The Scourge of God

by William Dietrich

  “I’m light, a good companion, and I’ve been where we need to go.”

  This sounded like madness. “Can you even ride a horse?”

  “Julia can. I ride with her.”

  “Another woman!”

  “You started it. Do you want my help or not?”

  Ilana and I waited in an agony of impatience. The days were growing shorter, the land yellow and sleepy. Already there was a chill to the night and the first leaves petaled the Tisza. When the weather turned, the barbarian tracks became soup, and travel became difficult. Yet one week and then another slipped by, and no opportunity to leave presented itself. Hereka and Suecca kept sharp watch on us.

  Twice we managed to meet for quick reassurance. The first time was at the river, dipping water and murmuring quickly before breaking apart, each of us trusting a person we scarcely knew. The second time was in a ravine through which a seasonal creek fed the river, its bottom dense with brush. Some Huns coupled there, I knew, away from the eyes of their parents or spouses. Now I drew her near to whisper.

  These meetings had made her more precious, not less. I found myself remembering moments I didn’t realize I’d recorded: the way the light had fallen on her cheek by the river, the wetness of her eyes when she stared up at me on the wood cart, or the swell of breast and hip when she filled her jars at the river. Her neck was a Euclidian curve, her clavicle a fold of snow, her fingers quick and nervous with the grace and beat of a butterfly wing. Now I looked at her ear that gleamed like shell amid the fall of her dark hair, the parted lips as she gasped for breath, the rise and fall of her bosom, and wanted her without entirely knowing why. The idea of rescue and escape magnified her charms. To her, I was a comrade in a dangerous enterprise. To me, she was ...

  “Has the dwarf assembled our things?” she asked anxiously.

  “Almost.”

  “What payment does he want?”

  “To go with us.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “He could have betrayed us already.”

  She nodded, her eyes glistening like dark pearls. “I think I have good news.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a Greek doctor named Eudoxius who Attila sent as an envoy. He’s returning and is only a day’s ride away, according to gossip. Some think the Greek is bringing important news, and it has been a while since the community feasted. Men have been sent to hunt, and Suecca has started us cooking. I think there’s going to be a celebration.”

  “A Greek doctor?”

  “Another traitor, fled to the Huns. It’s the end of the summer, and there’s an abundance of kamon and kumiss. The camp is full because the warriors have been returning for winter. They will hold a strava to celebrate the return of this Greek and drink, Jonas, drink themselves insensible. I have seen it.” She grasped my arm, straining toward me, her excitement making her quiver. “I think this is our chance.”

  I kissed her.

  It surprised her more than I thought it would, and she pulled away, not certain whether she welcomed my advance, her emotions playing across her face like the rippling of a curtain.

  I tried to kiss her again.

  “No.” She held me away. “Not until things are settled.”

  “I’m falling in love with you, Ilana.”

  This complication frightened her. “You don’t know me.” She shook her head, keeping her purpose in mind. “Not until we’ve escaped—together.”

  * * *

  The news that Eudoxius brought back was secret, but his return excuse enough for a strava, a grand national party, or a celebration for as much of the fragmentary nation as happened to be camped around Attila at the time. It would welcome back the Greek doctor, mark the harvest that Hun vassals were humbly bringing to their masters, celebrate the humiliation of the treacherous Roman ambassadors, and commemorate a year in which the Huns had exacted a good deal of taxes, booty, and tribute with very little fighting. The relative peace, everyone knew, would not last forever.

  The strava would take place when the leaves turned golden and the morning plain was white with frost and would last three days. It would be a bacchanalia without Bacchus—a festival of dance, song, games, jesters, love-making, feasting, and above all drinking that at its end would leave the participants sprawling. It was this excess that Ilana was counting on to aid our escape. By the end of the first night no one would notice we were missing. By the end of the third, no one would care.

  Zerco promised to assemble the saddles, clothing, and food once the strava was well under way. There were Roman horses picketed in a meadow across the Tisza. I hoped to find Diana, but if not I would steal the strongest horse I could find. We would swim the river, saddle the animals, and ride north. Once well away we would cut west, following the northern bank of the Danube, and then cross into Pannonia and gallop for the Alps, eventually reaching Italy. From there we could take ship for Constantinople.

  I could smell the streets of home.

  Because tens of thousands of Huns, Goths, and Gepids were celebrating, the strava was held outside. A thousand flags and horsehair banners were erected, fluttering in the wind like a rising flock of birds. A hundred bonfires were built in huge pyramidal pyres. Lit at dusk, they were so bright that they turned the cloudy sky orange, and plumes of sparks funneled upward as if Attila was giving birth to new colonies of stars. Each tribe and clan had its own music. The camp’s celebrants migrated from one center of entertainment to the next, each host determined to outdo his neighbor in the volume of song and the quantity of drink pressed into wandering hands. Voices rose and dancing started. Then flirtations. Then fights. A few Huns were stabbed or garroted like fighting wolves, their bodies casually cast behind yurts to be attended to when the strava was over. Couples broke away for lovemaking, legs splayed, buttocks pumping, in anxious release before they became too drunk. The warlords and shamans drank mushroom and forest herb drafts and were so exhilarated by their visions that they pirouetted around the fires, roaring nonsense prophecies and staggering after screaming damsels who stayed maddeningly out of reach. Children wrestled, ran, stole. Babies cried, half ignored, until their own noise finally put them to sleep.

  Both Ilana and I were required to serve. We dragged forth casks and amphorae of wine, bore heavy platters of roasted meat, hauled the insensible to one side so that they would not be trampled, and threw dirt on the worst of the vomit and piss. Despite the cool night air we were sweating from the heat of the fires and the press of bodies. Attached as we were to the houses of Hereka and Edeco, we were at the center of the strava’s galaxy, all other fires and merriment wheeling around those of the great kagan and his chief lieutenants.

  “Attila has promised to speak,” I whispered. “When that happens, all eyes will be on him. Leave, alone, so there is no suspicion. I’ll follow.”

  With no stump or stone on the flat plain, Attila chose a novel means to get attention. A trio of horses was walked into the gathering as the merriment and mayhem built to its first-night climax. Two of the horses had riders, but the third was bare. It was onto this horse that Attila sprang, boosting himself up until he balanced on its back, the flanking riders encircling his calves with their arms to brace him. “Warriors!” he cried.

  They whooped in response. A thousand men and women crowded to hear his words, bellowing and singing at the sight of their king. And what a sight he was! Again, Attila wore no decoration, yet what he did wear atop his ordinary Hun clothes was ghastly. The bones of a man had been tied joint to joint and arranged on his front. The bones matched Attila’s own frame, jiggling and rattling as the king drunkenly swayed to keep himself standing upright on the back of the nervous horse. The skull was missing, but Attila’s own head was far more terrifying. His visage was dark, his hair wild, and two curved horns had been attached to jut from his temples like a demon god’s. Lightning bolts of white paint zigzagged down his scarred cheeks, and black paint circled his eyes to turn them into pits. “People of Hunuguri! People of th
e Dawn!”

  They roared their fealty. Attila was giving them the world. Ilana pushed out through the crowd to slip away.

  Finally it quieted. “As you know, I am the meekest of men,” he began.

  There was appreciative laughter. Indeed, who was less ostentatious than Attila? Who wore less gold, demanded less praise, and ate more modestly than the king of the Huns?

  “I let deeds replace speeches. I let loyalty speak my praise. I let mercy show my heart. And I let dead enemies testify to my power. Like this one here!” He shook the skeleton hanging on his body, and the Huns howled. “This is the Roman I crucified after his friends tried to have me assassinated. Listen to this Roman of the West, because I have no words to match what his rattle says about my contempt for his people!”

  I was sickened. Rusticius’s head, I knew, must now be mounted on one of the poles around Attila’s house, its fine brown hair blowing in the wind, his once-friendly grin now a skull’s grimace.

  “You have been patient this year, my wolves,” Attila went on. “You have slaked your thirst for blood with water and let tribute substitute for plunder. You have slept, because I commanded it.”

  The crowd waited, expectant.

  “But now the world is changing. New tidings have come to Attila. New insults, new promises, and new opportunities. The Romans must think we are a nation of women, to send a few pounds of gold to kill me! The Romans think we have forgotten how to fight! But Attila forgets nothing. He misses nothing. He forgives nothing. Drink well and deeply, my warriors, because for some of you it will be your last. Sleep deeply and rut deeply, to sow new Huns, and then sharpen your weapons this long cold winter, because the world must never stop fearing its Hun master. All this year we have rested, but in the coming spring, we ride. Are the Cadiseni of the Huns ready to ride with Attila?”

  “Ten thousand bows will the Cadiseni bring to the king of the Huns!” shouted Agus, the chieftain of that clan. “Ten thousand bows and ten thousand horses, and we will ride from Rome itself to the bowels of Hades!” The crowd cheered, half crazed with drink and bloodlust. All they really knew was conquest and restless journey.

  “Are the Sciri ready to ride with Attila?” the king cried.

  “Twelve thousand swords will the Sciri bring when the snows melt in the spring!” promised Massaget, king of that nation. “Twelve thousand who will be first to break the shield wall and let the Huns follow us!” Cheers, hoots, and challenges followed this boast, and there was a friendly and rough jostling as the warlords pushed and jockeyed for position before their king.

  “Are the Barselti ready to ride with Attila?”

  Another roar. Now I began to push my way out of the crowd, saying I was under orders to fetch more food. Attila would give us the time we needed.

  Ilana had initially stumbled in the dark after leaving the area of the great fires, but soon her eyes adjusted. The glow from the clouds cast a lurid red light. As she neared the Tisza the camp seemed empty at its margins, only an occasional Hun hurrying to fetch another skin of mead or chase the rump of a lover. No one paid her any heed. So now she was about to trust her life and future to this young Roman and his strange dwarf friend! It was necessary. Although Jonas and his party had failed to ransom her as she originally hoped, he at least represented the male strength she needed to help escape to the Empire. He’d even said he was falling in love with her. Did men fall in love so easily? Did she at all love him? Not in the way she’d loved her betrothed, the dear Tasio, who’d been shot by that arrow during the siege of Axiopolis. She’d dreamed girlish dreams of marrying him, having a vague but happy future of home and children and sweet surrender to his lovemaking. Now that seemed a thousand years removed, and she could scarcely remember what Tasio looked like, much to her secret embarrassment. She was more practical now, more desperate, more cynical. This man from Constantinople was really just a convenient ally. And yet when he kissed her, and looked at her with longing eyes, her heart had stumbled in a tumult she dared not confess. What foolishness to be thinking of such a thing before they were even away! And yet if Jonas and she escaped together, would he try to press himself upon her? And what should be her reaction if he did . . . ?

  It was while lost in such girlish thought that a wall loomed in the darkness and she stopped abruptly, afraid she was about to crash into a house. But, no, it sidestepped, snorting. She’d been so witless that she’d almost walked into a horse and rider! The Hun who loomed above her leaned drunkenly down, swaying slightly and grinning. “And who is this sweet woman, come to meet me before I’m fully home!” he said in slurred recognition. “Have you been waiting for me, Ilana?”

  Her heart sank. What monstrous fortune was this? Skilla!

  “What are you doing here?” she breathed. She’d thought him still away at Constantinople, escorting the humiliated Roman embassy.

  Leaning precariously, a skin of kumiss dangling from one shoulder, Skilla slid off his horse in a half topple. “Finding you, it seems,” he said. “What a homecoming! First I find the whole plain alight with celebratory bonfires. Then a sentry patrol passes me some tart kumiss so that they don’t drink so much that they pass out themselves, earning a crucifixion. And then, following the river path because it’s the only one simple enough for my tired horse to negotiate, I find you running out to meet me!”

  “It’s a strava for the Greek envoy Eudoxius, not you,” she said. She was thinking furiously. “I’ve been sent to fetch more kamon for the party.”

  “I think you’ve come to look for me.” He swayed, leering. “I’ve been thinking of you for a thousand miles, you know. It’s all I think about.”

  “Skilla, it’s not our fate to be together.”

  “Then why did the gods send you to me just now?” He grinned.

  Please, please, she prayed, not this, not now. “I have to go.” She tried to dart around him but he was quicker than his drunken state made her expect, snaring her arm.

  “What beer is out here in the dark?” he objected. “I think it is fate that sent you to meet me. And why do you recoil? All I’ve ever wanted to do is honor you, to make you my wife, and bring you rich presents. Why are you so haughty?”

  She groaned. “Please, I don’t mean to be.”

  “I saved you.”

  “Skilla, you were with the Huns who killed my father. You carried me into captivity—”

  “That’s war.” He frowned. “I’m your future now. Not that Roman slave.”

  She craned her neck, looking for help. She knew she should try to charm her way out of his grip but she was flustered. She had to get away! Jonas might come at any moment and a confrontation between the two men could ruin everything. She shoved and they rocked backward in a crude dance. “Skilla, you need to sober. We have to part.”

  It amused him, this smug little flirt, this woman who preened. He yanked and pulled her in close, his breath on hers, the rank smell of travel sweat and dust pungent and disagreeable. He sniffed her sweetness greedily. “In a strava? This is when men and women come together.”

  “I have duties. I serve the wife of Edeco.”

  This challenged him. “I am the nephew of Lord Edeco and a future lord myself,” he growled, twisting her arm so that she remembered who was master. “I am one of those who is going to rule the world and everything in it.”

  “Only if you prove yourself! Not like this—”

  “You could be a queen. Can’t you see that?”

  She slapped him with her free arm, as hard as she could, and the sound was as loud as the crack of a whip. Her hand stung like fire, the blow jolting her shoulder, and yet he seemed oblivious to the pain of it. He grinned more fiercely.

  “I don’t want to be your queen. Find another. There are thousands who would want to be your queen!”

  “But I want you. I’ve wanted you since I saw you by the burning church in Axiopolis. I wanted you all the way to Constantinople these last weeks, prodding that foolish senator seated backward on his ass an
d hating him for taking me away from you. I wanted you all the way back. You hang on me like that bag of lead hung on the neck of Bigilas, bowing his shoulders, humping his back, until at the end he could barely stagger, weeping, his son leading him by the hand. I’m tired of this foolish waiting.”

  What to do? His grip was like a manacle. She had to find an excuse. “I’m sorry I slapped you. I’m just surprised. Yes, yes, I know we must marry.”

  He looked triumphant and greedily kissed her.

  She broke with a gasp and twisted her head away. “But Edeco said you must wait for Attila to give me! We must wait, Skilla. You know we must!”

  “To hell with Attila.” He sought her lips.

  She gave him only her cheek. “I’ll tell you said that! I’ll tell you’ve interrupted my duties, I’ll tell you drank on the way into camp, I’ll tell—”

  Maddened by impatience he snarled and pushed, as violently as if in battle. She fell, the wind knocked out of her, and bounced her head off the hard-packed turf of the track. She was dazed, her eyes blinded by tiny lights as she looked up at him. He fell to his knees, straddling her, and grasped her dress at its neck.

  “No, Skilla! Think!”

  He pulled and the garment tore, its strings parting like scythed wheat, and her breasts came free to the cold kiss of the night air. She spat in frustration and defiance, and he cuffed her, dazing her even more, and began hauling her dress up her thighs. He’d gone crazy. The more she squirmed and struggled, the more it seemed to excite him. She clawed at him, and he laughed.

  “I told them you’d scratch me.”

  She screamed, hopelessly, because she knew the scream would be lost in the shouts of this wild night. Skilla was insane, drunkenly wrestling with her clothing and his own. Yet if he raped her, what would it matter? She was a captive and a slave, and he was of the Hun aristocracy.

  Then something hurtled in a rush of wind and crashed into both of them, knocking Skilla aside and rolling with him across the grass and dirt. There were grunts and soft curses, and then the newcomer got atop Skilla and struck him.