Attila

by William Napier

  ‘He is a good man,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Good is the opposite of weak, and it often enjoys little comfort and contentment in the world. Be patient, and watch over Ailsa like a mother-hawk, as I know you will. And watch, too, for the dark shadows of the Saxon longships, for there is no knowing when they may come again. We will be back. Before too long, we will be back, with your son, and you will be a family once more.’

  Seirian brushed her tears angrily from her eyes and nodded briskly. ‘I know. I know. Here,’ and she turned and slipped back into the cottage. Gamaliel followed her in, stooping low so as not to bump his head, as he had often done before. She retrieved a cloth package from the bread oven beside the hearth and thrust it into his gnarled hands. ‘I made some honey-cakes.’

  ‘Ah, the far-famed honey-cakes of Seirian, daughter of Maradoc!’ cried Gamaliel, raising them above his head. ‘How can we come to harm with such talismans of great power in our pockets? Surely even the gods look down and smell their savour rising unto heaven, and toss aside their bowls of ambrosia and their cups of nectar, and wish themselves mortal men upon the earth, that they might taste the joys of the blessed honey-cakes of Seirian, daughter of Maradoc!’

  ‘Enough, enough, you old fool!’ cried Seirian, and she bundled the old man out of doors into the sunshine.

  Ailsa had finished herding the chickens to her satisfaction, and she came over to him and stopped in front of the tall old man and squinted up. ‘Cadoc showed me the flowers, and he always caught fish,’ she said, ‘lots of fish. He was very clever.’

  ‘He still is very clever,’ said the old man gently.

  Aisla stared up at him. ‘Now when we have breakfast he’s not there . . . You will find him again, won’t you?’

  He laid his hand on her mop of curls. ‘Have no fear, little one. Your brother will be here again soon.’

  They left the next morning at dawn. Seirian and Lucius clung to each other wordlessly and with such desperate longing that Gamaliel had to turn away in his sorrow for them. He felt his hand plucked by a smaller hand, and he looked down into Ailsa’s bright brown eyes.

  ‘Are you going, too?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, little one, I am going, too.’

  ‘Your hands are all dry and wrinkly. Are you a captain of a ship?’

  ‘Not exactly, no.’

  ‘But I like your hands anyway,’ she added hurriedly.

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’

  ‘And you’re too old to fight any bad men.’

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  Gamaliel smiled. ‘I wonder that myself sometimes,’ he murmured. ‘Well, I will keep your father company on the long voyage to find your brother.’

  ‘But you don’t know where he is.’

  ‘We don’t know exactly.’

  ‘So how will you find him?’

  ‘By looking.’

  Ailsa thought for a while. ‘Sometimes I find things by looking. I found my hoop in the pighouse the day before yesterday, and I never put it down there, and the pigs don’t play hoop. They’d be too fat and it’d get stuck round their middles.’ She frowned. ‘And sometimes I can’t find things and give up, and then they come to me anyway. It’s odd, isn’t it? Does that happen to you?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Gamaliel, ‘all the time.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Ailsa. Then she ran off to play.

  Lucius and Seirian came over hand in hand, and she kissed Gamaliel, and he said quiet words to her, and she nodded and smiled with an effort. Then all three of them held hands in a triangle.

  Gamaliel said to Seirian, ‘The Comforter be with you. May He guard your fields by day, may She sit at your fireside by night.’

  Seirian replied, ‘May the road rise up to meet you, may the sun make his face to shine upon you, may God be the third traveller who walks by your side as you go.’

  Lucius and Seirian said nothing to each other, and Gamaliel knew why. The deepest things cannot be caught in words.

  Ailsa came running back and pushed into the triangle indignantly, so they had to make it a square. She closed her eyes and prayed, ‘May Daddy and the old man not have to go to bed without any supper ever, or be killed or eaten by sea-monsters, or anything else.’ She thought, and added, ‘Or even just get their arms and legs bitten off, and have to come home in a wheelbarrow.’

  At which they all solemnly said, ‘Amen,’ and the little group broke up.

  Lucius and Gamaliel took up their leather packs, and Gamaliel took his yew-staff in his hand.

  Ailsa ran to Lucius and threw her arms round his legs. ‘You didn’t come back for very long,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even remember you when you came back.’

  Lucius kept his voice steady. ‘I am only going away one more time, and I will come back with your brother.’

  The little girl beamed with delight. Seirian lifted her into her arms, and they watched from the rickety wooden gateway as the two men, the tall, grey-eyed, broad-shouldered younger man, and the other, lean, rangy and as old as the hills, walked on together up the lane towards the ridgeway and the east.

  15

  THE SEA-WOLVES

  Along the coast at the little port of Saetonis, they persuaded a local merchant and his crew to ship them across the Celtic sea towards Belgica.

  When they left the coast of Dumnonia in the Gwydda Ariana - The Silver Goose - it was bright sunshine, and with the wind behind them and only slightly abeam, they were making a good hundred miles a day. They would be at the coast of Belgica by nightfall.

  In the afternoon the wind dropped to the south, as suddenly as if someone had closed a door against a draught, and from the crow’s nest - which is to say an old barrel roughly roped to the mainmast - came the cry of fog ahead. They drifted on until they could see the fog-banks from the deck: great dense shapes that lay unmoving across the flat and windless sea, ominous and forlorn.

  They sailed on a little with what wind they could find, the trickling of the bow-wave eerie in the surrounding silence as they approached the fogbanks that lay across the channel, obscuring the white cliffs of the Gaulish coast from view. The sea, which had up to now been a typical channel sea of short, choppy waves, fell as calm as a village pond, and the dumpy little vessel began to roll placidly to port and starboard, her sail flapping futilely in the listless sea.

  The captain, a grizzled old veteran with two gold earrings and a left eye damaged by a swinging crossbeam, scowled into the fog-bank and gave no orders.

  ‘Why aren’t we setting oars?’ demanded Lucius.

  The captain didn’t respond for a long while. When he did, he growled, ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘It’s only fog. How many more miles to the coast?’

  ‘Another twenty, maybe.’

  ‘Well, can’t we break out the oars? We’ll be there in a few hours, wind or no wind.’

  The captain still didn’t look at Lucius. He spat over the gunwale, and said, ‘The Saxons. They love a fog.’

  After some hesitation the captain gave the order to put out the oars, and they rowed on into the fog. The silence was unnerving, the only sound the slow dip and sweep of the oars in the water below. They passed through thinner patches, and Lucius could see the poor watchman in the crow’s nest, high above the deck. When they hit another fog-bank, he vanished from sight as entirely as a bird in the clouds.

  At last the fog thinned and dissolved behind them, and then the rain came down. Gamaliel and Lucius sheltered in the cabin, the sailcloth drawn tight across the stanchions and the raindrops drumming down furiously. The wind, at least, got up again, from the west now. The captain gave orders for the sail to be unfurled and they plunged onwards through the beating rain. No other vessel, hostile or not, would see them through such a curtain of water.

  In the late afternoon the rain slowed and stopped and the sun broke through. The watcher in the crow’s nest stripped off his clothes and hung them on the sides of the barrel to dry. He began to scan the horizon. Noth
ing. Though to the east there was still cloud low on the horizon, and . . .

  He was hauling his clothes back on when a speck of colour caught his eye on the eastern horizon. He straightened and stared. Ten miles off or more. No, less. It was nearer than the horizon. He hadn’t spotted it soon enough; his eye had grown lazy. Bright sail and dark hull, and closing on them straight. Dreading his captain’s wrath, he leant over the side of the barrel and called down, ‘Sail off the port quarter, sir.’

  The captain glared. ‘How far?’

  ‘Six miles, sir. And closing.’

  ‘If you were sleeping on watch, sailor,’ roared the captain, losing his temper with impressive abruptness, ‘I’ll have the cat across your back quicker than you can spit.’

  ‘Not asleep, sir. No, sir.’

  Lucius and Gamaliel appeared on deck again. Lucius gazed out across the sea. At deck-level the distant ship was still on the horizon.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  The captain hawked and spat. ‘Trouble. It’s always fuckin’ trouble.’

  Their sail was bellying in the full wind. The captain gave the order to turn to port, and it luffed and shimmered.

  ‘Jupiter’s balls,’ growled the captain.

  ‘Purple sail,’ called the lookout.

  ‘Time was,’ growled the captain to his two landlubbers, ‘purple sail meant a Roman sail. Now it could mean fuckin’ anything. Rich ladies wear flaxen wigs like whores, ships go under purple sail, and the emperor in Rome wears yellow fuckin’ panties, for all I know.’

  Lucius nearly reprimanded the foul-mouthed old curmudgeon, but he hesitated. What had the emperor’s dignity to do with his concerns now? Besides, every captain was an emperor aboard his own ship. That much even a landlubber knew.

  ‘Steersmen!’ roared the captain, stumping back along the deck. ‘Three points to port and hold her steady. Haul in the starboard sheet.’

  The two huge steersmen, their arm muscles bulging with the strain of turning the ship under full sail, strained at their steering oars, the broad leather support-belts round their waists creaking with the effort. A group of sailors hauled in the starboard sheets, and the bulky merchantman swung slowly, painfully slowly, to port. The captain barked further orders, and at last the Gwydda Ariana was sailing almost at right angles to the wind. She could turn no closer.

  Ahead, the watch saw the purple sail swing round, too - to starboard. It swung much faster. The dark hull, he could see now, was low and lean. The two ships were running parallel, to the north. He touched the bone-handled dagger at his side.

  Lucius asked, ‘What’s so fashionable about purple sails these days?’

  ‘Don’t show up against the sea like white,’ snapped the captain. ‘Purple lets a pirate get in close.’

  ‘You can’t be sure it’s a pirate.’

  ‘Yeah, and I can’t be sure my mummy ever fucked my daddy, neither. But I’d be prepared to lay a bet on it.’ He swivelled away. ‘Deckhands, break out the starboard oars. On the fuckin’ double!’

  The six remaining crewmen obeyed, resting the oars in the six crude holes at either beam, only a few inches above the deck. Instead of rowing benches, such as a warship or quinquireme would boast, this old bucket had only cleats pegged to the deck for bracing. The scraggy-looking sailors braced their bare feet against the cleats and began to heave at the sweeps.

  The ship swung onto a course further from the approaching ship - and the approaching ship did the same. The captain cursed again.

  ‘We’re heading for . . . ?’ asked Lucius.

  ‘The gates of Hades,’ he growled.

  ‘You swear too much,’ said a low, steady voice behind him. ‘And my friend here asked you a question. I think you should have the courtesy to give him a plain answer, unadorned by redundant copulative allusions, and explain to him whither we are bound.’

  The captain turned in some surprise, and saw the old man with the priestly beard and the certain look in his eye. To Lucius he said grumpily, ‘We’re bound back for the coast of Britain, around Portus Lemanis, if we can make it before our friendly visitors get—’

  He was interrupted by a sudden lurch of the boat as the sail ceased drawing and began to flap violently in a wind that was now coming from just forward of the port beam.

  The captain roared orders for his men to put out the port-side oars, and there was a mad scramble to do his bidding. He might be a tough old bird who hadn’t smiled in twenty years, but they’d faced hard times before, and he’d always got them through.

  ‘Furl sail!’ he roared out. ‘Steersmen, hold her west of north!’

  The wind now blew in their faces. The buntlines snapped taut and the sail shrank into bundles of canvas along the yard. The Gwydda Ariana lost headway immediately, beginning to roll as she started to move across what had been a following sea. Waves slopped over the bow, the ship wallowed in the trough and nosed slowly forward, as she steered more and more to windward.

  ‘Row! Row you gutless yellow-livered sea-spawned bastards! Row like you’ve got a knife at your throat and the devil at your back. Remember every tale you ever heard of the tricks of the Saxon pirates, my boys, and row till you bust your guts and spew up blood. Heave at those sweeps, my boys. Push and heave. Tired muscles will mend in a day, but a cut throat takes a little while longer. Ha!’

  The captain lined up the rest of the crew to take over at regular intervals as each oarsman tired. ‘If you see a man puke or drop, knock him out the way and take his oar. By the time your wind’s broken we’ll have another man for you.’

  Lucius and Gamaliel eyed each other. The foul-mouthed old goat was almost enjoying this, all the more alive in the face of death.

  The two men took their place in the prow, and waited.

  ‘What was wrong with the sail?’ wondered Lucius. ‘We’re hardly moving now.’

  The captain was behind them again, glaring over his sweating oarsmen with his hands bunched into fists behind his back. Lucius and Gamaliel jumped as he growled his answer.

  ‘That’s a fast ship,’ he said. ‘They’d catch us no trouble under sail.’

  ‘And we’re quicker under oar?’

  The captain grinned a black-toothed grin. ‘No fuckin’ chance, mate. They’re faster than us on the oar, too. But the question is: can they be bothered? Any fool can unfurl a sail and sit back farting in the sun. But rowing bow-to-wind takes some determination. All that’s in it for them is the off-chance of some loot. What’s in it for us is our sorry little lives.’ He swiped his arm under his nose and snorted. ‘So who d’you think’s going to row harder?’

  ‘Well,’ said Gamaliel, nodding towards the purple sail, ‘it looks as if they’re going to do their utmost.’

  The captain sucked in a hiss of air over his teeth. For there was the pursuing ship, its big purple sail now shrinking against its yard. At the same time there came flashes of bright light as its crew broke out the oars and began to swing them through the waves in unison. And now her bow, her cruel, sharp-beaked warship bow, was swinging lightly round and coming straight for them.

  They rowed on, harder, harder, but it was useless. The distance between them and the warship shrank to three miles, two, one, half a mile . . . On the deck of the Gwydda Ariana, the broken-winded rowers lay choking in pools of their own vomit while their replacements heaved and sweated in their stead, their muscles burning cords and the soles of their feet splitting against the cleats in their furious press and strain. But strain heroically as they might, there was no escaping the speed of the lean, dark warship.

  ‘Lay off, men,’ called the captain at last, his voice sounding as weary as they looked.

  It was done. They were finished. The Gwydda Ariana wallowed to a sluggish halt in the troughs and waited.

  A hundred yards off, and they could see the Saxon crew easing up on their short oars, hefting their great ashen spears in their fists and setting on their plain steel velite helmets. Their warship was beautifully crafted, even Lu
cius had to admit, predatory, fast and sleek, with a close-packed eighteen oars each side. No wonder the Gwydda Ariana had been so easily outrun. This ship might outrun even the fastest two-banked Liburnian warship in the Mediterranean.

  Some forty Saxons crowded silently to the stern. They held themselves erect and expressionless. This was fate. The gods were with them. In their beliefs, none of these fierce Germanic warriors ever had even the room for doubt. Things were as they were. You lived, you fought, you died. All that mattered was to be strong.

  Their captain was a blustering, red-faced, barrelchested giant with a bearskin wrap round his beefy shoulders. His eyes were a sharp, keen blue, and a triumphant smile played on his lips.