Raptor (89 page)

Raptorial I may have seemed, in my taking and discarding of lovers, but not one of those, freeborn man or female slave, ever complained of being hurt by loving me. If I distressed anybody at all, it may have been those lovers’
future
lovers, or their wives or husbands, who very possibly were deemed inferior bedmates by comparison to me.

Of the male lovers, I recall the name of only one—Widamer—and his name I have reason to remember vividly. Though I was to be only twice in his company, my meeting with Widamer there in Novae would eventually lead to another encounter—the most astounding of my life, perhaps the most fantastic ever to tincture the life of
any
human being. I met Widamer in a Novae market square, the same way I had met other men, and we contrived some excuse to introduce ourselves and proceed to get acquainted. Widamer was some four or five years younger than myself, and he was dressed like any Gothic young man of estimable status, but there was a slightly foreign cut to his clothing, so I presumed him to be a Visigoth, not an Ostrogoth. In our first tentative skirmish of light conversation, he confirmed that guess. He had come hither, he said, all the way from Aquitania, merely to deliver a message, and would be in Novae only long enough to get a written reply to that message, and then he would be off again for his homeland.

That suited me. I preferred a transient visitor to a permanent resident. He would less likely want to become my one and only and ever-abiding lover, and thereby become a pestiferous nuisance. However, I should have interrogated Widamer at length, to satisfy myself as to his identity and credentials. I would have done so, except that I had been much taken with him at first sight. That was because Widamer was almost the twin of the young and anonymous Theodoric I had first known and traveled with, back in Pannonia. Widamer had much the same features and coloring and manly build, and he was
nearly
as handsome, and he had the same devil-me-care rakishness about him. So, contrary to my usual practice on meeting a new man, I took him home with me that very day, and accorded him rather more varieties of delight than I usually bestowed at the first bedding of a new lover.

Well, come to that, I too enjoyed rather more delight than I usually did during a first coupling. For one reason, Widamer looked so much like a younger Theodoric that I was able to imagine, even with my eyes open, that he
was
Theodoric. And there was another, realer reason. I had always imagined that Theodoric’s amatory appendage must be of an admirable robustness. And that is what Widamer’s proved to be, and he employed it with commendable prowess.

I wallowed for so long in such blissful rapture that, when Widamer and I at last uncoupled, I decided to reward him for the experience, and I shifted position in the bed to lavish on him an even more intimate attention. However, when I bent close to his fascinum, and saw it to be of an unnatural flamboyant maroon color, I recoiled and exclaimed:

“Liufs Guth! Are you diseased?”

“Ne, ne,” he said, laughing. “That is only a birthmark, nothing worse. Taste it and see.” And I did, and he had spoken the truth.

In the evening, I bade Widamer take his leave, because I had to dress for another engagement later that night. So he and I parted, with fervent mutual thanks and fulsome mutual compliments and the expression of hopes that we two might meet again sometime. I doubt that Widamer expected that we ever would, and I know that I had no such expectations.

But meet again we did, that same night. My engagement was at Theodoric’s palace, where he had invited his marshal Thorn to attend a convivium feast. I had not known that the gathering was being convened in honor of a messenger named Widamer. Since quite a few courtiers were being introduced to that young man, he surely did not realize that a particular one among them he had already met under other circumstances. Still, I was understandably a little uncomfortable when Theodoric stood us face to face and said affably:

“Saio Thorn, be so good as to bid welcome to my cousin Widamer, son of my late mother’s late brother. Though by birth a noble Amaling, Widamer chose to cast his fortune some years ago with the court of the Balting Euric, King of the Visigoths, at Tolosa in Aquitania.”

I gave the raised-arm salute and said in my deepest, most masculine voice, “Waíla-gamotjands,” and Widamer returned the greeting without evincing any recognition of me.

Theodoric went on, “Widamer comes as an emissary, with the news that our fellow king Euric and the Roman king Odoacer have concluded an agreement—to make the Alpes Maritimae henceforth the firm boundary between their domains. That is little business of ours, of course, but I am pleased to have the report, simply because it brought Widamer here for a visit. He and I had not seen one another since we were small children.”

I said politely, “I wish you a pleasant stay in Novae, young Widamer.”

“Akh, it already has been extremely pleasant,” he replied, without any smirk or insinuation of double meaning.

Thereafter, while the many guests milled about and drank and conversed, I managed to keep away from Widamer. Then, when we all went to the dining chamber and reclined at tables for a midnight nahtamats, I took a couch at a distance from that of Theodoric and Widamer. But I must have drunk copiously and unwisely of the table’s wines and mead, because, before the night was over, I would utter a horrendously imprudent remark.

Theodoric was recounting to his cousin some of the events of his career during the years they had been apart—and, in keeping with the festivity of this occasion, he was relating mainly the more lightsome and entertaining events. The other guests listened with interest, except when they were laughing uproariously or when they interrupted Theodoric to shout some recollection of their own, usually an indelicate or downright bawdy anecdote. And, for some reason, I too felt impelled to contribute a sally. I can only suppose that, seeing Theodoric and Widamer side by side there, the two so nearly indistinguishable, I had got drunkenly confused as to which of
my
identities I was currently inhabiting. At any rate, I had got too addled to remember that it behooved me to stay inconspicuous.

“…And then, Widamer,” Theodoric was saying, with great good humor, “when we laid siege to Singidunum, I took a local wench, just to while away the time. But she is with me yet. Not only have I not got rid of her—behold!” He gestured to where his consort reclined among some other court ladies. “She
multiplies!”

True, Aurora was again visibly pregnant, but she was not embarrassed by the waggery. She only put out her tongue at Theodoric and, when the company laughed at that, she joined in. Then my own voice loudly overrode the laughter:

“And behold, too—Aurora blushes no more! Theodoric, tell Widamer how Aurora used to blush! Vái, she used to blush as dark a color as the birthmark that stains Widamer’s svans!”

The room’s laughter instantly stilled, except for a bewildered feminine giggle here and there. As if my blurting out such a privity were not unseemly enough, the word “svans” is frowned on in mixed company. A number of women
did
blush bright red—and so did Widamer—and
everyone
in the chamber turned to stare at me, appalled. The silence would doubtless have been broken, next moment, by a volley of demands to know if I was making a jest, and, if so, what was the point of it. But, belatedly aware of my own indiscretion, I now regained sense enough to feign sudden drunken unconsciousness, and toppled off my couch to fall asprawl on the marble floor. That occasioned several more feminine giggles and some contemptuous masculine growls of “Dumbs-munths!” I merely lay where I had fallen, with my eyes shut, and was relieved to hear Theodoric take up his storytelling again, with no one making further reference to my oafish outburst.

But I could not lie there forever. Happily, the marshal Soas and the physician Frithila came to my aid, though with disapproving sniffs. They poured cold water over my head and down my throat and, rather than strangle, I pretended to come back to some semblance of muddled consciousness. I thanked them in a slurred voice, and let them lead me to a far corner of the chamber, where they propped me on a bench against the wall. When they left me there, the pretty cosmeta Swanilda came over to stroke my wet head and murmur comforting words, and to her I mumbled indistinct apologies for my witlessness.

At last the gathering began to break up, and Swanilda left me. I was trying to figure out how best I could stagger convincingly but
unobtrusively
from the palace, when abruptly Widamer was standing in front of me, legs apart, hands on hips, and he asked, in a voice low enough not to be overheard but cold enough not to be ignored:

“How did you know about the birthmark?”

I grinned as foolishly as I knew how, and said, making my tongue fumble, “Edivently—I mean evidently—we have been in and out of the same warm bed.”

“Indeed,” he said, making of the word no question. He put a hand under my chin and tilted up my drooping head so he could closely scan my face. Still without making of it a question, he said, “It
would
have been warm, would it not, if you got into that bed in the brief time between my leaving it and your arriving at this convivium.”

I could think of no rejoinder to that, so I gave him only another sloppy grin. He kept hold of my chin and keenly studied my face, then finally said, “Be easy. I am no gossip. But this I will ponder on… and remember…”

Then he was gone from the room, and shortly so was I.

I might have been inclined to stay well away from the palace for some time after that night, until perhaps my atrociously dumbs-munths performance might be forgotten. But I was anxious to know whether I was to be permanently in disgrace with Theodoric and Aurora and everyone else of the court. I was even more anxious to find out whether Widamer had made vociferous complaint about my inhospitality toward a foreign emissary. So, despite my apprehensions (and a fearsome headache), I presented myself at the palace early the next day.

My misgivings were much allayed when Theodoric did not berate me, but only grinned and chaffed me for having drunk myself “aisa-nasa”—copper-nosed, as the Old Language has it. He also told me that Widamer had already, even earlier that morning, departed for Aquitania, without having done more than chuckle indulgently about my sottish impropriety. And Aurora took one look at me, did some motherly clucking and waddled out to the kitchen to prepare a beaker of Camerinum wine mixed with wormwood and costmary. She brought that to me, saying with a smile, “Tagl af wulfa”—as the Old Language calls it: the tail of the wolf that had bitten me—and most thankfully I quaffed it down.

So I was not in irremediable disgrace, and my brief spell of derangement was not held against me. Also, not Theodoric or Aurora or any other person ever afterward pressed me to know
“what
birthmark?” or anything else about the innocuous secret of Widamer’s that I had divulged. Still, if no one else felt like despising me, I did, because I knew that Widamer had behaved much more decently than I. Whatever suspicions or intuitions he may have had about
my
deep, dark secret, he had not confided to anyone. Or so I then believed. Not until a later time—and in another land—would I realize all the repercussions of that one fateful day’s encounters among Veleda and Widamer and Thorn.

So I went on passing my time in mere activity, which is not the same as action, until I was brought to an awareness of how very
much
time had gone by. That realization occurred when one day I rode from my farm into Novae and encountered the court physician Frithila on the street.

“Have you heard the news, Saio Thorn?” he asked. “Last night the lady Aurora gave birth to another daughter.”

“Say you so? I must hurry to the palace and bestow felicitations and gifts. But… gudisks Himins…” I said, calculating. “This means that I have been stagnating in frivolous retirement since before the king’s
first
child was born. And little Arevagni is no longer so little. Where has the time gone to?” Frithila only grunted, so I asked, “And why are you not overjoyed, Lekeis, to be spreading such glad news?”

“It is not entirely gladsome. The lady died in giving birth.”

“Gudisks Himins!” I said again, for this was a real shock, and I had been brotherly fond of Aurora. “But she was such a sturdy woman, of good strong peasant stock. Were there untoward circumstances?”

“None,” he sighed, and helplessly spread his hands. “She came to term and to labor as healthily as before. There seemed no more than the expectable amount of pain, and the midwife properly kept masturbating the lady to palliate that pain. The delivery was easily accomplished, the infant proved normal in every respect. But then the lady Aurora slipped into coma, and never awakened.” He shrugged and concluded, “Gutheis wilja theins”—which means “God’s will be done.”

I spoke that same pietistic phrase to Theodoric when I went to condole with him: “Gutheis wilja theins.”