Raptor (74 page)

The princess glowed happily and I murmured, “Most gracious of you, Sebastós.”

“I will send another grammateús over to your xenodokheíon, so that you may dictate the quitclaim of Singidunum. Then, as soon as we have affixed signatures and seals, and exchanged the documents, I would wish that you depart immediately, to bear the pactum directly to Theodoric at Singidunum with all haste. I dislike to dismiss any guests so summarily, but I trust you both will return here—in company with our esteemed Magister Militum Theodoric—when you have ample leisure to enjoy all the charms of our imperial city.”

Amalamena contained her girlish joy until we were again riding side by side, while the same attendants and guardsmen and musicians escorted us back to the guesthouse that afternoon. Then she laughed, more musically than the music playing around us, and exclaimed:

“You did it, Thorn! You got from the emperor everything that Theodoric wanted, and more!”

“Ne, ne, Princess, not I. Aristotle was right. It was your
beauty
that swayed that crusty and crabby old ex-soldier. Your beauty and your winning ways. You are another Cleopatra, another Helen.”

Her blush of pleasure made her glow even more radiantly, though I was instantly sorry that I had compared her to those two queens. According to Plutarch and Pausanias, both of those women died untimely and ingloriously. But at least, I thought, in their lifetimes they had done deeds worth remembering in their graves—and now so had Amalamena.

“I thank you, Thorn, for so gallantly sharing the credit. But the important thing is that Zeno
did
agree.”

“He agreed, ja. Let us see if he keeps the agreement.”

“What? You do not trust the word of an emperor?”

“He is an Isaurian, and an Isaurian is a Greek. Have you read Vergil, Princess? ‘Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos…’ “

“But—but Zeno is putting it all in writing. Why would you distrust him?”

“Three things. For one, that last look he threw at Rekitakh. It was not a look of
keep-silent!
It was a look of only keep-silent-
for-now!
However, even in tacit collusion, Rekitakh should have gone on loudly protesting, for the sake of appearances—certainly when Zeno ceded to us his father’s claims, his father’s gold and his father’s military command. But Rekitakh was too gudgeon-stupid to do that. Lastly, although Zeno referred to your brother by various names and titles, he never once called him King of the Ostrogoths. Presumably he still reserves that honorific for Theodoric Strabo.”

“Now that I recollect, ja, you are right.” Amalamena’s glow had diminished. “Still… if he is entrusting to us the pactum… sending the gold…”

“If I myself had that gold right now, Princess, I would wager every nummus of it on one guess. That the pháros back yonder—and you will notice, I have not looked behind me since we left the palace—is already wafting signal smokes, telling someone of all that has just occurred.”

She swung around in her saddle—and gasped loudly. I turned also and saw that the lighthouse smoke was still a steady column, only a little breeze-blown. But I had not been wrong in my guess, merely premature, for a man was scrambling hurriedly up the ladders from the ground, almost certainly bearing a message to be sent by that means.

I was not too much concerned about that. What was more immediately worrisome was that gasp Amalamena had uttered. She had closed and clenched tight her eyes and mouth, and her face had gone from the rosy glow to a whiteness that was tinged with greenness, and she weaved in her saddle and clung desperately to its horn. Her sudden turning to look at the pháros, I decided, must have torn something inside her. So I took the reins of her horse, drew it close beside mine, put out an arm to steady the swaying girl and shouted to our escorts to double their pace.

At the same moment, even there in the open air, being nearer to Amalamena than I ever had been before, I caught a whiff of an unfamiliar scent coming from her. As I have said, I had long ago become accustomed to discerning the various odors given off by females, and divining from them the women’s various moods or emotions or feminine indispositions. But this odor I had never encountered before. Because of my acute olfactory sense, I may have been the first, even before the princess, to have noticed that scent about her. It was a smell not especially strong, not overwhelming—like the miasma of Daniel the Stylite—but as penetrating, insidious and clinging as smoke. It would eventually pervade Amalamena’s entire person, her clothing and bedding and everything she touched.

The Iatrós Alektor later told me what it was, and that it is by no means peculiar to females. It is exuded by anyone of any sex, he said, afflicted with the kind of killing kreps that erupts into an open ulcer. It is called in Greek the brómos musarós, the abominable stench. That name doubly describes the odor, because the word ‘musarós,’ ‘disgusting,’ contains the word ‘mus,’ meaning ‘mouse.’ And the smell truly is rather like that of a musty nest of mice, but commingled with a sharper odor, like that of a person’s urine after he or she has eaten of asparagus. I can add, from my experience on battlefields, that the odor also resembles, though not exactly, the gangrenous stink of a neglected and purulent combat wound.

However, I am getting ahead of events.

When we arrived back at the xenodokheíon, I tenderly lifted the princess down from her mount, and Swanilda and some other servants came to help her to her chambers. Since Amalamena could hardly deny now that she was ill and in pain, and since she was too weak to protest that I was being meddlesome, I sent one of the Khazar maids running to fetch the iatrós.

Alektor came in company with the grammateús that Zeno had promised to send, a wispy old man who introduced himself as Eleón. I showed him to an empty room and bade him sit still until I was ready for his services. Then, while the iatrós was off attending the princess, I anxiously paced the floor of that room and watched old Eleón sharpen a number of his quills and stick them here and there in the white hair above his ears, and unroll sheets of parchment and give them an unnecessary burnishing with a moleskin, and stir his little pot of ink and somehow manage to splash stains of it onto himself and several pieces of furniture roundabout.

When Alektor came to the room, morosely shaking his head, he and I went aside and he said:

“There will be no need to disguise the mandragoras. She takes it willingly. But now that the carrion worm has revealed itself, it is eating ravenously and rapidly on her. She will require more and more massive doses of the drug. That I leave to you to administer. To her female attendant I have given instructions as to the changing of dressings and so forth. But I recommend that the princess be attended night and day. There will be times, increasingly frequent, when she is physically unable to effect her own, ahem, necessary functions. So her one servant will not be enough. There should be several, and strong ones—strong of stomach as well as of musculature. I seriously doubt that any of these giddy Khazar wenches would suffice.”

“I pledge that she will have suitable and constant attention,” I said. “And again I implore: is there nothing else that can be done for her?”

“Oukh. Nothing that I, as an iatrós, can in conscience even hint at. But I must say—something worthwhile seems already to have been done. For a young woman in such dismal straits, the princess appears to be in an admirably tranquil mood.”

“Ouá… well… I did my best to administer your earlier prescription, Iatrós Alektor. She
has
accomplished something of considerable consequence.”

“Good, good. Try to keep reminding her of that. Exaggerate the importance of it, if necessary. She will need all the inspiriting support that can be given her in the days to come.”

When Alektor departed, I told the grammateús to wait a while longer. Then I made a brief visit to my own chambers before going on to Amalamena’s. Swanilda politely left the room where her mistress lay on her bed, and I said:

“Princess, the lekeis now tells me that you are not in the prime of health. I have no doubt that I am asking a futile question, but, as your responsible safekeeper, I must ask it. Will you stay here, where you can be properly cared for, while I hasten back to Theodoric with the pactum?”

She smiled, a wan smile, but a smile. “As you say, a futile question. You also said earlier that I was at least partly responsible for the securing of the pactum. Surely you would not deny me the prideful pleasure of being able to join my brother in rejoicing over it.”

I sighed and spread my hands. “I said yet another thing, once. That I would never deny you anything.”

“In return, Thorn, I promise that I will not delay our column’s progress on the road. That new medicine, the substance like shredded bark, whatever it is, it really does relieve my… this temporary indisposition… much more effectively than anything the lekeis Frithila formerly gave me. With the aid of that medicine, I will not need to loll in the carruca dormitoria like a lady of leisure. We can leave that here, and I will travel the whole way on my mule.”

“Ne, ne, do not be foolish. I shall send an advance rider galloping with the document. The rest of us can proceed at an easier pace. Carruca and all. I have sworn to the lekeis Alektor that you will be pampered and coddled, even more so than Swanilda could do for you.”

“Better than Swanilda? Nonsense. Swanilda has attended me since we both were girls. We are not mistress and servant, we are friends.”

“Then she can now do you a really friendly favor. With your permission, I have a different task in mind for Swanilda. In her absence,
I
will do the attending of you. I have had some prior experience at ministering to ailing patients.”

Of course, I thought, considering the eventual fate of those patients—my juika-bloth, young Gudinand, old Wyrd—it was not high recommendation of my ministering abilities. In any case, she only smiled again, and with fond gratitude, but said firmly:

“A male nurse for a female patient? Unthinkable.”

“Amalamena, it was your beauty and bravery that
did
procure the pactum, and I will not let your accomplishment go for naught. The document must get safely and quickly to Theodoric. If it does not, Zeno can pretend that he never wrote it, never agreed to it, never was
asked
for it. And you know that I have suspicions of Zeno’s good faith. I intend to make sure that the document does get to Theodoric, so I ask for your further assistance in this mission. Indeed, what I plan to do cannot be done without your help. And to have that, I am ready to take a rather desperate measure of my own. It may shock you, distress you, revolt you, I do not know, but I am going to trust you to keep it a secret between just the two of us.”

“What
do
you plan, Thorn?” she asked, in mock alarm, as I closed and latched the door. “Seduction or ravishment?”

I ignored the levity. Although I had promised to make the princess laugh whenever possible, this was anything but humorous to me. “I am about to introduce you to the female who will be attending you during our journey. Her name is Veleda.”

“Her? I thought you said that
you
would—” She broke off, in real alarm now, and weakly tried to edge across the bed, farther away from me, when I began to disrobe. I believe the princess totally forgot her own troubles and everything else, for at least a moment, as I stripped off all my clothes except the “modesty” band around my hips, and she gasped,
“Liufs Guth!”

Dressed again, I returned to the room where Eleón the grammateús waited, and there I paced the floor some more while I dictated the covenant of cession of Singidunum. From my own scribe days, I remembered all the formal salutes and flowery phrases with which to begin the communication. But when it came to the meat of the matter, I could think of nothing better than to say simply, “For consideration received, I, Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, do hereby cede possession of the city of Singidunum in Moesia Prima to the Sebastós Zeno, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire.”

“Ouá, papaí,” groaned the grammateús. He shook his head over my words as unhappily as Alektor had shaken his head over the imminent demise of the princess. “Excuse me, young presbeutés, but that will not do. Oukh, oukh.”

“Why not, Eleón? It says all that I wish to say. All that the emperor could wish to be said.”

“But it says it too
plainly,
too forthrightly. Theodoric gives, Zeno accepts. Why, any shrewd practitioner of law would find such simple honesty a challenge, and would taken keen delight in contesting its legality. You must lard it with obfuscatory terms. ‘The cedent irrevocably agrees, warrants and assigns… waives all rights forevermore… swears that the city is not subject to any other lien, levy or counterclaim…’ Things like that, Presbeutés. And also make frequent referrals to the legal code. ‘Pursuant to chapter number so-and-so, title number so-and-so, book number so-and-so of the Forum Judicum…’ “

“I know nothing of titles and chapters and such.”

“Then allow
me
to sprinkle those citations and some nicely dense legalities here and there in the conveyance, Presbeutés. They actually need have no cogency to the issue. They are only included to make legal heads nod in pretense of jurisprudent appreciation, and the heads of others to nod in drowsy boredom.”

I laughed and said, “By all means, let us comply with the legalities.”

He immediately set to, with much scritch-scritching of his quill, and I looked over his shoulder while he wrote. I was being as much a solemn pretender as any practitioner of law, because, for all I could read of the manuscript, Eleón could have been setting down a warrant for my execution. Finally he scattered sand over the document, blew it off and handed me a fresh-cut, unused quill with which to append my name and title. I wrote not nearly so beautifully as he had done, but I extravagantly praised the quality of the parchment on which I was putting my signature. “Ouá, an imperial court would of course use none but the costliest materials,” he said proudly.