I wanted to ask the king to free my brother. My brother is a petty thief, the black sheep of our once-respectable Roman family; at the moment his wife had left him, and their three children were in my charge. So I cut across the crowd until I was almost at arm's length from the king. His guards thought I wanted to kill him, and sometimes I do. But before the guards reached me, someone grabs my arm and pulls me back. I turn around and well, you know, one of those moments you never forget. There stands this tall slender young man, sandy-haired and blue-eyed, dressed in the gaudy clothes of a Gothic officer, but with his hair cut short as a Roman's - at least that was the intention, because it stuck out all over the place. No classical beauty, with his long face and gangly frame, but a cheerful and friendly countenance. He said something to me - the first words I heard him utter - but I did not understand any of it. That barbaric accent!
You see here a fairly good likeness of him; the image in the upper right is of a warrior who looks a lot like him when he was younger.

I would later learn that Ælfwine is not a Goth, he is from Britannia, and he is not a Celt either, he is a child of the fabled Saxon invaders. To make a long story short, Theodoric has some kind of blood debt with him, so, after playing with our minds a bit as he is wont to do, the king let me go with the promise that he would free my brother. Ælfwine walked me home, and I introduced him to the children...

But before I go on, I know you are curious. Theodoric is fairly unapproachable, as a king should be, but I know him well by now. He is as tall as Ælfwine, though slighter of frame. No wonder some think he is a sort of demon: he has flame-red hair, white skin and eyes of an almost colourless gray. Nobody could doubt little Princess Amalaswintha's paternity. That day he had cut his hair short and was shaven clean; nowadays he has reverted to a more barbaric look and wears his hair almost to his shoulders, and a light beard. I had thought he was much older - it seems I have heard of him since forever - but he looks about forty. I do not think Queen Audofleda minds the age difference. He is quite a personable man; his character, now, is entirely another thing.

Anyway, that night Ælfwine and I talked until the morning, and then he went back to the palace, because he lived in the officers' quarters. Among all the things he told me, he explained that he was nominally an officer in Theodoric's army, but his duties consisted in map-making. And in being Theodoric's ear and shoulder when needed. He was not interested in war anymore, though he is perfectly able to defend himself. Now he had found contentedness with commandeering the palace library and drawing maps of the realm. He has a gift for this: he can sketch the lay of the land as though he was a bird flying overhead. And he loves the order and simplicity of living in the officers' quarters and being appreciated and recognized for his abilities. He has found his place.

As for myself, I did not feel that my life had changed: it was just an interesting acquaintance, useful when my newly-released brother got into more scrapes. But before long, my sister-in-law came back and took the children away. I think it was one of the darkest moments of my life. I had brought up the little ones, and was powerless to stop her. She did not want to let me know where she went, to get rid of my brother once and for all. Luckily the girl is almost 12 and soon she will be married and will be able to come and see me with her little brothers.

Sorry if I get maudlin over them, but they were all my life. Until Ælfwine. I do not know if I grew so attached to him because I had lost the children, or if I was moved by his behaviour. He started dropping by regularly to see how I was. His speech got progressively more understandable, and he revealed a culture that was unusual even for a Roman, picked up here and there in his travels but wide and fascinating in its variety and enthusiasm. Came a time when my day was not complete if Ælfwine had not come to see me or had met me at the market place. I think I knew this time was the one when he, entirely on his own and with no help from his fellow officers, tracked the children. He respected my sister-in-law's wish to leave them alone, but reported to me that they were well and that their mother had remarried with a good man, a good father. But I will never stopped believing that Ælfwine would have been the best father of all to them.

Another defining moment was a massive quarrel I had with him about Theodoric. I have said already that they have this bond since before Theodoric became king. After Theodoric almost condemned Ælfwine to death, suspecting him to be an accomplice to my brother's latest jail escape (he was not), I took serious exception to his continued devotion to the king. I think I ended the day calling them both barbarians and other names and leaving Ælfwine outside the door. This is something I will never really understand, I fear. I love Ælfwine and have come to stand Theodoric's presence, mainly for Audofleda's sake, but I cannot accept this brand of honour.

And this brings me to Odoacer. Odoacer was a barbarian, yes, but he was *our* barbarian. I had seen him king for all of my adult life. They say he had even become a Catholic, though I do not know how truthful this rumour was. His murder was an awful shock for the city. That night there were commotions everywhere - the children and I had locked ourselves inside - and then came the news that Odoacer had been murdered. The distasteful details came out later, how his whole family had been exterminated, but at once Theodoric boasted that he had killed him by his own hand. I cannot explain to you the hatred and the horror that this caused in me and in many others, also considering that Odoacer could have been Theodoric's father. But I could not help wondering: why had he boasted of it? I think that single act endangered his chances for reigning peacefully more than anything else he has done in these few years. He could just have lied, saying that there had been a pitched battle, or even a duel... but telling everybody he had killed an unarmed old man, and joking about it? Something that Ælfwine told me later made me understand that I just could not understand. That for him it was a sort of ritual and it had to happen exactly like that, risking his own honour and popularity. Why? Only he knows. Even Ælfwine draws a line somewhere. He told me that Odoacer's murder was a time of crisis for him too, as he wondered who exactly he had thrown his lot with. But it seems that the bonds between them go deeper than blood; and I have to admit that Theodoric has always done well by him. Except when they try to kill each other.

But back to my Ælfwine. Something that had always seemed to me unbelievably frightening and complicated and dangerous and above all impossible flowed so naturally and easily that, in little more than half a year since our first meeting, we were married. I guess that my sister-in-law's experience had made me negatively biased towards marriage and men in general. Despite my love for my brother, I can now say that she was just unlucky. Not even Theodoric could turn me away from this man. He made me happier than I could ever possibly imagine, and I daresay I provided for him the haven of his wandering life.

It was not smooth, of course. The priest who married us wisely avoided to ask too many questions about Ælfwine's brand of Christianity, after another one had been horrified by the fact that he truly had no idea because his was an ongoing search, and thus he did not feel like becoming a Nicene could really fit him. This did not matter to me, but it mattered to those few friends and neighbours I had, who started shunning me because I had married not only a barbarian, but a heretic as well. And then, of course, there was the fact that he lived most of his time at the palace, in the officers' barracks, and

to be continued...
Portrait of Iunia: Fayoum Portraits
Original drawings by Ælfwine Scylding, all rights reserved.