Raptor by Jennings Gary

Author:Jennings, Gary [Jennings, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Romance, Historical, Fantasy, Thriller, Adventure, Epic, Military
ISBN: 9780553562828
Amazon: 0553562827
Goodreads: 79202
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1992-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The journey was a long one, for a fact. From Serdica to our destination turned out to be much, much farther than the distance that my own column had traveled from Novae to Constantinople. We went directly east from Serdica, along the southern foothills of the Haemus range, across the provinces of Thracia and Haemimontus. There are practically no roads in those regions, and obviously that was why Strabo chose that route: not to chance meeting any traveling troops of Theodoric’s rival Ostrogoths. So, with only rough cart tracks and horse trials to follow, we progressed but slowly.

We could have moved rather faster if I had volunteered to ride a horse and let the big carruca dormitoria be abandoned. Strabo and others of my captors several times growled hints to me that I ought to do just that, but I was stubbornly resolved not to. If I was being carried into faraway captivity, I would be carried. After all, I was impersonating a princess; I would be treated like one. Since we came to no settlement anywhere along the way that was big enough to boast even the most primitive pandokheíon or taberna or gasts-razn or krchma, we had to make camp in the open every night. But I at least had the carruca’s shelter from the increasingly cold and worsening weather, and—whenever Strabo did not crawl in with me for a while, which he did every third or fourth night—I could sleep the whole night away, comfortable on my couch in there.

Here and there along our way, we did come upon a decent Roman road, but always running north to south, across our route. One of them was the very road over the Shipka or Thorny Pass that I and Amalamena and Daila and our company had traveled. But Strabo did not avail himself of any deviations from our direct route, even if the longer way would have made for easier and faster progress; we pressed on continuously to the east. I still did not know to what city or town or fortress we were headed, but I knew that if we went eastward long enough, we had to come at last to the Black Sea.

And so we did. And I confess to have been a trifle disappointed to discover that the Black Sea does not consist, as one would naturally suppose, of a stygian-black liquid. It is, in truth, a beautiful body of water—azure with lacy trimmings of white foam where it laps the sands of the coastline, darkening through blue to blue-green to deep green as it gradually deepens offshore, and then dimming and paling again to blue and blending into the blue of the sky at the far-distant horizon. It is also much more pleasant to bathe in than are any of the waters around the Mediterranean, because it is only half as salty as they are. I should correctly say that the Black Sea is a beautiful sea when it wants to be.

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