Raptor (92 page)

He did not; he could only say, “What do you mean? That is our name. You might as well ask why is this river called the Danuvius. It simply
is.”

Gradually the river widened and in time we floated on past the widest part of it that I had heretofore seen, and
still
the river broad ened. Eventually we were drifting among wide-apart, low-lying, wooded but uninhabited islands and islets and knolls and hillocks. Then the forests on those bits of land and on the farther banks began to diminish, until there were no forests, but individual trees. Then there was only underbrush, eventually giving way to reed beds and swales of marsh grass and floating pallets of tangled weed. The circumjacence was not improved by the swarms of blood-prickers and other insects that arose from the mud flats, very nearly as numerous and predatory and maddening as I had known them upstream of the Iron Gate. But it was at about this point in our voyage that the barge owner swung his arm about and announced:

“Here you are, then. The Mouths of the Danuvius!”

“Iésus!” I exclaimed. “Our Gothic forefathers were satisfied to live
here?
In a swamp?”

“Akh, do not disdain it. This is a rich land and a vast one. We are yet more than forty Roman miles from where the many mouths of the river spill into the Black Sea. And these marshlands stretch for many more miles than that on either hand. In all, this delta is of more sprawling extent than many an entire Roman province. And far more bountiful than some.”

“Not in beauty,” murmured Swanilda.

The old man said drily, “I think, dear lady, our forefathers gave precedence to other things than beauty. They took heed first of livelihood, and these Mouths of the Danuvius gave abundantly of that. Look you at all the fishing boats still plying these channels, because the waters here teem with succulent fish. Perch, carp, catfish, a hundred other varieties. And have you not noticed the immense flocks of birds? Heron, egret, ibis, pelican. And the islets and hummocks are also home to the animals that prey on the fish and the birds—boar and wildcat and glutton and marten…”

His enthusiasm was persuasive. I looked about me again, now seeing the place with the eyes of those long-ago Goths who had arrived here after crossing all of northern Europe, seeking a habitable place to settle, and who had more than likely arrived here hungry.

“Ja, the Goths waxed fat and happy in these parts,” the barge owner went on. “They smoked and salted the surplus meat, and they collected the furs and feathers and down, and they traded most profitably in those commodities on all the shores of the Black Sea—even to Constantinople and beyond. Why, the Goths would never have left here had not the invading Huns uprooted them and swept them westward.”

“Then who,” I asked, “are the people manning all these fishing craft roundabout?”

“The inhabitants now are mostly Tauri and Khazars—who also know a good dwelling place when they see it. But some few of the old-time Goths managed to hide here from the marauding Huns—or they returned after the Huns were obliterated. Ja, here and there resides a family of Goths—perhaps a sibja or a gau, nothing so numerous as a tribe—still or again fishing and trapping and fowling and trading, and thereby living comfortably. You will find them if you stay here a while.”

“But stay where?” asked Swanilda, because there was nothing in sight any larger than the fishing boats.

“Noviodunum,” said the old man. “We will be there tomorrow. It once was a fair-sized city, until the Huns sacked and burned it. But what remains still thrives, because the river there is deep enough to give passage and anchorage to the Black Sea merchant vessels. So there are several gasts-razna offering decent enough lodging.” He paused, then laughed. “And you will see quite a sight when you first espy one of those seagoing ships coming into Noviodunum.”

He was right about that, because we saw one the next day, at the same time we sighted the town—both of them at a great distance. The waters and the riverbanks and the other bits of land thereabout are of almost equal flatness, and Noviodunum consists entirely of buildings only a single story in height. So the bulky, apple-bowed, two-masted Black Sea vessel looked like a misplaced mountain creeping across the level landscape and cautiously negotiating the twists of the channel, and its size was even more exaggerated by the smallness of the fishing boats and other minor craft that shared the river with it, and it fairly towered over the town it was approaching. It all made for a vision so incongruous as to seem dreamlike.

By the time our barge reached the town, the big merchantman had already tied up offshore, and small skiffs were busily ferrying goods to and from it. Our crewmen made us fast to a dock and I helped them coax and lead the two horses from barge to shore. Then I stepped onto the bustling dockside street for a look about. Of the throngs of people, most were dark-haired and dark-skinned: Khazars and the Tauri, whom I assume to be the Khazars’ racial cousins. But there were a number of fair-haired and fair-skinned persons of clearly Germanic origin. Also, as would be expected in any port this close to a sea, there were other persons of just about every nationality on earth: Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Slovenes, Armenians, even here and there a black Nubian or Ethiope. And there were as many languages being spoken. Some were those of the individual peoples I have mentioned, but the most generally spoken (and loudest) was a sort of sermo pelagius, or port traders’ speech, compounded of words of
all
those languages, the tongue evidently best spoken and understood by everybody.

Among the vessels moored near ours was a dromo of the Moesian Fleet, so I accosted its commanding navarchus, who of course spoke Latin, and asked him if he could recommend to me any particular hospitium or taberna in the town. While Swanilda and the bargemen put the saddles and packs on the horses, I paid the barge’s owner, thanked him for a pleasant voyage and left him casting about the docks for a possible freight he could take back upriver. Then I led Swanilda and our mounts to the suggested lodging place. It called itself a pandokheíon, being kept by Greeks, but it was much less than luxurious and not overly clean. However, the navarchus had told me it was the best in Noviodunum, so I engaged a chamber for Swanilda and myself, and stable stalls for the horses.

The pandokheíon naturally boasted no therma, so Swanilda set the servants to drawing and heating water for the basins in our room, and prepared to bathe. Meanwhile, I asked the proprietor if the town had a praefectus—or a kúrios, or a city elder, or whatever his honorific might be—on whom I could pay a courtesy call as the king’s marshal. The Greek had to ponder the question, then said:

“There is no one officially designated as master of the city. But you might call on Meíros the Mudman.”

“Singular title,” I muttered.

“He is probably the oldest resident, certainly one of the foremost merchants, hence he is acknowledged the senior personage here in Noviodunum. You will find him in his warehouse near the dock you just came from.”

The warehouse would have been as undistinguished as any other I had ever visited, except that its dark, dank interior was pervaded by a rank, almost fetid odor. I stood in its street doorway, peering about, trying to see through the gloom the source of that smell. Then a man came out of the shadows, saying “Welcome, stranger” in six or eight different languages, a few of which I could comprehend. He was an old man, exceedingly stout, and I took him to be a Khazar from his olive complexion, hooked nose and voluminous curly beard, so black that it belied his evident age.

I returned his greeting—in just two languages: “Salve” and “Háils”—and held out to him my document of credentials. But as soon as he joined me in the light of the doorway, he seemed to recognize me, for he said amiably:

“Saio Thorn, of course. King Theodoric earlier sent an advice that you were to be expected, and just an hour ago I was apprised of your arrival. Allow me to introduce myself. Meirus Terranius in Latin. Meíros Terástios in Greek. Or, in my native tongue, Meir ben Teradion.”

I blurted, in the Old Language, “Ist jus
Iudaíus,
niu?”

“Ik im, ja. You have an aversion to Jews?”

I hastened to say, “Ni allis. Nequaquam. But it is… well, unusual to find a Jew accounted the senior personage in any community of the Roman Empire.”

“An anomaly, ja. Or perhaps an
inelegancy,
as the Khittim would say.”

“The Khittim?”

“The Romans, as they are named in my native language. And I wager, Marshal, that you have already heard me called by another name.”

“Er… ja, I have. But I would hesitate to address anyone as Mudman. I supposed the agnomen to be not exactly complimentary.”

He chuckled. “Purely descriptive. I am the man who trades in that commodity.”

“You trade in
mud?”

“Surely you smell it. This building is full of it.”

“But… to whom do you sell mud? And where? Is there any place in the world that does not already have its own mud?”

“Mine, as you have noticed, is especially odoriferous mud.”

“I should think that would make it especially worthless.”

“Akh, you do not allow for imagination, and the value that ingredient can add to anything.”

“I suppose I do not, since I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Imagination, young man! Most merchants deal merely in
things.
They are but peddlers. I deal in
fancy.
You see, I was not always a merchant. In my young and wandering days I was variously a poet, a minstrel, a storyteller—in hard times, even a khazzen, which is an augur, a wise-sayer. But those were ill-paid occupations, and I was getting older, seeking to settle. So, on a day long, long ago, I found myself here at the Mouths of the Danuvius, and I looked around. I saw many a man getting wealthy, trading in furs or fish or feathers. The trouble was that all the profitable products of the delta were already spoken for. There was nothing left untaken in these marshlands except the marsh itself.”

He paused and gave me an arch look, so I said, “The mud.”

“Ja! The distinctively stinking mud of this delta. Mere peddlers would not have given it a second sniff. But I—
I
had imagination. Also I had the khutzpa of an augur, and my days as an augur had given me experience of human gullibility. So I bought little pots and filled them with that mud, and I offered it as a cataplasm for rheumatic joints or wrinkled flesh. And people bought it—vain, aging women and pain-racked old men—on the premise that the most efficacious medicine is always the most unappealing. I even had the audacity to give the awful mud an awful name—saprós pélethos, rotten ordure—and to set an exorbitant price on it. The repellent name and the outrageous price made it absolutely irresistible. For years and years now, I have been selling the ghastly muck to rich Khittim as far away as Rome and Ravenna, to rich Yevanim as far away as Athens and Constantinople and to rich men and women of every other nation in between. The saprós pélethos has made
me
as rich as any of them. Akh, I tell you, imagination is the magic ingredient!”

“I congratulate you. And your imagination.”

“Thags izvis. Of course, once having exerted my imagination, there has since been little need for me to exert anything else. Selling mud takes no great attention or effort. I do not have to exist, as most tradesmen do, in a state of perpetual anxiety and desperation. That is why I have ample leisure to busy myself with civic and provincial affairs, and occasionally to perform as a wise-sayer for those requiring that service, and frequently to do favors for such notables as our military magister Theodoric. And his visiting marshal. Allow me, Saio Thorn, to present you with a potful of my miracle mud. You are too young to be rheumatic, but perhaps you have a wrinkled lady friend…?”

“She is not yet aging, thags izvis. Anyway, I expect to be out in the marshlands myself. If need be, I can procure my own mud.”

“Of course, of course. Now, how may I assist you, Marshal? Theodoric’s message represented you as a traveling historian, and asked that you be accorded every convenience. Are you seeking history in these marshlands?”

“And wherever else it may be found,” I said. “I know that this is where the ancestral Goths resided before they were pushed westward by the Huns. I know that, while they lived in these parts, in addition to their peaceable pursuits of fishing and trapping and trading, the Goths became also seafaring warriors, and raided many cities, from Trapezus to Athens.”

“Not exactly,” said the Mudman, raising a finger. “The Goths were ever foot soldiers and horse soldiers. Land-lobbes. The seafarers were the Cimmerii—so called in the old histories. Those were actually the people now called Alani, who also inhabited the Black Sea shores. The Goths persuaded the Alani to transport Gothic warriors on those raiding expeditions—just as you employed bargemen to bring you hither. The Alani provided the seamanship, the Goths did the fighting and plundering.”

“I will make a note of the correction,” I said.

Meirus went on, “Those sea-raiding Goths were famous—or infamous—for the brevity and cruelty of the message they always sent ahead of them to the next city their ships approached. In whatever language they employed, the message consisted of just three words. Tributum aut bellum. Gilstr aíththau baga. Tribute… or war.”

“But that all ended, did it not, when the Goths eventually made alliance with Rome, and learned the ways of peace, and began to absorb Roman culture and customs…?”

“Ja, the Goths then enjoyed a golden age of peace and plenty, for fifty years. Until the Huns came, under their chieftain Balamber.” Meirus dolefully shook his head. “Earlier, the Romans had used to say of the Goths, ‘God sent them forth as a punishment for our iniquities.’ Then it was the Goths saying of the Huns, ‘God sent them forth as a punishment for our iniquities.’ “

“And all men know the history of the Goths since then,” I said. “What I now hope to find out is what the Goths did, and where, before they settled here around the Black Sea.”

The Mudman sighed a great, gusty sigh. “Truly I am old, old, oh vái, but not quite that old. And my powers of wise-saying extend only into the future, not the past. You have said you will prowl the marshlands. You will find there at least scattered remnants of the Goths. Perhaps among them you will find other old men, and perhaps they will remember things told by their fathers and fathers’ fathers. Let me lend you a reliable guide, Saio Thorn.” He turned and called to where some men were working deep in the shadows of the warehouse, “Here… Maggot!”