Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  The agreement now entered into between the West Goths and the Roman Empire concerning the Huns was a simple business agreement and had no foundation of terror or panic. The Romans could have hired troops out of Africa or Spain or Cappadocia or Persia to cope with any sort of situation. They decided to use the West Goths, a people they had not employed before—except for a few thousand adventurers integrated into their legions—a people beginning to have some fame as warriors. Half a century later the Romans would not have been able to arrange support from many sources, but now they could still deal with forces and nations as needed. The Romans contracted with the Goths for a certain job.

  The West Goths had offered to maintain the line against the Huns if they were given a topographical basis of operations. They were given the Ister River and the now half-populated provinces directly south of it. They entered on this territory. The Huns, understanding military reality, turned aside at finding the Goths established behind the river. They knew them to be impregnable there; they went and ravaged elsewhere.

  It was in the year a.d. 376 of the new era that the Emperor Valens agreed for the nation of the West Goths to cross the Ister River (the Danube) and to settle in Lower Moesia (Bulgaria and Serbia). In the summer and the late summer—the Goths had no word for autumn—of that year, two hundred thousand Goths crossed the river and made their initial settlement near the most southern of the six mouths.

  The two hundred thousand Goths were now—by agreement—Romans. This was the largest single entry of outlanders ever to come into the Empire, but actually it was not a great accretion: a fifth of a million people added to the seventy-five million of the Empire.

  And in the same year (376) Alaric was born of the Gothic noble family of the Balthi. He must have been born late in that year—after the crossing of the river—for it is always mentioned that he was born a Roman.

  It is also said that he was born on an island named Peuce (the fir) at the mouth of the Danube. Whether he was born there or not, it was necessary for his future that he be born there. The coming king of the Goths was to be island born, and he was to come to his people riding on a sorrel mare.

  But this was still Roman territory, so he was still born a Roman. The line of the Empire began at the northernmost mouth of the river.

  2. About Alaric of Balthi

  But if Alaric was born a Roman after the river crossing, how did he remember the life and the land north of the river? He remembered them from many additional crossings made during his infancy and childhood.

  A third of the West Goths had remained in the land north of the river. The river was an avenue, not a division. Alaric must have crossed the river many times in his childhood, since his father was in the business of hauling merchandise and crossing the river was a main occupation of the family.

  The Balthi family, of which Alaric was a member, had been in the service of the Imperial army even before the Gothic entry into the Empire. They had been employed in the ferrying and transportation of whole legions where required. They were contract haulers, of goods, grain, animals, men, or armies.

  It was in the transportation of armies that Alaric later came to excel.

  The name of the father of Alaric is in one place given as Alareidar. This is a doubtful source and nowhere else is he mentioned by name, although he is several times spoken of as the head of the Balthi family.

  Alaric never knew his mother, for one of two reasons. In the first account she is mentioned as dying in giving birth to him. In the second account she is mentioned as being taken hostage by the Romans—along with the wives of a certain number of Gothic nobles at the time of the river crossing—and as being murdered, along with the other hostages and seized children of the Goths, by the order of Julius, Master General of the Roman troops, in 379 or 380. The theory that Alaric swore an undying hatred of Rome because of the murder of his mother will not stand up. Alaric grew up considering himself a Roman. He considered himself a Roman till the very last, or nearly the last; though he did make symbolic reaffirmation of his Gothic identity before the time of his final assault on the Empire and the City.

  Alaric, as a prince of the royal line, was raised by male tutors. But the place of his actual mother was taken by the girl Stairnon in a very peculiar relationship, for she was no more than five or six years his senior. Before it was finished, Stairnon was to be in every relationship to Alaric that it is possible for a woman to be to a man. Stairnon—sometimes called by her Roman-Christian name of Stella or Stella Maris—was a cousin of Alaric. The degree of cousinship is not known. She and her brothers, Athaulf and Sarus and Singerich, were raised in one family with Alaric.

  These were all children of extreme talent, and every one was to make a great name in the world. Any one of the five children would have assured for any family remembrance forever. They all set early into a pattern, except Alaric, and what they were in childhood they remained forever.

  Singerich, the youngest of all except Alaric—they seemed about the same age—would always be the smallest of the group, though he would be man-sized. He was dark and clever and quick. He was the Goth who became a Greek, and he was born with many of the qualities of that people. It was he who was selected to be taught to read and write, and he learned it in early childhood—later being something of a patron of literary men in Greece. It was felt that even in the noble families one literate member was enough. The others apparently picked up the arts later in life when they had the need for them. Alaric may have learned at the cadets' school, if not before. Stairnon is known to have written many letters and to have aided Alaric in drafting documents. Athaulf, the Goth who remained a Goth, is said to have handled a stylus awkwardly with two hands, and may have mastered no writing but his own name. And there is strong indication that Sarus, when a General, misunderstood the import of written messages more than once. He would half read, half guess, the contents of whatever came to his hand, and he sometimes guessed wrong. The Roman generals, who were sometimes only semi-literate, would always have a scribe trooper by their side; but the Goths were too proud to admit that they did not know everything.

  Alaric when small was said to give the impression that he had only two great piercing eyes—no face, legs, arms, body, only eyes. When he developed a body it was at first a very long, stringy one. He was to become the boy giant. He would reach his tremendous height early and then fill out to it, but for the first dozen years of his life he was like an unfledged bird pushed too early from the nest. As a small boy he was a total dunce, despaired of by all except Stairnon, but by the time of his adolescence he developed a tremendous aptitude for learning. He was the only one who learned and changed every day of his life. The rest of them were set in their mold from birth.

  Athaulf was huge from childhood—a bear of a boy. When they were grown he was not quite of Alaric's extraordinary height, but seems to have been a much heavier man. He had an amazing intelligence, limited only by his hatreds. In the time of troubles for the disintegrating Empire, he would pull the strings that animated a dozen barbarian nations, and drive the Emperor and Master General frantic. In him most strongly, and in his sister Stairnon to nearly as great an extent, was the old Gothic dream of conquering Rome. But in ordinary things he was a man of fine good humor and amiable nature, a letterless administrator over the affairs of a hundred thousand feral Goths, a military genius in his own right, and the idol of the roughest soldiery in the world. There was never any doubt that he would be and do all these things. He developed in one straight line, and divergence was impossible with him.

  Sarus was not to be a giant like his brother Athaulf and his cousin Alaric; but he was as large as the average of his large race and was to be something of a physical marvel. His great strength of hand is mentioned over and over. This is a peculiarity of many very intense men of history who were otherwise but little over the average size. The Emperor Tiberius had it, and William of Falaise. Sarus, when a man, could break horseshoes with his hands. This is a trick which amateur a
nd professional strong men can do today, but the Roman horseshoe—and Sarus was the Goth who became a Roman—was more nearly like a shoe. For reinforcement it had a toe or cusp piece for over the front of the hoof; and from the appearance of surviving shoes it would have taken superhuman strength to bend and break one.

  As a man Sarus also performed the feat of lifting a horse, a Roman not a Gothic horse, on his shoulders. He was sometimes called the lion, and he was very cat-like in his motions. His hands and arms were those of Esau, covered with golden hair like fur; and his eyes, like a cat's, are mentioned as looking through, not at one.

  Sarus had grave limitations. Though he was to become the finest horseman and the most feared raider in the Empire, he demonstrated a curious incompetence when placed in the command of more than a very few hundred men. In his own specialty he was unequaled, and some of his wild raids were to pass belief. But when he had no clear aim, as when he did not know to whom he owed allegiance as the embodiment of the Empire, he became completely confused. Alaric and Athaulf were to be Kings in their turn. Even Singerich would be King in the weird last seven days of his life; but no one would have offered a kingship to Sarus. In personal combat he was the most feared man in the Empire, but he would not have made a king.

  There was great affection among this family—the four cousins of Alaric and himself who grew up with them—with one exception. Stairnon, who was their matriarch from early childhood, loved and was loved by them all. She was an absolute cult with them. It may be for this reason that Sarus and Singerich never married, that Alaric was predestined to marry her, his cousin, and that Athaulf married only after she was dead, though then he married her worst enemy. Between Alaric and his cousins Athaulf and Singerich and Sarus there was close feeling. This may seem to be contradicted by later conflicts between himself and Sarus, for the conflicts are the stuff of which history is made; but in normal times they were very close. And Singerich, until right at the end, had a real love for all. But there it ended.

  The conflict between Athaulf and Sarus was called by Alaric the black shadow over his life. It broke the heart of the Valkyrie Stairnon and helped drive her to her death, and it sent Singerich into fits of weeping—after he had become a Greek. For between the brothers Sarus and Athaulf there was something that went beyond all antipathy and all reason. From the cradle there was red hatred between them. It would be justified later when the two stood as far apart politically as it would be possible for two men to stand—when they represented two different views of a world of which only one could survive.

  But in their childhood they had no such reasons. It was a blind and bloody hatred unheard of in children. Three times before they were in their teens they fought to near death. After that it was always assumed that one would kill the other—as was to happen. But they were separated. Athaulf was always thereafter kept with the branch of the family doing business beyond the Danube, while Sarus was kept within the Empire. Stairnon and Alaric and Singerich saw both of them often, but they did not see each other; not until, years later, Athaulf entered the Empire with his army, in the year the world ended, and Sarus followed to kill him before he should reach Alaric at Ravenna—but was unable to overtake him.

  These three brothers and their cousin Alaric were the fruit of the Balthi family, one of the most talented kindreds ever.

  It is not likely that Alaric would have married Stairnon if they had been within the forbidden degree—closer than third degree of kindred, or second cousin. The Gothic families, particularly the noble ones, were of large accretion, and there were often more than a hundred of them considered as one immediate family. The term brother, also, was used loosely by the Goths. Alaric and Athaulf have been called brothers in several primary sources, though plainly they were not. And several others, of lesser historic importance, have been referred to as brothers of these when only kindred seems to have been meant.

  There is also the proposition, which may be the true one, that Athaulf and Stairnon were brother and sister in one family of cousins, that Sarus and Singerich were brothers in a second, and that Alaric was a singleton in a third—therefore, that these were only brothers in the wide Gothic sense. It cannot now be determined, but these five children were all raised in one family, and Singerich and Sarus and Athaulf all called Stairnon their sister; but Alaric called her both sister and wife.

  Stairnon, the matriarch of the children, was their undisputed leader. She still dominated Alaric, to a great extent, when he was first put in command of troops and had entered his initial phase of the conquest of the world; when he was just short of eighteen years old.

  Stairnon, as the first of the Valkyries, is legendary and so defies description; but it must be attempted. Physically she was magnificent. The Gothic standards, however, were not the modern standards. Alaric was envied for having her, but it is not known if he would be envied today. She was taller than most men of her very tall race, and magnificent of shoulder and arm and breast. The Gothic women went bare in arm and shoulder except for the fur capes in winter weather. She was red-headed, and in her case there was no possibility of the red and the blonde being confused. Her hair was flame-red, and she is spoken of as standing out like a beacon. She wore it to below her waist and it was very heavy. It was once spoken of as of such weight that a Roman woman would not have been able to bear it, but this may have been poetic exaggeration. She was to become a cult with the Goths. But when, in the last years, the goblin girl Galla Placidia called her a holy cow, the blow struck home. But even as a girl she was of this compelling appearance.

  Stairnon was the fabulist to the other children. The common heritage of children's stories was already old and known. The Gothic tales were thousands of years old before the latter-day Goths, the brothers Grimm, collected them.

  The repertoire of Stairnon consisted of northern fairy tales and Christian legendary, Greek mythos and Hagios and nostos, Gothic airzjanhait—tales of wandering—and Roman fabulae. Storytelling had a large place in a world that was still mostly unlettered, and some of the stories of the steppes had come all the way from China. And all the tales were of lands of wonder.

  But, if the lands of wonder to the children of the Empire were the weird exterior lands, those of the Gothic children concerned Rome itself. The Empire was the magic land that they had only begun to taste, the Pandora's Box that would contain all treasures when opened. The glory of the City of the Empire had amazed these northern people for the hundreds of years of their wanderings; and, in some way not understood, they had a folk memory of Rome. The stories of Rome were never entirely believed, just as stories of terrestrial paradises and isles of the blessed are never entirely believed; but much of the stuff of the stories was believed, and much of it was true.

  In the tales Rome was always a high-towered city on a tall pinnacle—which it was not; and shone like gold—which it didn't. Rome was mostly built of gray blocks of tufa or slabs of tufa-concrete; sometimes it shone like silver, but not like gold.

  But the Goths were never to lose their wonder of Rome, and they have not lost it yet where they remain in Italy, Spain, France, and the Rhineland. Eventually, they made it somewhat into the image they had conceived of it. There was a further element in these stories. The Pandora's Box of the riches of the world belonged to the Goths by right, having anciently been stolen from them. And at the end of their quest the Goths were to recover it.

  This is the one fairy tale that really came true. Three of the children, Alaric and Stairnon and Athaulf, would indeed take the city of Rome and open the Pandora's Box of all treasure. But they had misunderstood the ending of the Pandora story. They hadn't known that when the lid of the box was opened the world would come to its end.

  But there was still more to this legendry, as created by Stairnon. Alaric was to be the king and conqueror of Rome—Alaric, the most unlikely of them all who was then nothing but an unfledged nester with only a startling pair of eyes. Only a mother or a Stairnon could have preferred the grotesque Alaric
in his early stage, but she decided for him; and what she decided was decided for all the children. She decreed that Alaric should be king and conqueror, before he understood what it was to be either. She used the inevitability of this event as a weapon. She was his first oracle, and she gave him his first prophecy that he would take the City. This was some years before a more formal prophecy was given by an official oracle in Latin verse.

  She told him that his name Alaric meant the all-powerful, the all-ruling, just as the name of his father, Alareidar, had meant the all-riding, one who excelled in the saddle. She told him that the name Alaric could be given to the scions of only five families in all Gothia. The Balthi were one of the five families from which a king might come.

  Stairnon insisted to her brothers, Athaulf and Sarus and Singerich, that they must always defer to Alaric, that he was to be the king and emperor. Neither Athaulf nor Singerich ever swerved in their loyalty to Alaric, or questioned the word of their sister in this, though in many respects both of them had more ability than Alaric. Sarus, however, who had not the high intelligence of his two brothers, was to see a distinction that they missed. Sarus, at one later period acting as spokesman for the generals assembled in Bologna, offered to sponsor Alaric as emperor (and his sponsorship would have made him so), but only on the condition that Alaric should cease to be King of the Goths.

  If kingship could come to the Balthi, among the five families, it must come to one of these four boys, the princes of Balthi. Stairnon, by her early influence, arranged that the choice should be Alaric. To do this she had to seize on an old legend and make it come true: the legend that the next king of the Goths, island born, would come to his people riding on a sorrel mare.