way—clothed in moonlight and nothing else.

As she melted into my arms, I said with a mixture of amusement and admiration, “My dear, you certainly know the right raiment to wear, whatever the occasion.”

She laughed, then said shyly, “But… other things… I told you… you may have to teach me…”

Well, I have already indicated that there was little I could teach her about woods traveling. So, yes, I did teach her some other things, and she was an eager student and an apt learner—perhaps the more so because I accomplished that teaching more playfully than didactically. For example, I recall an occasion when I entertained her by recounting all the Greek words pertaining to the female breast, words I had learned while in Constantinople. Swanilda found them both instructive and humorously intriguing, because our own Old Language has but one single word to refer to everything in that area of the human anatomy.

“What we call the brusts, the entire bosom,” I said, “is called in Greek the kolpós. But each of these”—tenderly I cupped one of hers—“is a mastós, and this cleft between them”—I stroked it—“is called the stenón. And this pink forepart of each mastós is the stetháne”—my finger drew a circle around one of them—“and this little nub in the middle of the stetháne is called the thelé. And
akh,
behold what the thelé does at my lightest touch. In that alert state, Swanilda, it is called the hrusós.”

She shivered delightedly and asked, “Why do you suppose, Thorn, the Greeks saw fit to make up all those words?”

“They have always been a famously inventive people. And they are reputed to be far more sensual and abandoned than the northern races, such as ours. Perhaps the Greeks devised those words—and there are many others, descriptive of other human parts and functions—to aid them in the making of love most voluptuously. Or perhaps to instruct youths and virgins who are novices at the art of making love. As you have noticed—and at this moment are demonstrating—the mere telling of the words and the showing of where they apply have a marvelously exciting effect on those parts of a woman.”

As might be surmised, we both were finding our journey so gratifying that we did not hurry it, but were rather more disposed to make it last as long as possible. Still, after a leisurely two weeks or so, we came to the riverside fortress town of Durostorum and there took lodging in a well-appointed hospitium. I left Swanilda luxuriating in the establishment’s therma while I went to call at the praetorium of the Italica Legion. The commander whom I had met there before had, this long while later, been retired. But his replacement was, of course, also subordinate to Theodoric, so was most hospitable to a marshal of the king. We sat and drank of one of Durostorum’s innumerable wines and he told me the latest news from Novae. He had had only routine reports, no word yet of any threatening movements by Strabo, with or without his presumptive Rugian allies. So there was no need or excuse for me to interrupt my quest and return to Theodoric’s side.

“Neither is there any need,” the commander said helpfully, “for you to go on plodding laboriously overland, Saio Thorn. Why do you not engage a barge here and float comfortably down the Danuvius? You will reach the Black Sea rather more quickly, and much less travel-worn.”

I made inquiry along the riverside about the possibility of hiring a barge. And right there I came upon the first spoor of those early Goths whose trail I sought.

The second or third barge owner whom I approached was a man almost old enough himself to have been one of those ancients. He asked, somewhat incredulously, why I should want to pay the considerable price to ride a barge clear to the Black Sea when I would be freighting no trade goods. Since there was nothing secret about my mission, I told him forthrightly that I wished to look for the homeland that my Gothic ancestors had once occupied.

“Akh, then a river barge is the way to find it, right enough,” he said. “You will not need to circumnavigate the whole long shore around that sea, searching for that land. I can tell you—the Goths long ago lived in just one particular area there. The delta called the Mouths of the Danuvius, where the great river debouches into that sea.”

Somewhat incredulous in my turn, I asked, “How would you know that?”

“Vái, cannot you tell from my speech that I am of the Gepid Goths? Besides, it is the business of us bargemen to know who lives where on our river. So of course we know who
used
to live where. Not just last year, but centuries agone. And it is well known to us that in olden time the Goths dwelt among those Mouths of the Danuvius. Very well, then, if you have the money to squander, I and my crew will set you on that delta.”

I engaged him on the spot, bade him make ready for departure on the morrow and gave him part of the money in advance, instructing him to stock the barge with ample provisions, including feed for two horses—and, I said as a happy afterthought, an assortment of good Durostorum wines sufficient for two passengers. Then I went back to the hospitium, to join Swanilda in bathing voluptuously and at length, for what would probably be the last time in such an elegant therma until we returned to civilization.

The next morning our barge shoved off as soon as the crewmen had led our horses aboard and tethered them securely amidships. I was helping Swanilda stow our belongings and lay out our sleeping furs in the canopy-covered stern of the barge, when the old owner called to me from his place at the steering oar:

“Would yonder horseman be looking for you?”

I raised up and saw, on the dock we had just left, another horse and rider. The man was sitting high in the saddle and shading his eyes to gaze after us, but he was not hailing or making any urgent gestures. I could see only that he was slight of figure—from our midstream distance I could not make out his features—but there was something vaguely familiar about him.

“A servant from the hospitium, perhaps,” I said to Swanilda. “Did we go off and leave something of ours there?”

She cast a glance of inventory over our belongings and said, “Nothing of any consequence.”

So I signaled to the old steersman to continue on, not to turn back. And as soon as we had rounded a curve of the river, that person on the dock was out of sight and forgotten.

The whole of our voyage downriver might have been a continuation of the indolent life I had lived for so long in Novae. The Danuvius flowed at a much faster than horseback pace, but, here in its lower stretches, was not roiled by any rapids or interrupted by any cascades. I had no work to do, no exigencies of land travel to contend with, no need even to think about acquiring food. I did occasionally dangle a line in the water to add fresh fish to our provender, and a time or two, just for the experience, took a turn at the steering oar. Swanilda helpfully did some sewing repairs on the bargemen’s clothing, and trimmed their hair and beards when they needed it. But she and I mainly lolled through day after day, basking in the warm summer weather and admiring the passing scenery and the other craft on the water. At night, we had other enjoyments. The only effort I made to pursue my quest was to inquire of the old barge owner whether he knew how his branch of the Gothic nation had come to be called the Gepids.