Attila

by William Napier

  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 all 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.

  Dark shapes bobbed on the river upstream: the heads of men and horses. Downstream, near the fort, showed the black hulls of the legion’s river fleet. But they were too slow. The boys were already in midstream and crossing fast.

  Attila knew it. ‘Here’ he said, tossing the oar to Orestes, who took it with weariness but without complaint. To Orestes’ astonishment, Attila got to his feet, and began dancing like a lunatic in the stern of the dangerously unstable little boat. He shook his fists and tossed his angry head at the speechless soldiers staring from the bank and the river.

  ‘You fucking arseholes! You thick, Roman bastards!’ he screamed. ‘You useless fucking scumsucking motherfucking sad-arsed abortions of men! You haven’t got a hope in hell of catching us, you steaming sacks of mule-shit! Come and get us if you can, you fucking Roman wankers! Astur piss on you all!’ He stopped jigging for a moment and turned, raised his tunic and bared his buttocks at them. Still there came no sound from the soldiers or their open-mouthed officers.

  He resumed his taunting. ‘You couldn’t run a bath, you couldn’t invade a fucking Corinthian brothel, you feckless big-nosed cunts! You dog-breathed turds of the devil! You try swimming after us and you’ll sink to the bottom like lead weights, shitbrains! Come on, try and get us! Come on! Arseholes!’

  He whirled to face Orestes, grinning with insane delight, his eyes aflame with a burning, furious madness. In the darkness, Orestes couldn’t see the soldiers’ faces, but he saw that their dim shapes had stopped dead in the shallows, still mounted. He could imagine their expressions.

  Attila turned back again. ‘Losers! Abortions! Scumsuckers! Pigfuckers! You’re all going to rot in hell! Rome’s going to fall! We’ll be back, and there’ll be nothing left of your rotting fucking empire but a heap of blood and rubble!’ He wiped spittle from his mouth on his ragged sleeve. ‘And fuck your emperor, and his sister, too! Fuck him right up his scrawny chicken arse!’

  Almost choking with lunatic laughter, he sank down in the stern of the boat. He leant his head back, raised his fists at the stars and cried one last time, ‘Fucker-r-r-s!’

  At dawn, a company of the Palatine Guard arrived at Aquincum.

  ‘You have the Hun boy held captive,’ rasped their commander, a lieutenant with half his face collapsed and shapeless from injury. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Dismount and salute when you address your superior officer!’ roared the colonel, red with rage.

  In answer, the Palatine lieutenant simply held out a sheet of parchment with the imperial seal on it. The colonel lost his confidence at that moment.

  ‘The Hun boy,’ repeated the lieutenant.

  ‘He . . . he’s escaped,’ said the colonel.

  The Palatine looked at him in disbelief. ‘Escaped? From a frontier fort?’

  ‘He had an accomplice. What do you want him for, anyway?’

  ‘No business of yours.’

  The colonel looked away over the river, quite calm now, in the face of his impending punishment at the edge of the sword. ‘He has gone away across the Danube, back to his people.’

  The Palatine looked over the river likewise and said sourly, ‘So. I suppose we will never hear from him again.’

  The colonel replied, ‘Oh, you will hear from him again.’

  The Palatine remembered what they said about dying men’s prophecies, and under his gleaming black armour he shivered.

  PART III

  Into the Wilderness

  1

  THE DEATH OF THE HEART

  After three bitter days of struggling across the wide Pannonian plain, the fugitives came to a safe place to rest. Attila found a medicine woman who set Orestes’ broken leg, scolded him roundly, and told him not to move a muscle for at least two weeks. After that he must walk only with a stick, and put as little weight as possible upon his injured leg for at least another moon.

  It was early spring by the time they journeyed again, and came to that great range of mountains which in the Gothic tongue are called the Harvaða, in the Hun the Kharvadh, and in the Latin the Carpathians. They crossed the high passes of those wild mountains in flower-bright springtime, and came down at last onto the limitless steppes of Scythia in March, when the grasses, as Attila had said, flashed young and green like the kingfisher’s breast on the Dnieper.

  They walked for many days across the steppes, silent and intoxicated with their vast emptiness, their beauty and their immemorial loneliness. One morning they came near to one of the slow, winding rivers of that country, and they heard a woman singing by the riverside as she washed clothes and dried them on the rocks. She sang her nomad songs in the tongue of the Huns, and Attila knew that he was nearly home.

  ‘My beloved, how proudly he rides,

  Proudly, like the wind;

  Soon he will be gone,

  Like t
he wind, like the wind.

  ‘My beloved, how proudly she dances,

  She dances like the wind;

  Soon she will be gone,

  Like the wind, like the wind.

  ‘See, the tribe is moving on,

  Flattening the grass like the wind;

  Soon we will be gone,

  Like the wind, like the wind.’