Raptor (126 page)

Theodoric did take note of that, though, and grumbled to me, “Four days without report. Is it possible that that young peacock plans to keep me stalled here in ignorance just so he can strut without the supervision of his elders?”

I said, “I do not believe the lad is capable of insubordination. But it might be that he hopes to present you with an already accomplished feat of some ostentatious sort.”

“I prefer not to wait upon his whim,” growled Theodoric. “Bid messengers ride west and south to seek and find him and report back here.”

Before I could get them away, however, a messenger did come riding into camp from the south. He came on a lathered horse, riding hard, skidding to a halt at the tent bearing Theodoric’s standard, nearly falling from fatigue when he dismounted. But he had not come from any of the ten turmae under Freidereikhs’s command. This messenger came from the century that Theodoric had sent from Concordia to keep watch along the Via Aemilia.

“Centurio Brunjo’s compliments, King Theodoric,” he gasped. “You asked for word of any messenger dispatched by Odoacer toward Ravenna or Rome. I come to tell you he sent no messenger. Rather, he himself rides toward Ravenna—at the quick march—he and his General Tufa, at the head of what seems to be a full-sized army, and with our captive shackled men being dragged along behind the Romans’ horses.”

“Odoacer
and
Tufa?” Theodoric said, through clenched teeth. “And
what
men of ours?”

“Why, King Freidereikhs and two or three hundred of his Rugii, all much bloodied. The centurio assumed you must have suffered a significant defeat here, to have lost so many—”

“Hold!” snarled Theodoric, white with anger. “I have suffered a stinging slap in the face! But never mind the assumptions. Report what was seen and what was done about it.”

“Ja waíla!” The messenger stood extremely erect and said smartly, “Odoacer’s columns came from the west of Bononia and pelted straight on through that city, going southeastward. You had given no orders covering such a contingency, but Centurio Brunjo intended to attack with what men he had, and hoped to inflict some damage, though knowing the assault would mean death or capture. Only because he
commanded
it did I turn and run to bring the word. I would rather have stayed and—”

“Of course, of course. Anything else?”

“Since Odoacer is moving at quick-march pace, and did not turn south at Bononia along the shortest road to Rome, he is apparently not making for there. Our lookouts had earlier determined that the Via Aemilia can take one either to Ravenna or to Ariminum, but Centurio Brunjo conjectured that the former is the more probable destination. That is all I can tell you, King Theodoric, except that my centurio and all my comrades are most certainly—”

“Ja, ja. And you wish you were, too. What is your name, young man?”

“Witigis, optio of the second turma, Brunjo’s century of cavalry, at your service, King Theod—”

“Well, Optio Witigis, go and tell General Ibba to prepare his entire cavalry force for immediate departure and an early combat. Tell him also to assign you to one of his vanguard turmae, where you may have your wish soon granted.”

The young man saluted and strode away, and Theodoric muttered glumly, “It may soon be granted for all of us, nolens volens, with a fool like me conducting this campaign. How could I have been so easily duped by that perfidious Tufa?”

I said, “He spoke with seeming sincerity.”

“Vái! So did Herduic, when he called Odoacer a boneless old man. What, then, should I be called? I must be getting as jelly-boned as a Gades dancing girl, to have let myself be thus deluded.”

“Come now,” I said. “I am seeing a Theodoric unfamiliar to me. Most other times, when I have known you to be wrathful, you seemed more dare-the-devil than desolated.”

“I am less wrathful at Tufa than at myself. He told the truth about one thing, at least—about there being a trap set. Only it was not here in the city, it was waiting down the road.” He barked a humorless laugh. “And the villain even had the brazen audacity to invite
me
to ride into it. What Odoacer wanted was to thumb his teeth at me
and
to assure his getting safely wherever he decided to go, by ambushing a sufficiency of hostages to be his traveling turtle armor. And what did I so obligingly send him? Not only ten turmae of my trusting allies but their crowned king besides!”

I reminded him, “You hold ten times that many of Odoacer’s legionaries. The Roman army has always scrupulously observed the rules of civilized warfare, one of which allows for the ransom or exchange of prisoners. And the messenger reported Freidereikhs still alive.”

“I hope he stays so. Odoacer was not too lovingly concerned for the lives of his own men here. He may be King of Rome, but neither he nor Tufa is Roman by birth, not necessarily respectful of Roman ideas of honor and civility and humanity. As soon as they know they have safely outpaced pursuit and interception, their hostages will only be burdensome to them.”

“True,” I said uneasily. “And we can hardly expect any more messengers reporting from there. Theodoric, I ask your leave to go myself and learn the fate of those captives.”

“Can you ride, Thorn? You are wounded.”

“A trifle. Already healing. And it does not hamper my using reins or sword.”

“Go then. You may take along another ten turmae, if you like. The rest of the young king’s Rugii will be ravening to retaliate.”

“Not just yet. I will fare better alone. And so I will know where to find you again, may I ask what you plan to do next?”

“Ja,” he said grimly. “I plan to enliven my spirits by doing some killing.” He added, with a self-mocking smile, “I also plan to go on trusting the tales of Tufa.”

“Eh?”

“He spoke of another Roman force camped on the river Addua, and that sounds like the truth. I believe Odoacer will expect me to come racing after him, addled by anger, blindly pounding south toward Ravenna. In which case, he would summon that Addua army—perhaps with his system of Polybian signals—to close in on me from behind.”

I nodded. “Catching you in a pincers.”

“Instead, the moment Ibba’s cavalry is ready to ride, I will make a swift lunge westward at that Addua army. Catch it unawares, I devoutly hope, so I can
pulverize
it. I will leave Pitzias and Herduic and our infantry here to hold Verona, just in case there are other Roman armies somewhere about.”

To cheer him, I grinned and said, “I had best be on my way, then, or you will have won the whole war before I get back.”

When I saluted and took my leave, Theodoric was girding on his battle armor, but I left mine there in camp, and my snake-blade sword and belt knife, and everything else that would too readily identify me as an Ostrogoth and a warrior. I wore on my back and carried in my saddlebags only indifferent traveling garb, and slung on my pommel a captured, battered Roman short-sword. I let Velox walk gently across the Athesis River bridge, the stones being hard to his hoofs. On the other side, I put him on the turfed margin of the Via Postumia and gave him my heels, and we galloped southward.

If you think about it, the human form is composed almost entirely of convex shapes. On the normal, typical, full-grown human body there are very few concave places. The palm of the hand, the arch under the foot, the chelidon, the axilla; are there any others? So it is repellent, even nauseating—simply because it is unusual, unexpected, unnatural—to view a human figure that
does
have spoon-concave dips and hollows defacing what should be the smooth roundness of its torso and limbs.

On a bright blue October day, some miles east of Bononia, in the stubble of a recently harvested grainfield beside the Via Aemilia, I stood looking at that ground’s new sowing—a litter of more than two hundred corpses. Most of the men had been efficiently dispatched with one stab or a slash wound apiece; only a single well-placed hole is really necessary for letting out a man’s lifeblood and spirit. But Odoacer’s columns had been moving at the quick march; they could brook little delay; their slaughter of their prisoners had had to be done in a hurry. So a number of the victims, Centurio Brunjo and the young King Freidereikhs among them, had been so carelessly hacked to death—the skin and meat clumsily scalloped away in gobbets—that their corpses were gouged and pitted and cratered with concavities, rather like the ugly terrain of those karst lands across which they and I had once ridden together.

Perhaps it is unbecoming in a warrior writing of war, but I must belatedly confess that, on every battlefield after a battle, my feminine emotions always came unsoldierly to the fore: a deep pity and an unfeigned grief for
all
the fallen.

This day, though, in this grainfield, I felt a welter of other emotions as well. One of them was a sorrow that I can only describe as tenderly maternal. While I never have experienced maternity, I truly could shed motherly tears for Freidereikhs, if only because I knew that his real mother was unlikely ever to do anything of the sort. As I gazed on his poor desecrated corpse, I seemed to hear the words that once had been said to a genuinely loving mother: “Behold, this child is set for the fall… and your own soul a sword shall pierce.” My soul, being the kind of soul it was, had at the same time to suffer the pangs of a
masculine
sadness, because I also mourned the loss of Freidereikhs as would a bereaved older brother. It was with the boy Frido that I had traveled in the lands and the lights of the “merry dancers.” It was to the eager lad Frido that I had taught some lore of woodcraft. It was to the growing-up Frido that I had introduced his first-ever woman. And now, to my shame, as I remembered that occasion, I recognized in me another feminine emotion, and a base one. I felt a selfish, sulky regret that I had not
been
that first woman of his, or any of the later females who had given joy to the comely young king, and taken joy from him, because now there could never be another opportunity…

Still, for all my mixed and not entirely lofty emotions, my overriding feeling—I hope to my credit as man and woman both—was a cold, raptorial determination to redress the atrocity committed here.

Meanwhile, I was gradually becoming aware that there were live people in the grainfield too. The assembled local farm and village folk were lethargically digging large holes for mass graves, and they were growling, cursing and muttering about this offal that had been left for them to clean up. Not far beyond Freidereikhs’s body, four old peasant men were digging in a group. The nearest of them, noticing my regard, shouldered his mattock, came over to me and said conversationally:

“You may wonder, friend, why we are all grumbling when we ought to be grateful. Except for the numerous bastards that our noble lord has fathered on our daughters, this generous gift of ground-enriching dung is the only gift he ever
has
given us.”

“What lord?” I asked. “King Odoacer?”

He shook his head. “The clarissimus Tufa. Magister militum of Odoacer’s armies. Abo dux of this province of Flaminia and legatus of the city of Bononia.”

I motioned at the field. “A Roman dux did such butchery?”

“A Roman? Nullo modo. No Roman he, but a sus barbaricus. And a barbarian swine in a tinted toga is still a barbarian swine. You are a stranger, then. I hope you are not traveling with wife or daughter. Second only to his fits of fury, Dux Tufa’s
other
chief pleasure is the deflowering of maidens and dishonoring of matrons.”

I indicated the field again. “Why did it pleasure Tufa to have this fit of fury?”

The old man shrugged and repeated, “Sus barbaricus.” Then, to explain, he began pointing here and there. “Odoacer and Tufa came leading their columns at a trot along this road, and we local folk gathered to cheer—‘Io triumphe!’—as we are bidden to do always on such occasions. It appeared that Odoacer had somewhere won a victory indeed, for there were countless prisoners being hauled along at the horses’ heels. Then, suddenly, from yonder, came charging other riders, shouting some barbaric cry, and there was a brief affray. But the attackers were only few in comparison, and quickly laid low. There lies one of them.” He pointed at the dead Centurio Brunjo. “When the flurry subsided and those were dead, Tufa gave orders to his men, and all the captives were slain as well. Then he gave orders to us bystanders—‘dispose of this lot before they begin to stink!’—and he and the whole army rode on. We have been at this drudgery now for three days, and weary we are. Fortunately the weather has held cool and dry.”

The old man waited for me to make some comment, but I was reflecting. Brunjo’s brave and self-sacrificing but ineffectual attack would have told Tufa what he wanted to know: that his army had no weightier assault to fear before it reached its haven in Ravenna. He would then have had no further need of the hostages for protection. I heaved a despondent sigh. But for the centurio’s foolhardy interference, Freidereikhs and his Rugii would likely have been taken all the way to Ravenna too. They would have been imprisoned, humiliated, possibly ill-treated, but they would still be alive. Akh, well, perhaps not. Tufa might have slain them at the city gates. So I would not lay blame or cast aspersion. If Brunjo had made a lamentable mistake, he had paid for it.

“As you see,” the gravedigger resumed, “we are getting little for our labors except the dung to plant under our crops. These prisoners, whoever they are—or were—had already been plundered by the legionaries. Their weapons, armor, everything else of value is gone. Only the blowflies here have a bounty to rejoice about.”

It was evident—from the old man’s saying, of the prisoners, “whoever they are”—that he did not know that his land of Italia had been invaded by us Ostrogoths and our allies. Probably, considering how many wars this piece of the earth had endured throughout history, the peasant was quite inured to such convulsions and did not much
care
who was fighting whom. At any rate, possibly because I had addressed him in Latin, he had not instinctively taken me, a stranger, to be his enemy. Nor did I consider him to be mine, since it was also evident that he was no ardent admirer of his Dux Tufa.