The Scourge of God

by William Dietrich

  The chance of discovery by roving patrols of Huns or Germans forced us from the main tracks and required us to move slowly. We rested during the middle of the increasingly short days as autumn advanced, but rode into the night and rose again before dawn, as stealthy as hunted deer. Fortunately, we were away from major rivers or trading routes and settlement was sparse. Log huts crouched in clearings amid forest as old as time, the smoke of cooking fires curling away into thick ground mists. Trunks were as fat as towers, their limbs the outstretched hands of giants. Leaves rained down, and the days were growing cloudy and cold. The world was growing darker.

  This was country different than I had ever seen before, different even than the mountains we’d crossed to get to Attila. It was dim in the forest and hard to tell direction. Shapes moved in the night, and occasionally we saw the moonlit gleam of animal eyes, of which kind I cannot say. The air was always chill and damp, and our reluctance to light a fire, because of its revealing smoke, made our meals cold and cheerless. My only consolation was that I believed the Huns would like this pathway even less, given their love of open sky and rolling grassland.

  I could have ridden faster by myself, I suppose, but it would have been with a sorrowful recklessness likely to get me caught. The elation I’d expected from fleeing Attila’s camp had instead become sadness at the loss of Ilana. In this somber mood, the company of the dwarf and his wife was a comfort, relieving me of having to make the decisions of where to go. They were gentle at my remote and troubled manner—only much later would I think to thank them—and Julia, who had come from such country, instructed us in the ways of camping. Zerco tried to explain the intricacies of imperial politics to me. So many kings, so many alliances, so many treacheries! Animosities reaching back two and three hundred years! The sword, perhaps, would help temporarily unite them.

  The kidnapped Eudoxius, in contrast, was a misery as company. The Greek, once his gag was removed, was tireless in complaining not just about his capture but also about the weather, the food, the route, the hard ground at night, and the companionship. “I consort with kings, not jesters,” he ranted. “I am on a mission to free a captive world. I am Pericles! I am Spartacus! I am Gideon! I can hear the pursuing hoofbeats now! Listen, you’ve sealed your own doom by capturing me!”

  “Listen?” Zerco replied. “How can we not? You’re louder than a mule and twice the trouble, and your braying makes just as much sense.”

  “Let me go and I’ll trouble you no more.”

  “Slit your throat and you’ll trouble us no more! You are gabbling your way toward a bright red necklace, believe me!”

  “Let’s do it now,” I suggested irritably.

  “He’s met Gaiseric,” the dwarf replied wearily. “That’s what Aetius will be interested in. Trust me, he’s worth all his noise.”

  Zerco knew more than I suspected. His fool’s antics had allowed him to be ignored like a dog during some of the Hun councils, and he’d learned much about the location of barbarian tribes, favored routes to the west, and where provisions might be bought or stolen. Riding like a stocky child in front of his wife, his head cushioned pleasingly against her breasts, he led us by the map he’d formed in his mind. At an unmarked crossroads or at the hovel of a sutler where we might buy food, he’d clamber down and leave us waiting while he played the mysterious and misshapen pilgrim. Eventually he’d waddle back with information and bread. “This way,” he’d announce confidently. Then we’d be on our way again. Never seen was the great sword that was swaddled in rags and slung across my back.

  The traveling was more rugged than my journey to Attila. The autumn rains were chill and this part of Germania seemed a maze of low hills, cloaked by dark forest that extended as far as the eye could see. Our sleep was restless, and there were no slaves to pitch a tent or prepare a meal. We huddled like animals.

  It was on the fourth night that Eudoxius tried to escape. I’d tied the captive’s hands behind his back, hobbled his feet, and strung another rope from the Greek’s ankle to my own to alert me of any mischief, but in the deepness of the night I shifted slightly, my leg stretching, and realized the tether had gone slack. I came sharply awake. Someone was moving because I could hear his anxious breath.

  The quarter moon came out from behind a shred of crowd, and I saw a dark form crouched over my saddle where I had placed the great iron sword.

  I reacted without thinking, hurling a faggot of wood that took Eudoxius by surprise. It bounced off him, drawing a grunt, and then the Greek was running hard for the darkness of the trees, abandoning the sword he’d tried to steal.

  I snatched up the Hun bow I’d been practicing with and had taken, but Zerco, also awake, stayed my hand. “Aetius needs him.” So I ran, too, and here my youth stood me in good stead. I steadily gained on the lumbering doctor, hearing his panicked wheezing.

  It was when I was about to tackle him that he whirled and almost killed me, lashing out with a bright knife I didn’t know he had. So that is how he’d cut himself free! It barely grazed my side before I was inside his reach and plowing into him like a bull. We both flew; the knife was knocked free and crashed. Then the same boxing skills I had used on Skilla were employed again. I wasn’t sure what I was more furious about—my own laxness at searching him, his greed for the sword, or his attempt to kill me—but I pummeled him thoroughly for all three. In moments he gave up resisting and curled into a ball.

  “Please, mercy! I only wanted to go back to Attila!”

  I stopped, panting. “Where did the knife come from?” He peeked and smirked. “From the small of my back to my inner thigh to the stitching on my saddle—wherever I could hide it.”

  Zerco came and spied the knife in the moonlight. He picked it up. “This could have ended all three of us, if he’d been brave enough to go for our throats while we slept.” He turned its jeweled hilt. “A pretty blade. Look at the workmanship!” The dwarf squatted. “Where did you get it, doctor?”

  “What care is that of yours?”

  Zerco pricked the doctor’s throat. “So I’ll know who to send it for cleaning!”

  “It was a gift from Gaiseric,” Eudoxius squeaked. “He took it from a Roman general. He sent it as a token of his word to Attila, and Attila gave it to me as a reward.”

  The dwarf handed it to me. “And now you’ve bestowed it on Jonas, while you’ll be trussed each night like a pig.” He gave a kick to the prostrate doctor. “That’s for disturbing my sleep.” He kicked again. “And that’s for having to listen to you for the last four days.”

  “I’ll speak my truth!”

  “And I’ll kick you again.”

  We traveled on. With no Roman mileposts and few promontories to judge our progress, this new world seemed as endless as the sea. Crude forest tracks wound underneath patriarch trees that had sprouted before Romulus and Remus were born. This was a world Rome had never conquered and never wanted to, a place of shadowy stillness; gray marshes; and dark, tunneled brooks. The sun of the Bosporus seemed impossibly distant, and when we encountered settlement, the primitive state to which people were falling after the rampages of the Huns was depressing. At the ruins of Carnuntum we passed by a small party of Gepids living like animals in its corners. How I longed for a Roman bath! And yet the baths were a ruin, the pools empty and the boilers unlit. The only water left running was through the abandoned community’s sewage drains, and it was here that the hapless barbarians washed themselves and their clothes.

  We bought food, and passed on as quickly as we could.

  I learned more about the peculiar marriage of Zerco and Julia.

  “The union was meant to mock me,” Julia explained. “I was captured from the Scuri tribe when a child and sold by the Huns to a Gepid master as brutal as he was stupid. He thought he could force affection by the whip, and meant to take me to wife when I reached thirteen. I was comely enough to excite his lust, and he was ugly enough to extinguish mine. He proclaimed one night I was ripe enough to give up my virg
inity, but I put foul meat in his stew and gave him a night at the privy instead. His neighbors laughed at him. He threatened to kill me, but the Huns warned him not to, so he went to Bleda demanding his money back. Bleda, who didn’t want to offend the Gepids at that moment, paid for me himself from money he owed his own jester. Then he awarded me to Zerco instead, as an insult to me and in punishment for my mischief.”

  “Not that I minded losing coin I might never see anyway,” the dwarf chimed in. “I’d no hopes of marrying, and then suddenly I was presented with this angel. The Huns thought it hilarious. They offered to lend us a stool.”

  “What others treated as a joke we saw as salvation,” Julia said. “Zerco was the first truly kind and gentle man I’d ever met. We had a bond: our fear of a future dominated by Huns. Attila is a parasite on better people.”

  “And he is driven by two great fears,” Zerco added. “The first is that his people are being corrupted by the booty they acquire and will become soft.”

  “Not likely by spring,” I said. “And the second?”

  “He fears his own failure. Do you realize what it must be like to be a tyrant who rules by terror and cannot trust one? How does he know a follower’s loyalty is given or extorted? How does he know that sex is love or coerced? The very might that makes a kagan all powerful can also make him all doubting. He gains support only by winning. If he falters, all might come undone.”

  “You think he’ll falter without the sword?”

  “That’s my hope.”

  “And Attila sent you to Aetius, and Aetius back to spy.”

  “Our marriage was an excuse to send Zerco back to where I was trapped with Attila,” Julia went on. “And there my dwarf saw a way to solve all our problems.”

  “How?”

  “By getting you to steal the sword, of course. It will demoralize Attila and encourage Aetius. If we can get to the Roman army, the captured sword may help the army to rally, and if the Romans win, Zerco and I can live in peace.” She nodded happily, as if the fate of the world were an easy enough thing for me to arrange.

  XVIII

  THE AVALANCHE

  Skilla’s Huns were tired and far from home, riding in a frontier region not firmly held by any nation. The once-inviolable northern boundary of the Roman Empire had long been breeched. Far south of the Danube the Romans still held sway, in order to guard the passes into Italy. Far north of it the Germans dominated in the deep forests that deterred all conquerors. But along the Danube itself, order had devolved to a rabble of semi-independent governors, warlords, and chiefs who had carved out fiefdoms in the dying Empire’s disorder. A party as large and deadly as the Huns could move through this landscape with relative impunity, but Skilla’s group dare not linger long in case a local duke or renegade centurion decided to treat them as a threat. The Hun’s task was to recover the sword and kill Jonas, not provoke a skirmish with provincial bumpkins. So he and his men skirted the walled villas and new hilltop forts as carefully as the fugitives did, muttering at the gloom of the trees, cursing the frequent grades, and grumbling at the weather. Their bowstrings were continually damp, detracting greatly from their killing power, and even their swords showed spots of rust. To add to their unease, the Alps loomed to the southwest. Snow was creeping down the autumn flanks.

  Zerco was key. At any one time there were hundreds of couriers, peddlers, pilgrims, mystics, mercenaries, and witches wandering the crumbling roads, making it hard to track a single fugitive such as Jonas. But a dark dwarf riding with a full-stature woman and two other men, one of them bound, was a curiosity that even these strange parts did not see every day. As Huns followed the river upstream toward Lauriacum, they began to hear stories of an odd quartet who had emerged from the forests of the north. The newcomers were filthy and exhausted, and yet the halfling had paid in gold for a hired courier to take a message upriver. The rumor was that the document was a missive for the great Aetius himself. Then they crossed to the river’s southern bank and aimed in the direction of the alpine salt mines where Roman garrisons still soldiered. One of the fugitives carried a strange bundle on his back: long, narrow, and as high as a man was tall.

  If the fugitives could find a powerful Roman escort, their escape would be completed.

  The Huns had to find them first.

  They galloped hard for Lentia and the last standing bridge on this part of the Danube, its stone piers cracked and mossy and its wooden span a crude replacement for long-destroyed Roman carpentry. Yet the bridge remained passable. It was manned by ruffians who demanded tolls; but no sooner had these toughs heard the sound of hooves, and swung shut their gate of thorns, than they smelled the rank odor of Huns, like smoke on the wind. The bridge keepers reconsidered. By the time the barbarian party broke free of the trees and galloped onto the bridge like wolves from the steppe, several with bows in hand and their brown faces mottled with scars, the gate was open and its toll takers in hiding. All they saw was a blur of clods, accompanied by the excited yips of barbarians aimed eagerly southward.

  On the warriors went like a dark and urgent cloud, collecting scraps of rumor at this place and that. Somewhere on the highway to Iuvavum fled four tired fugitives. One of them gabbled in Greek.

  Skilla found himself thinking of Ilana more than he wanted to, despite the humiliation of her both rejecting him and then saving him from Jonas. He knew she lived, and the thought of winning her back still haunted him. Why had she pushed aside Jonas’s spear from that final thrust? If she hated killing, why had she later tried to burn Attila, instead of simply fleeing with Jonas? She baffled him, and it was her mystery that kept her in his mind. He had visited her in captivity before setting out, bringing her food as an excuse and hoping she might give some clue about the fugitives, torn between pity, obligation, and exasperation.

  “None of this would have happened if you had come to me,” he had tried.

  “None of this would have happened if you and your kind had stayed where you belong, out on the oceans of grass,” she’d replied. “None of this would have happened if I’d let Jonas win the duel.”

  “Yes. So why didn’t you, Ilana?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. The noise, the blood . . .”

  “No. It’s because you’re in love with me, too. You’re in love with both of us.”

  She had closed her eyes. “I’m Roman, Skilla.”

  “That’s the past. Think of our future.”

  “Why do you torment me!”

  “I love you. Accept this, because I’m going to free you from this cage.”

  She had spoken with the weariness of the terminally ill. “Just leave me, Skilla. My life is over. It ended in Axiopolis, and it’s some kind of monstrous mistake of misguided destiny that I’ve been left to witness this other. I’m a dead woman, and have been for some time, and you need to find a wife of your own kind.”

  But he didn’t want his own kind—he wanted Ilana. He didn’t believe she was dead at all. After he killed Jonas, retrieved the sword, and won her back, everything would become simple. They would scratch and buck like wildcats, but when they coupled, what sons they would make!

  The country became steeper, reminding him of his horse race with Jonas on the journey from Constantinople. Skilla sensed the Roman was near as he sometimes sensed a deer or wild horse was near, and yet he felt blinded in these hilly woods. He was growing discouraged—had the Huns somehow galloped past them in their haste?—when one of his men shouted and they reined up at a wondrous discovery: a bright Greek ring, left like a golden beacon beside a track that led off the main road. Eudoxius!

  So the Huns rose long before dawn to ride quietly on the sidetrack, finally spying a pillar of gray smoke. Had the fugitives become so foolish or so overconfident? Then the smoke disappeared, as if someone realized the mistake. The Huns quietly ascended ridges that overlooked where the plume must have come from, dismounting to lead their ponies through the trees. It was the grayness before dawn, the mountains ahead a soft pewter and
the trees a dark foundation. At the crest, Skilla spied three horses in a hollow below.

  Now he would be revenged! But Skilla didn’t have much practice yet at leadership, his band was young, and before he could order a proper ambush his warriors whooped and charged. A dwarf and a woman? This would be easy.

  It was the noise that saved Jonas. He sprang up, shouting, just as the first arrows, fired at too long a range, arced into his campsite to stick in the ground. He seized one horse, mounted it, and dragged some other man—the Greek doctor?— across its neck with him. The woman and dwarf grabbed another as the third animal simply reared and plunged out of reach. It ran toward the attackers until Hun arrows thudded into the mount’s breast to make sure their quarry couldn’t use it, bringing that animal with a shudder to its knees. Now the fugitives were kicking their two surviving mounts furiously as arrows rained around, all of them precariously mounted bareback. The Huns had them! But then the Arabian horses seemed to explode with speed, weaving almost instinctually, and in a flash they were obscured by the branches. The warriors cried in excitement and frustration and whipped the flanks of their own ponies in pursuit, embarrassed they had not encircled their prey. But the fugitive horses were fresh from a night’s rest and the Hun horses, already exhausted from these mountains, had been climbing for two hours and had sprinted in attack. In moments, what should have been easy capture turned into dogged pursuit.

  Skilla was furious. Each of his men had abandoned the tactics they’d been taught since childhood in hope of the individual glory of retrieving Attila’s sword. Now they’d all spoiled it for one another. The warriors blamed as they rode, pointing, while their prey’s powerful horses slipped around the shoulder of a ridge, ending any chance of shooting them. By the time the barbarians crested the hill, the fugitives were streaking for the valley below, where an arched Roman bridge led over a foaming stream.