Attila ath-1

by William Napier

  Orestes crept down to the creek, and a surprised moorhen erupted from the reeds and beat away across the dark river, setting his heart thumping anew with fright. He stepped painfully into the boat. It was taking in water slowly, an inch or two swilling muddily in the bottom, and it stank of old fish. It would be no easy matter to move and steer the boat with a single oar, and maybe bail, too, with only his cupped hands, across a mile of the great flowing river. But it was a boat, for all that, and a boat meant freedom.

  He squatted in the bottom of the boat, the muddy water oozing over his bandaged toes, clutched the end of the flatboard oar, and brooded. That stinging denial of Attila’s, was, he knew, his salvation. That was why he sat here now, on the verge of reaching freedom in the ungoverned lands on the farther shore. While the tattooed boy who called himself a prince was incarcerated in a locked and bolted dungeon reeking of ordure, somewhere back in the city, being ‘questioned’ by his unsmiling captors.

  Orestes looked up at the clear winter stars. Did they care what happened to him or the other boy? Did they care what he did next? Did it matter if they cared or not? When he looked down the stars still shimmered at him inescapably from the surface of the black water. They would not leave him alone.

  At last he sighed, laid the oar down against the side of the boat, and stepped painfully back out onto the slimy bank of the creek. He crept up through the reeds and the galingale, and limped slowly back towards the city.

  Attila was manacled hand and foot, as the burly white-haired officer had ordered, and half dragged, half carried up a narrow, spiralling stone staircase to a small upper room with a single, strongly barred window. There he was set down upon a stool, and two guards stood by him with spears set firmly in front of his darting eyes.

  After a few minutes, fresh from his dinner, the white-haired officer came strolling in and ordered the door to be shut behind him. He was still mopping his mouth with a linen napkin, and his demeanour was more relaxed now that he had a bellyful of food and wine.

  ‘Just wait till my people hear how I have been treated,’ hissed Attila, before the officer could say a word. ‘Just wait till my grandfather Uldin hears. He will not endure such an insult to his blood.’

  The officer raised an eyebrow. ‘Who says he will ever hear of it? You are escaping no further now. Your next stop, and your place of residence for a long, long time to come, will be the imperial court at Ravenna.’

  ‘Never,’ said Attila. ‘I will die first.’

  ‘Spoken like a man,’ said the officer. Despite himself, he was beginning to admire, or at least enjoy, the lad’s sheer, naked ferocity. As one might enjoy the spectacle of a wolf-fight in the arena.

  ‘Neverthless,’ he went on, ‘that is where you are bound – and with the agreement of your people, don’t forget. You are a hostage. It is all a perfectly civilised arrangement.’

  ‘Civilisation,’ spat the boy. ‘I’ve been there before. Give me anywhere else but civilisation.’

  The boy and the man eyed each other in silence for a while. Then the boy looked away.

  The officer said, ‘I have never been far beyond the river. Just the occasional punitive expedition when the Alamanni or the Marcomanni have got uppity. Tell me about your country beyond.’

  My country? thought Attila. How would you understand my country? You Roman, with your mind as straight and unwavering as a road? How to describe to you, you oaf, my beloved country?

  He took a deep breath, pulled at his cruel wrist-manacles, and settled his hands in his lap. He said, ‘My country is a land without boundaries or frontiers or armies. Every man there is a warrior. Every woman is the mother of warriors. Cross the grey Danube and you are in my country, and you may ride for weeks and months and never leave it. There is nothing there but the green, green grassland of the steppe, feathergrass and hare’s-tail grass as far as the eye can see. As far as the eagle flies, a hundred days’ riding eastwards into the rising sun, it is still the green grassland of my country.’

  ‘You have an active imagination, boy.’

  Attila ignored him. He could no longer see him, or even the dank walls of the dungeon around him. He could see only what he described.

  ‘In March,’ he said, ‘the grasslands flash young and green like the kingfisher’s breast on the Dnieper. In April they are purple with saxifrage and vetch, and in May they are yellow, like a brimstone’s wings. There, many days’ riding beyond the steppes, which are a thousand times the size of your empire, with never a fence or a barrier or a plot of land that is owned or fenced in, nothing to stop you galloping all day and all night, as far as you want, as if you and your horse were flying… There, there is a freedom such as no Roman has ever known.’

  The officer stood very still. The two guards did not move. They listened.

  ‘Beyond the steppes, there rise the white mountains, where the souls of the holy men are fed when they go to dream and commune with the ancestors. Beyond the black waters of Lake Baikal, and the Snow Mountains, and the Blue Mountains, are at last the Altai Mountains, the soul and navel of the world, where all men must go who would be wise or powerful. The high Altai are seen for many days’ riding, high over the plains and the eastern deserts. They are the home of all magicians, all shamans and holy men, and all who hold converse with the Eternal Blue Sky since time began. They say that even your god Christ walked there, in the time before his time of sacrifice.’

  He fell silent. It was blasphemy that he had spoken. He would say no more, for even to talk of the Altai was treachery to any who did not know.

  After a long pause, the officer said quietly, ‘And I always heard that the Huns had no poetry.’

  ‘The Huns have poetry,’ said Attila indignantly, ‘but they entrust it not to paper but to memory. All that is holiest and most dangerous is entrusted to memory alone.’

  The officer was silent again for a while. Then he nodded to the two guards and they opened the door. With a sombre tread he walked from the room, and left the boy to his dreams of his unknown country.

  Attila lay on his side on the lumpy straw pallet, comfort impossible with his arms wrenched behind him and his wrists manacled. They had said he would be unmanacled tomorrow. But tomorrow was tomorrow.

  He could see the bright winter stars through the bars of iron: green and twinkling Vega low on the horizon, and Arcturus, and brilliant Capella. And then he heard the high, distant cry of a sparrowhawk. It came from far below, near the ground, which was wrong, and in the middle of the night, which was even more wrong. A sparrowhawk’s cry, like that of all birds of prey, was a cry of power and triumph, as it wheeled high in the sky in the bright day, and surveyed all the earth below it as its kingdom. He tensed and strained his ears, and after a while the cry came again. Not a real sparrowhawk: it couldn’t be. It was a boy with a shiny blade of grass trembling between his taut thumbs…

  He had no grass to answer with, and anyway his hands were not free. Unable to contain the beating of his heart and the hot surge of his blood, he cried out in a loud voice, the cry echoing round the little cell and bringing the guards running. They shot the bolts and flung open the door and roughly demanded what he was up to. He said he must have been having a nightmare. They eyed him suspiciously and then left again, double-bolting the heavy door behind them.

  He waited patiently on his straw pallet for the cry to come again. Patience is a nomad. But he heard nothing. Instead, something fell like a shadow across the stars beyond the window. He thought at first that it was a night-flying bird come to roost on the narrow shelf of stone outside the bars, but it was gone in an instant. Then it came again, and fell with a barely audible thud on the ledge. He got up and hobbled painfully to the tiny window. There on the ledge was the end of a knotted rope. He didn’t stop to consider, but hurled himself at the bars, reaching his head forward to try and grab the rope with his teeth. He could not reach it. He tried again, flinging himself at the bars with bared teeth, but it was hopeless. The knot trembled on the very
verge of the ledge, and fell away and was gone. He sank back in despair.

  Again and again the rope-end flew through the night air towards the little barred window, and again and again it fell away uselessly. Attila stopped even waiting for it to come. And then at last, thrown in a wider arc than usual, it sailed cleanly, miraculously, through the bars and fell back against the inner wall. Attila was on his feet immediately, grabbing the knot and holding on to it for all he was worth. There was a tug, and he tugged back. Then a much stronger weight, and he gasped with pain as his pinioned arms were wrenched upwards with the force. He sank to the ground and still clutching the rope he laid his whole weight upon it and braced his feet against the wall. He hoped and prayed it would be enough.

  Twice the rope began to slip and his arm muscles screamed in pain, but he held on. The rope trembled in his grasp like a fishline. And then a shadow blocked the stars through the window, and a piping, boyish voice whispered his name.

  He struggled up. ‘Orestes?’

  The shadow nodded.

  ‘You came back.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The shadow against the stars was perched precariously on the tiny ledge, squatting like a goblin. One hand clutched one of the bars; the other held a thick length of wood.

  ‘You need a crowbar, you muttonhead,’ said Attila. ‘You can’t shift iron with wood.’

  ‘People don’t just leave crowbars lying around, you know,’ hissed Orestes, indignantly. ‘It was all I could find.’

  He set the thick log between two bars and began to lean his weight back against it, his body stretched almost horizontally out from the wall of the fort, thirty feet or more above the ground. Nothing. He collapsed back against the bars.

  ‘Here,’ said Attila, ‘try this end one.’

  Orestes changed his grip and tried again, and this time it shifted slightly. The mortar setting gave in a little cloud of dust, and the bar fell on its side.

  ‘Now use that bar on the others,’ said Attila.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Orestes.

  He had managed to break off two more bars when they heard soldiers unbolting the door.

  ‘Quick, the other bar!’ cried Orestes.

  Attila twisted painfully and managed to pass it up. The first door-bolt was shot. Orestes stood the bar upright in its place as the second bolt was shot.

  ‘Get down!’ hissed Attila, and he flung himself back onto his pallet and closed his eyes.

  The door swung open and the soldiers looked in. They saw the little runaway hooligan asleep, sleeping like a baby. At the window, two boyish hands clutched the bars and a knotted rope, but the soldiers saw nothing. The door was closed and bolted again.

  One more bar was wrenched free, and then Orestes could just slither in to the cell. He took the rope from Attila and tied it to the one remaining bar.

  ‘Will that hold?’ asked Attila.

  ‘It’ll have to. Here, kneel down.’

  ‘My ankles first, you fool. No one ever runs away on their hands.’

  With a harsh twist of the bar in his ankle manacles, Attila’s feet were free. Then Orestes did the same for his wrists.

  He grimaced and rubbed his bruised flesh. ‘Right. Time we left.’

  It was the loose bar left carelessly on the window ledge that did it. Attila got down safely, but Orestes swung a little too much in his descent. The rope grazed over the ledge, nudged the loose bar and set it rolling across the the stone. It dropped with a loud, echoing clang – inside the cell.

  In a trice the soldiers were back at the door and shooting the bolts. The door was flung open, and they stood open-mouthed at the sight of the empty pallet and the window with four bars missing. Then they sprang into action: they ran to the last standing bar, and slashed the rope knotted round it.

  Orestes fell fifteen feet. Attila heard his bones break. He heard the crack quite clearly in the still night air, and he heard his friend scream.

  ‘Run!’ cried Orestes. ‘To the river – run!’

  But Attila grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. He looped Orestes’ left arm over his own shoulders, and together, hobbling, not running, they made for the shelter of the reeds down by the silent river.

  Behind them they could hear the creaking of the wooden gates of the fort. The soldiers were coming after them.

  ‘Leave me,’ gasped Orestes as he stumbled at Attila’s side. ‘Run!’

  The older boy ignored him. He did not look back – he might stumble and trip. He dragged Orestes on down through the meadows beyond the town to the misty riverside. He could hear horses close by as they harrumphed their astonishment and displeasure at being pulled from the stables and galloped so hard at this peculiar hour of the night.

  They came to an orchard and ran panting into its shadows. The branches were bare, and last year’s sere and yellow leaves strewed the ground; the grass was long and damp. They fell against a treetrunk and let their lungs suck in the cold night air as quietly as they could. They could hear the shouts of men through the trees.

  Orestes’ leg throbbed with its new, twisted form, but it did not yet give him agony. Despite the broken bone jutting out like a malignant lump under the skin, the terror and excitement of their flight somehow dulled the pain. For now.

  ‘We must go on,’ said Attila. ‘Follow me.’

  Beyond the orchard was a stony cart-track, and then the dense reeds along the river’s edge. Cavalrymen from the fort were spreading out all along the track, blocking all approaches to the river.

  The two boys crouched at the edge of the orchard and peered out through the long grass. There was no moon, but even the winter stars seemed cruelly bright.

  ‘We’re trapped,’ moaned Orestes. ‘And the boat’s just there, near that broken-down old landing-stage.’

  Attila stared at him.

  ‘Just there,’ said Orestes, indicating the place with a jerk of his head. ‘I found it.’

  ‘You found a boat?’ said Attila. ‘And you still came back for me?’

  Orestes shrugged, embarrrassed.

  Attila gazed across the misty river. Once they were back on the windy plains, he thought, there would be no manacles for either of them. Nor would he permit his friend to be hobbled, as most of the Huns’ slaves were: the tendons in the heels were cut to stop them running away. But this Greek boy – he would be treated differently.

  He slipped away and came back a few moments later with a stout-looking stick which he handed to Orestes.

  ‘When you can,’ he whispered, ‘run for the boat.’

  ‘Run?’

  ‘Well, hobble or whatever.’

  ‘But they’ll see me. Where will you be?’

  ‘In the river.’

  ‘Can’t they follow you in? Can’t they swim?’

  ‘Are you joking?’ said Attila. ‘Some of those Batavian cavalry units can swim a horse across a river in full armour. But…’ He looked around desperately. ‘Well, whatever.’ And he was gone.

  He made his way along the edge of the orchard, and then down a filthy-smelling drainage ditch that ran to the river. The soldiers in their winter cloaks were still spread out along the frosty cart-track, looking uncertain, their orders vague. Somewhere the white-haired officer was riding around in a rage, but the chain of command seemed chaotic.

  Attila drew in a deep breath, leapt from the ditch and ran.

  He ran straight between two startled horsemen and on into the reeds, slowing horribly as his feet were sucked down into the oozing mud. He hallooed as he stumbled on.

  The horsemen shouted and galloped after him, but they, too, were slowed down in the thick reeds and the clinging, viscous mud. The boy felt a rope whistle past his ear and fall with a sigh into the reeds. He grinned and struggled on, knee-deep in mud. No one could throw a rope as well as a Hun.

  He felt gravel under his feet, and the reeds thinned out, and he hurled himself forwards into the freezing river.

  Orestes watched as the horsemen on the track a
ll made for the place where Attila had dived in. They gathered in a useless knot, leaving the track unguarded. He hobbled to his feet, clutching the stout stick in both hands, his broken leg dragging behind him. Clenching his teeth to keep his agony silent, he hauled himself over the cart-track like the sorriest cripple in the empire, and on into the reeds beyond. He wasn’t seen.

  Dragging himself through the ooze of the mud was harder. With his whole weight on only one foot he sank deeper with every step, and the stick sank deeper still. He cursed his bad luck for having fallen from the wall. But he dragged himself onward, his lungs aflame as if he had just run five miles. Every muscle in his body ached. Even his neck ached terribly – he couldn’t understand why – but he went on.

  Upriver, there was no sign of the Hun boy but for a stream of bubbles on the surface. No more than a diving otter might make in the black, starlit waters.

  At last Orestes got to the boat and hauled it down to deeper water. He pushed off, utterly exhausted, with the single oar and with the stick on each side. Then, almost collapsed in the bow of the boat, which was dangerously low in the water, he began to paddle, a stroke each side of the bow, like a barbarian in a dug-out canoe on the Rhine.

  He didn’t know what he was supposed to do next. His head spun, his limbs burnt, his eyes were almost blind with sweat and dizziness. He heard shouts from the bank, and heavy splashes, and knew he had been spotted, and that the cavalrymen were dismounting and diving in, or ordering their own boats upriver, or even plunging in on horseback like true Batavians, as the Hun boy had said.

  Then he was aware of another sound, and looking blearily down he saw two hands appear on the gunwale of the boat, then two arms and a soggy top-knot, and then a round head with yellow, glittering eyes. With a great gasp and heave, as if he still had as much energy and strength left in him as ever, Attila was up over the side of the rocking boat and into the back.

  ‘Give me the oar!’ he shouted, grabbing it from the startled Orestes, and he began to paddle furiously, one side then the other.