Alaric, on coming to the river, was told to enter a boat with only a single oarsman. He did so, and was transported across nearly a mile of slanting water to a small wooded island. This was to be, Alaric knew, an important meeting—one that might explain the motivation of his whole mission. He expected the meeting to be with his cousin Athaulf.
Instead, Alaric was met by a rough-looking, weird, giant of an old man, who told Alaric that he was his father.
7. Of Gothic Lightning and Frankish Thunder
Alaric remembered the death of his father seven years before—the death, but not the burial. The body of the father of Alaric had been taken out by boat, across the slanting water of the river where all things seem to diminish in the sudden shine, to be left on an island in that same Danube River. This was where all the Goths of the horde, who died at that particular time of swarming, were taken to be buried. Some Goths had been buried there from as much as two lifetimes before, and earlier peoples had been buried there from the beginning of time.
There was, however, a strangeness in the traveling to this Shade Island. Nowhere else did the water seem to slant as on this queer journey. Nowhere else did objects seem to diminish, and oneself also if going there, as on crossing an invisible mid-water barrier. It was as though all things going there passed through a mirror and into the land beyond. Alaric had had this impression on seeing the body of his father taken there for burial seven years before; he had the same impression now.
The place itself, the neighborhood of the cemetery island, was well known. It was a familiar crossing where the river, flowing from the west, turned to the north to find its mouths. Alaric had been to the region many times in childhood, as it was a famous Gothic rendezvous. The shore about was familiar from previous visits; the island itself could never become familiar. There was a chilling remembrance of the island, but out of stories, not out of experience. This was the Shade Island of the early ghost stories of Stairnon.
The island, she had told, was not there all the time; or if there, was not always visible. Boats, in fact, could drift right through it when the island was in its unseen state; but every boat that should do so unwittingly would lose one man. He would disappear from the boat and be never seen again, but he would repose in a new grave on Shade Island, a grave that was not dug by hands. And the island was never knowingly approached except by one small boat capable of carrying but two men, usually a dead man and the live one who would give him burial. Sometimes, however, when it was wished to consult the dead, the oarsman would take another live man as special emissary, as in this case Alaric.
The island was clearly older than the river, and older than the land of the surrounding shores; this was certain from the evidence of the senses, evidence which was quite clear, but which could not be put into words.
The cemetery island held a whole labyrinth of dead, and a vast multitude of markers. There were rune stones and seven stones; caverns raised above ground, and those dug into the ground; rock piles; stepped pyramids twice the height of a man; genuine monuments and dressed-stone tombs; and Christian crosses.
Of these there were rude stick crosses, but also ornate carved wood and stone crosses of Greek, Roman, and Celtic design. The Greek crosses had all four pieces of equal length. The Roman crosses had a long vertical piece and a shorter cross-piece high upon it, as has generally the modern cross. The Celtic cross was similar to the Roman, but surrounding the intersection of the pieces was the large wheel, the circle, the halo that was meant to represent Christ. The Goths did not then have their own characteristic cross form, but most often used the Celtic cross.
This was the Island of the Dead, but not of the irrevocably dead. As Christians, the Goths could not believe in eternal death.
There was an adit on the island—though Alaric did not see it—an entrance by which one came to the downward passage to Hell. This was on the early word of Stairnon, as was that of the Mound.
The Mound was in the center of the island; and there the blessed, having made restitution for their sins, should assemble (usually on a Thursday afternoon) and be taken thence to Heaven. To the unbelievers or to the pagans they would look like a flight of eagles, but the true believers would see them as ascending saints.
This habit of the Goths of burying their dead in the river—on islands in the river—may have been the basis for the final legend that was to attach to Alaric. But the dead Shades did indeed walk on the Island of the Shades. This was known to Alaric, not only from the childhood stories of Stairnon, but from later accounts given to him by grown and mature Gothic men—men who had actually seen the old dead walk and talk.
But was this large rough old man actually the dead father of Alaric? Alaric did not believe so. There was a certain intimacy struck between them, but not the very close intimacy that had been between young Alaric and his father. This man looked much like the father of Alaric, but was much older than Alaric's father would have been—unless it is that the dead age more rapidly than do the living. The father of Alaric had been cut down in full early manhood; not in war, but by an accident with the horses. This old man could hardly be Alaric's father, but he might well be his father's father.
Then Alaric shivered as he realized that he was actually living out one of the ghost stories of Stairnon. For this old man must be no other than the last Balthi to have been king of the Goths, the first old giant who had reigned six generations before. Alaric, who was a boy hardly to be intimidated by a dead man of his own ancestry, asked the old giant who he was, and in what way he might be his father.
The old man averred that he was both Alaric's father and his father's father, and the grandfather of his grandfather. He also stated that he would be the father of Alaric's children; that there was no seed in the Balthi but his own. He had been for a long time, the old man said, and when he was a boy the great mountains had been but hillocks.
Had he then been dead quite a long time? Alaric asked him.
It did not matter whether he was alive or dead, the ancient man told Alaric. The differences between the two states are less than one might imagine. But he let it be understood that he spoke with the authority of the dead, and he would be heard as one from the ancient days.
The scene becomes a little bit eerie and we have only an indirect report of it—things that Alaric later told to Singerich and to Hafras, or things that they came to believe that he had told them. Alaric was to take a conscious part in building up the Alaric Legend, and he may already have begun to do so.
The old Balthi grandfather made Alaric swear a series of oaths, not all of them of the Christian sort, owing eternal fealty to the Gothic nation and an enduring enmity for the Roman Thing.
Alaric argued—inasmuch as it is possible to argue with a Gothic great-grandfather who may or may not be dead—that he himself was both a Goth and a Roman, as well as a Christian; and that the Roman Thing was his mother.
The ancient Shade spat angrily, and there was some bitterness between them. Alaric insisted that he would continue to be both a Goth and a Roman, and that his aim in life was to bring it about so that the two should be one thing.
Only as the fox and the hare become one thing after the fox has eaten the hare, the old man told him.
There was much more to it, an elaborate ritual and mystique—with the old man sometimes breaking off and going into the area of the tombs to consult with the other dead on certain points. But, in the end, Alaric had the full blessing of the old man, his mystic Gothic father.
Others had sometimes been intimidated, even frightened, in speech with him—the old man told Alaric—and they had been inclined to agree to things without thinking them through. There is something to be said for a boy who will stand his ground and argue with the ancient dead, even though the boy—in the rashness of his youth—might be wrong on the particular point of argument. Such a boy will some day be a man—the old grandfather told him—and having been at the same time respectful and unafraid of the dead, he will be competent to deal w
ith the living as well.
The old man went back into the monuments and returned with a broken-hafted old blade that was nearly rusted through, as was he himself. He gave the ruined sword to Alaric, and told him that it was for him, and that no other man would ever be able to wield it. It passed from the hand of the old giant—for the grandfather was towering—to the hand of the young giant.
The sword would not be useful in battle, but Alaric would find it impressive as a talisman. It was recognized as a symbol of authority; and it was this rusty old blade that Alaric would hold in his hand when the Goths would raise him to be king.
Now the old man raised his right hand as if compelling the skies, and Alaric shivered with sudden memory. This would be the test. If Alaric were living through an old Gothic ghost story, then this was the test by which he might know if the story were a true one. The giant king of the tale had a way of ending an interview, of dismissing one from his presence. Alaric froze in anticipation; and as the second doubled itself, he nearly lost faith. But it was no more than two seconds that the old man raised his hand to heaven. Then it came.
A blinding white flash of lightning! The legendary king had been wont to call down lightning from the skies for a sign, and he had done so now. There had never been so sudden and stark a lightning stroke as this.
Alaric, when his sight returned, started to ask the grandfather how it was done, but the old man was gone. Alaric was forced to take the lightning as dismissal, and he returned to the boat where the lone oarsman was waiting for him.
Such, at least, is the account of the happenings on Shade Island as Alaric told it to his cousin Singerich and his friend Hafras on the same day. They have written their separate Gospels of it, and they agree closely. Alaric himself would not have been capable of fabricating this account of talking to his dead ancestor, but there were others with a talent equal to it: Stairnon, it might be, or her brother Athaulf. It is possible that Stairnon, after agreeing on the details with Athaulf, might have coached Alaric in the story before he left the farm in Little Moesia; and Athaulf could well have had the lone boatsman waiting.
But it is possible that it happened just as Alaric said that it did. It is far from the most impossible thing that ever happened to him.
Alaric did bring from the cemetery island the old rusted sword, the same that he would hold when he was crowned King. This sword had a name and was remembered by the old Goths by certain signs; or they came to believe that they recognized it by old signs. A mystique was created. If a man is great enough this will gather around him like clouds.
This giant old man seems also to be the mysterious “father” of Athaulf, of whom he had written several times in recent years.
Alaric and the lone oarsman went to the north bank of the river as the storm broke. There was a terrific rainstorm that was introduced by the fantastic lightning. The storm would have been memorable even without the unearthly story associated with the first lightning bolt of it.
On reaching land, the real point of rendezvous, Alaric met his waiting cousin Athaulf. These two, though they had not seen each other for five years, were very close and would always be close—closer than actual brothers. Theirs was the one friendship that would never turn sour; nor has the complete openness of it ever been suspected during the ensuing fifteen and a half centuries.
Athaulf may have been Cain in another connection, but he could not have been so in connection with Alaric; nor while Alaric still lived and had influence over him. Athaulf was not then a bad man, and it is disputed at what point he became bad; or if he ever did so except from one partisan viewpoint. The horrifying double fratricide that was later to engulf the family could not have happened until after the death of Alaric.
With any two men other than Alaric and Athaulf, there might have been suspicion of foul play at one point. For it is a fact that, a little more than a dozen years later, the two of them—with five hundred wagon loads of the richest booty that the world had ever known—went into South Italy together. After some weeks Athaulf came back, himself the new King of the Goths, and neither Alaric nor the booty was ever seen again.
The later Gothic troops of Athaulf, who had been the troops of Alaric, seemed uncomprehending or hard of hearing when asked by outsiders for an account of the events in the South. The story, as given out to the world by Athaulf, of the death, and particularly of the disposal of the body, of Alaric is simply not acceptable as having happened in fact. What it was that did happen will not be known by us until the afternoon of the day of the last judgment, but it was not the murder of Alaric at the hand of Athaulf. That would not have been possible of these two, and history has never considered it possible.
The two were one. Alaric could not make his telling and world-turning moves till he had Athaulf with him in Italy. And Athaulf, though he was the more intelligent of the two, was nothing without Alaric. Together they would bring the world down; but Athaulf, after the death of Alaric, became a very ordinary sort of man and was the leader of a never-again-distinguished force.
But their joining of forces on this day on the north bank of the river was only partial. Athaulf would support Alaric with men and arms and supplies as well as with a sweeping border-sort of diplomacy. But he would not yet re-enter the Empire, nor would he permit the elite of his forces to re-enter. They would come in only some years later, when it was time to put the Empire itself to death.
However, it was the other cousin, Singerich, who kept Alaric amused on their torturous march up the river, and his Greek salt was almost a new thing to Alaric. Here we are indebted to Hafras for almost the only episodic and daily details of Alaric that we are able to come on. Other accounts give a small space to the large things and nothing at all to the trivial; but Hafras has recorded scraps of the conversations of Alaric and Singerich on this campaign.
Singerich was a mocker and a self-mocker. There was very little of the earnestness of the Goths in him; nor was he a heavily religious man as were the Goths of the day. Though he would swear by the Blood of the Martyrs and by the Wound of the Side of Christ, as they all did, there was something very light about it with Singerich. The Christ accepted by Singerich was the Laughing Christ as carved by Creophylus, surely a more true Christ than He of the Puritans and Manichees.
Singerich may have had in him a Gothic element that had not yet come to the surface in the main body of solemn Goths. All the Goths were grotesque, but Singerich seemed to be the only one who realized their grotesqueness and made game of it. It would come to the fore in the next century and the next, when the Goths, in their new kingdoms in south France and Spain, would begin to carve and rime and build with that high Gothic humor. It would come to the fore strongly eight hundred years later when they built the great cathedrals of Europe, which are not misnamed Gothic—with apes and deformed angels and gargoyles and monsters crawling all over them inside and out—and when there would be another Laughing Christ, in France, by a Gothic hand.
Now Singerich ran on in easy anecdote. He told Alaric of the time when he had visited his sister Stairnon at the farm in Little Moesia. He had gone to the baths, well built in the Roman style before the farm was first abandoned and still operable as such. But Stairnon was using them as a place for storing fruit; the Goths had not used the baths after the novelty had worn off. Stairnon had told him that it is not necessary for a person to wash more than the face and the hands and the feet, and that a basin would suffice for that. Alaric could see nothing funny in the account and was puzzled at the merriment of Singerich. He explained to Singerich that at the time of his own recent visit the baths were being used as an icehouse and a smokehouse.
Singerich also told of the Gothic countryman who came to the city of Constantia and entered a room of a private building, the guest of a suspected Greek-Roman with whom he had business. When the Goth turned to leave the room he could not make the door opener work. He believed himself to be ambushed and trapped in a strange place, and he set up a great outcry and beat his head o
n the floor. He was about to turn his sword on himself and have it done with, when his host opened the door and came in to see what was wrong. The Goths, to open doors, turn all clasps, handles, and hafts to the left; but the Romans to the right. But the Goth left the city at once and did not transact his business; for who can trust one of a people that does all things backwards.
Singerich told of another Gothic clodhopper coming into an Empire city and being unable to tell the shaven and plucked men from the women. The Gothic men wore trousers and usually beards; but the Romans and Greeks, both the men and the women, were a clouted, skirted, and robed people, close-cropped and usually scented. The story of Singerich had a Greek denouement, and Alaric is reported to have flushed with shame.
Singerich told his stories in dialect, and Alaric for the first time was painfully aware that he himself spoke both Latin and Greek with an intolerable Gothic accent. Previously he had assumed that it was the old Empire people who spoke their own tongues in a peculiar manner.
Singerich caused Alaric himself, who was a familiar of the Royal Family, to feel like a clod. But there was no meanness in the jibes and satire of Singerich. They took a little flesh off, but not much; and the new contact with his cousin Singerich would broaden Alaric's outlook. Still, it is difficult to ungoth a Goth; and culture—the turning into the Greek—is not brought about in one afternoon.
The epic element kept creeping in, in spite of the banter of Singerich, and it took hold even of that Greek-Goth. Singerich was a man of the world too early, but he was still boy enough to abandon his prospects and business in Constantia and go off soldiering with his ungainly cousin. Singerich could as well have been a general as a lawyer or minister; he could have been anything. He had traveled by boat to both Asia and Africa, but he had never traversed such an exhilarating course as that sea of trees and mountains.
Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction Page 25
