Raptor (127 page)

(I
was
a little surprised to find a simple countryman so well spoken, but I reminded myself that I was now in the Roman heartland; even the rustics here ought rightly to be more articulate than those in outer regions of the empire. Also, I was later to learn that the people hereabout were of Celtic descent. They were paler-skinned and bigger in stature than their Celtic-cousin Veneti we had encountered in Venetia, and, no doubt because these lived closer to Rome, they spoke Latin much more correctly.)

Since the old man was capable of talking, and seemed willing to do so without inhibition, I decided to get from him as much information as I could. I said, “I assume your sus barbaricus Tufa took his army on to Ravenna. Will this road take me there too?”

He cocked his head and asked sardonically, “Are you wanting to take a look at the beast?”

“Perhaps I just wish to thank him, on behalf of the blowflies, for the bounty of their gift.”

He chuckled and said, “This Via Aemilia’s terminus is the Hadriatic seaport of Ariminum. However”—he waved eastward—“a few miles from here, a very wretched little road forks off to the left and winds its way across the marshes to Ravenna. You would think, in all the years since that city became the capital of the empire, some ruler would have laid a decent Roman road. But none has wanted to make his sanctum easy of access.”

“There is no other way in?”

“Yes. Trade your handsome horse for a boat and you can approach Ravenna from the Hadriatic. The only other
road
is the Via Popilia that goes north and south along the coast, but it is no grand highway, either. It is used mostly by mule trains bringing salt from the Alpes to be shipped abroad.”

“Very well,” I said. “I shall try the marsh road.”

“Be warned, though. When Odoacer is in residence, Ravenna is heavily ringed about with guards and sentries. You will at least be challenged. More often, uninvited visitors are shot on sight.”

“On behalf of the blowflies,” I said lightly, “I must take the risk.”

“You need not, if all you wish is to present the flies’ compliments to their benefactor. Odoacer often closets himself in Ravenna for months at a time, but Tufa’s military duties require him to travel. Also, as I said, he is the legatus of Bononia. You have only to wait at his palace there, and soon or later he will be in residence. Of course, you will not easily get in to see him—not without being rudely interrogated and stripped and searched. Others before you have tried to present certain compliments to the clarissimus Tufa.”

Our colloquy was interrupted by rude shouts from the old man’s fellow diggers—demanding that he stop shirking and get back to work. He grunted a curse, saluted me with his mattock and said jovially:

“Anyway, stranger, do us a favor and take some of the blowflies with you as you go. Vale, viator.”

Then he went to help the others, who were toppling the remains of Freidereikhs and six or seven of his Rugian warriors into a common grave.

Ill paved and rutted and pitted though the marsh road was, I was glad to have it under me. I was advancing along it in the darkness of deep night, and its windings this way and that gave evidence that it was keeping me and Velox safely clear of quaking-sands and other such treacherous spots in the surrounding bogland. I had come about twelve miles since turning off the Aemilian Way, and I knew not how far ahead Ravenna might lie, but I could see no lights of it, and there were no clouds above to show any reflected glow. I was afoot and leading Velox, to move as quietly as possible and, because of the cloudless sky, to make our profile against the stars as inconspicuously low as possible.

I was getting a good appreciation of the stronghold aspects of Ravenna. An army approaching the city by this single twisty road would be slowed to a walk, and the army’s striking front could be only four or five horsemen in breadth, meaning no effective front at all. On the road or off it, neither an army nor a lone spying speculator could get close to the city unobserved, day or night, except by creeping on hands and knees. The land was as flat as the road, with no concealing cover higher than swamp grass, reeds and some weedy shrubs. And of course, all that terrain being mud and mire and muck and slime, if an army did attempt to flounder across it, every last man would be as easy a target as a water rat trying the same. I had not yet seen Ravenna from its seaward side, but I was coming to the conclusion that an assailant from the landward had no hope at all, unless he either laid vast fields of pontoons, enough for his whole army to cross at once, or trained the local marsh birds to attack in his stead—the latter option being no more ludicrously impossible than the former.

I knew I could not go much farther this night, as I was going, without soon alerting some sentry. I paused while I considered whether it would be better to tether Velox to a tussock and steal on by myself, or just to stop both of us where we were and wait for dawn to give me a clearer view of our situation. While I was weighing the matter, it was decided for me. At some distance to my front—I could not judge how far—a light was kindled, and so suddenly that at first I took it to be the spectral draco volens common in miasmic swamps like this one. But then the light divided into nine distinct points, and those moved apart into two groups—five on the left, four on the right—and I recognized them as the torches of the Polybian signal system.

To my puzzlement, they did not immediately start a message, but only jiggled up and down. After a moment of perplexity, I somehow thought to turn and look behind me. There, another incalculable distance away, came into existence an identical line of nine lights. I realized that, far to the northwest of these marshlands, some Roman legionaries or speculatores—or, for all I knew, just plain Roman citizens—were preparing to communicate with the troops inside Ravenna. That western line of torches
did
commence a message, and I marveled to think that this news might have come from anywhere in the outside world, passed along by relays of such lights, shortly to be read by Odoacer and Tufa within their sanctum. And by me out here.

But then something happened that did more than puzzle me; it quite dumbfounded me. When the “outside” lights moved—the first torch raised on the left, the third on the right—what was being communicated, unless Odoacer had recently altered his system, was the third letter of the old-time runic alphabet. And the lights continued to signal the same letter over and over, as if for insistent emphasis, and that third letter of the futhark is the rune called thorn. I was amazed and more than a little dismayed. How could this have happened? Not only had my stealthy progress along the marsh road been noticed; Ravenna was being urgently warned of
who
was approaching.

In another moment, though, I laughed ironically at myself. I had been overpresumptuous of my own importance. The lights stopped repeating the thorn, rested briefly, then signaled the ansus, the dags, the úrus and the ansus again—A, D, U, A—and I comprehended. Such a slow-spelling system must confine itself to the absolute minimum of words, and even must condense those where possible. From this word ADUA an unneeded D had been subtracted. The thorn that I had mistaken for my name signaled only TH, the sound that rune represents, here being used as short-sign for the word “Theodoric.” I could gather that the message was telling something about Theodoric and the river Addua. However, the communication consisted of just one more word, or part of one—the runic letters winja, eis, nauths and kaun: V, I, N and C. Then both of the lines of torches did that up-and-down jiggling and abruptly were snuffed out.

I stood in the darkness, which now seemed blacker than before, and pondered. The message sent and received—TH ADUA VINC—was admirably concise and no doubt fully informative to its receivers, but it left me only partly informed. Theodoric had recently been or was right now at the Addua River where Odoacer’s other Roman force was stationed; that much was clear enough. And the VINC, in the context, had to stand for “vincere,” to conquer. The signalers would know, by prearrangement, the verb’s intended voice and mood and tense. But to the uninitiated, meaning me, the truncated VINC could signify that Theodoric was being victorious, or that he was being defeated, or that he was
about
to be one or the other, or that he already
had
been.

Well, I thought, whichever of those eventualities was being reported, the message ought to fetch Tufa out of Ravenna again in rather a hurry. Odoacer might hide there while the rest of his country was or was not being purged of its invaders, but his chief military commander could hardly do that for long. So, I decided, I would be waiting for Tufa when he emerged. And, as the old gravedigger had suggested, Bononia seemed the best place for me to lurk in wait. I turned and began leading Velox back toward the Via Aemilia, frankly relieved that I had not had to try some means of sneaking all the way into Ravenna.

As I trudged through the night, still moving cautiously, I had to admit to myself that, in plotting to waylay Tufa, I was actually disobeying orders and exceeding my office. Theodoric had bidden me only to investigate and report on matters here—not to be again his “Parmenio behind enemy lines”—so I ought rightly to be galloping north to find and join him. I could be at the Addua in just two days or so of hard riding, and a marshal’s place in battle was at his king’s side. I also had to bear in mind that, on another occasion when I sought to bring retribution to a sus barbaricus—the one named Strabo—I had left the job unfinished. Even if I were now to be fully successful in giving Tufa the requital he deserved, Theodoric might not thank me for it. Tufa was guilty of an offense even more heinous than the slaughter of defenseless prisoners. Tufa was a regicide. Custom and tradition would dictate that the slaying of a king be punished by no man of lower rank than a king. Furthermore, Tufa’s violation of his given word had been a flagrant insult to Theodoric personally. From any point of view, vengeance properly belonged to Theodoric.

Nevertheless, I would chance my sovereign’s displeasure. Freidereikhs had been my friend, my ward, my younger brother. And though Theodoric perhaps was not aware of it, his own princess-daughter had hoped to make Freidereikhs one day her royal husband. So I would not stay my hand. I would avenge the young king and his warriors, needlessly dead. And in the name of all of us who had been bereaved—myself, Theodoric, Thiudagotha, the Rugian nation, the—

My musings were cut short, almost literally, when I walked up against a sharp point and it painfully pricked my belly. Deep in cogitation, I had ignored Velox’s whuffle of warning, and then had failed to discern the dark figure crouched against the darkness, until I strode right into the spear leveled at my beltline, and heard a hoarse voice say menacingly:

“I know you, Saio Thorn.”

Iésus,
I thought, I was right all along: the Romans
have
had me marked from my first arrival in these parts. But no—this man had spoken in the Old Language. I must be again mistaken. And then, to my further confoundment, he demanded:

“Speak the truth, Marshal, or I spill your guts on this spot. Are you Odoacer’s man, niu?”

“Ne,” I said, speaking the truth, whatever the cost. “I am here to
kill
one of Odoacer’s men.”

The blade did not plunge into my bowels, but neither did it waver. I added, “I am Theodoric’s man, and I am here at his behest.” After another tense moment of silence, I said also, “Spearman, you know me in the dark. Would I know you in the light?”

He finally moved the spearpoint aside and stood erect, but still he was only a darkness in the dark. He sighed and said, “My name is Tulum. You would not have had reason ever to take note of me. I am a signifer of what was the third turma of what was Brunjo’s century of cavalry. It was our century that Theodoric detached at Concordia and sent south on patrol. When we came to Bononia, I was one of the men whom Brunjo posted as lookouts at varying distances outside the city.”

“Akh!” I said, enlightened. “So you escaped the shambles.”

He sighed again, as if he regretted that, and said, “After some while at my post, during which nothing of interest occurred, I rode into the city to make routine report to my centurio. He was not there, and the townsfolk were talking of the Romans’ having scurried through, herding a mass of captive outlanders. When I learned which way Brunjo had gone, and at last caught up to him, at that grainfield east of the city… well, you know what I found.”

“And there you espied me, too.”

“Ja. Of all the outlanders, the only one still alive. Watching the burial and conversing, apparently calmly, with one of the Roman buriers. I will not apologize, Saio Thorn, for my having been provoked to dark suspicions.”

“You need not apologize, Signifer Tulum. There have indeed been betrayals aplenty.”

“When you went on toward Ravenna, as the Roman columns have done, I thought my suspicions confirmed—that you had long and secretly been in league with the enemy. I followed at a very discreet distance. I was behind you all this night, and moving ever closer, until we had gone so far across the marsh that I expected the city’s guards to be surrounding us at any moment. They would welcome you, I supposed, but not me, and I did not wish to be cheated of killing a traitor.” He uttered a sort of embarrassed half-laugh. “I can tell you now. When you stopped back there—while those torches briefly burned—had you resumed your course, just one more step toward Ravenna, at that instant I was going to skewer you. But then you turned and came back this way. That made me uncertain. I decided to give you one chance to speak. I am glad now that I did.”

“So am I, and right heartily. Thags izvis, Tulum. Come, the dawn will break soon. Let us hasten back to the main road. There is much to relate of the events that have happened since you came south. For one thing, you may be relieved to know that at least one other warrior of your century did not die here. Brunjo sent an optio named Witigis to make report to Theodoric, which is why I am here. I might remark that Witigis was not much pleased to have been spared.”