Gasping with fright, his blood hammering, the boy flung himself off the path and into the trees, scrambling uphill to the stony track above. As he burst out onto it the cavalry troop rounded the corner and saw him. It must have been the officer’s voice, harsh and authoritative, that called out to him. But he was already scrabbling at the cliff-face. A shard of dust-dry limestone came away in his frantically grasping hands, and he could hear the sound of the horsemen trotting easily towards him. They were almost upon him. One of them was already slicing his thick swordblade through the air.
With a cry Attila ducked lithely under the horse’s neck, swerved and ran on a little further. To his right he saw a crevice in the cliff, a tiny valley carved by millennia of water running from the hills above, a single scrawny juniper bush guarding the entrance. He scrambled into the crevice, dragged himself behind the juniper bush, and gazed up: the damp, steep crevice ran all the way up the cliff. But it was impossible to ascend. The limestone was slick as oiled skin where the water cascaded down, and crumbling dry where it did not. Behind him he could hear the men dismounting and the officer telling them to get on in there and bring him out. He whipped round in desperation. His hand fell on the pommel of his sword. If he must die here, trapped like a hunted animal in a crevice in the rocks, he would at least try to take one of them with him.
Something touched his cheek. He whipped round again, and found to his astonishment that it was a thin rope, knotted at regular intervals for grip. The soldiers were just the other side of the sentinel juniper bush, hacking at its branches to get through. Without questioning this miracle, the boy clutched the rope as a drowning man would clutch a spar of wood, and crawled up it in a trice. He came to a narrow ledge about fifteen feet above the ground, and rolled free onto it. Looking down, he saw the soldiers at the foot of the rope, gazing up in amazement. One began to climb up after him, but now he had a chance – just the one chance, just one slender advantage. He tore his sword free from his scabbard and slashed at the rope at the edge of the ledge. In two swift strokes it was severed, and the soldier tumbled back down to the ground, angry but uninjured. Immediately there were yells for their comrades to bring more rope and some spearhafts. They would not be long in pursuing.
Lying flat on his belly for fear of sly arrows, Attila looked around the narrow ledge, still too dazed with terror to think rationally about the presence of the rope. The back of the ledge was damp and dark, overshadowed by the huge overhang of the cliff above. He wriggled towards it. It was as black as pitch. He hated confined spaces. It was his secret terror. For a second, he felt he would rather die than have to squeeze himself into so confined a space. But he gritted his teeth, and even grunted at himself in fury, and pushed himself in under the overhang. The narrow horizontal gap in the rock was just enough for him to wriggle through, and then he was inside the cliff itself, rolling downwards several feet to a halt. He had no idea where he was, for the narrow slit in the rock admitted no light. His terrified gasps told him, however, that he was in a cave or a chamber of some size, for they echoed back at him from all sides.
Against the dim light of the slit in the rock he saw the silhouettes of soldiers who had shinned up to the ledge and were working out where he had gone. He felt sure none of them would be able to crawl through after him, so with a mix of fear, courage and pulsing hatred he crawled back up the slope to the crack in the rock like a lizard, hands and feet moving alternately, his sword-blade gripped between his teeth. As he reached the crevice, and drew the sword-blade from his teeth, a soldier’s face appeared just outside and peered in unseeing. Attila drew back his sword and thrust it forward through the crevice, straight into the soldier’s face. No scorpion under a rock ever gave a more terrible sting. The soldier howled with agony, clutching his hands to his face, which spurted gore between his splayed fingers, and tumbled backwards. A few moments later, a muffled thump told the boy that he had rolled off the ledge to the ground below. Attila heard distant shouts and roars of anger, and he bared his teeth like a wolf in the darkness. Then he turned and crawled back down the slope to his unseen cave.
After some time, the sounds of the soldiers died away. But Attila was no fool. He would not emerge from that cave for at least a day.
He found by touch a place on the wall where water trickled down from the rock above, and he put his tongue to it and drank what he could. The water tasted green and slimy, but it would do. It would keep him alive a little longer. He would survive. He would always survive.
He crouched all day in the cave, his arms wrapped tightly round his knees. When night came, even the sliver of daylight through the crevice vanished, and he was in utter darkness. His fear of enclosed spaces came back to him with full force, and he imagined the most terrible of things. He imagined a deep, distant rumbling of rock, and then the overhang shifting, just a few inches, and his escape route being sealed for ever. He would sit in absolute darkness, unable to see or move, and scream until he died.
But he gritted his teeth and willed himself to sit out the night. If he returned to the crevice and the upper air, the soldiers would be waiting, and they would drag him out like a rat from a hole, and crowd around to drive their swords into him with all their anger and frustration. He screwed his eyes shut so that at least he had the light of the red and green stars that played upon his eyeballs, and he waited.
He awoke from troubled dreams when he heard a scuttling in the darkness. A bat, he told himself. But it was bigger than a bat. It was more of a shuffling. He prayed that it was not a cave-bear. He prayed to Astur his father in the eternal blue sky that there was not another entrance to the cave, and that a monstrous cave-bear had not returned home, its dark fur glistening with blood.
He drew his sword and stared into the darkness, but it was like trying to see through tar. He couldn’t make out so much as his hand in front of his face. He had the horrible feeling that someone – some thing – was at this very moment squatting malevolently, immediately in front of him, its face only inches from his own, its black eyes boring into his, its long fangs dripping. He even dared to sniff the air a little, hoping against hope… He smelt no foul carnivorous breath, nothing but damp cave air. Yet still he could hear the snuffling noise, and it was coming closer.
He thought of his people’s stories about foul creatures which lived in darkness and crept out at night to crawl through the trees, or fly through the night air with their outstretched bats’ wings. They alighted under the eaves of lonely cottages to sniff the air, crawling inside to fix their sharp fangs into the soft flesh and to drink the blood of babies, leaving them only a black and withered dried-out husk in their cot, to be found by their screaming mothers in the morning. Perhaps the sound was one of those ghastly vampires, flesh moonwhite and translucent, eyes like jelly, scuttling home to sleep with a bellyful of babies’ blood. He pressed himself against the wall and held his sword more tightly. You could not kill a vampire, they said. Metal would pass through it as it would pass through mist. And when they had sucked your blood, you became one of them.
He heard a weird, high-pitched cry that was almost a scream, and he could have sworn, though it was impossible in the night, that it was the high, lonely cry of a sparrowhawk. Or maybe a vampire…
But it was no vampire who spoke from the darkness beyond. It was the voice of, he guessed, a young boy.
‘Pelagia!’ the voice whispered. ‘Are you all right?’
Attila kept silent. There was no other noise.
‘Pelagia!’
There was another pause, and then beyond the entrance of the cave there came a soft scraping. Suddenly against the blackness there flared a small yellow flame, and by its dim light, Attila saw a slim, grimy hand reach in, followed by the body of a young boy, two or three years his junior, gripping a spear in his other hand. He set the flickering lamp on a stone ledge and looked around. The instant he saw Attila he crouched lower and aimed his spear straight at his belly.
‘If you have touched her,’ he h
issed. ‘If you have harmed her in any way…’
‘Who?’ whispered Attila, bewildered, but keeping his sword up in readiness all the same.
The boy glanced across the cave, and there, by the dim light of the little lamp, Attila saw for the first time that there was a roll of blankets against the wall opposite.
The boy said no more but scuttled over to the blankets and drew back the edge very gently. Attila realised to his astonishment that he had shared the cave all night with a young girl, and had never known a thing. The poor waif must have been terrified, yet he had never heard her breathe, let alone scream. She was only about six or seven, and her face was pale and drawn. The boy leant down, kissed her forehead and whispered a prayer of thanks. The girl turned her head where she lay and looked across at Attila, her eyes huge in her thin face, her lips pale and bloodless.
‘He killed a man,’ she whispered. ‘A soldier. Over there.’
‘That was the blood on the ledge?’ said the boy jumpily. ‘That was your doing?’
Attila nodded. ‘I didn’t know anyone else was in here. I was hiding.’
‘Well, so are we. You an escaped slave as well?’
Attila suppressed the lofty contempt that he felt at this slur on his ancestry. ‘No,’ he said with as much evenness as he could muster. ‘I’m a… from the north. I was taken as a prisoner of war. I’m going back to my people.’
‘Beyond the Great River? You mean, beyond the empire?’
Attila nodded.
The boy stared at him. Like his sister, he had wide, staring, hare-like eyes, although he looked healthy enough. Skinny and undernourished, maybe, nervy and excitable, but well enough for a runaway slave.
He said, ‘Pelagia and me – I’m Orestes, by the way – we ran away.’
‘They were horrid,’ whispered Pelagia. ‘And fat. And the mistress of the house used to stick pins in us if we didn’t work hard enough, or if we spilt anything.’
Orestes nodded rapidly. ‘Actual pins. In our arms, or in the backs of our hands. So we ran away.’
Attila smiled. ‘Well, that’s three of us.’
Orestes stared at Attila a while longer, then he said, ‘Can we come with you?’
‘Not really. I go much faster than you. Anyway,’ he added, a little brutally, ‘your sister’s not well.’
‘How do you know she’s my sister?’
‘You look the same.’
The boy nodded again. ‘Yeah, well, she is my sister. She’ll be all right.’ He leant over her: she seemed to be asleep again, her breathing fast and shallow. ‘You’ll see.’
‘You didn’t come across any soldiers out there?’
Orestes shook his head.
Attila grunted. ‘Well, soon as it’s dawn I’m off. I wish you luck.’
‘There’s another way out of the cave if you need it. Just be safe. Down there.’ He pointed.
‘Well why didn’t you tell me before?’ he said with some anger.
The boy stared wide-eyed at him for a little while longer, then lay down to sleep beside his sister.
Attila had only been walking a mile or so, in the grey light of dawn, when he heard footsteps behind him. He hid up and waited, and soon there came in sight the boy Orestes, hand in hand with his sister. Their faces were bright in the chilly early air, their cheeks flushed. Pelagia’s were too flushed, red with hectic spots.
Attila waited for them, then stepped out. ‘I told you,’ he said.
‘Have you got any food?’ asked Orestes. ‘We’re really hungry, Pelagia especially.’
Attila looked at the girl, and then back at the boy. Reluctantly he reached into his leather bag and handed them some stale bread. ‘It’s all I’ve got,’ he said.
They broke it in two and began to eat. The girl chewed slowly and painfully, but she ate it all.
‘Thanks,’ said Orestes.
‘It was nothing,’ said Attila sourly. He walked on.
The two children walked on behind him.
After a while, he turned back and said, ‘That noise you made, outside the cave, like a sparrowhawk. That was you, wasn’t it?’
The boy nodded proudly. ‘We use it as a signal. I’ll teach you if you like.’
Attila struggled with his pride a while, and then said grudgingly, ‘It was a pretty good imitation. Go on, then.’
‘All right,’ said the boy. ‘You use a blade of grass. You take it between your thumbs and…’
They made slower progress now there were three of them, but they managed to steal more food and rest up on warm days in the woods or the hills. The Greek slaveboy talked endlessly, until Attila had to ask him to shut up. Pelagia seemed to grow in strength again. She even began to put on a little weight.
‘You’re good at stealing,’ she told him when he returned one night from yet another lonely farm-house with a flask of thin wine, some bread, salt pork, dried beans, and even a purloined wood pigeon, ready roasted.
‘It’s my greatest talent,’ he said.
‘You could be a proper thief when you grow up.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘I’m going to be in a circus,’ said the little girl. ‘And ride on a bear. I saw it once, in a circus. We were only allowed to sit right at the top, so we were a long way from the arena, but I saw a woman riding on a bear. She was very beautiful, and she had long blond hair and her robes were orangey and gold, like a queen’s.’ She tore off a big chunk of pigeon. ‘Then they put some people to death and everybody cheered, but that was boring, and we were too far away to see much, anyway. And when we got home the mistress stuck pins in our arms because we were late.’ She swallowed the chunk of pigeon meat without chewing properly, and nearly choked. Attila banged her on the back. ‘Bless you,’ she said when she had composed herself again, wiping her watery eyes. ‘We will serve you when you get home. Are you rich?’
‘Fabulously,’ said Attila.
‘Fabulously,’ she repeated. ‘Fabulously rich.’ She liked that word.
He said, ‘In fact, I am a prince. My father’s house is built of pure gold, and even my slaves are dressed in robes of silk.’
She nodded. ‘Do you have bears?’
Little girls are weird, thought Attila. ‘Hundreds,’ he said. ‘We ride them everywhere, like other people ride horses.’
Pelagia nodded again. ‘That’s settled, then. We will be your servants when we get to your kingdom.’
12
REST ON HER LIGHTLY, EARTH AND DEW
They came down from the mountains and crossed the plains of the Po in the frosty start of the new year. Attila dreaded leading them up into the towering white peaks of the Julian Alps at such a season, but they must move on. They had made it so far because there were so many refugees on the roads, so many alarms and rumours sweeping the country, so many tales of the Goths, and even the dreadful Vandals, still on the warpath, and the emperor going mad in his marsh-bound palace.
No one had stopped to question three ragged children on the road along with all the others. Yet. But it only needed one soldier to block their path with his spear, to demand of the oldest boy why he kept his face covered, and to rip the rags away and see his bright, tattooed cheeks, and his slanted, leonine eyes. It was well known what punishment was meted out to runaway slaves, no matter what their age might be. First, the letters F U G would be branded with a red-hot iron on their foreheads, for fugitivus. Then the real punishments would begin…
They must press on. They would not be safe until they had crossed the snowy peaks of the Julian Alps and the mountains of Noricum, and come down into the Pannonian plain, and finally crossed the wide brown waters of the swollen winter Danube to freedom.
They passed by Verona, and keeping near to the flat coast passed by east of Patavum. At last they halted by the roadside, weak with hunger and weariness, and a cold wind blew in from the lagoons to the east, and from the mountains of Illyria beyond. The three children shook with hunger and fatigue, and the little girl was racked with co
ughing, as if her very ribs would break. Orestes had asked again and again if they couldn’t steal some horses, but Attila replied that they would draw too much attention to themselves that way, now that they were out on the more populated plains of the Po. They must walk on, like all the other thousands of nameless fugitives on the roads of Northern Italy. But they could not walk on. They were exhausted.
As they rested, a great gilt carriage, flanked by numerous bodyguards, came down the dusty road, heading for the famous city of Aquileia on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. It drew up alongside the huddled children. Inside sat a handsome, clean-shaven man with gold signet rings flashing on his fingers. He stared at them for a little while, and a smile gradually crept over his face. Pelagia, at least, smiled back, and then had another fit of coughing. The man touched his hand to his mouth, and began to question the children from within his carriage. At first the two boys were wary and suspicious, and only wished that he would leave them alone. But after a little while he won their confidence, and even Attila, usually so acutely sensitive to danger, was taken in; perhaps his senses were dulled by hunger and exhaustion. After a few minutes, the children were persuaded and taken with the wealthy man and his train into Aquileia.
A few wealthy men, a very few, might put themselves out in a charitable way for a trio of travel-sore little guttersnipes, none too sweet-smelling, and coarse in their manners and address. But the great majority of such men, suddenly overcome by an apparent excess of charitable feelings which they have signally failed to display hitherto, will have another, rather less amiable motive behind the benevolent mask of their charity. So it was with this man, the richest citizen in Aquileia, a merchant and dealer in everything from horses to ships, from cinnamon to silk, from pepper to papyrus to perfumed beeswax candles. Surprisingly, perhaps, given what transpired later that day and on into the night, in his private bath-houses at his villa in Aquileia, guarded at every entrance by his expressionless, highly paid bodyguards; surprisingly, given what he called his ‘Tiberian theatricals’, which the three children were forced to enact, sometimes at the point of a dagger, for his purring delectation; surprisingly, this good citizen was also a family man. Indeed, he was the head and paterfamilias of the Neriani, a clan who had dominated the finances and politics of that wealthy trading city on the shores of the Adriatic for generations, and would continue to do so for a generation more – until a whirlwind came out of the east, and visited Aquileia with a punishment as terrible as any city has suffered in history.
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