For a long while the icy eyes of Galla and the slanted eyes of the Hun warrior met across the vast, brittle space of the Audience Chamber. It was Galla who, at last, looked away.
‘In all the moons and years and generations henceforth,’ resumed the warrior, addressing Honorius, ‘the Hun nation will never ally with Rome again.’
The emperor looked up from his lap, where he had been watching his sweaty fingers writhe around each other in perplexity. ‘You are going to come and attack us?’
Galla winced with irritation.
Chanat remained motionless. ‘What I have said, I have said.’
Honorius looked down at his writhing fingers again, thinking how horribly they looked like maggots, and then he cried shrilly, ‘I could have you killed!’
Galla was about to signal to one of her chamberlains to come and escort them away, for the audience was clearly at an end, when the warrior spoke again.
‘Nothing you could do to me,’ he said, smiling broadly, as if at a joke, ‘would be so terrible as what my lord and king would do to me if I failed him.’
Honorius stared at this terrifying barbarian for a little while longer, his small round mouth agape. Then, with a high-pitched shriek, he sprang from his throne and ran off down the steps towards the rooms behind, clutching his skirts up round his bony shanks as he went. His sister stood and hurried after him.
The moment they were gone, Chanat ripped apart the delicate brooch that held the white silk cloak around his shoulders. The cloak slithered from his golden, lean-muscled torso and fell with a whisper to the floor. He turned and trod it underfoot and walked out of the Chamber of the Imperial Audience.
At the gates of the city, his horse was returned to him. He checked the reins, and found that not one of the decorative gold coins was missing. He complimented the guards on their honesty in perfect Latin, vaulted onto his horse, and rode away across the causeway over the flat Ravenna marshlands towards home.
Attila and Aetius hunted together more and more, along with their slaves, Orestes and Cadoc, until they began to be referred to among the People simply as ‘the Four Boys’.
They competed endlessly in games of wrestling and swordplay, spear- and noose-throwing, or the ancient Hun game involving furious galloping after an inflated pig’s bladder which they called a pulu. They came to worship Chanat, the greatest and most fearless warrior among all the People, but he told them to admire not strength but wisdom.
‘Wisdom,’ snorted Attila. ‘Give me strength any time.’
Chanat shook his head. Then he began to speak; strangely, he spoke of Little Bird, though Attila had not mentioned the mad shaman.
Nearby Aetius stopped to listen, his deep blue eyes grave in his fine-featured face. He, too, wondered about Little Bird, this high-born Roman boy, raised on the solemn teachings of Seneca and Epictetus as much as the doctrines of the Holy Catholic Church, and all their fine words about the wisdom of Providence, and the ultimate goodness of the world. In his heart the words and songs of Little Bird frightened him more than any other.
‘There are many reputed to be wise in this world,’ began Chanat slowly, ‘but we among the People know that Little Bird alone in all his madness is wise. He is wise because he is god-maddened. He alone has walked with the gods in counsel. He sat for nine winters and nine summers on a mountaintop in the holy Altai Mountains, and he ate nothing but a grain of rice a day. For water he sucked the snowflakes that landed on his lips. And for nine long years he never once opened his eyes upon the sensate world, but walked only with the gods, with the unknown powers behind the curtain of the world. When he came back, he came back not with a message of comfort.’
They waited for his words.
‘He came back from them, those beings with hawk-heads and eagle-eyes, who cast shadows on the earth bigger than mountains, those makers of the bear’s claw and the boar’s tusk – such things delight them. Since then, Little Bird only dances, or sings nonsense songs, or talks with his only friend, the wind. He delightedly mocks any who speak wise, grave words about the justice of the heavens, or the high duty and destiny of men. For, he says, we men are only the idle jokes of God.’
Aetius was afraid of Little Bird; or at least of the words that Little Bird madly spoke and sang. And he knew that his friend Attila was afraid, too.
4
THE FOUR BOYS
Attila was preparing to ride out one morning with Orestes, each of them astride one of the squat, large-headed little Hun horses, when Aetius and his dark-eyed slaveboy came riding back into camp.
‘You’ve been hunting already?’
The Roman boy pulled a duck from his shoulder bag.
Attila sneered. ‘A day’s ride, and we’ll be in boar country. There’s a wooded valley to the north-east. We’ll stay the night and hunt tomorrow. But’ – he reached over and flicked the quiver that hung from the Roman boy’s shoulder – ‘you’ll need more than your little boy’s bow and arrows.’
Aetius glanced down and saw the heavy spear slung along the belly of Attila’s horse. He rode off without another word, and a few minutes later reappeared, riding out of the camp with a long ashen spear, a thick iron cross-bar just below the long, pointed head: a boar-spear, to stop the animal’s furious charge. For it wasn’t unknown for a boar to receive an ordinary spear in its side and yet push its way onward, screaming, right up the shaft to rip open the horse’s belly with its six-inch tusks, even in its bloody death-throes.
Attila narrowed his eyes as the Roman approached, his silent, faithful little slave behind him.
‘Come on, then,’ he said to Orestes. ‘He’ll have to catch us up.’
Driving his heels hard into his little pony, he set off at a gallop across the bright green grasslands of the unfenced and endless steppes.
By the end of an unremitting day’s ride, when they reached the edge of the wooded valley, all four boys were exhausted, though none would show it. They said little as they made camp in the shadows of the trees, dragging up firewood and building themselves a comforting orange glow.
‘You, boy,’ said Attila to Aetius’ slave, ‘bring more firewood up to last the night.’
The boy trotted off to do his bidding.
Attila nodded. ‘He’s good.’
‘He’s very good,’ said Aetius.
‘What people?’
‘He’s a Celt – British.’
‘Ah. Good fighters once.’
‘Good fighters still.’
‘And he understands Hunnish.’
‘He speaks and understands Hunnish, Latin, Celtic, Saxon, Gaulish, and some Gothic.’
‘Educated, for a slave.’
‘He wasn’t always a slave.’
The boys stared into the fire for a while, wondering how else they could compete. Then Attila said, ‘Here, have some of this.’ He passed over a leather flask.
‘What is it?’ asked Aetius suspiciously.
‘Kind of fermented sheep’s milk.’
‘Not koumiss again?’
Attila shook his head. ‘No, it doesn’t get you drunk. It’s just sheep’s milk that’s gone sour, sort of. It keeps well in hot weather.’
Aetius put the neck of the flagon cautiously to his lips and tasted. An instant later he held the flagon aside and spat his mouthful of the stuff straight into the sizzling fire.
Attila roared with laughter and took the flagon back.
Aetius wiped his lips, an expression of revulsion on his face. ‘What in Hades was that?’
Attila grinned broadly. ‘We call it yogkhurt.’
‘ Yogkhurt?’ repeated Aetius, even more gutturally.
Attila nodded.
Aetius shook his head. ‘Sounds as bad as it tastes.’
The next day they went looking for boar. They picked up a spoor very soon – telltale footprints of two main toes, with two barely visible either side – but lost the track in the dense undergrowth where their horses couldn’t go. Later they found what looked like a wa
llow beside a fallen treetrunk. Attila dismounted and gave a low whistle, crouching beside the treetrunk, running his fingertips over the bark.
‘What is it?’
‘These grooves. They’re deep.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a big one.’
They rode on.
‘It’ll be lying up somewhere,’ Attila called back. ‘We’ll have to flush it out.’
‘I can smell something,’ said Cadoc.
Attila turned and stared at the slaveboy. ‘You have boar in your country, as well as perpetual rain?’
The boy nodded. ‘Many boar. In the autumn, up in the beechwoods, we-’
The boar came screaming out of nowhere. It flashed across Attila’s mind, even as he glimpsed the great, bristling curve of its back as it charged snorting towards them, that it must be a mother and they had stumbled on her close to her litter. No ferocity in nature like the ferocity of a mother protecting her young. But then he registered the boar’s size, the length of its tusks – eight inches? nine? – and his ears registered the thunderous galloping of its small hooves across the clearing, carrying its massive weight of four hundred pounds or more His ears were filled with a more dreadful sound, of a horse screaming. He was lying face down on the forest floor, his mouth full of a mulch of last year’s leaves. His horse was writhing in agony across his legs, as the huge boar worked furiously away on the other side, opening up the horse’s belly with lightning-quick slashes of its terrible tusks.
The three other boys dismounted in an instant, and Aetius scrabbled desperately to drag his spear from its sling. At any moment the boar might tire of tearing the horse’s guts from its stomach and turn its beady little eyes and monstrous tusks on them. Or on the other boy, trapped and helpless beneath his dying horse. If the boar trotted round and began to work on him, he would be dead in seconds.
The boar stopped, and there was silence in the glade but for the thrashing of the dying horse. The boar raised its massive head. Aetius thought it might weigh four hundred and fifty, even five hundred pounds. It was the biggest boar he had ever seen; bigger than any in the arena, in the forests of Silestria, anywhere. The stench of it filled the forest glade with a thick, dark musk, and its cruel off-white tusks, gleaming through the dripping blood and the tendrils of torn intestine from the disembowelled horse – nine inches long was perhaps an underestimate.
The boar stared at them for a little while longer, its flanks heaving furiously as it got its breath back, unhurried and unafraid. Then it sensed movement beside it, and suddenly was afraid again, and hot with rage. It turned to gore the horse. But it wasn’t the horse, it was something else.
Snuffing the air, the boar galloped round to where Attila lay trapped and twisted, lying there helpless in last year’s leaves, and moved furiously towards the fallen boy with lowered tusks.
The Celtic slaveboy moved as fast as a forest animal. He slithered in the horse’s spilt guts, scrambled over the mound of its open belly and thrust his sword into the boar’s flank, just as the first swipe of its tusks opened up a deep cut across Attila’s back. The blade went in less than an inch, but it was enough. The boar turned on him, screaming with fury, and drove straight at him. But Cadoc slipped back over the dead horse and the enraged boar drove its tusks uselessly into dead flesh again. Then it felt a far deeper, more terrible wound along its back, penetrating deeply into its tough old bristling hide. It whipped round on its neat little hooves and saw Aetius. The Roman boy pulled the spear free again and braced his back against an ancient beechtree. The butt of his boar-spear was braced deep among the roots, for a boar that size would knock a man and spear aside like gossamer if they were not rooted in the ground like the roots of an oak.
Out of the corner of his eye, Aetius saw the Celtic slaveboy about to scramble over the horse again and try to attack the boar from behind.
‘No, Cadoc!’ he cried. ‘Let him come to me.’
The boar eyed Aetius a moment longer, its ears deaf to their human cries, filled only with the furious bang of blood in its brain. Then it charged.
The thick ashen spear snapped in two like a twig with the force of that five-hundred-pound weight, and Aetius threw himself aside only just in time. But in its mad unheeding charge, the great boar had also driven its own chest deeply onto the spearhead, which was buried up to the crossbar in its lungs and killing it. The boar reeled back, squealing, and fell to one side, slashing at its invisible tormentors, bright pneumonic blood frothing and spraying furiously from its champing jaws. It struggled to its feet again, but then its hind legs collapsed, its forefeet still planted unyielding in the soft forest floor.
Aetius crawled to his feet, dazed and shaking, and saw two boys – the two slaveboys, both acquainted with the lash and chain of their masters – creep towards the dying boar from either side, small blades in their hands. Aetius shouted ‘No!’ to them, for the boar was dying anyway, and yet, even in its last moments, it might turn that massive, bristling head and slash a man open from navel to throat. But the two slaveboys for once ignored the command of the master, and moved in closer, carefully avoiding that slowly swinging, bloody head. As one, they pounced forward and drove their blades into the creature’s body, Cadoc’s blade going deep into its tough, muscled neck, and Orestes’ slipping between its ribs. Still the boar swung its head, butting Cadoc and tossing him back into the leaf litter as if with mild irritation, but making no contact with its terrible tusks. Its mad ferocity was draining away now with its blood. It lay down in the leaves, and gave another heave of its blood-soaked flanks, and then after a long while another. And then it died.
Aetius steeled himself and tried to shut his nose against the stomach-turning reek of the disembowelled horse. He grasped it by its hind legs, ready to drag it off the fallen boy, and shouted orders to the slaves to take hold likewise. But from the other side he heard a cry, and there was Attila. He had hauled himself free, and although he clutched the back of one thigh, where he felt he had twisted a tendon, and he could sense the back of his shirt soaked where the boar’s tusk had razed through the skin of his back, nevertheless he was only slightly hurt, and too full of the furious thrill of the danger to feel real pain yet.
In that instant the mood of the four boys changed, and they were suddenly dancing around in the forest glade as four equals, slapping one another’s hands and punching the air, whooping like the most barbarous tribesmen in all of Scythia. They hopped and hollered round the huge, bloody mound of the slain boar, and seized their swords and their broken spears again and stabbed at it ceremonially as they circled. They shouted defiance at the boar’s ferocious soul, and even at the unknown gods who made such a creature of blood and horror and set it on the earth with a smile to be a terror and a torment to all men. They smeared themselves and one another with boar’s blood, and then a primordial paste of boar’s blood and moist forest earth, and howled at the high blue sky glimpsed through the waving light green leaves of the springtime canopy. Four different languages chaotically mingled, Greek and Celtic, Latin and Hun, but all crying the same angry defiance, the same bloodstained defiant triumph over life and death.
At last they fell exhausted to the forest floor and gradually regained their breath, their composure, and their awareness of difference and hierarchy. As their hot blood cooled, and their taut-strung limbs relaxed, they even said prayers, each of them. They prayed to the spirit of the boar, begging forgiveness, and to those nameless spirits behind the curtain of the world who made the boar, who bent and formed its curved spine in their iron hands, set with black bristles, who made its thundering hooves, and shaped its terrible ivory tusks.
Attila ordered the two slaveboys to make a fire, and began to slash the boar’s flanks, pulling away the thick hide to reveal the dark pink flesh, the meaty haunches of its powerful hind legs. They spitted the meat on greenwood twigs and roasted them over the fire. Despite the boar’s vast size, the four ravenous boys still made considerable inroads into its carcass, before they sank back into the leaves, un
able to eat a mouthful more, and fell asleep.
When they awoke it was growing dark. They warmed themselves by building up the fire, by roasting yet more meat, although none of them felt they could eat another thing, and by taking it in turns to hack at the boar’s massive neck. With only their lightweight swords it was hard work, and each boy hacked himself to the point of sweating exhaustion.
‘But we can’t leave it here,’ said Orestes. ‘They’ll never believe us.’
It was strange that he, like Cadoc, now presumed to speak his opinions before the masters asked for them. But an ease had settled over the four that would not have been possible in court or camp.
Attila nodded. ‘All that meat’s going to waste, anyhow. But we have to take the head back.’
After nearly an hour of hacking and slicing through hide, sinew, muscle and bone, at last the mighty head fell free of the neck. There was some discussion about how to get it back, for the head alone must have weighed nearly two hundred pounds. At last it was decided to build a rough travois of strong hazel sticks, drag the boar’s head onto it, make it secure with more hazel twigs hooped over the top, and haul the travois back to the camp of the Huns, changing ponies every hour or so.
‘We’ll be the heroes of the People,’ said Orestes excitedly.
‘The envy of every man there,’ said Cadoc.
‘And the dream of every woman,’ chuckled Attila.
The other three all looked more or less embarrassed.
Attila grinned. ‘What, none of you have ever done it? To a woman?’
The two slaveboys flushed deeply. Aetius shook his head.
Attila settled back and grinned. ‘Well, well.’ It was good to feel powerful. He liked that feeling. After a while he said, ‘So you miss home?’
Aetius looked up and saw he was talking to him.
‘You pine for Rome?’
Aetius pulled a face. ‘I miss Italy,’ he said. ‘Rome is-’
‘Rome’s a cesspit,’ said Attila.
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