Raptor (59 page)

As in Vindobona and most other cities, these outskirts constituted the lower quarter of the city, the site of all the poorer inhabitants’ houses, of workshops and warehouses and markets and cheap popina eating houses and such. The garrison fortress, the finer public buildings, the better mercantile houses, the more luxurious tabernae and deversoria, the residences of the richer folk, all those were atop the plateau. As I have said, that entire height was surrounded by a wall, and now I could see how the wall was built of huge stone blocks, firmly cemented, and built unassailably high. As Thiuda and his men and I rode up the main street from the riverside, I could see not so much as a roof peak, dome or spire thrusting above the height of the wall. Furthermore, that wall had only one gateway, visible at the top end of the street we were climbing, and that entrance was of course closed by a great arched double gate. Though the gate was of wood, it was constructed of beams so immense, so firmly held together by massive iron staples, and so studded all over with reinforcing iron bosses that it looked as indestructible as the stone wall.

There were people in the streets—almost as many Ostrogoths as cityfolk—and the daily life of Singidunum seemed to be going along fairly routinely, but I noticed that none of the citizens favored us with smiles or salutes or greetings as we rode by. When I remarked to Thiuda that the people did not appear to regard us jubilantly as welcome deliverers, he said:

“Well, they have reason. At least they do not object too much to our quartering ourselves in their shanties. But that is about all they can offer us. Babai ransacked their larders and cellars and shops, and took all their provender inside the walled city with him, so the people are as hungry as we are. Whether the richer folk within the walls are delighted to have the Sarmatae dwelling among them, I do not know. But these out here are equally disgruntled with Babai for having seized the city, with Camundus for having let him do so, and with us for our not being able to do much to remedy the situation.”

I said, with due humility, “I doubt that I can do anything that is not already being done. But I should like to lend what help I can. Perhaps if I were granted audience with your chief commander, he might find some post to assign—”

Thiuda grinned and said, “You have already been blooded in combat, Thorn. Be not too eager to get yourself
bloodied.
First let me introduce you to our armorer, Ansila, and have him arrange for you and your steed to be properly equipped. Meanwhile, I must accompany my wounded men to the lekeis, and see that they are well doctored.”

So he and I stopped at the workshop of a local faber armorum, where the smith was doing his work under the supervision of a hefty, middle-aged, bushy-bearded Ostrogoth. To that man Thiuda said:

“Custos Ansila, this is Thorn, my friend and a new recruit. Take his measurements for a complete outfitting. Helmet, armor, shield, lance, everything he currently lacks. His horse as well. Have the smith get to work on that immediately. Then show Thorn the way to my lodgings. Habái ita swe!” Ansila silently saluted, and to me Thiuda said, “I shall see you there, and we will talk further.” And he was gone.

While the faber, with a length of string, measured the circumference of my head and chest, the length of my leg and so on, the custos Ansila eyed me with some curiosity and finally said:

“He called you his friend.”

“Akh,” I said offhandedly, “when we met we were both mere woodsmen.”

“Both mere woodsmen, eh?”

“I must say that Thiuda seems to have come well up in the world since then,” I went on. “He issues orders as if he were commanding every man involved in this siege, not just a single turma of them.”

“You do not know, then, who is our commander?”

“Why… ne,” I said, realizing that I had not even thought to wonder about that. “I was told that your King Theudemir recently died, but I have not heard who succeeded him.”

“Theudemir—that is the Alaman and Burgund pronunciation of his name,” said Ansila, in a pedantic manner reminiscent of my abbey tutors. “We spoke our king’s name as Thiudamer, the
mer
of course meaning ‘the known, the famed.’ Thiudamer, the Known of the People. He could rightly have taken the honorific suffixion of
reikhs,
‘the ruler.’ But, for many years, he and his brother Wala equally shared the kingship of us Ostrogoths, so they more modestly styled themselves Thiudamer and Walamer, the Known of the People and the Known of the Chosen. Even after Walamer was slain in battle, his brother modestly still refused to change and exalt his name and title. Now, however, Thiudamer having died, and his son being the one and only king—”

“Wait a moment,” I said, beginning to comprehend at last. “Are you saying that my friend Thiuda—?”

“Is the son and namesake and successor of Thiudamer. He is King of the Ostrogoths, and of course our commander-in-chief. He is Thiudareikhs, the Ruler of the People. Or however you wish to pronounce that name, in whatever dialect or language you customarily speak. The Romans and Greeks, for instance, call him Theodoric.”

The Singidunum house that Thiudareikhs had appropriated for his residence and praitoriaún was very close to the walls of the inner city. As I approached it—on foot, having left Velox picketed with the troop’s other mounts—I saw that the Ostrogoths were engaged in one of their spasmodic harassments of the enemy. Warriors stationed at intervals were variously discharging arrows or fire-tipped arrows, using slings to throw fist-sized stones or blazing balls of oil-soaked flax up and over the wall. From the battlements and towers of the rampart there came back only a few arrows in contemptuous reply. Thiudareikhs’s house was no better and no worse than any that quartered the lowest-ranking of his men—except that (I could not help noticing) the family living in it included a comely young daughter, who blushed every time she glanced at the king or he at her. And the family members were the only servitors that Thiudareikhs had about him. He clearly did not require to surround himself with a slavish retinue of courtiers, aides, orderlies and other such hangers-on. A few of his warriors stood at the street door, to serve as runners if he had messages to send, and now and again one of his centuriones or decuriones would enter the house to make a report or receive orders. But no guards or officious lackeys impeded my going inside to see him, and there was no ceremony about his receiving me.

Nevertheless, when I entered the simple room in which he sat—divested now of helmet and armor, clad only in common tunic and hose like my own, wearing no regalia either of command or of kingship—I felt compelled to go down on one knee before him and to bow my head.

“Vái, what is this?” he protested, with a chuckle. “Friends do not kneel to friends.”

Without raising my head, I said to the packed-earth floor, “I really do not know how to salute a king. I have never met one before.”

“When you met me first, I was not a king. Let us continue to behave as informally and comradely as we did then. Stand up, Thorn.”

I did, and looked him in the face, man to man. But I knew that he was someone different from the Thiuda who had first befriended me, and I think I would have known it even if I had not been apprised of his true identity. Though he wore no trappings of royalty, there was a new regality in his very visage and posture. His blue eyes still could be as merry and mischievous as they had been when he was shouting praise of his “master Thornareikhs,” but they were equally likely to darken with pensiveness or to smolder hotly when he spoke of combat and conquering. He had formerly been just a handsome, likable young man. Now he was an
exceptionally
handsome and personable young monarch—tall, graceful, well muscled, with a virile mane and beard of gold, with skin bronzed by sun and wind. His manners were courtly, his nature gracious, his intelligence manifest. He needed no crown or scepter or purple to confirm his eminence among men.

The thought flashed unbidden through my mind: “Akh, could I but be a
woman!”
and for an instant I felt distinct envy of the blushful peasant girl who was flicking a goose-wing duster about the sill of the room’s one window. But I sternly quenched both the thought and the emotion, and asked Thiudareikhs:

“How, then, do I properly address you? I would not presume on our friendship, and I would not wish to seem disrespectful in the company of your other men. How
does
a commoner address a king? Your Majesty? Sire? Meins fráuja?”

” ‘Poor wretch’ might be most appropriate,” he said, not entirely humorously. “But in fact, during the many years that I lived at the court of Constantinople, everyone there called me Theodoric, and I became quite accustomed to that name. My tutor even gave me this golden seal, as a gift on my sixteenth birthday, with which to affix a monogram of that name upon my lessons and letters and such. I still treasure it and use it. See?”

He was seated on a bench behind a rude deal table that was littered with parchments on which there were many scribbles of chalk. Onto one of the parchments he dripped candle tallow and stamped his seal upon it and showed it to me:

I had already recognized that the word “Theodoric”—accented on the second syllable, spoken more or less as “the odder rick”—represented a fair attempt by the speakers of Greek and Latin to approximate the pronunciation of the outlander name Thiudareikhs Besides that, it possessed an extra distinction, for it incorporated two Greek words:
theós,
meaning “god,” and
doron,
meaning “gift.” So the name, in addition to its original significance of “King of the People,” could be taken to mean also “the God-Given.” No doubt the name was patterned, as well, on that of Theodosius, once emperor of the Eastern Empire, still reverently remembered as a most able and extremely popular ruler. All in all, I thought, a monarch could hardly hope to wear a name more fraught with good associations than Theodoric.

“Theodoric I shall call you, then,” I said to him. “It is a name of rich augury. Why would you refer to yourself as a poor wretch?”

He swept an arm about and said glumly, “Does this poor and wretched hovel look to you like a royal palace?”

The girl who was dusting put on a mournful and contrite look, I suppose because she could not provide more luxurious quarters for him.

“Here am I,” Theodoric went on, “master of six thousand men who are hungry for both food and conquest, and I can give them but little of either. Meanwhile, the rest of my people, in our lands south and east of here, are not enjoying much better fortunes. I cannot feel myself truly a king until I have proven myself one.”

“By retaking Singidunum for the Roman Empire?”

“Well, ja. I must not fail in my first kingly endeavor. But ne, not exactly for the empire, and not simply to prove myself, either.”

“For what, then?”

He explained to me some things of which I had first heard mention from old Wyrd. For nearly a hundred years, said Theodoric, his branch of the Gothic nation—the Amaling line, the Ostrogoths—had been a rootless, landless, wandering people, living by forage and plunder. But then his father and uncle, the brother kings Thiudamer and Walamer, had made treaties of alliance with Emperor Leo of the Eastern Roman Empire.

“That,” he said, “is why I was sent as a child to live in Constantinople. I was hardly Leo’s prisoner—he had me reared right royally—but I was
his
hostage. Against my people’s breaking those treaties.”

In accord with their alliance, Leo had paid the two kings a substantial consueta dona, a yearly sum of gold, to have their warriors police and defend the empire’s northern borders. Leo also had granted to the Ostrogoths new lands of their own in Moesia Secunda. There they had lived secure and settled lives as farmers and herders and artisans and traders, and had striven to cultivate all the refinements and enlightenments of modern civilization, and had endeavored to be worthy Roman citizens. But their security had evaporated with the recent death of the Emperor Leo, because his successor grandson, Leo II—or, rather, whoever was the regent governing in his name, was respecting no treaties with any outlanders.

Theodoric sighed and said, “The Goths of the Balting line, now—our cousins the Visigoths—have long been firmly and prosperously settled in the far-west province of Aquitania. But, as of the day old Leo died, we Ostrogoths have no place anywhere to call our own. I want to take Singidunum and hold
it
hostage, as I once was. I trust that I could thereby force the younger Leo to observe his grandfather’s obligations to us. This city overlooks and commands all the river commerce traveling between the upper and lower Danuvius. Both Rome and Constantinople ought to deem it a bargain—in exchange for my giving Singidunum back to the empire—to reaffirm our right to our lands in Moesia Secunda, and to resume the gold payments for our protecting the Danuvius frontier.”

“I should think so, too,” I said.

“But only
if,”
he reminded me. “If I can wrest the city from King Babai. It may take weeks for my supply train to make its way here with those ponderous siege engines, and only the liufs Guth knows whether we can endure until then. We are literally living on horsemeat and horse fodder. The Sarmatae, having no need of mounts once they were within the walls, did not bother to ransack this outer city of all its oats and hay and bran, so
we
are dining on those dainty viands. The only nourishing flesh we get to eat is what we carve from any horses slain on patrol.”