Raptor (77 page)

“Come now,” I said. “According to local report, every visitor to Pautalia since the Emperor Trajan himself has praised the healing power of these springs. Bathing in this water can hardly
worsen
your health.”

“I am not concerned about that, Veleda. What in the world
could
make it worse? I simply refuse to uncover my… my blemish, and have it visible to both of us for that long a time.”

“Very well,” I said, pleased to have a good excuse not to remove my own concealing girdle. “We will both be Romanly modest while we bathe. Then, when we are done, I will promptly change your dressing for a dry one.”

As we left the therma on the third night, the princess said, with some wonderment, “I can only half believe this, Veleda, and perhaps I should not mention it, lest I invite rebuke by the Fates, but I do think these waters are helping me. I am still weak, but I
feel
healthier—of both body and mind. And the pain has so much abated… Do you know, I have not had to take any mandragoras at all today.”

I smiled and congratulated her. “I had thought that it might just be the baths’ heating of your body that made you look rosier and happier. But it seems to me that the ulcer itself is smaller and less angry-looking than it was.”

Well, I also thought that the open sore might have been shrunken and closed to some degree by the waters’ astringency. And Amalamena’s brómos musarós was not perceptibly diminished. Nevertheless, I decided to tell Daila on the morrow that we would all stay at Pautalia for some days more, just to see if the princess continued to improve. Anyway, she went to bed with me in a considerably more blithe mood than she had enjoyed for a long while past. And it was in the middle of that night that the unforeseen thing occurred.

“Saio Thorn!”
boomed a voice from outside our quarters. I was instantly awake, and aware that the day had dawned. Almost equally instantly, I was out of the bed and scrambling to get into my Thorn garments and armor.

“Coming, Daila!” I shouted back, having recognized the voice. While tugging one of my boots on with one hand, I reached the other under the pallet for the folded parchment, to tuck it inside my tunic. It was not there. Startled even more wide awake, I flipped back that side of the pallet for a look. The package was nowhere in sight.

“Amalamena!” I gasped. She was sitting up, looking as shaken as I, clutching the covers over her bare breasts. “The parchment! Did you take it? Move it?”

She said faintly, “Ne, not I.”

“Then, please, you get dressed too—in Swanilda’s clothing. As soon as none of our men is close enough to identify you, make a brief appearance as the maidservant.”

I did not wait for a reply, but clapped my helmet on over my disheveled hair and hurried out the door, still fastening various closures of my apparel. The optio was waiting for me, blackly scowling but—gods be praised—holding in his hand the purple-sealed parchment. He was not alone. Several others of our warriors were with him, and two of them were supporting one who appeared to have fainted or been injured.

“Saio Thorn,” Daila greeted me sourly. “If you have been sleeping with one eye open, I recommend that you give it a rest and employ the other eye for a while.”

I could hardly upbraid him for disrespect to a superior. I could only inquire, and apologetically, “How did the thing get stolen?”

“A traitor in our very midst.” Daila indicated the man who hung slumped between two others. His face was so battered, bruised and bloody that it took me a moment to recognize him as one of my two bowmen. The optio took me a little apart from the group to speak confidentially.

“Our other sentries are still loyal, and they watch with both eyes open. They saw him steal into and out of the princess’s quarters. They laid hands on him before he could break the seals and discover that he had pilfered a worthless imitation.”

That was some relief, but I was still appalled—and doubly so. Not only had this personal guardsman of mine tried to subvert the plan that I had taken so many pains to arrange. He also must be now aware that I, the Saio Thorn, was not what I had for so long claimed to be. He had tweaked that package right out from under my sleeping head. Even in the dark, he would have realized that the Saio Thorn and the “Khazar servant girl” were one and the same. Well, I was as much to blame as the thief. The relationship between sisters Amalamena and Veleda had become so intimate and cozy that I had allowed myself to get scandalously comfortable and complacent. Now both Thorn and Veleda were at hazard of being denounced and unmasked, and eventually punished or banished or even eradicated. Still, Daila had not yet said anything on that subject, nor had he given me any searching or equivocal looks—only his understandable glare of disapproval—so I, too, spoke only of the matter of closest concern.

“Why would an Ostrogoth stoop to betraying his own king and nation and fellow Ostrogoths?”

The optio said drily, “We asked him that, and, as you can see, we asked him most emphatically. He finally confessed that he had got enamored of one of the Khazar maids back at the guesthouse in Constantinople. She inveigled him into this treachery.”

Another thing, I thought, for which I had to share the blame, because it was I who had bidden the two bowmen to lodge indoors there, instead of in the courtyard with their company.

I sighed, “I have been woefully remiss.”

Daila could not forbear grunting, “Jawaíla!”

“I naturally assumed that the xenodokheíon servants all were spies. It never occurred to me that they might persuade one of my own men to turn his coat.”

“And for such a sordid cause,” growled the optio. “For
love,
of all paltry things! For love of a guesthouse appliance already much used by innumerable previous guests. He will certainly be granted no warrior’s death.” Daila walked over to the slumped man and slapped his wobbling head several times back and forth. “Wake up, you wretched nauthing! Wake up, so you can be hanged!”

“He deserves it, true,” I said. “But let us not put on a show that will amaze the local folk, and make them curious about this dissension in our ranks. Ne, Optio. Let us dispatch him quickly, then make of him just another pack on our pack animals, and dispose of his cadaver in some uninhabited place along the road.”

Daila grumbled, but finally said, “Ja, you are right.” He put his hand to his sword hilt. “Will you do it, Saio Thorn, or do I?”

“Hold,” I said, suddenly struck by a worrisome thought, and I beckoned him aside again. “Might the bowman have told his lover about our advance messenger?”

“He could not have done. Not he or any other man except you and myself, Saio Thorn, knew of that. I alone escorted the girl to the city gate. And now the tetzte traitor cannot tell anyone, either, that we carry only a counterfeit pactum.”

Daila’s calling me a “man” emboldened me to ask, “And, in his confessing, has he spoken of… anything else?”

The optio shrugged. “The rest was babble. I fear I may have hit him too often and too hard.”

As if that remark had waked him, the flaccid prisoner stirred and raised his head. He looked at me and Daila from the one of his eyes still working, and that red eye fixed malevolently on me. When the bowman spoke, he sprayed a mist of blood, and his speech was slurred by broken teeth and torn lips.

“You. You are not… not marshal… not warrior… not Thorn.” He choked and swallowed and tried again. “There
is
no man Thorn.”

“You see?” said Daila. “Babble.”

“No Thorn… and the princess has no female serv—” There he stopped abruptly, because I had, in one movement, unsheathed my sword, stepped forward and cut his throat.

“Now get him out of sight,” I told the men who held his corpse still upright. “Roll him in a blanket and sling him on a pack saddle.”

I had finally made use of my new snake-pattern Gothic blade. But I could not be very proud of that, its first victim having been an Ostrogoth kinsman of mine. And I had slain him, not really for his attempted betrayal of us, but to prevent his disclosure of my own personal secret—because that would be a revelation that his and my fellow Ostrogoths might well deem more horrific even than his treachery. But, I reminded myself, I had not killed the man
entirely
for that reason. Right now, my chief motive for maintaining my secret was to enable Veleda to go on attending the ailing princess, and Amalamena’s well-being was worth the slaying of any number of wretches such as this one. Still, I did wish that my sword could have been baptized with the blood of a fighting enemy warrior.

As the dead man was dragged away, the optio said, “I doubt that he was going to desert us and carry the parchment all the way back to Constantinople. He would have known that we would chase after him and hunt him down. More likely, he was going to hand the thing on to someone else. And, since he waited until now to steal it, probably he meant to meet that someone hereabout.”

“I agree,” I said. “And if we
do
have an enemy or enemies lurking hereabout, let us get speedily away from this place. Yonder is Amalamena’s Khazar cosmeta now, plucking some autumn flowers for her mistress.” (And, I noted approvingly, making sure that the blossoms obscured her face.) “So the princess must be up and about as well. I will not let her leave until she has adequately broken her fast. See that the men and animals also are well fed, and have the company ready to ride immediately afterward.”

I explained everything to Amalamena while she and I ate from the tray I had brought to her quarters—and it gladdened my heart to see her eating now with robust appetite.

“I should have liked to stay longer here,” she said. “The thermae seem to have done me most miraculous good. I was truly hungry to break my fast this morning. But, as you have said, we have a mission to accomplish. I am ready—and I feel strong enough—to get on with it.”

“Then hasten to don your princess regalia for the day’s journey,” I said. “But tonight, as soon as we make camp, dress again in Swanilda’s apparel.” I took from my tunic the retrieved parchment and said, “Also, tonight, I believe I will sleep with this clenched in my
teeth.”

When the column was all formed and readied, and the horses were whuffling eagerly to be off, the optio rode back from the head of the company to where I sat on Velox beside Amalamena’s carruca, and he said:

“There are two roads we could take from here, Saio Thorn. The dead traitor expected us to stay on the one we came by, the road going directly northwestward from here to Naissus and then to Singidunum.”

“I see what you mean. So his accomplice—or band or army of accomplices—will likewise expect us to leave by that road. Thank you for the observation, Daila. And the other road?”

“It runs alongside the river Strymon from here, more northerly, eventually to the city of Serdica.”

“Well, Serdica is far out of our way,” I said. “But we will take that road, and stay on it until we are well away from here. Then we will hope to strike another road branching off toward the west, and resume our former course. Very good. You may put the column to the march, Daila.”

We seemed to be almost the only journeyers using the riverside road this day; we neither caught up to nor passed any other trains coming or going along it, except for some flocks of sheep and herds of pigs and their drovers. That made me—and optio Daila, too—vaguely uneasy about the safety of this particular stretch of the road.

What more concerned me was that, in making this departure from the shortest way to Singidunum, we were no longer following the course that Swanilda would have taken before us. At each stopping place so far, I had made discreet inquiry. No one I asked had any vivid recollection of a small, slight, fair-haired horseman having passed through—and that was all to the good, because neither had anyone witnessed or heard of any such lone rider’s being waylaid or falling ill or getting injured by an accident. I could assume that Swanilda had at least reached Pautalia without misadventure. But until we were back on her track, I could only trust that she was still making her way toward Theodoric or—as I devoutly hoped—had already found him and delivered the pactum.

Very soon, though, I stopped fretting about Swanilda’s progress. I and Daila had more reason to be uneasy about our own, because the land began to close in on us at either side. We found ourselves in hilly country through which the river Strymon had cut a deep and narrow defile. With the river and our road beside it being hemmed in by steep cliffs, we felt uncomfortably vulnerable to ambuscade.

However, by the time the optio and I were mulling those apprehensions, our company was too far along the defile to have turned back and got out of it before dark. We had to forge onward, hoping to emerge from the farther end of the ravine before the day ended. We did not, but neither were we assaulted by anyone or anything, in daylight or dusk. So, when the twilight darkened enough to make further travel impractical, we took advantage of the next wide place in the gorge to move off the road and break column and prepare to camp.

“I do not want anyone rolling boulders down on us,” said Daila, so the first thing he did was to send two men climbing the cliff that overhung us. They would take turns keeping watch overnight. Next he sent two warriors to watch the road, one in either direction, up the road and down, a considerable distance from our encampment, and he posted other sentries at intervals along the riverbank beside us.

While the rest of our men were tending to the animals, lighting cooking fires and laying out our provisions, I made sure that Amalamena was seen, and seen twice, by anyone who cared to look. First, she descended from the curtained carruca wearing her princess apparel, and made a pretty show of stretching the travel kinks out of her limbs. She got back into the carriage and—after a little, when the twilight was deeper—emerged again in her “Khazar maidservant” garb and head covering, carried a ewer down to the river, filled it and took that inside the carruca.

Then, just in case our sentries atop the cliff might
not
prevent some enemy’s tumbling a landslide down onto our encampment, I took the reins of the carriage horses and led them back the way we had come, nearly to where the down-road sentry stood leaning on his spear, and positioned the carruca there safely apart from the rest of the company. I summoned another soldier and, while he unhitched the horses and took them and my Velox to be picketed on pasturage with the others of our animals, I entered the carriage to ask the princess how she had fared during the day’s journey.