Raptor (28 page)

He said, “By the dun cow that sustained St. Piran, we should much have preferred—if a soldier were allowed any preference—to have gone on defending our own home region of Cornovia, against the Picti and Scoti and Saxones.”

“Well, now that you are retired, you could return there, surely.”

“Akh, who would want to? Now that Rome has totally abandoned Britannia, that land has degenerated again to the barbarism that prevailed before the Romans ever came. The fine cities and forts and farms and villas are now but the squalid camps of people as savage and filthy as those Huns from whom you and Wyrd escaped this morning.”

“I see.” I said. “That is a pity.”

“Gwyn bendigeid Annwn, faghaim,” he sighed, and then translated that for me: “Fair blessed Avalonnis, farewell.”

A faraway look came into his bleared old eyes, and he said, more to himself than to me, “It must suffice us now just to take pride in the memory… that we were once of the Twentieth, the Valeria Victrix, one of the four mighty legions that first subdued and civilized that land. Why, in the great days of the Twentieth—in the great days of the empire—a man might travel from the Tin Islands in the west to the Pepper Ports in the east, and travel safely, and speak and hear the Latin tongue the whole way.”

He poured another horn of wine, and raised it to me again: “Iwch fy nghar, Caer Thorn. You, like us, were born too late,” and drained the horn.

“You are not drinking, urchin,” said Wyrd, with a hiccup, as he rejoined us and Paccius went out the door, raising his clenched right fist in salute to us all. “And you will certainly fall asleep if you stay on here, being bored by the reminiscences of two old campaigners. Go and sleep in comfort at the barrack. But first—take this.”

He unfastened his wallet from his belt, upended it over my hand and let jingle into my palm a considerable number of coins—copper and brass and silver and even one of gold.

I asked, “What would you have me do with this, fráuja?”

“Whatever you like. It is your share of the money our furs brought us.”

I gasped, “I never did anything to earn this much!”

“Slaváith. I am the master. Hic. You are the apprentice. I am the judge of the worth of your services. Go and buy anything you think you may need during the continuance of our journey. Or anything that strikes your fancy.”

I thanked him most sincerely for his munificence, and thanked Dylas for the good meal, and wished both of the old friends an enjoyable and satisfyingly drunken confabulation, and took my leave. I waited until I was outside to count the money. There was one gold solidus, numerous silver solidi and siliquae, and many brass sestertii and copper nummi—in all, to the dazzling value of about
two
gold solidi.

I looked about me, and took note that Basilea had come again to life. Men, women and children moved freely about the streets. Nearby houses had their shutters open, and from them I could hear the thin, shrill sound of housewives’ loom shuttles going back and forth. On the downslope of the hill behind the garrison, where the ground was shaded and snow still clung, several off-duty soldiers were playing like boys, sitting down on their shields and merrily shouting as they slid and spun downhill. The cabanae shops all had their fronts open, and many people were going in and out of them, replenishing the household supplies they had used up while they were barricaded indoors.

I myself could think of no supplies that I might need for my further journeying. I had already and fortuitously acquired more treasures than most persons amass in a lifetime—a splendid horse, its saddle and bridle, a sword and scabbard, a military flask, plus all the other goods I had bought in Vesontio. But it hardly made sense for me to carry money into the wilderness, where it would be of no use whatever, and I now had enough money to purchase just about anything that was for sale in Basilea—or anything except one of the Syrian’s ten-solidi charismatics. I had no least wish to buy one, but the thought of those pathetically sexless creatures made me think of something else, since I was the very antithesis of sexlessness.

I owned the rudiments of female costume—a gown and a kerchief—in the likelihood that I should find it advantageous, somewhere, sometime, to be publicly a girl. But I lacked the refining touches of coloring and adornment. So, as I ambled among the cabanae, I sought first a myropola, and found one. I went into the shop and—partly to conceal the fact that I wanted the commodities for myself, partly to account for my having so much money to spend—told the woman tending the place that I was the servant of a femina clarissima. Since this shopwoman would doubtless have known of all the fine ladies already resident in Basilea, I told her that
my
fine lady was shortly to arrive here, and that, on the road, she had lost her entire casket of cosmetics.

“Naturally,” I said, “my lady will desire to appear at her best when she arrives, so she sent me on ahead to purchase replacements for her—dyes and lotions and so forth. However, I knowing nothing of such things, caia myropola, I will trust you to provide everything a fine lady would require.”

The woman smiled—rather greedily, at this opportunity to make such an extravagant sale—and said, “I shall need to know your lady’s complexion and hair color.”

“Which is why she sent me,” I said, “instead of one of her female servants, because her coloring and mine are almost identical.”

“Hm,” murmured the myropola, her head on one side, eyeing me professionally. “I think… a fucus of blushing peach… a creta of ashy brown…” And then she bustled about the shop, collecting jars and phials and pencils.

It was a costly purchase, but I could well afford it, and I left there bearing a neatly wrapped parcel of potted unguents and powders, bottled liquids and sticks of chalk, a real woman’s counterparts of all those berry juices and soots and tallows that we primping girls had slathered on ourselves at St. Pelagia’s.

My next purchase was even costlier, at the workshop of an aurifex, where I bought jewelry for my “soon-to-arrive fine lady.” Though I passed over the smith’s excellent goldwork, and selected only silver pieces without any inset gems, the prodigality much depleted my newly come fortune. I bought a fibula that looked like a knotted rope of silver for either shoulder of my gown, and a necklace, a bracelet and earrings that were all of a match, each of them having been made to resemble chain links of silver. Afterward, going on uphill toward the garrison, I worried a little about my choices and my taste. Did jewelry that simulated ropes and chains look exactly
feminine?
But finally I decided that, if it was perhaps the male half of me that had selected them, then any man seeing me as a girl thus adorned ought to admire the jewels—and therefore admire me. And wasn’t that what women wore jewelry
for?

The garrison was not so crowded as it had been, most of the countryfolk and travelers who had been sequestered there having now gone on about their business. But the Syrian and his charismatics were still in residence, still in the same barrack as Wyrd and myself, the slaver evidently waiting in the hope that Paccius might bring Becga safely back with him.

In the barrack room, I resisted my very feminine eagerness to unwrap and gloat over and play with my latest acquisitions, because I had a very masculine job to do first, and I wanted to get that done before Wyrd should return and berate me for my having to do it. What it was—the night before, when I slashed the throat of that Hun hag, I had neglected to wipe the blood off my short-sword before I sheathed it again in my scabbard. Overnight, of course, the blood had dried, and now the sword was inextricably glued to the scabbard’s wool lining. So I borrowed a washtub from one of the barrack soldiers, and filled it with water, and swashed the scabbard around in it until I could work the sword loose. Then I carefully wiped the blade clean and dry and left the scabbard in the tub to soak until the wool could get white again.

I was getting extremely sleepy by now, but I
was
girlishly yearning to try on my new jewelry and cosmetics. Since I had no speculum—and was hesitant to ask any soldier if he owned such a foppish piece of equipment—I had no way of seeing how those things looked on me. So, the Syrian being nowhere about at that moment, I summoned to my barrack room one of the charismatics, a boy near my own age and coloring, and he compliantly—even delightedly—sat still while I put my ornaments on him, and daubed fucus on his cheeks, and chalked darker his lashes and brows, and reddened his lips with one of the unguents. Then I stood back and eyed him, while he beamed pridefully at me. His ragged garb notwithstanding, the silver jewelry looked very fine, and accorded well with his pale hair. But what I had done to his face I had lamentably overdone, and garishly, so that he looked like what I imagined one of the more fiendish skohls might look like.

I was about to wipe it off, but he protested so pitiably—saying it made him “happy to be pretty”—that I let him go on wearing the skohl face, and called over another boy of about the same age and fairness. This time I employed a lighter touch, and applied the cosmetics more deftly, and, when I stepped back, was pleased with the result I had achieved. It gave me considerable assurance that, when I had access to a speculum and could make up my own face, and had the added advantage of being able to
feel
that application, I ought to be able to do a more than passable job of it. I took the jewelry off the skohl-boy and hung it on this other one. The skohl-boy and I enthusiastically agreed that he made a very lovely girl indeed, and he himself said that he truly felt like one, and then all three of us jumped, when the Syrian Natquin snarled behind us:

“Ashtaret! You meddling whelp, first you steal my Becga.
Now
what are you doing to my Buffa and Blara?”

“Making them as attractive as young girls,” I said blandly. “What objection could you have to that?”

“Bah! Anybody who wants a lowly female can get one of those for a hundredth the price of a charismatic. You brats go and wash that scum off your faces.”

They gave me back my jewelry and meekly trotted away. I went into the barrack room to put my things in my pack, and to swash my scabbard around in its water some more. The Syrian followed me inside, saying in a whine:

“Ashtaret! I am sick and tired of being treated like a vile whoremonger, when I am a respectable dealer in exceedingly valuable commodities.”

I stretched out on my pallet bed and asked, though I did not really care, “Who or what is that Ashtaret you so frequently invoke?”

“Ashtaret is a mighty goddess, whom I highly revere. She was previously the Astarte of the Babylonians, and before that the Ishtar of the Phoenicians.”

“I do not believe,” I said drowsily, but with malice, “that I should wish to worship a goddess of the second or third handing down.”

He snorted. “There is no god or goddess or demigod of any religion that would welcome close investigation into his or her antecedents. The pagan Romans’ foremost goddess, Juno, was born as Uni of the Etruscan religion. The Greeks’ Apóllon was originally the Etruscan Aplu.” The Syrian laughed mockingly. “Now, as for what I could tell you about the true origins of
your
Lord God and Satan and Jesus…”

I have no doubt that he did tell me, and maybe even truthfully, but by then I had fallen fast asleep.

I woke in the dark, in the middle of the night, when two half-drunk soldiers half carried and half dragged an unconscious Wyrd into our room. After lurching about and cursing for a bit, they found the empty bed and toppled him onto it. When I asked, in some alarm, what was wrong with Wyrd, they only laughed and suggested that I lean over and smell his breath.

When the soldiers were gone, I did that—just to make sure he
was
breathing—and then reeled away from him, almost dizzied by the fumes of wine. I was glad I had been awakened, though, because my sword’s scabbard was still in the washtub. I took it out, wiped it as dry as I could, then slipped it between my pallet’s pad and the bed’s board, and lay down on it, so that my weight would keep the leather from warping as it dried, and immediately fell asleep again.

When I next woke it was daylight, and quite late in the morning. Wyrd was already up, and bending over the borrowed washtub, repeatedly dunking his head under the water. I wondered why he had not noticed that the water was tinged very pink—that he was soaking his head in the diluted blood of a Hun—until he stood erect and turned around and I could see that his eyes were a considerably more vivid pink than the water was.

“Oh vái,” he muttered, wringing out his beard. “I have the father and mother of a headache. That Oglasa wine exacts a fearsome penalty from its votaries. But worth it… worth it…”

I grinned and said, “Perhaps breaking your fast would make you feel better. Let us go to the convivium and see if they will feed us at this hour.”

“Dead men do not eat. Let us go first to the therma and see if a thorough bathing will restore me to life.”

But Wyrd was at least somewhat revivified before he ever got into the bath, because in the apodyterium we found Paccius. He was just then removing his armor, the metal and leather of which were dirty, scuffed in places and stained with dried blood. Paccius himself was dirty and weary-looking, but nonetheless bright of eye and smile. “Ah, Signifer—salve, salve,” said Wyrd. “It went well, then?”

“It went well, it is over, it is done,” Paccius said jovially. “And I will thank you to address me properly, as the centurio I now am become.”

Both Wyrd and I said, “Gratulatio, Centurio.”

“Yes, we exterminated every last one of the savages at the encampment,” said Paccius. “And Calidius tells me that the Trojan column did likewise at the river Birsus. Those scurvy scavengers will trouble us no more. Not that band of them, anyway.”

“And…?” prompted Wyrd, as he too began to undress.

“And, as you instructed,” said Paccius, rather more soberly, “we did not attempt to bring back the remains of Fabius and Placidia. We burned those with all the other corpses, and I told the legatus that the bodies of his son and his son’s wife had already been destroyed before we arrived there. He will not be able to give them decent Roman burial, but neither will he be further grieved by knowing how Fabius died.”