Raptor (17 page)

“But you have not, fráuja,” I said. “Do you not share the universal fear of the Huns?”

He sniffed contemptuously. “I was fifty years old when the Khan Etzel-called-Attila died. Before that, I had been hunting in one forest or another, man and boy, during some thirty-five years. Since Etzel’s time, I have been hunting in
these
woods. I know them as no Hun ever can. Compared to me, the scavenger Huns now infesting the Hrau Albos are almost as much newcomers and fledglings as you are.”

“You will return here, then, after you have been to Basilea?”

“Not to this precise spot, but ja, I will stay at the garrison only long enough to peddle my bearskins and purchase fresh supplies for myself. Towns are not for me, nor I for them. I will make my way eastward then, toward the great lake Brigantinus, for the springtime breakup of the ice on the streams thereabout, when the beavers emerge from their burrows and their pelts are at their prime.”

I pondered. The old man seemed to detest or despise every other person in the world. He was ill-mannered and foulmouthed and blasphemously irreligious (toward
every
existing religion, I gathered). Why, I might be tainted and irredeemably damned through mere closeness to him. And I could hardly expect to be tenderly treated by the old scoundrel. Still, he did know the lore of the woods. And if he had spoken true about the dangers lurking in wait…

I said hesitantly, “Fráuja, since we both are going in the same direction… do you suppose we might travel together… so that I might learn some woodcraft from you?”

Now it was his turn to ponder. He eyed me for a long time before he said, “Akh, you might be useful, at that. Can you carry that big bale of furs yonder?”

Poor old brute, I thought; he is not so stalwart as he would wish to appear. He will probably dodder and totter and, crabby as he is, complain every step of the way. I could probably get along better without him, and take care of myself, and travel much more quickly alone. But I said, “Ja, I believe I can do that.”

“Agreed, then. Now, enough of talking for tonight. And here, urchin, you might as well sleep more warmly than you have been doing.” He doffed one of his furs and tossed it to me.

When he lay down close to the now very small fire, he took out from somewhere a brass basin that was evidently the dish from which he ate and drank. Then he picked up a pebble, held it in his fist and adjusted his sleeping position so that that hand was extended above the basin. I started to ask myself why he did that, but then I discerned the reason myself. If he were startled in the nighttime by any slightest sound, that hand would drop the pebble into the basin and the clang would wake him. Well, he had me now to help him repel any assailant.

As I thankfully rolled myself into the fur he had lent me, I said, “Fráuja, if we are to be companions for a time, what do I call you?”

He never had said whether or not he was an Alaman, or of some other nation, and I had not yet been able to identify the accent with which he spoke. Nor did his name—though it might have been a variant of the name of the old god Wotan—tell me anything of his origins. He said, “I am called Wyrd the Forest-Stalker,” and in a moment more was sleeping, breathing deep, but uttering no snore that might be heard by any predator, raptor or night-prowling Hun.

We woke at first light—what light there was from the still overcast but no longer snowing sky. My juika-bloth flew off to seek its morning meal, and Wyrd and I made water behind separate trees. I deliberately did it boy-fashion this time, but he gave no sign of noticing or caring. Then we went to the brook to bathe our faces in the painfully cold water.

I said, “I surely do thank you, fráuja Wyrd, for the loan of that fur. It made a most comfortable—”

“Shut up,” he growled, as grumpy as ever. “Until I have broken my fast, I do not attain to my accustomed good humor, and until then I have no patience with prattle. Come, I have some dried rashers you may share.”

“And I have some smoked sausage,” I volunteered. “It makes one dreadfully thirsty, so let us eat that up, since we have ample water here.”

While we chewed on the tough, dry sausage, I remarked, “I have several times tried to quench a raging thirst with snow, and I cannot understand why it does not serve as well as water. After all, snow is nothing
but
water that has—”

“Iésus,” grunted Wyrd. “I regret that I ever encouraged you to talk. An ignorant dotterel indeed, you are. A man can die of thirst in a snowfield as big as an Alb.”

I said, a little testily myself, “So I have discovered. But I do not know why that should be so.”

He gave a sigh of exasperation. “Attend closely, urchin. I do not explain things twice. When a man—or a woman, whichever you be—eats snow, it chills his mouth and throat and gullet so that they constrict, and cannot swallow enough of the snow to allay his thirst. Even to melt snow over a fire would keep a man so frantically collecting wood that he would get thirstier and thirstier, faster than he could melt water enough to quench that thirst. Let us make ready to move on. I will carry both our packs. You heft those bearskins down, and I will strap them on your back.”

“Since we are leaving,” I said, “why are you stoking the fire?”

“I am not,” he said, though he had laid a fresh branch on the few remaining embers and was blowing on them to set the branch’s tip aflame. “When I travel on a day as cold as this, I always carry a firebrand and hold its flame near my mouth and inhale the warm air. Very comforting, it is. I told you to fetch those skins.”

I went, and discovered that their perch was so high that I had to find a windfall limb to reach up and poke them loose and make them fall into the snow beside me. I wondered how Wyrd had got them up to that crotch, since he was only a hand’s span taller than myself, and I certainly could not imagine him climbing a tree. When I picked up the bale, I staggered and again said, “Iésus!” I had no idea how many bears’ skins were in the bundle, or how much even a single one might weigh, but they were tightly compacted and, all together, weighed perhaps half as much as I did. How
had
the old man lifted the bale to the tree crotch? And how was I to carry this monstrous burden any distance? When I wobbled with it in my arms, back to the now snow-smothered fire, Wyrd said, as though he had anticipated my misgivings:

“If an old ferta like myself could carry that, so can you. It will seem to weigh less when I get it onto your back.”

He had his burning brand stuck upright in the snow, and already had rolled my bundle of extra clothing and other belongings inside the fur I had slept in. I said nothing, but ruefully took note that I was not to be wearing the fur today, and also that he had not provided a firebrand for me. Again as if he were reading my mind, Wyrd said:

“Playing pack mule for me will keep you warm enough. You will see.”

And he began rolling his own belongings into the fur that had been his bed and blanket. This disclosed to my view two objects on which he had protectively lain all night: a bow and a quiver of numerous arrows.

I said, “I have heard you twice invoke the pagan goddess Diana. I should have known that you must hunt with a bow.”

“Did you suppose that I slay bear and elk with my bare hands?” he asked scornfully. But his voice softened as he picked up and fondled the bow. “Ja, this is my beauty, my treasure, my ever-reliable.”

“Some of the men where I came from had bows,” I said. “But theirs were much longer, and shaped in a simple arc, like the Roman letter C. I have never seen one like yours before. It looks more like the crooked rune called sauil.”

“Ja, each arm curves one way, then the other.” He went on, very proudly, “Notice, urchin. Where an ordinary bow is made of wood, and has only the recoil strength of wood bent and tensed, this war bow starts with wood and adds to it.” He gently stroked the outer curves. “See, the back of it here—”

“I should call that the front of it,” I commented.

“Shut up. Here, the bow’s wood is backed with dried animal sinews, because they resist being stretched. And it is bellied with horn, because that substance resists being compressed. So, to the recoil of the bent wood’s trying to straighten is added the horn’s strong urge to stretch and the sinews’ strong urge to shrink. With all that power together, this bow will—at sixty paces—make an arrow pierce clear through a good-sized sapling, and at that range is so deadly accurate that it would bring down yonder bird on the wing.”

He pointed to my returning juika-bloth as it gracefully swooped and glided toward us through the trees, then added:

“Even at nearly two hundred paces, the arrow—should it hit a man—will usually hit hard enough to kill him. That is, if he is wearing only quilted or leather armor, not the sturdier scale armor. Let me tell you, urchin, it may take a bowyer fully five years to fashion a single bow like this one. First, the finding of the various materials—the wood, the bone, the horn—and selecting only the best of each. Then the ageing of them, and then the cutting to shape of them, and then the intervals of drying and seasoning them between the several operations, and then the putting together of them, and then the reshaping of them for the best proportions, and then the making of minute adjustments to the bow many times during its first months of use. Truly, all that can take as long as five years before the bowyer pronounces the work finished. Akh, ja, urchin, the Goths make the world’s best swords and knives. But the Huns—oh vái, it must be conceded—the Huns make the world’s best war bows.”

“A Hun gave you that bow? I thought you were no friend to any Hun.”

Wyrd uttered one of his laugh-snorts. “Ne, ni allis. I took it from him.”

“You
took
a bow from a Hun?!”

He said drily, “Well, not until I was sure that he had no further use for it.”

“I see,” I murmured, with unfeigned awe. And then cautiously, not to rouse his choleric temper, I said, “I suppose, fráuja Wyrd, you were, uh, quite a bit younger in those days?”

“Ja,” he said, sounding not at all insulted. “That was three years ago. Before then, I had had to rely on an ordinary hunting bow, such as you say you have seen. Now, we are wasting time. Let me load you, pack mule. This deep and fresh snow will make for difficult walking. And I wish to reach our destination well before dark.”

As he easily lifted the bundle of bearskins and hung it on me, using broad canvas straps that went over my shoulders, crossed at my chest and were drawn securely about my waist, I managed to say, “Destination?
Oof!
What is our—
oof!
—destination?”

“A certain cave that I know of.” He held up his sun-stone and scanned the sky. “That way. Atgadjats!”

The command meant “Let us be off!” and off he went. The business of using the sun-stone must have been only for show, because he headed directly into the teeth of the northeast wind, the same direction we both had been traveling for many days now. Wyrd strode through the knee-deep snow as briskly as a young man, and the trench he left in the snow afforded slightly easier going for me as I lurched along behind.

I was thinking that I might have been brashly mistaken in my assumption that this “old ferta”—as Wyrd had vulgarly described himself—was in any degree enfeebled or decrepit. He said he had been fifty years old when Attila died. So, unless he was lying with every word he spoke, he was now sixty-five, an extreme of longevity that few men attained, except idle, pampered townsfolk and ecclesiastics. Yet, at the age of sixty-two, he had somehow slain a savage Hun to acquire his war bow. Wyrd might no longer have any “marrow in his bone,” as he had vulgarly said of himself. But if he was too old to indulge in sexual activity—or even to evince any interest in whether his new companion was male or female or eunuch—that seemed the
only
thing he was too old for. I now had no doubt that Wyrd could carry my bearskin burden more easily than I was doing, that he could hoist or even
throw
it high into a tree every night. This night, though, we were evidently going to camp inside a sheltered and cozy cave. That was something to look forward to.

But we were a long and weary time getting there. Even with Wyrd breaking a trail for me, I reeled and stumbled along, and was soon breathing in labored gasps. The old man had been right: I needed no extra fur wrapping or even a firebrand to warm the air I inhaled. Cold and blustery though the day was, I actually perspired, and copiously. The bale on my back reached from my waist to somewhere above my head—I could not raise my head to see how high—and my juika-bloth rode on top of it. Or the bird did until I got so tired that I urged it to fly along with us, and thereby relieve me of even that inconsiderable weight.

Without once breaking stride or ever failing of breath, Wyrd talked ceaselessly—or shouted, rather, to be heard above the Aquilo wind. He provided a continuous commentary on the weather, the terrain, the local fauna and flora, other weathers and terrains and fauna and flora he had known, and liberally larded his speech with his usual profanities, blasphemies and obscenities.

“Look yonder, in that patch of ground blown clear of snow. Do you see the shriveled remains of that plant, urchin? That is the laser plant, and glad you will be to find it if ever you are constipated and in need of a good skeit. Wring out some of the laser’s gum and take a dose of it. You will skeit yourself empty, you will.”

“Useful… to know… fráuja…” I gasped.

“You think these Hrau Albos forests are monotonous, urchin? Just wait until you get to the swampy plains around Singidunum in the lands of the Goths. So flat and barren of vegetation are those plains, the tallest thing to be seen in the landscape may be a solitary standing peasant. Or his goat. Or even his goose.”

“Very… interesting… fráuja Wyrd…” I gasped.

“And now we are coming to some pine woods, urchin. Did you know that pinecones, if you roast them first and then burn them, make a sweet-smelling incense? More than that, the resin aroma of their burning is a sure stimulant of women’s venereal desires. Certain pagans use them in their temple orgies, to arouse the lust of their female votaries. Ja, by the forty-nine fornicating daughters of Thespios, but roast pinecone incense makes a kunte as hot as the incense itself!”