Raptor (95 page)

“Very interesting, good Fillein,” I said sincerely, “and information new to me.”

That seemed to soothe Fillein’s ruffled feelings. He said, “We are past the quaking-sands morass now, Saio Thorn. The path ahead is clear to see and easy to follow through the reeds.” He even stepped aside to let me take the lead.

As I strode on ahead, I prompted him, “So Ermanareikhs bequeathed his crown to a nephew…?”

“Ja, his nephew Walavarans. As Baúhts would tell you, that king is known to history as Walavarans the Cautious. Next came King Winithar the Just. And after him came the kings of whom I spoke last night. Tell me, Saio Thorn, has this latest king, Theodoric, yet earned an auknamo for my dear Baúhts to add to those she has memorized?”

“Ne, but I am sure he will. Doubtless a memorably complimentary auknamo.” And then I bellowed suddenly and profanely,
“Akh! Skeit!”

“Theodoric the Excrement?” Fillein said with a straight face. “Hardly complimentary. By the way, Marshal, I meant to warn you, there is open water ahead.”

Since I was already standing neck-deep in it, I simply glared at him, high and dry on the bank above me, doing his best not to break into a triumphantly malicious cackle.

“As long as you are there, Saio Thorn, you might save an old man a wetting. Would you retrieve the catch for me, niu?”

He pointed off to my right and I saw the nets. They had been cunningly placed. The water in which I was immersed was either a tributary or some random small channel of the Danuvius, about as broad as a Roman road and evidently only man-deep, bordered on both sides by reedy banks, from one of which I had so foolishly toppled. In all this wilderness of reeds, the stream was an obvious place for water birds to alight when they came down to nest or feed or just to rest for the night. So Fillein had stretched three nets across the breadth of it, at intervals some distance apart, and each of those had snared five or six sizable birds that, like myself, had not paid sufficient attention to where they were going.

I breasted the water and, half walking, half bobbing, propelled myself to the closest net, finding it to be made not of any cord but of painstakingly braided and knotted reed fibers. I was starting to disentangle a large, dead egret—and noticing that the bird, in its death struggle, had severely torn the meshes—when Fillein called to me:

“Do not bother with that, Marshal. Drag the nets over here entire. They will all need mending, anyway.”

While I was doing that, Fillein was going up and down the bank on his side of the stream, feeling about under the surface and bringing up small objects of some sort. When I had the last of the nets at the bankside, I hauled first myself, then them, up onto dry ground. Fillein joined me, carrying his tunic hem turned up before him like a basket. He let it fall and there spilled out a bustellus or so of glistening blue mussels.

I asked him, “How could you have carried this burden of nets and birds—and now shellfish—all the way back to your house? It is going to be a considerable challenge for both of us.”

“Who wants the birds?” he said as he ripped an egret loose from the meshes, quickly plucked out its long dorsal plumes, then flung the cadaver far off into the reeds. “The martens and gluttons will thank us for them.”

So he went on, taking only the shoulder plumes from egrets, the head plumes from herons, the curly crests from pelicans and—to my mystification—breaking off and keeping the slender curved beaks of the ibises.

I asked, “What possible market can there be for
beaks?”

“The lekjos buy them. Medici. Physicians.”

“What on earth for?”

“To be blunt, Marshal, for
skeit
—a word you used a little while ago. A physician binds the two parts of the beak tightly together, saws the tip off clean and ties a leather bag to the larger end. Then, to ease the misery of a costive patient, he rams the tip of the beak far up into the man’s backside and gushes into him a curative, skeit-inducing clyster. Now, Saio Thorn, while I am working and you are just sitting there idle, you might usefully pluck one of those dead sheldrakes for us to take home. Ne, on second thought, let us take two of them. To celebrate this good catch, we might as well treat Maghib to a decent meal also.”

So, when we were done with our separate labors, we went back the way we had come, I carrying the two ducks I had plucked and the bundle of nets enclosing the mussels, Fillein carrying the precious feathers and ibis beaks. And that night, though Maggot again was given his meal outdoors, all five of us feasted deliciously on wild duck stuffed with mussels and baked in the hearth ashes. Later, in the loft, as Swanilda and I lay replete and drowsy, I amused her by telling how the king’s august marshal had spent the day being ordered about by an ancient peasant, and being given menial work to do, and even being unceremoniously dunked in a stream by that lowly old man—and how the king’s marshal had meanwhile learned many things.

Next morning, when we were breaking our fast, the old man said, “I have decided, Saio Thorn, that today I am going to inflict you and your inquisitiveness and your disbelief on someone other than myself.”

“Come now, venerable Fillein,” I said. “There are other questions about the old times that I would like to put to you.”

“Ne, ne. I and my old woman and your younger one will spend today in mending my nets. I wish to do that without distraction. You can go and put your questions to my neighbor Galindo.”

“Your neighbor?” I echoed, for I had seen no other houses in the vicinity.

“Akh, there are no
near
neighbors anywhere in this delta, but you can get to Galindo’s abode and back again by nightfall.”

“Galindo. That is a Gepid name, is it not?”

“Ja. Since he is a Gepid, he may regale you with a totally different version of local history. He has traveled even farther than I ever did. In his youth, Galindo served with a Roman legion somewhere in Gallia.”

“I am certain that I will find him less interesting to talk to than you, venerable Fillein. But I value your advice. How do I find him this Galindo?”

“I have already given directions to Maghib. He will guide you there. Galindo being a Gepid, therefore lethargic, he has burrowed himself away as reclusively as an oyster, in one of the remotest barrens of these marshes. He lives alone, without even a woman, and shuns any company. But at least the trails are on firm ground all the way from here to his hermitage, so you and Maghib can ride the horses.”

“If he is so averse to company, how do you know he will see even a king’s marshal?”

Fillein scratched in his beard. “True, your being a marshal will not impress Galindo. But mention my name and he should receive you not too grudgingly. Of course, being a Gepid layabout, he will not bestir himself to feed you. I will have Baúhts wrap some morsels from last night for you and Maghib to carry with you.”

Outside, Maggot was saddling the two horses, and doing it with little hums and whistlings of childish good cheer. I remembered how Meirus the Mudman had said, “Do not spoil the creature,” so I assumed that this must be one of the few occasions in Maggot’s life when he had not had to lope alongside a mounted master. But when Baúhts and Swanilda brought our packets of provisions, Maggot watched me closely as I vaulted astride my Velox, then he tried to emulate me—but too energetically, for he went clear over his saddle and fell in a heap on the other side, to the great admiration of us all, including the horses. I realized that Maggot never
had
been “spoiled.” He never had straddled a mount at all. So I bade him change horses with me, and that gave him the seating security of Velox’s foot-rope. I was not just being the gracious master; I did not want to be repeatedly delayed on the trail while he fell off and got on again.

For part of the forenoon, Maggot was unwontedly quiet—concentrating either on trying to stay aboard Velox or on the trail directions Fillein had given him. After some time, though, he began tentatively to talk and before much longer was being the typically voluble Armenian. I was rather grateful for his prattle. In the endless grassland we were crossing, under its vast blue sky flecked with puffball clouds, there was nothing interesting to see or hear—or even to think about, except how
much
grassland and sky there was—so Maggot’s garrulity was some relief from boredom.

His effusion consisted mainly of accounts of his fráuja Meirus’s more marvelous feats of foreseeing and wise-saying, every instance of which, according to Maggot, had resulted in tremendously increased profits for the Meirus mud establishment, but none of which, according to Maggot, had put a single additional nummus in the purse of Maggot or any other of Meirus’s workers. For which reason, said Maggot, he was exceedingly anxious to put his talents to more personally profitable exertion. If, he said, he had such a provably good nose for sniffing out the best grades of mud, he believed he could sniff out much more valuable substances in or on the ground. Having said that, he gave me a sidewise look and added:

“The fráuja Meirus said that you will retrace the old track of the Goths all the way from here to the distant shores of the Wendic Gulf.”

“Ja.”

“And that gulf shore, it is called the Amber Coast?”

“It is.”

“And amber is found there in great quantities?”

“It is.”

“Will you seek for amber yourself while you and the lady Swanilda are there?”

“Not seek it, ne. I have other business. But if I should stumble on some, I assuredly will not step over it.”

There, Maggot dropped the subject of amber, and began to talk of inconsequentials, cleverly leaving it to me to argue with myself the possible utility, of taking north with me a person who kept his nose to the ground, so to speak. Well, he did not
have
to say anything more; he being an Armenian, the nose in question was perpetually and obtrusively in plain sight. However, he did finally make another reference to his talents as we approached a miserable pimple of a hut. “You see, fráuja, how good I am at finding things? This has to be the place to which old Fillein directed me, the residence of old Galindo.”

If it was, then old Galindo was sitting outside it, visible for long before we got there, because either he was almost as big as his house or it was not much bigger than Galindo. Indeed, the “residence” was only a rough dome of sun-dried mud, looking no more habitable than the mud bubble that a swamp sometimes belches up. But its occupant had fenced it off from intruders as formidably as if it had been a fortress city. He could not have been often beset by horsemen on that trail—Maggot and I had seen not one all morning—but, nearly two stadia distant from his door, he had dug a ditch across the path, wide and deep enough to halt a cavalry charge.

The ground was solid enough thereabout so that we could probably have circumvented the obstacle. But I decided to respect it, at least to the degree of dismounting and leaving Maggot to hold the horses while I went on foot, clambering across the ditch and then walking to where the man stolidly still sat. I waved amiably to him, and received no response, and not until I stood directly before him did he do or say anything at all. Then, without even looking at me, he said only:

“Go away.”

He may not have been
quite
as old as Fillein, for he was somewhat less wrinkled, and possessed a few teeth, but he was at least as old as my onetime companion Wyrd would have been by this date. He was all gray hair and whiskers that merged into his gray wolfskin robe, so that he seemed only a heap of hair with some few facial features at its upper front. I could understand why he was outdoors, his windowless mud hut being obviously nothing but a sleeping shelter. His hearth was a few blackened stones on the ground, alongside which were ranged what appeared to be his only belongings—a cooking pot, an eating bowl, a water jug.

I said, “If you are Galindo, I have come a long distance to speak with you.”

“Then you must know the way back to wherever you came from. Go there.”

“I came here from the abode of Fillein, an acquaintance of yours. He told me that you once served with a Roman legion in Gallia.”

“Fillein always has talked too much.”

“Might that have been the Eleventh Legion, the Claudia Pia Fidelis, in Gallia Lugdunensis?”

He glanced at me for the first time. “If you are compiling a census, you have come a long way to assess the most insignificant property in the empire. Look around you.”

“I am no censor. I am a historian, seeking only information, not taxes.”

“I have no more of one than the other. But I too am curious. What would you know of the Claudia Pia, niu?”

“I had a very good friend once who was a veteran of service with that legion. A Brython from the Tin Islands, called Wyrd the Friend of Wolves. Or, in Latin, his name was Uiridus.”

“Horse, was he, or foot?”

“Horse. In the battle of the Catalaunian Plains, Wyrd rode with the antesignani.”

“Did he now? I was but a foot soldier, a pediculus.”

Well, I thought, Galindo had a soldier’s wry sense of humor. The Latin word for an infantryman is “pedes,” but “pediculus” is not the diminutive of that. It means literally a louse.

“You did not know Wyrd, then?”

“If you are a historian, you must be aware that a legion comprises more than four thousand men. Would you expect us all to be close acquaintances, niu? You are close enough to me right now that you are making me sit in your shade, and I do not know
you.”

“Excuse me,” I said, moving so he had the sunlight again. “My name is Thorn. I am a marshal of King Theodoric Amaling. He sent me to these parts to gather an accurate history of the Goths. Fillein thought you might tell me useful things about the Gepid part of that history.”

“I would tell you to go straight to Gehenna, except for your mention of that legionary who once rode with the antesignani. I too fought the Huns on those plains near Cabillonum. If a man was courageous enough to have gone out ahead of the standards there, he was a man indeed. And if he later befriended you, then
you
must have some merits. Very well.” He made a grand gesture, as if he were offering me a throne instead of the bare ground. “You may sit down—on the unsunny side of me. Now, what useful things would you like to know?”