Raptor (132 page)

“And probably,” muttered Pitzias, “that is one reason for Tufa’s having butchered our men. So they would not be a drain on the city’s store of resources.”

“If so, it was an unnecessary precaution,” I said. “The occupants of Ravenna can live well—and indefinitely—even without having collected those harvests. I remember, when I was Strabo’s prisoner in the Black Sea city of Constantiana, how he boasted that all the armies of Europe could not prevent that city’s being supplied and fed by seagoing ships. And Ravenna sits beside the Hadriatic Sea. That is why I tell you this. The one and only practical way of assailing Ravenna is to utilize the Roman navy. Have its ships transport our troops and put them ashore there, and—”

“I cannot do that,” Theodoric said flatly.

“Proud warrior,” I said, “I know you would prefer us to take Ravenna without any outside assistance. So would I. But you must believe me when I say it is beyond our doing. And that Navarchus Lentinus of the Hadriatic Fleet seemed well enough inclined to—”

“Lentinus is
why
I cannot enlist the Roman navy. Vái, Thorn, you were present when I gave that man my word—that I would be his legitimate, lawful, rightful commander before I ever would give him a command. Zeno has not conferred that authority on me, and cannot, and Lentinus knows it. Even if I wished to go back on my given word, there is no way I could make the navarchus obey me. He has only to move his ships out of my reach.”

“And such a rebuff,” Ibba remarked, unnecessarily, “would demean Theodoric, in the eyes of his soon-to-be subjects, worse than would the most devastating battle defeat.”

Theodoric went on, “I had already thought of landing seaborne troops, Thorn. And, failing that, of using seaborne catapults to assail Ravenna. And, as a last resort, of employing a naval blockade at least to ward off the ships supplying the city. But ne, I cannot. Lentinus has already very kindly obliged me to the extent of lending his fastest vessels to carry messengers between Aquileia and Constantinople, That is how I learned of Zeno’s illness. But more I cannot request of Lentinus, and nothing can I demand.”

I shrugged. “I can suggest no other recourse. So lay siege to Ravenna, if you like, when our armies get to Flaminia. It will do no good, except to keep Odoacer in there, when what you really want is to get him out. But at least you will know where he is. Perhaps, by the time we conquerors are settled down and peaceably farming on every other jugerum of Italian ground except that swampy bit of the coast, Odoacer will finally concede that he is beaten and come out voluntarily.”

“Habái ita swe,” said Theodoric, not in a commanding tone this time, but in a rueful wishing way.

At that, the gathered officers took their leave, and I deliberately lagged to be the last, so I could ask Theodoric, “And what of King Clovis’s sister, niu?”

“What?” he said blankly, as if he had quite forgotten her existence. “What can I say about her? I can hardly contemplate making an empress of Audefleda until I have some claim to an empire.”

“Which you will, in time, Guth wiljis. And then? Will you contemplate wedding an alien woman whom you have never even seen?”

“Akh, you know there is nothing uncommon about that, not in the case of royal families arranging marriages of alliance and convenience. However, General Respa
has
met Audefleda. He assures me that she is of passable intelligence, of acceptable graces and of rather more beauty than is usual among princesses.”

I said, in the solicitous way in which feminine spitefulness is oftenest expressed, “Such a pity that Frankish women, as is well known, tend to age and wither rather sooner than others. Since, as you remark, it may be some considerable while before you can contemplate—”

“Oh vái!” Theodoric exclaimed, with a robust laugh. “Clovis himself is only a stripling of twenty-three, and Audefleda must be six or seven years younger. I certainly expect to enjoy ample and savory tasting of that plum before it shrivels to a prune.”

So I slouched out of the basilica, slightly seething. Even a woman ordinarily as sedate and levelheaded as Veleda cannot help being perturbed when she tries to measure her qualities against those of another woman, and—before she can even begin to tally things like beauty, charm and wit—is confounded to discover that the other woman has the overwhelming, insurmountable, horrendously unjust advantage of being
younger.
And I, Veleda, was—liufs Guth!—something like
twice
the age of the upjumped Audefleda!

I realized that I was gnashing my teeth, so I forcibly reminded myself that I was not yet
old.
The august Christian Church, which purports to be infallible when consulted on every other question that mortals can put to it, has determined
precisely
when a woman is old—old beyond repair, beyond redemption, beyond protest or pretense or appeal for reprieve. The sage Church fathers have decreed that a woman is old at forty, that being the age at which she becomes eligible for the oblivion of the nun’s velatio. As little Sister Tilde once explained to me (back when I was so unbelievably, impossibly young), a woman of forty is, by the Church’s reckoning, “aged well beyond having any indecent urges of her own… so antiquated and dilapidated that she inspires no such urges in any men.”

Well, thags Guth, I was still some six years short of toppling over that brink of no return. I might even be one of the few to extend that brink a little further than forty. Although nature had made an appalling error in first giving me human form, nature had since then dealt rather more kindly with me than with most women. I had always been trim and slight of build, and still was. My body had never been thickened and sagged by childbearing, my vigor had never been sapped by the menoths bleeding. And it may have been my lack of certain female glands—or my having them so inextricably mixed with the male—that kept the usual effects of age rather at bay. Granted, my hips had broadened just a
trifle,
my breasts and belly had become just a
little
less springy to the touch. But my skin was still smooth and unblotched, my face not wrinkled or lined, my pores not coarsened. My underchin was still firm, the back of my neck not bunchy, my hair still abundant and bright. My voice had not got strident, my walk not become a waddle. Even compared to an unripe, newly pubescent, barely nubile little minx like the sixteen-year-old Audefleda, I thought, I would hardly be judged decrepit. Still…

There is no denying that men who were comely in youth keep their appeal much longer than the comeliest women can hope to do. Veleda would not always be able to take her pick of men of every age and condition, as I had done in Bononia. But her contemporaries Thorn and Theodoric would, for many years yet, go on attracting women of their own age, and women younger and ever younger, not to mention women older. Right now, given their choice of a Veleda nearly ready for the veil, and the budding sprig Audefleda: which would they choose? I was tempted to tear my hair and wail, like that pitiable crone Hildr in the Gutaland cave, “I ask you, is that fair? Is it
fair?”

Instead, suddenly appalled, I stopped dead in the street where I was walking. In a manner of speaking, Thorn stood back to gaze at Veleda with a mixture of wonder and horror and amusement, and to cry aloud, “Gudisks Himins! Am I being consumed with bitter envy of
myself?”

At that moment, a patrol of our own warriors marched past in neat formation. They all dutifully saluted my marshal’s armor, but gave a very odd look at the marshal wearing it. When they had gone on, I laughed at my lunatic and overlapping vagaries, and now said—not aloud—“Vái, why conjure up so confused a future? It may well be that Fortune or Tykhe or some other goddess of chance has already decided that Thorn and Theodoric and Veleda all will fall in the next battle.”

But of course we did not, not in the next battle or in any after that. Indeed, the several battles to come were all rather perfunctory affairs, and quickly concluded, costing not too many casualties on either side. That was because the Roman legions, bereft of their chief commander and deserted by their king, were understandably disgruntled and disheartened. None marched out to meet us as we advanced southward along the peninsula, and when we came upon their defensive positions and sent ahead our haughty demand—“tributum aut bellum”—they put up just enough resistance that they could afterward say they had not surrendered without a fight. But surrender they did.

By the August end of the year, we were effectually in command of the entire land of Italia—except for Odoacer’s asylum city of Ravenna—though Theodoric had chosen to halt our advance along the east-west line of the Via Aemilia, only about half the distance between Italia’s Venetia border and its heart-city of Rome. He elected to stop there for the coming winter, simply to facilitate the travel of his messenger riders, because he was increasingly more occupied with the concerns of administration than of conquest. In the major cities that we had overrun, Theodoric had left detachments of our forces, and now he sent other detachments to police even the smaller towns, and he required quick and easy communication with all of those.

Zeno was still ailing—his life ebbing, said the reports from Constantinople—but no successor emperor or regent had been installed. Since Theodoric still could not be imperially proclaimed the new King of Rome, and since he virtuously refused to arrogate to himself any powers of that office, he lacked the authority to enact and enforce laws for the governance of his conquered land. However, he could and did impose the jus belli, laying down certain rules and regulations for the keeping of order and the conduct of civic affairs. The rules he instituted were by no means harsh; they quite surprised and pleased his “newly conquered subjects”; and they prefigured the beneficent despotism with which Theodoric would govern ever after.

As well as I have been able to determine from my readings in world history, every conqueror who ever lived before Theodoric—Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, every other—despised the peoples he subdued and made subject. The conqueror always set out to impose on the conquered his own ideas of what was right and wrong, not only in matters of government and law and statecraft but also in every least detail of behavior, beliefs, culture, customs and taste. Theodoric did not. Far from despising these inhabitants of what had been the mighty Western Roman Empire, he honored and admired them for their heritage and, from the very first, made plain that he intended to help them restore and regain that greatness.

For example, it would have been the expectable thing for a conqueror ruthlessly to purge every last subordinate and servitor of his vanquished predecessor, to expunge every last vestige of that predecessor’s rulership. Theodoric did not. For the time being, at least, he left in charge of the occupied provinces and cities and towns every Roman legatus or praefectus who had held that office during Odoacer’s reign, reasoning that a governor of some longevity and experience would govern better than any newcomer.

However, to assist (and invigilate) each of those governors, Theodoric instituted a kind of tribunal that, for fairness and justice, surely no conquered people ever had known before. At each level of civil administration, Theodoric installed both a Roman judex and an Ostrogoth marshal, coequal in authority. The judex oversaw all matters arising among the Roman populace, and judged according to Roman law. The marshal was responsible for matters pertaining to the occupying outlanders, and judged according to Gothic law. Both magistrates together, somehow managing amiably and equably to correlate their separate bodies of law, arbitrated transactions and adjudicated disputes between Romans and outlanders. Though at first this novel kind of tribunal was intended just to ease friction between the occupied and their occupiers, it proved so eminently serviceable and beneficial to all parties and to the whole nation—even after the influx of many more outlanders—that the system endured and still does to this day.

Over time, of course, Theodoric had to weed out numerous Roman legati and praefecti and judices who proved inept or corrupt or stupid, most of those having attained their offices through “amicitia,” which is to say favoritism or nepotism or bootlicking or bribery. He replaced the discards with Romans of demonstrable ability, although some of those told him bluntly that, while they would try to serve honestly and efficiently, they were not
joyously
serving under a non-Roman usurper. I think Theodoric best preferred those frankly reluctant holders of office; he could be sure that they were not lickspittles. There was only one kind of office that Theodoric closed to Roman candidates. After the Roman army inevitably came under his command and was merged with our outlander forces, he dismissed the Roman tribunes and would not give to a Roman any other significant military appointment.

“I am trying,” he told me once, in those early days of occupation, “to make a reasonable apportionment of responsibilities. Let each man do what he does best, and reward him accordingly. When it comes to cultivating the land and reaping its resources, Romans and outlanders can be equally hardworking and proficient and productive. But the tasks involved in defending the land, maintaining law and order, those are best entrusted to us of Germanic nationality, deservedly notorious as ‘battle-loving barbarians.’ And since it was the Romans of former times who developed the arts and sciences that have so much enriched mankind, I shall leave today’s Romans free of meaner drudgeries—insofar as possible—in hope that they will emulate their forebears, to enhance and enlighten the world anew.”

Most of his efforts toward those ends would come later, but, as I say, he made a promising beginning even in those months when martial law was all he had to work with. Though he and his army and his new subjects would continue to regard Mediolanum as Theodoric’s “capital city” for some while to come, he did not just go to ground there and rule by fiat, in the remote and uncaring way that most Roman emperors had done. All that winter, he was on the roads, going from one corner of the occupied lands to another, personally seeing to the security and comfort and cheer of “his people,” meaning the local folk as well as his troops. And wherever Theodoric might be at a given moment, he was constantly receiving and dispatching messenger riders, so that he was always in touch with every other corner of his domain, and nothing escaped his attention. For one instance, he had put all the land’s warehouses and this year’s newly stored harvests under martial levy, but not for confiscation. He set his quartermasters to meting out winter provisions, and doing it with an impartiality that amazed the commonfolk, because they were given as much food as the noble folk. Some of the commoners even got more. At those humble houses where an officer had quartered troops of ours, the family was given extra rations by way of compensation for the inconvenience.