Finally he spoke, his voice slow and careful. ‘See what water you can find.’
‘The wells are poisoned, sir. But in the hills . . .’
Tatullus nodded, still struggling to return to the world as it was. ‘Very well, then. Have them fall in.’ He drew breath. ‘We march south.’
When they were assembled in order, two abreast, Tatullus came down. He looked at each of them in turn. Finally he came to Barabbas in his shackles.
‘The granary thief.’
Barabbas shuffled and looked at the ground.
‘Fall out.’ Tatullus drew his sword. ‘Now kneel.’
Before the eyes of the horrified women and children, he raised his sword. But he could not bring it down. A stronger arm than his restrained him. It was Knuckles. They looked each other in the eye a long time. Finally the centurion’s arm relaxed. Knuckles let it go.
The Rhinelander picked up a heavy rock and shoved the prisoner’s feet apart. Barabbas closed his eyes. Knuckles smashed the rock down and broke the chain. Then he pulled him up and stretched his hand-shackles over a stump of wall. Smashed that smaller chain likewise. Barabbas pushed the iron bracelets back up his arms and rubbed his sores.
‘Now go and sin no more,’ said Knuckles sardonically.
The granary thief stumbled away into the wasteland, cradling his broken chains to his chest.
They traversed the scorched farmlands and passed through the desolate orchards, scanning the horizon for horsemen all the while. But they saw none. The firestorm had moved on south. They went up into the hills, where they found a clear stream in a shallow valley. The soldiers filled and refilled their leather flasks, passing them round, making the people drink slowly. The effect, especially on the children, was miraculous. Like hunted harts in the mountains, thought Arapovian. One moment exhausted, tongue lolling, foaming with sweat. He had seen them thus, watched and waited, holding his horse back in the thickets, cradling his spear. The exhausted hart would bend, drink, look up, drink more. And then, as if reborn, would leap forward, cantering uphill, and the hunt would be on again.
One small boy wiped his mouth and passed the flask on and looked up at him. ‘I’m Stephanos,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’
They rested all day in the green valley, hidden beneath a stand of grey alder trees, re-bandaging their wounds. Later the three soldiers went hunting and brought back gamebirds and some early wild plums, not very ripe but edible in small quantities, and at last the people ate. They also set horsehair snares and in the morning took fresh rabbit with them.
They crossed the hills.
Two days later they came down through woods and saw below them the road south to Naissus. Either side of it rose higher and higher hills, and beyond them were bare mountains. This was the Succi Pass: a long, narrow, five-mile way through the Haemus range.
Tatullus shook his head. ‘We can’t risk it.’
‘Nor can we travel over the mountains,’ objected Arapovian. ‘We three could, but not with the families, and without supplies.’
It was true. The children were weak and fractious with hunger. Twice they had come to isolated hamlets in the hills and found nothing: no people, no food, no livestock, nothing. They ate stewed nettles, yarrow, the skinny white roots of wild parsnip, and caught occasional game. But it was never enough, not for twenty of them, on the move all day.
‘The barbarians will have gone south,’ rumbled Knuckles. ‘Why should they turn back again?’
‘They probably won’t,’ said Tatullus. ‘But if they do . . .’ They all knew what fate awaited them if they met the Huns on the road. ‘We could leave the families here and go on over the mountains ourselves.’
They glanced over the hollow-eyed people, waiting for their decision as patiently as cattle.
Tatullus sighed. ‘Very well. Through the Succi Pass we go. Let’s make it fast.’
Each of the three took an infant on his shoulders and trotted. The rest of the people kept up as best they could, but still the soldiers frequently had to pause and wait for them to catch up. The sun rose high in the sky, yet the pass felt dark and cold and ominous. The further they progressed, the more threatening and precipitous the dark slate cliff faces rising on either side. There was no escape except forwards or back. High overhead, a raven left its perch and circled cawing.
The families straggled behind them, the old ones the slowest of all.
‘Faster!’ rasped Tatullus. He’d hoped to be through the pass in an hour, but it would take them two.
There was a widening in the pass, tumbled rocks to left and right, and a small stand of trees up a scree slope, before the gap closed up again and ahead of them was an even darker and narrower stretch of the road. Arapovian scrambled up into the trees to find the watersource and refill a couple of flasks. He re-emerged almost at once, flasks unfilled, standing on a rock, looking back over them blankly.
‘What is it, man?’ hissed Tatullus. ‘Move it!’
Arapovian’s expression remained blank, but he held his right hand out for stillness.
They stilled.
Then he said, ‘Into the trees, all of you. Now.’
The children scrambled up quickly enough and ran on into the green shadows, but the old ones needed hauling.
Knuckles crouched behind a clump of undergrowth and told the children to do the same. ‘Not a sound, now,’ he growled.
They crouched close around him, eyes wide with fear.
The last up over the rocks was the old man. Even as Tatullus pulled him up by his bony, shaking arms, he could hear what the Armenian had heard. The scuffle and clop of many, many hooves approaching.
Above them the raven cawed again. Arapovian pictured its black eyes bright with malice. The old man cried out softly and turned. The hoofbeats were very near now. The riders were only walking their horses, but they were mere seconds away round the corner. Tatullus lifted the old man bodily by his wrists, his scrawny arms straining in their sockets, and his knobbly vinewood walking-stick fell from his hand and clattered over the rock to the road below. Tatullus threw the quailing old man over his left shoulder and glanced back in despair. The stick lay at the edge of the track, brightly varnished, its grip still warm. But already he could smell the horses’ sweet aroma on the cool air . . .
‘No time!’ whispered the Armenian from the trees.
Tatullus strode up the rock and into the darkness of the covert. He dumped the old man behind the thicket and crouched.
Immediately below them appeared the riders. They were Huns.
They reined in and looked around with a puzzled air. Some were already unslinging their bows. Hunters like these did not miss many signs.
Under the trees, the little party were as still as statues.
At the head of the Huns, a war-party of a couple of hundred, rode their leader, an old man with long slate-grey hair and long moustaches, finely combed and oiled. He might have been in his sixth or even seventh decade, yet his chest and arms were still very strong. He sat his horse and bunched his reins in his fists on his saddle as his deep-set eyes roved around, and his nostrils seemed to quiver.
His gaze fell on the vinestick. He walked his horse over and gazed down. Then he slipped from his saddle, retrieved it and touched the knobbly grip to his cool cheek. Still warm.
He nimbly stepped halfway back up the rock, swivelled and leaped back on his horse, the vinestick still in his hand. He rested it over his shoulder like a spear and sat his horse again and waited.
The two hundred horsemen were utterly still and silent. The only sound was the caw of the raven overhead. Under the trees they barely breathed.
And then one of the hungry children hiccupped.
It was the boy Stephanos. Knuckles’ huge hand shot out and clamped over the boy’s mouth. The boy’s eyes flared wide but he didn’t struggle.
Down below, the Hun leader remained still. Perhaps he had not heard. Perhaps . . .
Then very slowly he turned his head towards them. And
smiled.
Moving as silently as a cat, Arapovian stepped back and searched behind them. But it was as he thought. The little wood backed into a dark, damp cliff, which rose, uninterrupted, for three or four hundred feet. They were trapped. ‘Well,’ he whispered, and drew his sword. ‘So be it. Here we die. For the sake of a child’s hiccup.’
He heard the Hun warlord speak.
‘Come forth! All of you. Young, old, the ancient who lately lost his vinestaff. And do not show me your weapons. My men will cut you down before you appear.’
After a moment’s hesitation, Arapovian sheathed his sword.
The people came slowly out of the woods and stood upon the rocks, abject, with heads hung low. Trained on them were two hundred arrows.
Stephanos hiccupped again.
The warlord looked them over, singling out the three soldiers for special scrutiny. At last he said gravely, ‘I am the Lord Chanat. You Romans slew many of my men.’
Tatullus nodded, his hand on the pommel of his sword. ‘We did. And we will slay many more in the next battle.’
Chanat pondered deeply, in no hurry. At last he declared, ‘You Romans are not all women. You are a Khan?’
‘I’m a centurion.’
‘A leader of men? Or a herder of women and children? ’
‘Leader of men, usually,’ growled Tatullus. ‘Leader of eighty.’
‘That is good.’ He nodded. ‘You will join us. You will be a commander of Huns.’
Tatullus looked taken aback. Then he set his face again. ‘I am a Roman. I fight only for Rome.’
‘Your empire is destroyed.’
Tatullus smiled very slightly, his teeth clenched. ‘Not yet it isn’t.’
‘Then I will kill you.’
‘You can try.’
Chanat made a strange noise, shucking his teeth. It would be wrong, by every tenet of the warrior code, to slay a man this heedlessly and magnificently brave.
He turned his attention to Arapovian, standing a little further back on the rocks, his hand not far from the hilt of his sword. ‘You. You are an Easterner.’
Arapovian did not reply.
‘Answer me, fool.’
But it was clear that Arapovian would not deign to speak to a Hun, though his life depended on it. He picked a burr fastidiously from his cloak.
‘Stiff-necked easterner,’ growled Chanat. ‘You must be a Persian traitor fighting for the Romans.’
At that, Arapovian could not keep silent. He drew himself to his full height and looked angrily down on Chanat. ‘I am an Armenian naxarar of the noblest birth. My name is Count Grigorius Khachadour Arapovian, the son of Count Grigorius Nubar Arapovian, the son—’
Knuckles intervened, jerking his head. ‘He is, too.’
‘And you,’ said Chanat, turning on him. Knuckles wished he’d kept quiet. ‘It is my belief that you are the brute who killed the Lord Bela on the bridge.’
‘I can’t say I ever found out the sav—the gentleman’s name, your mercifulness. But frankly, at the time, he wasn’t behaving too favourably towards me, neither.’
Chanat tugged his reins and half-turned his horse. ‘It is well,’ he snapped. ‘It is war. Now be silent.’ He looked them over one last time, trotted back, surveyed the women and children, and then made a typically abrupt decision. ‘This time, you may live. Next time, we will kill you.’
As he walked his horse away, he tossed the vinestick over his shoulder to clatter again upon the road.
‘And you can have that back!’ he called, laughing. ‘I am not so old as to need it yet!’
It was a fine story that night at the Hun campfire.
‘Magnanimous,’ said Attila.
‘Indeed,’ acknowledged Chanat solemnly. ‘I did not even demand one of the women for my tent.’
‘Old Chanat, your heart is as tender as a young lamb’s.’
‘Alas, but I fear my loins will not easily forgive my tender heart. Some of those Roman women weren’t so ugly.’
Still dazed at their escape and the terrifying randomness of Hun clemency, the refugees camped that night well up in scattered pinewoods. It was good that it was summer. In these hills, winter would have killed them by now. Still, Arapovian allowed them a small fire. The women and children, though hungry, all slept.
They were draining the last of the Armenian brandy, heavily watered, which Arapovian had managed to conserve through everything, when he heard a footfall nearby. The faintest padding footfall in the dry needles. He raised his forefinger.
Knuckles frowned and shook his head.
Arapovian drew his dagger.
And nonchalantly into the firelight stepped Captain Malchus.
Knuckles growled, ‘How in the name of Cloacina, goddess of Rome’s sacred shit-pipes, did you . . . ?’
Malchus grinned. His face and arms were a terrible mess. He had sewn up his own wounds again with horsehair and a bone needle. They could see the holes, clotted with dried blood.
‘Take more than that to finish me,’ he said. He sat cross-legged by the fire. ‘I’ve been tracking you. Good show when you met the Huns. I saw it all from the clifftop. It was me who set the raven off its ledge. Sorry about that.’
They stared at him a while longer, as if to ensure he was no ghost.
At last Arapovian said, ‘I don’t understand how you survived outside the fort, when the Hun charge ran you down.’
Malchus reflected. ‘Imagine,’ he said. ‘You’re one of two hundred horsemen galloping at a single man. How are you ever going to know which one of you killed him in the rush? If any of you?’
They shook their heads. Tatullus was stirring and awakening again.
‘What you do is, you drop just before they hit you. It’s all in the timing.’
‘And then two hundred horses gallop over you.’
‘That bit is playing with dice, I admit. You do like you’re back in your mother’s womb.’ He mimed a curled foetal position, wincing at his cuts. ‘Plus arms round your head. You know no horse likes to trample a living creature, not even those bullock-headed Hun brutes.’ He grinned again. ‘Well, maybe I was lucky. My legs got a bit bruised, but otherwise - here I am. And look.’ From a leather saddlebag he pulled a decent-sized flagon of looted wine, some very stale but edible bread, and some goat’s cheese wrapped in lime leaves.
‘Christ be thanked,’ growled Knuckles, grabbing for the wine.
Arapovian was faster. He set the flagon by his side. ‘Medical usage first. Those cuts need dousing and re-sewing. ’ He began to strop his dagger-blade, eyeing Malchus’ gruesome wounds.
Malchus looked indignant. ‘What do you mean? They’re fine.’
‘They’re rubbish,’ said Arapovian.
Later Malchus took a long drag on the bottle and passed it to Knuckles, wincing again at his fresh stitches.
‘I thought you took a vow,’ said Tatullus from the shadows where he lay on his side.
‘It got cancelled,’ said Knuckles. ‘By unforeseen circumstances. ’ He took a huge glug.
Arapovian guarded the bread and cheese for the children’s breakfast tomorrow. He eyed Knuckles’ considerable belly. ‘You won’t starve without it.’
They drank more from the welcome flagon.
Knuckles yawned and belched. ‘Name of Light. That wine’s gone straight to my lord and master. Wonder where the nearest whorehouse is?’
‘You’d have to pay a month’s wages for it, you would,’ said Malchus. ‘State of you.’
‘Look at you,’ said Knuckles. ‘While I, on the contrary, left many a broken-hearted lady behind me in Carnuntum, so fond had they grown of me and my hugely proportioned charms.’
Malchus snorted with incredulity. Even Tatullus managed a faint smile.
‘I was, to be honest, a most cock-witted lad in my youth,’ reflected the hulking Rhinelander, taking another huge glug of wine. ‘Give my own granny for a piece of skirt, I would. But with age comes wisdom. Perhaps I will endure tonight with neither fu
ck nor suck.’
Arapovian looked scornful, banking up the woodfire. ‘Well, you’d better not sleep too near me.’
Knuckles raised his eyebrows. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. My lord and master has some dimscrim . . . dimscrin . . .’
‘Discrimination.’
‘Exactly.’
Attila: The Judgement Page 16
