Attila ath-1

by William Napier

  ‘“For the time will come when the people will walk the fields like a setting dream,

  And talk, as though the days were long, and the starlight deep.”’

  Then he said more briskly, ‘After all, what was your father?’

  ‘You know what my father was,’ said Lucius. ‘A son of the druithynn.’

  ‘Then learning verses runs in your blood,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Your father could have recited ten thousand verses, without so much as a pause for a mouthful of mead.’

  Lucius snorted.

  ‘Learn it well,’ said Gamaliel, ‘every word, without fail. Now I am going for a lovely long walk with your pretty wife.’ And they vanished out of the door.

  Lucius heard Seirian giggle at one of Gamaliel’s jokes as they crossed the farmyard to the gate. It was the first time he had heard her giggle since his return.

  Settling grumpily back on his stool, he pulled the tattered parchment from his leather wallet, and began to read.

  Seirian and Gamaliel walked for a long time, down the valley to the sea, and along the fateful beach. Seirian drew to a halt and looked away across the grey sea, the cries of the wheeling gulls desolate in the autumn air. Gamaliel reached out his old hand and touched her bright young cheek.

  ‘Be comforted,’ he murmured.

  She turned to him, a little scornful. ‘How can I be?’

  ‘Be comforted,’ he said again, more gently than ever. ‘“Content” I did not say.’

  She looked out across the sea again. Then she turned and they walked on along the creaking shingle, up the west cliff into the woods, back along the ridge and down through the damp meadows. They spoke no more.

  But that evening, by firelight, the three of them having eaten a good stew of lamb, hazelnuts and winter vegetables, they talked again.

  ‘You have learnt it all?’ demanded Gamaliel.

  ‘Here,’ said Lucius, handing the parchment wearily to his old friend. ‘Test me if you like.’

  At which Gamaliel cried in a loud voice, ‘No! Do not offer them to me,’ and dashed the parchment away with a flying hand.

  Lucius and Seirian looked at him in astonishment. It was rare to see him moved to anger.

  ‘But-’

  ‘They are not for me,’ said Gamaliel, a little more controlled. ‘You do not understand. Never show them to me. In fact…’ He stood up and, with a deft flick of his yew staff, twitched the parchment from Lucius’ hand into the fire.

  ‘What the-?’ cried Lucius, reaching out to retrieve it.

  Gamaliel batted his arm down sharply with his staff, and ordered him to sit. ‘They are not needed now,’ he said simply.

  They watched the ancient parchment curl up in the flames, the lettering flowing strangely in the heat, as if the words might somehow outlive the parchment they were written on. There was a faint odour of something… unhallowed, as if from the charnel-house or the grave, and the parchment was burnt and gone in a wisp of dense black smoke. Gamaliel plucked a bunch of wild marjoram from where it hung from a nail in the wall, and cast it onto the fire to freshen the air again.

  ‘What was that,’ asked Lucius, ‘the breath of the grave, and the black smoke?’

  But Gamaliel did not answer. He only said, ‘You are the last of the leaves now.’ He smiled a little and said to Seirian, ‘Woman, behold your husband: the Last of the Sibylline Books.’ More gravely, he said to Lucius, ‘One day you will pass them on to your son, as was the Celtic custom with holy things of old. For you and Cadoc are of the line of Bran, and the blood of the druithynn runs in your veins, as you say.’

  Lucius looked uncertain. ‘But you must tell me more, Gamaliel. I am all in a Kernow fog.’

  The old man smiled, and gazed into the fire. ‘Alas, I am not so wise as you think. Mysteries are many, and none so mysterious as man. As regards the Sibyl’s prophecies… who can truly scry the future? Would the gods put such awful power into the feeble and treacherous hands of men? Is the future written in a book of heaven, unalterable and fated from the egg to the end? Do you not know in your heart that you can choose between the dark path and the Light?’

  Seirian said to Lucius, ‘You know it.’

  Lucius looked down, as if obscurely ashamed.

  ‘Then man has choice,’ Gamaliel continued, ‘and the future is unwritten, and prophecies are worthless doggerel. Even the parchment they’re written on isn’t fit for wiping an emperor’s arse!’

  Lucius grinned. ‘Then why bother with them?’

  ‘Because men believe in prophecies. They hear their horoscopes avidly, they cling to their birth-stones and their mythical forebears and their little, little lies. Our systems have their day, they have their day and cease to be. But during that day they surely have their power, to hurt or to heal. Therein lies their power.’

  Lucius nodded slowly.

  ‘The world is changed,’ said Gamaliel, ‘and we with it.’ He smiled at them with sadness. ‘And to this gentle land, and even to this valley, the Saxons are coming.’

  Seirian spoke. ‘I know little of the Saxons. I know that their name means “the People of the Sword”. I never saw a sword drawn in quiet valley till that day. And I know that now my every dream of them is a dream of blood.’

  ‘That is how they want to be seen – and dreamt of, too,’ said Gamaliel. He went on, in a low chant: ‘Nine days and nine nights,

  Lord Odin hung

  Nailed to the world-tree,

  A sacrifice to himself.

  ‘Then the sky cracked open,

  The thunder spoke,

  The dawn arose

  And the longships set sail.

  ‘A sword-people, an axe-people,

  An ice-age, a wolf-age,

  And no quarter given

  Between man and man.’

  ‘They are but one of many coming tribes,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Yes, they are a fierce and terrible people. In time, out of that fierceness something great and passionate may come, but now they are a People of the Sword, as you say, dear Seirian, and a People of Blood, and saxa is their word for their dreadful, biting longswords. They worship strange, dark gods, and the name of Christ is a torment to their ears. The sea is theirs, and in their narrow-beaked ships they traverse it by day and by night with a great hunger and with lust in their eyes. They laugh that they will sail across the uttermost ocean, to the mouth of Hell itself, which is like a great dark cave into which the sea flows in a black torrent. They jest without fear of the gods that they will sail into that infernal abyss itself and ransack even Hell for gold.’

  Despite the warmth of the fire, Seirian shivered.

  ‘Then what must we do?’ asked Lucius.

  ‘The last of the Celtic kingdoms will fight against the pagan invaders,’ said Gamaliel. ‘And the fight will be glorious.’

  ‘Will Britain be extinguished in the end?’

  ‘Every nation and empire will be extinguished in the end,’ said Gamaliel with a gentle sadness. ‘But not all will live on in legend as gloriously as the last of the Celtic kingdoms will live on.’ He looked into the fire. ‘It is as our soothsayers have said. It is as the Man of Myrddin has said. A hard age is coming for us all, and everywhere beyond the frontiers the tribes are stirring. The Saxons are a fierce people, yet no fiercer than the Sueves or the Goths or the Vandals, nor yet that other tribe that will come from farthest off. “Storm from the east, O Storm that will not cease.”’

  ‘What will become of us, Gamaliel?’

  Gamaliel smiled. Often, when he was at his gloomiest, as if surprised by a cheerfulness which welled up from deep within and which no one else could feel or comprehend, his lined and ancient face would break into a mysterious smile, and he would say, as he said now, ‘All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly, as I was told by a wise old man whom I met in the mountains between China and the deserts o
f Scythia.’

  ‘You talk in riddles, old friend.’

  ‘I talk in riddles because life is a riddle. Not a riddle to be solved, either, but one to be taken upon your shoulders, as you would take a heavy load, and to be carried on down the road, singing the praises of the world that God in his wisdom has made, untroubled in your heart.’ He stirred the fire with the battered end of his staff. ‘And, just so, we will bring your Cadoc back. For he is of the line of Bran, praise-singer and hymn-maker, and he was born for a purpose, which will not be served by his standing in chains in the slave markets of Colonia Agrippina.’

  Seirian winced at the cruel image and bowed her head. But Gamaliel would do nothing to lessen the truth of Cadoc’s plight. He only said again, ‘We will bring him back.’

  ‘ Can you bring him back?’ asked Seirian, aggression and anger in her doubt.

  Gamaliel said, ‘We shall see.’ He smiled gently at her and laid his dry old hand over hers. ‘In the heart of the darkest night-time, we shall see.’

  ‘Riddler,’ said Lucius.

  Gamaliel rested his other hand on Lucius’ muscular forearm. ‘Old friend,’ he said.

  The next morning, Seirian and Gamaliel stood watching Ailsa herding the chickens out into the yard, with Lucius up on the hill above, mending a fence by first light.

  Seirian said to Gamaliel, ‘He does not talk.’

  Gamaliel sighed. ‘He is a soldier, not an orator. If you want to know his heart, mark his deeds, not his words. You know how little he wants to go back to the empire. He only wants to find his son – for himself, for Ailsa, and for you. Watch his heavy tread and his weariness as he walks the road out of the valley. Remember why he does it, and with what heaviness of heart he leaves you again. Do not doubt him.’

  ‘I do not doubt him!’ exclaimed Seirian with sudden fierceness, her eyes flashing darkly. ‘I have never doubted him. There is not a breath of cowardice or faithlessness in him. It is that which makes me despair. A weaker man would give up, and stay home, and, and…’

  ‘And you would live happily ever after?’

  She looked down at the rough cobbles of the yard, and shook her head. ‘No. You are right. It is because he is going that I love him. If he stayed by our fireside and tended me, all smiles and kisses and sweet nothings, like some high-born noble lover, I would despise him a little.’ She smiled a little at the contrariness of the human heart.

  ‘He is a good man,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Good is the opposite of weak, and it often enjoys little comfort and contentment in the world. Be patient, and watch over Ailsa like a mother-hawk, as I know you will. And watch, too, for the dark shadows of the Saxon longships, for there is no knowing when they may come again. We will be back. Before too long, we will be back, with your son, and you will be a family once more.’

  Seirian brushed her tears angrily from her eyes and nodded briskly. ‘I know. I know. Here,’ and she turned and slipped back into the cottage. Gamaliel followed her in, stooping low so as not to bump his head, as he had often done before. She retrieved a cloth package from the bread oven beside the hearth and thrust it into his gnarled hands. ‘I made some honey-cakes.’

  ‘Ah, the far-famed honey-cakes of Seirian, daughter of Maradoc!’ cried Gamaliel, raising them above his head. ‘How can we come to harm with such talismans of great power in our pockets? Surely even the gods look down and smell their savour rising unto heaven, and toss aside their bowls of ambrosia and their cups of nectar, and wish themselves mortal men upon the earth, that they might taste the joys of the blessed honey-cakes of Seirian, daughter of Maradoc!’

  ‘Enough, enough, you old fool!’ cried Seirian, and she bundled the old man out of doors into the sunshine.

  Ailsa had finished herding the chickens to her satisfaction, and she came over to him and stopped in front of the tall old man and squinted up. ‘Cadoc showed me the flowers, and he always caught fish,’ she said, ‘lots of fish. He was very clever.’

  ‘He still is very clever,’ said the old man gently.

  Aisla stared up at him. ‘Now when we have breakfast he’s not there

  … You will find him again, won’t you?’

  He laid his hand on her mop of curls. ‘Have no fear, little one. Your brother will be here again soon.’

  They left the next morning at dawn. Seirian and Lucius clung to each other wordlessly and with such desperate longing that Gamaliel had to turn away in his sorrow for them. He felt his hand plucked by a smaller hand, and he looked down into Ailsa’s bright brown eyes.

  ‘Are you going, too?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, little one, I am going, too.’

  ‘Your hands are all dry and wrinkly. Are you a captain of a ship?’

  ‘Not exactly, no.’

  ‘But I like your hands anyway,’ she added hurriedly.

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’

  ‘And you’re too old to fight any bad men.’

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  Gamaliel smiled. ‘I wonder that myself sometimes,’ he murmured. ‘Well, I will keep your father company on the long voyage to find your brother.’

  ‘But you don’t know where he is.’

  ‘We don’t know exactly. ’

  ‘So how will you find him?’

  ‘By looking.’

  Ailsa thought for a while. ‘Sometimes I find things by looking. I found my hoop in the pighouse the day before yesterday, and I never put it down there, and the pigs don’t play hoop. They’d be too fat and it’d get stuck round their middles.’ She frowned. ‘And sometimes I can’t find things and give up, and then they come to me anyway. It’s odd, isn’t it? Does that happen to you?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Gamaliel, ‘all the time.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Ailsa. Then she ran off to play.

  Lucius and Seirian came over hand in hand, and she kissed Gamaliel, and he said quiet words to her, and she nodded and smiled with an effort. Then all three of them held hands in a triangle.

  Gamaliel said to Seirian, ‘The Comforter be with you. May He guard your fields by day, may She sit at your fireside by night.’

  Seirian replied, ‘May the road rise up to meet you, may the sun make his face to shine upon you, may God be the third traveller who walks by your side as you go.’

  Lucius and Seirian said nothing to each other, and Gamaliel knew why. The deepest things cannot be caught in words.

  Ailsa came running back and pushed into the triangle indignantly, so they had to make it a square. She closed her eyes and prayed, ‘May Daddy and the old man not have to go to bed without any supper ever, or be killed or eaten by sea-monsters, or anything else.’ She thought, and added, ‘Or even just get their arms and legs bitten off, and have to come home in a wheelbarrow.’

  At which they all solemnly said, ‘Amen,’ and the little group broke up.

  Lucius and Gamaliel took up their leather packs, and Gamaliel took his yew-staff in his hand.

  Ailsa ran to Lucius and threw her arms round his legs. ‘You didn’t come back for very long,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even remember you when you came back.’

  Lucius kept his voice steady. ‘I am only going away one more time, and I will come back with your brother.’

  The little girl beamed with delight. Seirian lifted her into her arms, and they watched from the rickety wooden gateway as the two men, the tall, grey-eyed, broad-shouldered younger man, and the other, lean, rangy and as old as the hills, walked on together up the lane towards the ridgeway and the east.

  15

  THE SEA-WOLVES

  Along the coast at the little port of Saetonis, they persuaded a local merchant and his crew to ship them across the Celtic sea towards Belgica.

  When they left the coast of Dumnonia in the Gwydda Ariana – The Silver Goose – it was bright sunshine, and with the wind behind them and only slightly abeam, they were making a good hundred miles a day. They would be at the coast of Belgica by nightfall.

  In the afterno
on the wind dropped to the south, as suddenly as if someone had closed a door against a draught, and from the crow’s nest – which is to say an old barrel roughly roped to the mainmast – came the cry of fog ahead. They drifted on until they could see the fog-banks from the deck: great dense shapes that lay unmoving across the flat and windless sea, ominous and forlorn.

  They sailed on a little with what wind they could find, the trickling of the bow-wave eerie in the surrounding silence as they approached the fogbanks that lay across the channel, obscuring the white cliffs of the Gaulish coast from view. The sea, which had up to now been a typical channel sea of short, choppy waves, fell as calm as a village pond, and the dumpy little vessel began to roll placidly to port and starboard, her sail flapping futilely in the listless sea.

  The captain, a grizzled old veteran with two gold earrings and a left eye damaged by a swinging crossbeam, scowled into the fog-bank and gave no orders.

  ‘Why aren’t we setting oars?’ demanded Lucius.

  The captain didn’t respond for a long while. When he did, he growled, ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘It’s only fog. How many more miles to the coast?’

  ‘Another twenty, maybe.’

  ‘Well, can’t we break out the oars? We’ll be there in a few hours, wind or no wind.’

  The captain still didn’t look at Lucius. He spat over the gunwale, and said, ‘The Saxons. They love a fog.’

  After some hesitation the captain gave the order to put out the oars, and they rowed on into the fog. The silence was unnerving, the only sound the slow dip and sweep of the oars in the water below. They passed through thinner patches, and Lucius could see the poor watchman in the crow’s nest, high above the deck. When they hit another fog-bank, he vanished from sight as entirely as a bird in the clouds.

  At last the fog thinned and dissolved behind them, and then the rain came down. Gamaliel and Lucius sheltered in the cabin, the sailcloth drawn tight across the stanchions and the raindrops drumming down furiously. The wind, at least, got up again, from the west now. The captain gave orders for the sail to be unfurled and they plunged onwards through the beating rain. No other vessel, hostile or not, would see them through such a curtain of water.