Raptor (94 page)

“And Wandalar’s father was before my time,” said Fillein, “but I knew his name. King Widereikhs.”

“Known as the Wend-Conqueror,” said Baúhts, as she slid flat rounds of dough among the hearth ashes to bake into trenchers.

I had by now decided that Fillein must be this household’s keeper of kings’ names, and his wife the keeper of their auknamons. But I was puzzled by something, so I said:

“Venerable Fillein, how can you call those men kings? You said yourself that the entire Ostrogoth nation was in bondage to the Huns until the time of the brothers Thiudamer and Walamer.”

“Ha!” he exclaimed, and his creaky old voice strengthened with pride as he explained. “That never stopped out kings from being kings, or our warriors from being warriors. And savages the Huns were, indeed, but clever savages. They knew our men would never take commands from
them.
So they let the royal succession continue uninterrupted, and our warriors took commands from our kings. The only difference was that we now fought not any of our ancestral enemies, but the enemies of the Huns. No matter. To a warrior, any fight is a worthwhile fight. When the Huns, driving westward, wished to vanquish the miserable Wends of the Carpatae valleys, it was our King Widereikhs who led our warriors in helping to accomplish that. And later, when the Huns wished to push the Vandals out of Germania, it was our King Wandalar who led our warriors in that exploit.”

“As you say, the Huns pushed every other people westward, including almost all the Goths. How is it, then, that
you
are living here?”

“Young marshal, reflect. Romans or Huns or any other race of men may rampage back and forth across the earth. The various parcels of land may change masters many times. The ground may be drenched with blood or strewn with bones or pitted with graves or littered with rusting and rotting armor. But those things wear away and vanish within a single man’s lifetime. I myself have seen them do so.
The earth itself does not change.”

“Do you mean… a man owes loyalty only to the immutable earth? Not to any auths or king, or kinship?”

He did not at once answer that, but went on:

“Balamer brought his ravaging Huns through here a hundred years ago. But our fathers had held and worked these lands for more than a hundred years before that. True, the Huns swarmed over our territory and called it theirs, but they did not lay it waste—and for good reason. They needed the produce of
all
the lands they conquered, to feed and clothe their armies, so they could go on marauding through Europe.”

“Ja,” I murmured. “I can see that.”

“But what did those Huns know of harvesting from the earth? To make the earth keep on providing, there had to be people who could work the lands and marshes and waters. So, although the Huns forced our kings and warriors and young men either to go westward with them or to flee before them, they also allowed the old folks, women and children to keep possession of the homesteads—and to share their harvests with the Huns’ supply trains.”

There was a break in the conversation while Swanilda and old Baúhts fetched our meal from the hearth to the table—the wild-boar bacon boiled with goosefoot greens, heaped on the bread trenchers. Because the night was now full dark and the hearth fire was the only light in the room, old Fillein took two burning brands and stuck them into slitted blocks of wood, and set those on the table as torches for us to eat by. While his old wife took a trencher out to wherever Maggot was to eat, Fillein also drew mugs of beer from a cask in the room’s corner and set them before us, saying, with a light cackle of laughter:

“Observe, Saio Thorn. We still do abide by some ancient Gothic traditions. Because this delta grows no decent beer-making grains, we must buy our beer from the traders in Noviodunum. We could as cheaply buy Roman or Greek wine. But in ages past, the strong-beer-drinking Goths scorned those watered-wine drinkers as effeminate weaklings. So…” He cackled again, raised his mug and wished us “Háils!” Then he reverted to the conversation:

“You asked earlier, Marshal, whether a man owes his loyalty to his native earth or to his ancestral auths. I suppose each man must make that choice for himself. When the Huns gave leave to the nonwarriors of the Ostrogoths to go on living and working here, the greater portion of them proudly disdained that concession. They refused to be parted from their warrior kinsmen, and went west with them, choosing homelessness and landlessness and often wretchedness for the rest of their lives.”

I said, “For many thousands of those people, the rest of their lives was not long.”

Fillein shrugged his meager shoulders and said, “Well, some few chose the assurance of survival. They stayed here. Among them were my great-grandparents, and other elders who were the great-grandparents of dear Baúhts here. Clearly, I cannot disprize those people for the choice they made, or Baúhts and I would probably never have existed. However, as subsequent generations were born, some of the young folks were not content to be perpetual drudges of the Huns. I was one of those. And believe me, Marshal, I was not always as you see me now.”

He crammed the soggy last bit of his trencher into his mouth and, as he munched it with his gums, he regarded the hands with which he had been eating. They were old hands, gaunt and gnarled and veined and blotched with the spots of age.

“These hands were once young and strong, and I thought they deserved better work than marsh-grubbing.”

“Akh, ja,” his wife put in. “He was such a fine, strapping young man in those days that he was called Fillein the Firm. His parents and mine had arranged our marriage when we were little more than children. They wanted to make sure, you see, that we would stay on the land. But when Fillein decided to go for a soldier, I did not try to dissuade him. I was proud of him. I swore to our parents that I would stay and do the work of us both until he should return.”

The old woman and the old man smiled toothlessly but warmly, lovingly at one another. Then he turned again to me.

“So I ran away and joined the forces of our King Wandalar, who was then marching against the Vandals. Like him and all his other warriors, I was of course campaigning on behalf of our oppressor Huns. But at least it seemed a more manly work to be doing.”

I said wonderingly, “You
fought…
with King Wandalar? But… but that would have to have been at least seventy years ago.”

Fillein said simply, “I told you. I was young then.”

Swanilda spoke up, just as wonderingly as I had done. “So you and your lady Baúhts have been married for even longer than
that…”

He smiled and nodded. “And for most of that time living together, right here. I am glad that I have my warrior days to look back on. But I was glad, too, when I was wounded in battle, severely enough to be retired—and glad to come home to my dear Baúhts. And here we have dwelt ever since, under this very roof, on this land that was settled by our fathers’ fathers’ fathers.”

The old woman said complacently, “When the hammer of Thor has been swung in its binding circle over a boy and a girl, they are bound for life.”

I was again slightly nettled to hear mentioned the name of Thor, so I sought to change the subject. “Let us hark back even before the kings Wandalar and Wideric—”

“Ne, let us not,” Fillein interrupted. “Not tonight. We old folk are accustomed to go to bed at dark, and it is long past that, and this room is where we sleep. Young Maghib has a hayrick behind the house. You two young people may take your sleeping furs to the loft above this room.”

As Swanilda and I lay together in the dark loft, we refrained this night from doing anything that would make noise to disturb or scandalize the old folks in the room below. We only talked quietly for a time.

Swanilda said, “Do you not find it touching, Thorn? That a man and a woman could have been married for so long?”

“Well, out of the ordinary, certainly. A man of Fillein’s great age could be expected to have outlived three or four wives, dead in childbirth.”

Swanilda shook her head. “Baúhts told me, while we were preparing the meal, that God—or perhaps she meant the god Thor who bound them—never blessed them with children.”

Because peevishness seemed to have become my usual response on hearing that name, I said sourly, “Perhaps that beneficent Thor sent them Maggot, not just for an acquaintance, but as a substitute son.”

Swanilda was silent for a little. Then she said: “Thorn, did you notice the two trees growing behind this house?”

“Eh?”

“An oak and a linden.”

That stirred something in my memory, but I was getting too drowsy to dredge for it. Anyway, Swanilda saved me the trouble.

“A story from the Old Religion,” she said. “An aged man and woman once loved one another so long and so devotedly that the Old Gods, in admiration, offered to grant them any wish they might desire. The man and woman asked only that, when their time came to die—”

“They be allowed to die at the same moment,” I said. “I remember now. I too once heard that story.”

“The wish was granted,” said Swanilda. “And the gods turned them into an oak and a linden, so that they might go on flourishing side by side.”

“Swanilda,” I chided her gently, “you are weaving a whole legend around two very ordinary old peasants.”

“It was you who said just now that they are
out
of the ordinary. Tell me truthfully, Thorn. Do you think you could live happily with one woman for all the rest of your life?”

“Iésus, Swanilda! No person could possibly say that, except in retrospect. Fillein and Baúhts could never have
foretold
their long association. It is only now, in old age, that they can look back and
remember
it.”

Swanilda said quickly and contritely, “Akh, Thorn, I was asking for no
vow…”

“You were asking for a prediction. So I suggest that you put the question to old Meirus the Mudman. He claims to have some prowess as a wise-sayer. Ask him what you and I will be remembering when we are as ancient as Fillein and Baúhts. Now, please, dear girl, let us sleep.”

The next mottling, Fillein wished to see what sort of catch he had made in some fowling nets he had lately spread in the marsh rushes, and invited me to go with him. Swanilda offered to stay at the hearthside and help Baúhts with some sewing, because, as the old woman admitted, her eyesight was “not what it used to be.”

“And surely, venerable Fillein,” I said, “your strength is hardly what it used to be. If your nets are far off, simply point the way, and Maggot and I will see to them.”

“Vái, old I may be, but not yet as old as some. Why, King Ermanareikhs did not die until he was a hundred and ten years old. He would have got even older, had he not committed suicide.”

“King Ermanareikhs?” I said. “Who was he?”

As I might have expected, old Baúhts readily supplied an auknamo for him. She said reminiscently, “Akh, Ermanareikhs, now. He was the king that many have called the ‘Alexander the Great’ of the Ostrogoth people.”

But she had no more to add to that, so I waited to hear that king’s history from Fillein on our way to inspect his nets. We descended the hillock and crossed several fields of the silvery-green feather grass, where the ground was firm enough. However, it soon became bogland, ever more fluid underfoot, and before long we were having to step high, lifting each foot with an audible
thwock
from the clinging muck. We were by now deep among the reeds that rose higher than our heads, and, as we sloshed and sidled through them, frogs jumped out of our way, water snakes undulated away, wading birds either took wing or stalked haughtily away. Meanwhile, for all his years and seeming fragility, Fillein slogged along as sturdily as I, and talked as he went.

“You inquired of Ermanareikhs, Marshal. When I was young, I heard from my elders what they, when young, had heard from
their
elders, and I was made to memorize it, and it was this. Ermanareikhs was the king who first brought the Ostrogoths from the far north to the Mouths of the Danuvius here. Then as now, this land was called Scythia, but today it is no longer inhabited by the degenerate Scythians. To make room here for his own nation, King Ermanareikhs drove those Scythians off into Sarmatia, where the remnants of them still live in their primitive squalid ways.”

I murmured, “Ja, I have heard curious stories of those once-great Scythians.”

Fillein nodded and went on, “However, before the Ostrogoths ever got
here,
they had passed through the lands of many other peoples. So, along the way, Ermanareikhs made all those sundry peoples acknowledge the Ostrogoths as their superiors and protectors. In effect, Ermanareikhs was king of many more peoples than just his Ostrogoths. Hence his being acclaimed an equal of that legendary Alexander the Great. Unfortunately, all his grand exploits went for naught when he suffered his first and only defeat. The Huns came swooping out of the remote east, and Ermanareikhs was by then a hundred and ten years old—too old to mount a proper defense. Seeing the Huns victorious, he took his own life as penance for his one failure. Now, be careful here, Saio Thorn. Walk only in my tracks. There are bottomless quaking-sands on either side of us.”

As he bade me, I walked behind him. But I had been getting increasingly skeptical throughout his recital, and now I said:

“Gudisks Himins, man, that king would have had to live something like
two
hundred and ten years to have engaged in all those events, from the Goths’ arrival here to their subjugation by the Huns.”

Fillein said petulantly, “If you already know everything there is to know, why did you solicit what little I thought I knew?”

“Forgive me, venerable Fillein. Evidently there are many histories. I only wish to correlate them, to sift from them the
true
history.”

He grumbled, “Well, there is one thing about King Ermanareikhs that cannot be disputed. After him, none
but
men of the Amal line have been kings of the Ostrogoths. Not necessarily the eldest son of each king, mind you, but the best-qualified Amal descendant. To illustrate, Ermanareikhs himself had an eldest son. That prince was called Hunimund the Handsome, but Ermanareikhs designated a less handsome, more capable nephew to be his successor.”