Raptor (41 page)

“Akh, who?” said Wyrd, mock-innocently. “Would I dare to try flouting all the powers of—?”

“You,” spat Winguric, stabbing a bony finger at him, “will be slain by a friend. So say the gods and so say I.”

That may have stunned even the cynical Wyrd. It certainly stunned me. Then, before either of us could utter a word, the wise-sayer swung his finger to point at me.

“You,” he spat, “will slay a friend. So say the gods and so say I.”

Then he creakily stood up and, without as much as another look at us, strode away.

I still could not speak, but Wyrd serenely hummed to himself as he completed the packing and tying of our sledges. And as we led our horses from the encampment, he waved and called “huarbodáu mith gawaírthja” to King Ediulf and the other Baiuvarja who watched us depart. Not until we were some distance from the camp could I speak, and then my voice came out with a bit of a quaver to it.

“If—if the frodei-qithans is right, fráuja, it almost sounds as though—as though I am sometime going to kill you.”

“Just try,” he said drily.

“You put no credence in the predictions?”

“By the sin-sniffing St. Jerome, of course I do not! Every time I encounter a wise-sayer or an astrologus or an augur of whatever sort, I recall the warning that Nero got from the oracle at Delphi. ‘Beware of seventy-three years.’ Nero was overjoyed to believe that he would live to such an age. But it was the seventy-three-year-old Galba who dethroned him. Nero took his own life at the age of thirty-two. Predictions are always couched in such a way that they can mean anything or nothing at all. Most often, urchin, they mean nothing at all. Like Cato, I marvel that one augur can look another in the face.”

Considerably relieved by Wyrd’s calm indifference, I said, “I know you share King Ediulf’s low opinion of Christianity. But I should have thought you might be a little inclined toward the Old Religion. It has at least the virtue of antiquity.”

“Vái! Those who revere the antique seem never to realize that a
pebble
is older than anything man ever made. Including all the religions invented by the so-called ancients. Everyone speaks with veneration of those ‘ancients’ and how wise they were. But they were neither. Consider, urchin. The ancient peoples, the ancient kingdoms, the ancient sages and prophets—why, they all existed in the ignorant youthtime of the world. So many ages have passed since then that even the stars have moved. In those times, it was Thuban that marked true north; now the star Phoenice shines there instead. Ne, ne, it is
we
who are the ancients—and the wiser, or at least we ought to be—we who live today, when mankind and the world have grown old.”

I thought it over, then said, “That would never have occurred to me.”

“Of course, there were intelligent and clever men, however ignorant, at the very beginning of the world, and then as now they took advantage of others’ ignorance. That is why I hold all religions to be equally valid—or equally absurd—because all religions are myths, and no myth can be superior to any other, and men made those myths.”

He stopped, both talking and walking, so suddenly that his horse bumped into him and the sledge bumped into the horse.

“Look here! Elk tracks! Come, urchin. We shall dine tonight on elk’s liver. A delicacy far superior to every juiceless, tasteless, indigestible myth ever made!”

Well, neither of us killed the other, and eventually, somewhere, we crossed an invisible boundary line in the forest, passing eastward from Bajo-Varia into the province called Noricum. Although Alamanni tribes wander about Noricum, too, there are also small settlements of Roman colonists whose ancestors emigrated from Italia, mainly because there is much iron in the ground here, and the Noricans prosper by making the fine Noric steel that Rome buys for making weapons. So every settlement that Wyrd and I came upon was centered on a mine or a forge or a foundry.

In early spring, we came downstream along the river Aenus, taking many beaver, and at last saw a real road, wider than a footpath. It was the Roman road that descends the Alpes by way of the Alpis Ambusta, probably the most traveled pass through those mountains, so the road bore a heavy traffic of persons and animals and wagons and carts going to or from or beyond the cities of Tridentum in Italia to the south and Castra Regina on the great river Danuvius to the north. The road crosses the Aenus on a well-constructed bridge, and so did Wyrd and I, finding the eastern end of the bridge guarded by the Roman station of Veldidena, garrisoned by troops of the Legio II Italica Pia. As elsewhere, the station’s surrounding cabanae—shops, tabernae, forges, tanneries and the like—had mostly been built and were tended by legion veterans, and here, as elsewhere, Wyrd had several old acquaintances. And here, as elsewhere, he got drunk with them, though not until after he had sold a quantity of furs and horns and, to the garrison’s medicus, even some of our castoreum. Then, while he swilled and guzzled and wallowed for many days in happy drunkenness, I did the buying of what supplies we needed for the next stage of our journey.

That stage, when Wyrd had recovered and we went on, took us farther down the ever-widening Aenus, and then—when the river bent northward—away from it, over lands that were watered by only small streams. We traveled faster now, because most of the fur-bearing animals were past their winter prime and we hunted chiefly for the cooking fire. So, in late spring, we came to the trading city and provincial capital, Juvavum. As soon as we had sold all our goods—and sold them for a fortune far surpassing what we had earned in Constantia the year before—Wyrd said to me:

“I have no acquaintances here with whom to dawdle and drink and reminisce, and cities do not greatly appeal to me otherwise. Besides, I believe we have earned ourselves a real holiday. Let us stay here only a few more days, urchin, long enough to soak the wilderness out of us in several good leisurely baths, and eat our fill of voluptuous city viands, and replenish our wardrobes and other necessities. Then let us depart, and I will take you to one of the most enchanting places in which one can make holiday. What say you?”

I still had painful memories of the last city in which I had tarried for long, so I concurred without any hesitation and, about a week later, Wyrd and I rode out of Juvavum, leaving our empty sledges behind. We did not take any of the many Roman roads that converge on Juvavum, but went southeast through the gradually heightening forelands of the range known to the local folk as the Roofstone Alpes.

After just a few days of easy riding, we were in the part of Noricum called in Latin the Regio Salinarum, in the Old Language the Salthuzdland, both names meaning “the place of much salt.” That did not signify a barren desert of salt (which sort of wastelands do exist, I am told, but only in Asia and Libya). Far from it. The region
is
amply supplied with salt mines, but they are all deep underground and the entrances to those caverns only infrequently pock the countryside. The rest of the landscape is truly grand, the loveliest country I had yet traveled through. Lush alpine meadows of wild-flowers and sweet grasses alternated with forests that were—I do not know why—different from all those we had earlier traversed. These forests were much like the parklands I would eventually see on rich men’s great estates: not clogged with underbrush, the trees standing fastidiously apart, so that every one had room to spread its crown most bountifully, and between the trees were flowering shrubs and grass as lawnlike as the prata of those carefully tailored and groomed estates.

“This is the prettiest country I have ever laid eyes on,” I said to Wyrd, in genuine awe and rapture. “Do you suppose there might be centaurs and satyrs and nymphs in these woods?”

“As many here as anywhere,” he said wryly, but he looked pleased to have me commend his choice of a place for our holiday.

The journey was marred by only one unfortunate incident. We had stopped for the night beside a crystalline brook that flowed through a flowery and fragrant arbor. I had gone off to collect windfall branches and twigs to build a fire, and was returning with an armload when I heard Wyrd shout a wordless exclamation of surprise, and then heard a strange animal noise, something between a whine and a growl, and then heard a scuffling noise that ceased abruptly. I ran then and, at the campsite, found Wyrd standing with his short-sword in hand, its blade all bloody. He was gazing morosely down at what he had slain, a very handsome bitch-wolf.

“What is this?” I asked. “I thought you were a friend to wolves.”

“I am,” he said, without lifting his gaze from the animal. “This one tried to attack me.”

I could believe that it must have been a sudden and fierce attack, for I saw a spatter of blood on one of Wyrd’s laced leggings, and he was ordinarily very neat in his kills, even when it was a charging boar.

I said, “I also thought a wolf would never accost a man. You told me so.”

“This one was ill,” he said glumly. “She was afflicted with a sickness I have seen before. She would have died in terrible torments. I killed her out of mercy.”

Wyrd looked so mournful that I forbore from inquiry about that sickness, and said only, “Well, at least you got her before she savaged you or the horses.”

“Ja,” said Wyrd, but still gloomily. Then he almost angrily rumpled his hair and beard, and said, “While I go to wash my sword and myself, urchin, please take the firewood farther along the brook to make camp. I would rather not spend the night so close to this poor dead creature.”

I had earlier brought down a hare with my sling. As we dined on it—broiled on a spit over the fire and well seasoned with salt, because salt was so cheap in these parts—it occurred to me to remark:

“You know something, fráuja? He
did
prophesy rightly—that aged Winguric we met back in the winter—only he got our fortunes reversed. It is you who have slain a friend, not me.”

Wyrd did not even grunt at that. I fancied that he was peeved to have been wrong about oracles and divination, so I twitted him:

“Probably you confused the old frodei-qithans with all that extravagant sneezing you did.”

Again he made no reply whatsoever, and I realized that I was being boorish and insensitive. It appeared that Wyrd was grieving over the dead wolf, much as I had done over my dead juika-bloth. So I shut my foolish mouth and we passed the evening in silence. By the next morning, though, Wyrd was his old self again—gruff and sarcastic and snappish—and the rest of our journey through those wondrous woods was carefree and gladsome.

I thought I had already seen beauty enough on our way, but all of that paled in my memory when I saw our destination. At about noon one day we rode around the shoulder of a high Alpe, and Wyrd reined his horse to a halt, and made a sweeping gesture of his arm to show me what lay below, and the sight made me catch my breath.

“Haustaths,” Wyrd said proudly. “The Place of Echoes.”

In my lifetime I have seen Roma Flora and Konstantinopólis Anthusa—the Latin agnomen and the Greek both mean “the flourishing,” and both cities are sumptuous indeed. I have seen Vindobona, the second-oldest city, after Rome itself, in the entire empire; and I have seen Ravenna; and I have seen many other historic cities. I have seen the lands that border the river Danuvius, from the Black Sea to the Black Forest, and I have taken ship on both the Mediterranean Sea and the Sarmatic Ocean. In sum, I have seen more of the world than most people ever will. But still I remember Haustaths as the most ravishingly beautiful and beguiling piece of this earth that I have ever beheld.

From the mountain whence Wyrd and I gazed down, the Place of Echoes was very like an oblong bowl made all of Alpes, the bowl holding some water in its bottom. But that water was a lake, and it had to be a tremendously deep one, for the mountains’ flanks went almost straight down into it, to meet conjoined somewhere far, far below. Only at intervals between the flanks, at lakeside, were there small patches of land sloping down to the water, and there were a few shelflike meadows visible on some of the mountainsides. Several of the Alpes on the farther side of the bowl were so tall that their peaks—even now, in early summer—were still white with snow. Here and there, the mountains also showed crags and cliffs of bare brown rock. But the bulk of them was clad in forest—from our distance, looking like billows and pleats of rich green fleece, dappled a dark blue-green wherever a cloud shadow undulated across it.

The lake, the Haustaths-Saiws, was a miniature compared to the Brigantinus, but it was incomparably more radiant and inviting. The blue—akh! the blue of it!—made it seem, from where I first saw it, a precious blue gem nestled among the mountains’ folds of green fleece. Not until long afterward did I have opportunity to see a dark-yet-glowing blue sapphire, but when I did, I was instantly reminded of the color of that Haustaths lake.

Floating about on the water were some objects unidentifiably tiny from this distance, and directly below us—so far below us that it appeared to be one of those toy villages that wood-carvers make for children—was the town of Haustaths, occupying the whole of one of the few meager patches of lakeside land. I could see only the roofs of the town, every one steep-pitched to shed the snow in winter, and an open market square among the roofs, and some piers jutting out onto the water. But there were
many
roofs, so many that I could not imagine how the houses under them all huddled together in a space so constricted.

Then we rode down from our Alpe, along a trail that ran close beside a wide stream bounding merrily down a series of cataracts toward the lake. And as we got nearer to Haustaths, I could see how the town was built. There was very little flat land alongside the lake here, so only a comparative few of the houses—and a sizable church and the town square, with shops and tabernae and gasts-razna all around it—stood on level ground. The other houses and establishments of the town were stacked almost one atop another, halfway up the steep mountainside. They were separated not by crosswise streets but by tiny alleyways, and up and downhill ran not streets but stone
staircases.
The houses were so cramped and crowded that some were very narrow, but those compensated for the squeeze by being two or even three stories high.