Raptor (96 page)

“Well… I hope you will forgive my beginning this way, but… how do you Gepids feel about having the name Gepids?”

He stared stonily at me for a long moment, then said, “How do
you
feel about having no name at all, niu? Thorn is not a name, it is a character of the runic writing.”

“I am aware of that. Nevertheless, it is my name. I can only say that I long ago became accustomed to it.”

“And I to being a Gepid. Next question.”

“I mean,” I said, “considering the derogatory connotations of the name Gepid…”

“Vái!” he said, and spat on the ground. “That old fable? How Gepid derives from the word ‘gepanta’? Sluggish, slow, slovenly, and all that? You profess to be a historian. But you believe that infantile balgs-daddja?”

“Why… I had it on good authority. On
several
good authorities.”

He shrugged. “If you are satisfied, who am I to quibble with a historian? Next question.”

“Ne, ne, ne. Please, good Galindo. If you know a different derivation of the name, I should very much like to hear it.”

“I know
the
derivation of the name. In old Skandza, where all of us Goths originated, the Amalings and the Baltings were flatland dwellers. We Gepids were men of the baírgos, the mountains. When later the Amalings and Bakings came to call themselves the Eastern Goths and Western Goths, we proudly continued to call ourselves the Mountain Goths. Gepid is merely the modern, abbreviated pronunciation of ‘ga-baírgs,’ mountain-born. You may believe that or not, as you choose.”

“Akh, I will, I will,” I said, surprised but pleased by the new story. “It is much more believable than the accepted account.”

“I advise you, young historian, do not put too much credence in any name. How many Placidias and Irenes and Virginias have you known who were in no way placid or peaceful or virginal? A name can be a flimsy thing, a fluctuating thing, even a delusive thing.”

“That is so,” I agreed, though I did not mention that I myself sometimes deliberately, even delusively, changed names.

“Regarding names, I remember one thing from my days with the Claudia Pia.” Galindo gazed out across the limitless grass, his old face going pensive, as if he were seeing instead the Catalaunian Plains of nearly forty years before. “We sang many martial songs, and not all of them Roman, for we legionaries were of many different peoples—including men of the Tin Islands, as you know—but whatever the song, we sang it in the legion’s common language of Latin. Now, those Brythons had songs of their own, but they also joined us Goths in singing our saggwasteis fram aldrs. And I remember us singing that old saggws that tells about the life and deeds of the great Visigoth hero Alareikhs. In Roman Latin his name would be properly Alaricus, but those Tin Islanders sang it in their corrupt Brythonic Latin as Arthurus.” Old Galindo came abruptly back to the here and now, snapping, “Confound it, Marshal! You are interfering with my sunlight again!”

“Not I. It is another of your delta’s accursedly instantaneous storms.” Just that quickly, the puffball clouds had grown and spread and merged into a solid blanket that now was blackening.

“Akh, ja,” said Galindo, almost approvingly. “Thor does love to fling his hammers hereabouts.”

“You believe in Thor, do you?” I asked, with my now usual testiness on hearing that name. “Are you of the Old Religion, then?”

“If I am anything, I am a Mithraist, having once been a Roman legionary. But it does no harm, I think, to acknowledge the existence of other gods. And if Thor is not the god of thunder, who is, niu?”

As if Galindo had invoked it, a fork of lightning jabbed down at the eastern horizon and the air quivered to the following drumroll. The first drops of rain began to fall, and I growled a profanity.

The old man gave me a look. “Do you fear the anger of Thor?”

“Not his or any other’s,” I snapped. “I merely dislike storms when they inconvenience me.”

“Myself, I find rainstorms no inconvenience whatever.” To my amazement, he doffed his wolfskin and then the few rags of clothing he wore under it. “The rains save me from having to trudge a far distance to a stream to bathe. Will you not join me, Marshal?”

“Ne, thags izvis.” I averted my eyes from his scrawny and hairy old body, bared to the rain that now came sluicing down. I could no longer see Maggot and the horses by the ditch where I had left them. I could only trust that the animals were safe—and Maggot, too, of course, since the horses might have run off without him to hold them. In the meantime, I sat uncomfortably and the naked Galindo sat contentedly and the rain poured on us both and I listened to his continued account of his people’s history.

“As testimony that the Gepids have always been at least the equals of any other Goths, I will mention two battles that took place not far from here, but a long time ago, during the reign of Constantine the Great. That emperor was not yet called ‘the Great’ in those days, but he already showed symptoms of greatness—when he defeated a combined army of Ostrogoths and Visigoths. But then, eight or nine years later, when the
Gepid
Goths were fighting the Vandals, Constantine brought his army to fight on the side of the Vandals—and suffered the first defeat of his life. One of the
few
defeats of his life.”

“Ja, that thoroughly vindicates the honor of the Gepids,” I said, as enthusiastically as I could in the prevailing damp conditions.

“Notice, Marshal, now that I am spotlessly clean, Thor’s storm conveniently diminishes. The beneficent sun of Mithras will be out in another minute to dry me.”

“I rejoice that you are on such good terms with so many gods.” I looked out through the thinning rain and was glad to see that Maggot and the horses were still where I had left them, and still upright. “But why do you live out here in the middle of nowhere, good Galindo, when you clearly have wit enough to make your own way in that outside world?”

He spat on the ground again. “I saw enough of the outside world while the Roman army marched me around in it for near thirty years.”

“Still, you could be living in retirement without having to live in quite such isolation and deprivation.”

“Isolation? Deprivation? When I have the company of such as Mithras and Thor, and the benisons of their sun and rain? I have birds’ eggs and frogs and locusts and purslane for food. I have hanaf smoke for comfort. What more does a man need at my age?”

“Hanaf smoke?”

“One of the few bequests that the decadent Scythians left to us here. You have never tried it? There is some dry wood just inside the hut there, Marshal. Be so good as to light a fire in my hearth here and I will show you.”

While I was laying the fire, I said, “I have now heard much of interest about the Goths’ doings after they settled here among these Mouths of the Danuvius. But can you tell me anything of what their lives were like—how they fared during their long migration—before they arrived here?”

“Not a thing,” he said cheerfully. “Here, set this pot on the fire, and put this hanaf into it.” From the recesses of his wolfskin, in which he was now reclothing himself, he took out a handful of a desiccated and crumbly substance. I dropped it into the otherwise empty pot, recognizing it as the dried leaves and seeds of the wild plant called in Latin the cannabis.

“But I will tell you this,” Galindo went on. “The best thing that ever happened to the Goths—to all of the Goths—was their being chased out of here by the Huns.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked as we watched the heated weed begin to curl and char and smoke.

“They were too comfortable here. Once they settled down to be well-behaved Roman citizens of approved Roman ways and manners, they were fast becoming bland, smug and self-satisfied. They were forgetting their heritage of independence and willfulness and daring.”

He leaned over the pot on the fire and inhaled deeply of the smoke that was now wafting profusely up from the scorching weeds, and he motioned for me to do likewise. I did, getting a lungful of sweet-acrid smell and taste, not repellent but not very pleasant either, nothing to explain why Galindo had called it a “comfort.”

“Those settled and indolent Goths,” he resumed, “even imitated the Romans in succumbing to the Christian religion, which was their most weakling submission of all.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked again, rather stupidly. In truth, I spoke with some difficulty, for that whiff of smoke seemed to have made me slightly but suddenly thickheaded.

Galindo took another deep inhalation of smoke before he replied. “What need had the Goths to import an oriental religion? Christianity is a faith best suited to tradesmen—nothing but barter for profit. ‘Do good,’ it preaches, ‘and you will be rewarded.’ “

I could not have confuted him if I had wanted to, because I was feeling quite drunkenly addled. Though Galindo sat right before me, his words seemed to come from far away, and hollowly, with echoes jarring between them, as if the words were somehow
jostling
each other.

“Akh, Marshal, you are sitting at a tilt,” he said to me, grinning. “You are feeling the effect of the hanaf smoke. However, it is better experienced in an enclosed space.” He gestured for me to sniff again, but I woozily shook my head. When he bent over the fire this time, he flung a flap of the wolfskin over both his head and the pot, and the covering heaved as he took repeated drafts of the smoke. When at last he emerged from that enclosure, his eyes were glazed and his grin extremely loose and foolish. But he continued to talk and, to my hearing, his words still sounded clangorously distant.

“Happily for the Goths, the Huns uprooted them from here. Until just recent years, the Goths were hunted or shunted from place to place. They hungered, they thirsted, they suffered. Those that did not die in battle died of disease or exposure. But that was good, too.”

“Why do you say that?”

I realized that I had stupidly asked the very same question a third time, as if I knew or could speak no other words. Well, I had a hard enough time speaking
those
—very slowly, with a pause after each one—because my own words, like Galindo’s, seemed to reverberate inside my head.

“It was good because those who died were the weak and the spiritless. The ones that remain are the strong and the bold ones. Now, with the Roman Empire so pitifully fragmented, the time is ripe for a Gothic resurgence. They could be a greater force than they ever were before. They could be the
new Romans…”

The old hermit was clearly drunk on his hanaf smoke, and babbling. But I hardly felt entitled to make mention of that, because my own organs of thinking and speaking were almost as badly impaired as his.

“And if the Goths should supplant the Romans as masters of the western world… well… the world would be grateful that the Goths adopted
Arian
Christianity and not the Athanasian, as the Romans did.”

To my private horror, because I feared that I would never be able to utter anything else, I heard myself asking yet a fourth time, “Why do you say that?”

“Throughout history, Europeans of different faiths have fought and killed each other for this reason or that. But never until the coming of Christianity did men of our western world fight and kill each other
because
of their faiths—one seeking to impose his on the other.” Galindo paused to take another draft of his awful smoke. “However, the Arian Christians are at least tolerant of every other religion, and of paganism, and of those persons who profess no religious beliefs at all. Therefore, if the Goths
should
prevail, they would not demand or even expect everyone else in the world to believe as they do.
Saggws was galiuthjon!”

Those last words made me jump, for he sang them, or bawled them:

“Saggws was galiuthjon,

Haífsts was gahaftjon!”

It was a relic of his martial days, evidently—“Song was sung, battle was begun!” I was now convinced that Galindo, sane though he had sounded at first, must have been long addicted to his weed smoke and had been incurably demented by it.

We parted without much ceremony. I got to my feet, somewhat shakily, and bade goodbye to Galindo. He only gave me the Roman salute, for he was still lustily singing. Then I staggered dizzily off across the plain and floundered my way in and out of the ditch to join Maggot, faithfully holding the horses. I squeezed my eyes shut so I could concentrate before trying my voice, and was relieved to hear myself speak other words than “Why do you say that?” though these came out in a croak:

“Let us return to Fillein’s abode.”

Maggot gave me a searching look. “Are you all right, fráuja?”

“I hope so” was all I could reply, for I had no idea whether one exposure to hanaf smoke might be permanent in its effects.

However, the untainted, newly rain-washed air of the grassland and the exercise of riding at an easy canter gradually cleared the murk from my mind. I was feeling healthy and sober again when, sometime after dark, we got back to the house of Fillein and Baúhts. Maggot got down from Velox not nearly so precipitately as he had earlier tried to mount, and tottered and groaned when he was on the ground. It was my turn to ask, “Are you all right?”

“Ne, fráuja,” he said weakly. “I do believe my legs are permanently bowed. And skinless. Does a horseman always feel this sore and stiff and raw after riding?”

“Only the first time or two,” I said. “Or three.”

“Akh, I hope not to have to do it twice. I shall be ever satisfied hereafter with running alongside, as I think Armenians must have been intended by nature to do.”

“Balgs-daddja,” I scoffed, but laughingly. “Go and dig up a horseradish. Mash it and rub that on your sore places. You will feel better by morning.”

Fillein and Baúhts had kindly waited nahtamats for our return, though this night it was only boar bacon and greens again. As usual, Maggot took his trencher to eat outdoors while he unsaddled and fed the horses. I sat down with Swanilda and the old couple and, while we ate, recounted some of what had passed at Galindo’s place, including his adopted Scythian habit of indulging in lunacy-inducing weed smoke.