At which the boy, to the stunned surprise of the assembled villagers, lashed out and struck the holy man a terrific blow across his face. Holy John staggered backwards, but he did not fall. He leant, gasping, on his staff a little while, blood trickling from his mouth and over his beard. Then he turned and stumbled away until he reached the shadowy edge of the forest. In the gloom they could hardly see him, and wished to see him no more. But still they heard his ancient, dried-out voice, taunting them.
‘Oh, ye are the children of very daemons. Ye are all in the devil’s own mouth, and shall be damned perpetually. And your gods and goddesses are the devils out of hell, one with Moloch and Ishtar and Ashtaroth, whom I shall not name before the Most High God, but Great Whores all, whose only worship is itself a whoring and a fornicating and a revelling in the filthiness of women and of…’
But at this the mood turned ugly. The people of the village were merrily impervious to the insults that Holy John or his fellow Christians hurled at them personally, but could not bear such attacks upon their most treasured mysteries, least of all on the night of the Feast of the Great Mother, and within the hearing of the goddess herself. No matter how festive their mood, they would not countenance Holy John coming down from the mountain and calling their beloved Great Mother, who gave them life and fed them all, a whore. Some of the younger men ran towards Holy John with a mind to give him a beating and a lesson. The old man evidently decided that, on this occasion at least, the one true and vengeful Lord God of Israel could not be relied upon to pluck him out and miraculously save him from this sinful crowd of idolators and fornicators, as He had once saved the Prophet Daniel in the lions’ den. He swirled round and, with a surprising turn of speed for a man of his years, dashed away into the woods and was lost to sight.
The girl and Attila walked slowly back towards the village, side by side.
‘Why did he say that to you?’ she asked. ‘About the End of Years and everything?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
She glanced sideways at him. ‘Where are you from, anyway?’
There was a pause, and then he said, ‘From the north.’ He grinned wolfishly at her in the darkness. ‘A Prince of Terror from the North.’
She eyed him sceptically, and took his hand again. ‘Come on then, my Prince of Terror. Time for another conquest.’
What he hadn’t realised was that, in these poorer parts, although the girl had her own pallet to sleep on, her entire family slept in a single room, up above the animals. Fortunately, perhaps, her entire family consisted of only her mother and her younger sister, the thin, pale, watchful girl with the dark-shadowed eyes. The father had died some years back of a wasting fever.
So that when he and his new love were just reaching the heights of transport, he looked over to see both her sister and her mother lying close by, watching with smiles on their faces, and even whispering to each other about what was going on.
‘Mother!’ cried the girl, covering them both with a sheet.
‘We can still hear you, even so!’ cried her mother.
Despite the proximity of the other two females, however, the boy and girl had only an hour or two of fitful sleep that night, and both looked flushed and tired in the morning.
Before the boy took his leave, the girl and her mother gave him a cloth-wrapped bundle of fresh bread, smoked sausage, dried apricots and figs. There was no sign of the younger sister.
‘There’s a horse tethered at the edge of the wood, round to the west,’ said the boy. ‘About half a mile away.’
‘Whose horse?’ said the mother suspiciously.
‘Mine, of course,’ he said. ‘Only I don’t want it any more. You have it.’
‘How far away did you st-did you get it from?’
‘A long way away,’ said the boy. ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. It’s a good horse.’
‘Well, the Goddess bless you,’ said the woman, still a little uncertain. ‘What’ll you do for the journey?’
‘Oh, I’ll soon st-I mean, find another.’
The woman tutted and muttered a protective oath. The girl just smiled. Her Prince of Terror, her tattered outlaw.
The sun was rising in the east, the morning star its herald still visible, and the cockerels were still crowing, when the boy left them waving after him at the cottage door.
The younger sister was waiting for him in the woods beside the path leading north into the hills. The low eastern sun slanted in through the trees, pouring coppery light over the ground padded with fallen pine-needles.
She leant back against a tree. Not a word was spoken between them. How frail she looked compared with her buxom sister, gazing up at him with her large, pensive eyes. When she raised her arms for him to take off her shift, she started to cough painfully. Her breasts were small and tender, her hair long and lank but sweet-smelling, for she had brushed it with rosemary water that morning, before dawn, for him.
She lifted her long hair in her slim hands and trailed it round the back of his neck, smiling shyly. They kissed. Her smile was wan and faraway. She touched his scarred cheeks. They kissed again. A little patch of her long dark hair was grey, just above her ear, as grey as an old woman’s. He touched it gently. She tried to push him away but he stroked her hair again, with its strange grey mark.
At last she whispered, ‘My sister is more beautiful.’
But he shook his head and kissed her again.
She looked into his eyes, the gold-flecked, slanted eyes of this strange, alien boy with the blue tattooed cheeks. She saw his desire for her, and at that her own desire burnt, too. She leant back against the sun-warmed treetrunk, wondering with a thrill at her own shamelessness, and slowly drew up her skirt, her eyes downcast.
Afterwards, as she walked down the path to the village, she looked back over her shoulder. He took a step after her, quite unconsciously. In that moment, even his deep, deep longing for home was overcome by his longing for this thin, pale girl with her large, sad eyes. It was as much as he could do to stop himself running after her and, and.. . With the other girl he had felt a hot, mind-numbing surge of his blood, but with this girl he felt it in his heart – and how it ached, so painful and so sweet. She smiled and waved to him, and he waved back. She turned away and walked on down to the village.
He looked after her for a long time, even when she had vanished from sight. He wanted to run after her and protect her from other men, and monsters, and daemons, witches and storms, and whatever else might ever come to threaten her gentle flesh. He wanted wolves and bears to appear from the forest, so that he could run after her and protect her, draw his sword and kill them all in front of her, even if he should die himself in doing so. It would be such a sweet death.
Eventually he turned back and began to ascend the long path to the north.
When he at last emerged from the woods on to the free, grassy, wind-blown hills, his heart leapt furiously within him, and his heated blood surged again. He flung his arms wide to catch the burly, buffeting wind, and he bellowed over the pale, wintry valley below that he wanted to conquer the whole world, and have every woman in it. Then he ran madly on until the air grew chill and seared his lungs, and drove his blood more and more madly through his veins, laughing and roaring as he ran higher and higher into the mountains.
Early one morning, not long after Attila had left the village, a troop of soldiers rode in from the Palatine fort near Ravenna. They were led by an officer with a face so scarred and lopsided that he made the children cry and run from him. Even the ragged dogs of the village yelped and hid under carts or in the shelter of cottage doorways.
He called his troop to a halt in the centre of the village, beside the thatch-roofed well. The people emerged from their humble dwellings spontaneously at this new arrival, murmuring among themselves. He said not a word but only held his hand up. His fingers were heavy with signet rings. The people fell silent. His horse stepped sideways and its breath trumpeted into the frosty air. The officer l
ooked around and then spoke.
‘We are here on the orders of General Heraclian. You have entertained a fugitive from Roman law in this village. A boy of some fourteen summers, with barbarian tattoos on his cheeks and his back. Where is he?’
The people tried not to look at each other, but some failed. The officer saw everything. He turned to his burly decurion and nodded. The decurion vaulted from his horse, strode over to the nearest hut, and emerged a few moments later with a flaming brand taken from an open fire.
‘I will not ask a second time,’ said the officer. ‘Answer me.’
The plump-faced miller said, ‘We know of no such boy, Your Honour. We are only simple-’
The officer nodded to two more of his men. ‘Bind him.’
They dismounted and seized the miller’s arms, wrenched them behind him, and tied them tightly with coarse rope. The miller, strong man though he was, could not suppress a muted howl at the agony he felt.
The other villagers eyed each other in open fear, but none of them could bear to betray one who had so recently been their guest. Every custom and law of hospitality rebelled against it. Inwardly, even now, they braced themselves for the inevitable punishment they would suffer for their insolent silence. They had had dealings with the enforcers of Roman law before, when they came round each season to collect the village’s meagre but hard-felt contribution to the imperial exchequer. Every taxation left them a little poorer, a little more bitter. Nothing they paid in tax ever came back to them, in kind, in protection, in security. They saw nothing for their money. Only their quiet, unknown valley kept them safe from the depredations of the wider world. Except when the representatives of the Roman state came to visit.
The officer read the situation with cruel exactness. He kicked his horse and rode over to one of the barns, lifting a spear from the grasp of one of his troopers as he passed. In the doorway of a barn crouched a furry, tatty-eared little dog, his brown eyes never leaving the lieutenant for a moment. But even so he was not quick enough. As the officer rode by, with an icy nonchalance that appalled even the most tough-minded of the villagers, he jabbed the point of his spear downwards and impaled the dog on the end, then wheeled and rode back towards the centre of the village square, the poor creature howling with its last breath as he came.
The officer rested the spear with its horrible load on the edge of the well, blood dripping slowly from the dog’s body and darkly staining the stone lip of the well.
‘No!’ cried one or two of the villagers, stepping forwards, unable to believe that anyone could be so savage.
The officer said, ‘The boy?’
They stopped in their tracks, and hung their heads in anger and shame, and said nothing.
The officer looked back at the dark mouth of the well. And then he drew back his arm, and scraped the blood-soaked corpse of the dog from the end of his spear. The clotted mass of fur and blood rested for a moment on the lip of the well, and then rolled and tumbled over. A moment later they heard a heavy splash, and the whole village gave a low, collective moan.
The officer turned to his decurion, who still carried the flaming brand. ‘Fire the haybarn,’ he said evenly.
At this the girl’s mother waddled forward in a fury, unable to contain herself. She screamed at the officer that he was a disgusting pig of a man, and a disgrace to humankind, and that surely the gods and the goddesses who looked down, would-She was cut short by a swingeing backhanded blow, the officer’s heavily ringed fist sending her spinning to the ground.
‘Mother!’ cried the girl, running forwards.
‘I’m all right, m’dear,’ she mumbled, struggling up from the dust, her mouth bleeding profusely. ‘Unlike this disgusting pig of a man will be soon enough, God willing.’
‘Sssh, mother, please,’ pleaded the girl.
The officer ignored her.
The woman was helped away by her daughter. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that tooth he’s knocked out was giving me grief anyhow. Hurt like crazy in me poor old skull, it did.’
No one else had the courage, or the foolhardiness, to protest openly, much as they might admire their neighbour for her sharp-tongued bravery. But in their hearts – those hearts as sturdy and enduring as the hearts of peasants everywhere – the more they saw their liberty abused and their property destroyed, the more silently, woodenly rebellious they became. At the outset, one or two of them might have considered telling soldiers which path the barbarian boy had taken into the mountains, in exchange for a quiet life. But now not one of them would dream of it. Their water might be polluted, their precious winter fodder for their cattle might be burning before their eyes, and the great haybarn, which had taken the whole village two weeks of hard labour to build, might be reduced to ash. But not one of them now would co-operate with these wretched, bullying minions of the state.
The soldiers did not stay to watch the barn burn to the ground. Once the flames had taken inextinguishable hold, they regarded their work as well done.
The officer looked over the cowed but undefeated villagers. ‘We will be back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And then you will tell us what we want to know.’
The villagers huddled together more closely than ever that night, but not a voice was raised in dissent. They would take whatever was meted out to them, and they would say nothing. Nothing would break them.
Some say that the peasants and country people have no sense of honour, and care only for brute survival. They say that a peasant will do anything, say anything, swear any oath or betray any friendship, to save himself and his family and his few precious animals. And it is true, perhaps, that honour is a virtue that only the rich can afford. A poor country girl in the city is quickly obliged to choose between her honour and her life. But in place of honour, the peasant nurtures a passion less overt, but every bit as fierce and intractable: a loathing for being told what to do.
General Heraclian’s soldiers did not return the next day. Nor the day after that. Their promise to do so had been only an idle threat, intended to terrorise recalcitrant villagers and remind them of their lowly status in the heaven-appointed scheme of things. The troop had already moved on after the barbarian boy, taking up fresh trails where they could. The villagers set about rebuilding their barn, draining and cleaning their well, gathering and drying what further winter fodder they could from the surrounding land that kept them. They would not see the soldiers again until the spring and the next levy of taxes. Meanwhile they could live in poverty and peace.
11
COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD
Attila remained happily unaware that the soldiers of Rome followed so closely on his trail. He even managed to push to the back of his mind the bewildering news that Galla Placidia had married the King of the Goths; and that the Eternal City would not be destroyed after all, but would triumph yet again, to subdue, civilise and finally Romanise her Gothic conquerors themselves. But at least now the Huns would know who their enemies were: everyone.
Despite the complications and treacheries of the wider world, as the boy saw them in the fierce simplicity of his adolescent heart, still that heart sang within him with youthful lust and longing, and sometimes he sang aloud as he walked the dusty goat-paths of Italy towards home.
One bright morning he was walking along a stony path with cliffs rising high to his right, and steep pine-clad slopes falling away to his left, through which he had just climbed, along a winding, zigzag path. He had stopped for breath and was staring up into the eternal blue sky. He thought he could hear something – the sound of horses’ hooves approaching. He wondered if he ought to get off the path to be safe, but he lingered, peering a little longer, to see if he could glimpse who it was, coming through the sparse pines below.
His blood froze with horror. On the bend in the path immediately beneath him, a full cavalry troop of Roman horsemen, Palatine Guards in their ominous black armour, was walking steadily up the hill towards him. The leader kept his eyes steadily, almost lazily on the ground beside
his horse, taking in every slightest sign that the boy’s light feet had made. Immediately behind the tracker rode the officer of the troop in his black plumed helmet, his terrifying visage deeply scarred and half-collapsed from where an enemy blade had severed his cranial nerves.
Attila whirled round in uncharacteristic panic. He knew now, deep in his heart, that they meant to kill him. This time they would not bind him with ropes and drag him back to the emperor or his sister for imprisonment again. This time they would stretch him over the nearest rock and hack his head from his body.
He thought as he ran. The horsemen would be round the corner in moments, and the instant they saw him they would gallop forward and bring him down with their spears, and he would be done for. Dashing down into the woods would take him nearer them. The only alternative was the cliff to his right, but that was a crumbling golden limestone wall of forty feet or more – unscalable, surely?
There was no more time to hesitate. Silent as a deer stepping through woodland, he crept into the pines and moved along, only a few paces above the horsemen. He heard one of them say how close they were to him now, how fresh the trail marks were. He stopped breathing for a moment. Then he moved deeper into the forest alongside the path, hoping to find refuge in the green gloom of the pines. He was so intent on watching the cavalry that he almost forgot to look ahead. When he did he saw only woodland ahead of him, but he felt in his blood that something wicked was coming steadily towards him. He could hardly bear to look, wanting to tear his eyes away. And when he did, he nearly cried out in terror. Before him on the narrow woodland path, walking silently towards him with eyes fixed, were more of the soldiers in black armour, on foot, their swords drawn, their faces terrifyingly expressionless. They might have been the ghosts of soldiers rather than men of flesh and blood.
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