‘He’s from the hills,’ said one, ‘from the south. Full of belly and empty of head, they say.’
‘No, he’s no Sabine,’ scoffed another. ‘He’s from the east, from the marshes. Look at his fingernails. He’s a fish-eater, morning, noon and night.’
Attila himself said nothing, and no one thought to ask him directly.
Another speculated that he might be from further south still. From Sicily, even.
‘Sicily?’ cried the first. ‘Hark at him, Sicily, indeed! What did he do, swim here?’
And after that, no one seemed to mind much where he came from, as long as he accepted their endless proferrings of meat, and bread, and wine, and more meat, and more wine…
The woman who had brought him in from the cold sat him between herself and a girl she said was her daughter, a well-fed, rosy-cheeked girl of about seventeen or eighteen. Not only was she better-fed than the wretched starvelings in the city but, like all the people here, she was also purer-skinned and brighter-eyed. Her light brown hair was drawn back from her brow with a ribbon of plain white wool, and she wore a simple white woollen tunic belted round the middle. The front of the tunic was deeply slashed, showing her plump young breasts and the shadowy cleavage between. The boy kept his eyes shyly fixed upon the food in front of him.
‘I know, she does show them off doesn’t she?’ cried the girl’s mother, seeing his discomfiture with great amusement.
‘Mother!’ said the girl.
Beyond this girl sat another, rather thin and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes. She said nothing, but Attila felt her gaze upon him, and once or twice he glanced along at her. Eventually he smiled, and she smiled back. Then she looked shy again and turned away.
‘Fresh meat, y’see,’ leered the old man across the table with the spittled mouth and the unshaven chin. ‘All the girls’ll be after you this e’en. Nice bit of fresh meat in the village. Who’d want an old smoke sausage like I, when there’s a nice bit of fresh meat going begging!’
The woman squeezed Attila’s thigh under the table, and said, ‘How old are you, boy?’
‘Fourteen. Fifteen this snowfall.’
‘I know what you’re thinking, you little wanton,’ she scolded, leaning across and slapping her daughter on the back of her hand. ‘Old enough, I warrant.’ She grinned at the boy and squeezed his cheeks. ‘Look at you, all ragged and drawn – thin as a winter gnat you are. You need some good old local hospitality, dearie, you do. A bit of meat inside you, and some good few cups of wine. I know I likes a bit of meat inside me whenever I can get it. And maybe a bit of the other kind of hospitality too and all later on!’ She rocked back and forth on her bench with laughter.
‘You ever been kissed, then?’ asked the girl.
The boy looked down at his plate. ‘Yes,’ he said defensively.
‘Aw, bless,’ said the girl. ‘And you know what the Saturnalia is for, don’t you?’
He didn’t. But he was about to find out.
The great double doors at the end of the longhouse creaked open and, to deafening cheers and hallooes from the assembled villagers, in came a procession of men and women bearing a train of crudely carved but unmistakable images. First came a rather stately matron carrying a statue of Priapus sporting a huge jutting phallus, carved from olivewood and seemingly oiled specially for the occasion. Priapus, the little grinning god of fertility, stood on a bed of winter berries, elderberries and hips and haws, and his proud phallus was lovingly decorated with wreaths of broom and ivy. Several of the women leant forward to kiss it as it passed by. Next came a tall, dark-skinned man bearing a primitive but rather touching statue of the mother goddess, Cybele, seated and in long robes, suckling her infant son, whom she cradled on her knee. Many people reached out to touch the magical statue. There followed more villagers with long poles garlanded, or hooked with lanthorns, singing and cheering as they walked round and round the long tables, while everyone else fell in behind them. Children ran and squealed and scurried in every direction, breathless and laughing with excitement.
One red-faced man leapt up on the table and raised his wooden goblet to the rafters. ‘To fertile fields and fat old pigs for another sunny year!’ he cried, and he tossed back his goblet, draining a full sextarius of warm red wine in a few mighty gulps. All joined in the toast at the tops of their voices.
The boy watched and took everything in, his slanted yellow eyes missing nothing, although with some astonishment. Among his own people, as among all lean, ascetic nomad peoples, matters of fertility were kept much more veiled. But among settled peasants and farmers who work on the land, fertility and the copulative act went easily together, and were regarded as essential to the fecundity of the earth. They saw the animals copulate freely, the only outcome of which was a happy one, the birth of new lambs or calves; and they saw no reason to conduct themselves otherwise. For a woman to give herself to a man, husband or no, was seen as an act of pure generosity – indeed, it was regarded as positively unhealthy among these folk not to engage in intercourse at regular intervals.
No wonder the unworldly and nature-fearing Christians of the city condemned all those who did not follow their god as pagani, which meant simply ‘country-dwellers’. The people who dwelt in the fertile southern valleys of the empire had long been most resistant to that gaunt, grim-visaged, sin-obsessed desert-religion from the east; and long would remain so. Here, where greenery and the ancient gods still throve, fertility and the breeding powers of Nature were still worshipped above all else.
More wine flowed from freshly unstopped barrels, and the village musicians began to puff away on their reed-pipes, or saw away at their coarse-toned three-stringed lutes, and people began to dance and sing. They sang ‘ Bacche, Bacche venies!’ and ‘ In taberno quando sumus ’, and many other folk-songs of love and wine and the earth, which they had sung in these valleys before the grand poets in Rome ever put pen to paper.
Si puer cum puellula
Moraretur in cellula
Felix coniunctio!
Amore sucrescente,
Pariter e medio
Avulso procul tedio,
Fit ludus ineffabilis
Membris, lacertis, labiis!
If a boy and little girl
Tarry in a little room,
Happy is their copulation!
Love arises with elation,
Weariness flees far away
When they hide in bed to play,
And their nameless game begins,
Of sighs and whispers, lips and limbs…
‘O mercy, mercy!’ cried the old man with the spittled mouth and the unshaven chin, jigging around in the dance with the rest. ‘You take me back to my young sapling days, and I’m all of a frustration that my member will not perform as it did once, in the swelling springtime of my lust.’
At which everyone told him to pipe down, and said they didn’t want to hear about his member, or the swelling springtime of his lust. Someone poured a full goblet of red wine over his white locks, pronouncing that he was now anointed and blessed by Priapus himself. Whether the charm worked was unclear, but the wine trickled over his face and down his furrowed cheeks, and the ancient dancer licked it happily enough from his beard.
‘This time next year we’ll have a carving of a crucified man on the table,’ cried another wag.
‘You must be joking!’ many voices objected.
‘A jolly feast it’d be with that in the middle of it,’ called another.
‘No drinking, no fucking, no farting,’ roared another. ‘Thank Lord Jove I’m not a craven Christian.’
Attila felt his hand taken warmly in another and squeezed. It was the rosy-cheeked daughter, pulling him away from the crowd.
‘Come on, then,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a nice little hut just round the corner.’
The thin, pale girl watched them silently as they went. But the mother winked at them. ‘You treat him gently now, dearie,’ she beamed.
The nigh
t air was chill and the sky was clear, the stars shining coldly down from where their fires burnt eternally in the heavens. Attila felt his chest tighten with cold and fear, but his hand in the girl’s hand was warm as she led him over to a small straw-thatched hut near a cottage. His heart was thumping so loudly he thought she must be able to hear. She pulled open the rickety, cobwebbed door and drew him inside. He pulled the door closed behind them, but through the open window came enough pale moonlight for them to see each other’s faces: his drawn and nervous, but with jaw set firm at the prospect of this new and frightening journey; and her eyes sparkling with delight at the prospect of a new conquest.
‘I should know your name,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘No names. And you tell me no names neither.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ she said, and sighed. ‘Because I know you’ll be gone in the morning. So what’s the point?’ She smiled a little sadly. ‘Now then…’
She pushed him down and knelt with him in the hay, and leaning forward she put her mouth to his and they kissed. It was very silent. After a little while she slipped her tongue between his lips. Attila had been kissed before, of course, in greeting – even, revoltingly, by Eumolpus when they were first introduced – and on the lips as well, as was the custom in the Roman court. That was one Roman custom that no barbarian nation, and certainly not the Huns, would ever adopt.
But this was a different kind of kiss, thrillingly close and intimate, and he immediately felt a surge and warming of his blood. He kissed the girl breathlessly in return, their tongues running over each other, entwining, their mouths opening to each other, their hands reaching out to stroke cheeks and hair…
‘My, you are the greedy little one, aren’t you?’ she whispered. He could see her white teeth in the moonlight as she smiled. She lay back in the hay and pulled her shift up to her waist. She opened her thighs to him, and ran her middle finger, the index lascivius as physicians have named it (although perhaps rather lascivious of them to have done so) down between her ripe lips.
‘Come on then, my darling,’ she said softly. ‘And here, too,’ she said, pulling her tunic down off her slim shoulders and exposing her breasts, ‘touch me here too, here, put your mouth to my breast, kiss me there, and with your tongue, oh my darling, oh…’
Her sighs and gasps filled the air of the little hut; the boy was silent and enrapt, the girl whispering all the time as she guided him and stroked his tousled hair. ‘Oh I love that, I do love that, here, kiss them, take them in your mouth, gently, yes lick them like that, suckle them, oh that is so sweet, do they taste sweet to you, oh my darling, that feels so sweet, and there, oh yes, inside me, touch me there, oh sweet gods, oh I love you, my darling, I do love you…’
And as she sighed and gasped, she reached down and pulled up the boy’s tunic, and felt for his hard cock, and said nice things about how he might be small for his age but that wasn’t, that wouldn’t shame a grown man, that wouldn’t. She spread her thighs wide and guided him inside her and closed her thighs tightly round his waist, and together they made excited young love for a short while, before the boy shuddered between her legs and pressed his cheek against hers and hugged her tightly and tensed and gasped and then slowly relaxed in her arms, his face pressed against her breasts. A few moments later he was asleep.
She looked down and stroked his tousled hair. ‘Typical,’ she whispered.
‘And how was that, you little monkey?’ cried the girl’s mother, grabbing him round the waist. ‘You been outside with my daughter, I know you have, rifling through her treasures like a little bandit. I knew you for a little robber the moment I saw you outside. And I know what you’ve been up to, smile like that, like puss with the milk. Like a hedgehog at a young cow’s udders, look at you, almost licking your lips you are.’
‘Mother, don’t embarrass him,’ said the girl.
‘Embarrass him? He knows well enough what he’s been up to,’ she laughed. ‘And I know what he’s been up to, too, eh? Boy that age, I bet you’d be up for another feather-bed jig later on, eh, my sweet-heart? How’s about something a little more grown-up later on tonight, hey? A bit of a lying-down dance with her old ma, eh? A bit of moaning at the ceiling and groaning at the moon?’
‘Mother!’ cried the girl in outrage.
And then the bawdy peasant-woman was away, whirling among the dancers with flushed cheeks and saucy eyes, her clay cup of wine held high in the smoky air.
Attila and the girl sat down at the table again, both hungry after their exertions. Under the table he took the girl’s hand and squeezed it tight. Save me, he thought. The girl squeezed back and leant over and whispered in his ear, her slim hot hand resting on the back of his neck, ‘You sleep in my bed tonight, don’t you worry.’
There was more formal dancing, with lines of men and women advancing towards each other, exchanging kisses in the centre of the hall and retreating again, with giggles and mock-bashfulness, eyes shyly averted even from those who had shared their beds the night before.
Then with still greater dignity, and with all the happy solemnity of the old pagan spirit, the little wreathed olivewood Priapus was taken up, and the whole village processed outside to the edge of the woods, where there stood a simple stone shrine. Within, lit by two precious beeswax candles, stood a naked statue of the Great Mother, smiling distantly, with benevolence and power, upon her simple devotees. Both men and women took it in turns to kiss the phallus of Priapus, before the little god was laid reverently between the Great Mother’s thighs. A white woollen veil was drawn over the pair, and they were left in discreet privacy for the night, to couple and so to ensure that the Earth herself should be born again in the spring.
No sooner had the villagers stepped back from the shrine, and bowed their heads one last time to their beloved deities, than there came a hoarse cry through the night air, from the hills above. The frenzied words cascaded down upon them, in a voice as cracked and dry as the wind in dead leaves.
The girl leant close to Attila, so that her soft hair tickled his cheek deliciously, and whispered, ‘It’s a local madman called Holy John.’
The boy nodded. ‘We’ve met,’ he said.
‘Idolators! Fornicators!’ cried Holy John. ‘May Christ have mercy upon all your Christless and unshriven souls! For ye dwell in the very mouth of hell, and are mired in the very mire of the devil’s own bowels in all your lusts and filthy fornications.’
The people looked at each other and guffawed merrily. Some even began to dance, as if his words were a kind of irresistible music.
‘Holy John,’ they cried, raising their foaming mugs of wine as if in salutation. ‘Holy John, come down from the mountain. Welcome to our Feast of the Great Mother, Holy John.’
There was a scuffling in the woods above, and the old man appeared, standing on a jutting rock, looking more wild-eyed than ever, Attila thought. He wore a long, begrimed habit of coarse brown-stuff, his grey beard was matted, and his thin lips worked in a fury. Even from this distance, the boy thought he could smell the old man’s rank odour: many hermits took literally the injunction of St Jerome: that those who have washed in the blood of Christ have no need to wash again.
‘Woe unto you, O Israel, for your filthiness is in your skirts. And, as the prophet Ezekiel saith, you have committed harlotries, and have lusted after your paramours, whose members are like the members of donkeys, and whose emissions are like the emissions of stallions.’
‘Where? Where?’ cried one of the women in the crowd. ‘I could do with some of that!’
‘Wherefore I say unto you-’
But already Holy John upon his rock was being besieged, first by loud obscene cries, so that his cracked and ancient voice was drowned, and then in person, by the girl’s mother, who to the approving roar of the onlookers hauled her considerable bulk up onto the rock below Holy John, and tried to lift his skirts.
‘Away from me, thou Scarlet Woman!’ cried Holy John, trying fr
antically to hold down his habit which she had hauled up over his scrawny, scabbed old knees, and he continued to preach with what dignity he could muster. ‘Avaunt thee, O thou Jezebel, without sense or shame!’
The crowd was in uproar, until eventually the two of them, hermit and peasant woman, came shuffling in a close-knit but inelegant dance to the edge of the rock and fell in a heap into the crowd below. Some of the sturdier younger men tried to catch them as best they could. No harm was done, and soon Holy John was staggering to his feet again. He retrieved his staff in a fury, and was about to stride off to a safe distance at the edge of the forest when his blazing eyes fell on the face of Attila who stood nearby, watching with great interest.
Holy John seemed horror-struck. His bony forefinger pointed, trembling, at the startled boy. ‘Behold, behold, for the End of Years is upon you!’ he cried.
The crowd fell silent, curious and a little taken aback by the sudden note of fear in the hermit’s voice.
‘For is it not written, in the Book of Daniel, that the king’s daughter of the south shall come to the king of the north, to make an agreement? Aye, and has this not happened in our time, with the daughter of the late Emperor Theodosius, whom they call the Princess Galla Placidia, wedded now to the King of the Goths?’
The crowd stirred and looked uncertain. Such news meant little to them, but a prophecy fulfilled meant much. Attila looked struck by the news: he took a gasp of air, scowling in a fury at some private vision before him.
‘Aye, and is it not written, in the same Prophecy of Daniel, that at the End of Years, a Prince of Terror shall come from the North, and shall utterly destroy you? For he shall come like a whirlwind, with chariots and with many horsemen, and shall overthrow the kingdoms of all the world. And he shall do according to his will, and shall magnify himself above all gods, and shall speak marvellous things even against the God of gods; for he shall magnify himself above all.’ Holy John’s voice rose to a demented shriek, and his finger trembled even more violently in the boy’s face. ‘And upon his face are the marks of his violence. See, see: he comes. He comes!’
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