Attila

by William Napier

  ‘Tell us something we don’t know!’ cried a wag from the crowd, hooting with laughter.

  The blazing, irresistible eyes of the scarecrow preacher turned upon the wag, and he said softly, ‘Aye, and Rome went laughing to her death.’

  Such was the power and mystery of the preacher’s eyes and voice that the wag was silenced and the laughter froze upon his lips.

  The scarecrow preacher said, ‘In after years, and in the last years of Rome and in the last age of the world, when God shall raze all clean and Christ shall come again in His glory, in those latter days, which shall come to pass before one of you here has passed away, so that you shall see it all with your own eyes - then a prince of terror shall come from the east, and he shall be called the Scourge of God. And his armies shall raze your proud temples and your palaces to the earth, and his horsemen shall trample your children into the dust, and everywhere your pride shall be laid low, and your haughtiness be made a laughing stock.

  ‘For mighty princes there have been before you on the earth, and proudly stood Sidon and Babylon, Nineveh, and Tyre. And now all, all are gone and have left not a wrack behind. They are blown away like grains of sand on the wind by the wrath of the Lord God of Israel, and their proud palaces, and their cloud-capped towers, and their demoniac temples with their altars of Moloch, stained red with innocent blood - they are all laid low.

  ‘For nothing that is of man alone endureth, but only that which is of God. And the blood of the innocent, and the weeping of the widow, and the tears of the orphan cry to heaven for justice! And even as I speak these words unto you, Holy Jerome sits in his skylit cell in Bethlehem, beating his breast with a stone for the sins of the world! And his heart cries out that though our walls shine with gold, and our ceilings, and the carven capitals of our proud pillars, yet Christ dies daily at our doors, naked and hungry in the person of His poor. For man is cruel in his heart from his infancy upward, and scorns the teaching of Christ Jesus. But God sickens to see the wrong that is wrought on the earth. And He will gather His children unto Him: the meek, the gentle; the sowers of peace and the lovers of concord, and all those that hate injustice, and are righteous in their hearts. But the proud empires of the world shall be swept into the fiery abyss, whence cometh no sound but the wailing of the wicked for all eternity!’

  The preacher preached on. He would preach until daybreak and beyond, until his voice cracked and dried in his throat. But the boy turned away with head bowed and made his way into the darkened streets beyond.

  There he began to run. He couldn’t have said why, but suddenly terror or disgust seized him, and he sprang forwards and broke into a pell-mell run, and felt as if he must run all night and all the next day before he would be safe.

  Racing through the jostling, drunken crowds, he ran hard, head-first, into a huge, round-shouldered ox of a man coming the other way. He could smell the wine on his breath even as he detached himself and made to run on again.

  ‘Oi, watch your step you little heathen!’ the man bellowed down at him.

  ‘Watch yours.’

  The man stopped moving on, swayed, and looked back blearily at the boy. ‘What did you say?’

  Attila stopped likewise and looked back. His eyes never wavered. ‘I said, watch yours.’ Under his tunic, his fingers touched the handle of his stolen knife. ‘You’re drunk,’ he added. ‘I’m not.’

  The man turned round properly and planted his feet wide apart. Now he didn’t seem so drunk, as if the promise of a brawl, even with a little gutter-born puppy such as this, had instantly sobered him up.

  In the flickering torchlight of the street a goat was being slaughtered under a canvas awning, ready to be skewered from end to end and roasted on a spit. People gathered around, fumbling for coins and tottering where they stood. It wasn’t every day that Rome could celebrate a triumph over the barbarians these days, and the rabble were clearly determined to continue eating and drinking, singing and fornicating until dawn.

  The goat’s resigned and pitiful bleats filled the air for a few moments. Then it was silent, and its lifeblood flowed over the dark dust between the two antagonists. A small crowd had already gathered to watch the fight.

  ‘Take him out, Borus!’ called one of his companions.

  Borus took a step forward, his sandalled foot splashing in the pooling goat’s blood, and he looked down and then up again furiously, as if this too was the little heathen’s fault.

  ‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ he said, softly this time, his voice filled with menace.

  Attila looked on, unimpressed. ‘You’d have done it anyway,’ he said, ‘you great oaf.’

  ‘Right, that’s it!’ roared the man, advancing on the boy with great lumbering strides. ‘You’re going to get a—’

  ‘Don’t you dare touch me. Do you know who I am?’

  The man was so astonished and the crowd so amused by this haughty reprimand, coming from this slight, scowling ragamuffin with the mud-caked face, that they paused as one body and waited for the explanation.

  The man folded his arms and rocked back on his heels. ‘Oh, I am so sorry. May the Lord have mercy’pon my sinful soul. And who might you be, pray?’

  The boy knew he should keep silent, that he should say nothing, be nothing; that he should slip away into the shadows, no more than a street urchin like the thousands of nameless others who lived in this city’s alleyways like rats. But his pride overwhelmed him.

  ‘I am Attila, son of Mundzuk,’ he said, ‘the son of Uldin, the son of Torda, the son of Beren—’

  The crowd started laughing, and their laughter drowned his small, proud, steady voice. He continued to list his genealogy, but he could not be heard. The crowd whooped and hollered with inebriated glee, and clapped their hands, and more were joining them all the time. Meanwhile Attila’s antagonist only encouraged them all the more, walking slowly round the still boy, as if viewing this strange, stunted specimen from all possible angles. He folded his brawny arms across his chest, furrowed his brow in puzzlement, and then grinned around at his audience with complicit mockery.

  ‘—the son of Astur, the King of all that Flies,’ finished the boy, his voice never faltering, but trembling now with rage.

  The crowd gradually fell silent.

  ‘And who might they be, Attila, son of Mud-Suck?’ asked Borus, sweeping his arm across his chest and bowing very low. The crowd began to laugh again. ‘They sound to me like names it’d be unkind to give a horse.’

  The crowd erupted with fresh laughter.

  ‘You aren’t descended from a horse, are you?’ he enquired. ‘You don’t look like - although as a matter of fact, now I consider, you do smell a little ripe and horse-like.’

  The boy’s trembling hand was clenched firmly round the handle of his knife. His feet did not stir, though an urgent voice in his head was telling him, Flee now! Drive your way through this mocking crowd and run like the wind, and never, ever look back. Or they will find you. They will come after you and they will find you.

  But his feet did not move, and his pride and anger boiled like lava within him.

  The crowd fell silent again, in expectation of further entertainment.

  ‘I am of royal blood,’ said Attila softly. ‘And I am bound for my homeland beyond the mountains. Now let me pass.’

  ‘The lad’s drunk!’ shouted an onlooker.

  ‘Mad, more like,’ said an old woman. ‘Mad as a sunstruck badger. Set the dogs on him, I say.’

  ‘Put him in the Circus,’ slurred another, before turning aside to vomit on someone else’s feet. A scuffle broke out, but most people’s attention remained on the strange, mad boy who thought he was a king.

  It was only because a fistful of mud hit Attila in the face that his ox-like antagonist got near him. One of the crowd had thrown it, and Attila turned his head in a fury to see who it was, wiping the mud from his face and his still-tender eye where Galla had slapped him only last night. Immediately, and with surprising swift
ness, the torchlit shadow of his huge opponent fell across him. Before he could move, Borus had picked him up in a single sweeping bear-hug, and raised him high above his head. The crowd bayed in delight as the man shook the boy violently.

  ‘Your Majesty!’ he cried. ‘Oh, your Sacred Majesty, oh, Attila, son of Mud-Suck, son of Udder, son of Turda, son of Arse-Lick - let me raise you high up above the level of the common herd, so that you may loftily survey your mighty kingdom! And then let me - but alas, alas, I have dropped Your Majesty in a horrible great puddle of blood! Oh woe is me, oh forgive me!’

  Attila lay stunned for a moment in the small quagmire of dust and goat’s blood while the crowd, growing in size all the time, jeered and laughed with the contagion of raucous herdlike delight. More onlookers spilt from the taverns round about, and the air was thick with dust and wine-fumes and scornful, jeering laughter.

  The boy looked up and around at their creased and wine-flushed faces with a black, scowling hatred. In his heart he cursed all Rome.

  Borus paraded around the natural ring of spectators like a Cypriot wrestler, flexing his biceps and smiling broadly. He didn’t notice the boy getting to his feet again, his hair matted with blood, his face streaked and his once-white tunic half torn from his back and thickly dyed a darkening red. He didn’t notice the boy reaching into his bloodstained tunic and producing a sharp knife with a rope-bound handle. He didn’t notice the boy stepping up behind him.

  But he did notice a sharp and agonising pain in the small of his back, and reeled round to see the boy standing facing him, knife held out in his right hand, his left hand splayed for balance and deflection.

  The laughter and smile froze on every watching face. Everything had suddenly changed. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  The man stared at the boy, in pain and astonishment more than anger. The very night was silent and watchful with fear.

  ‘Why, you . . . ’ he said shakily. He pressed his hand against the wound. It was in his kidneys. He reeled again. ‘You . . . ’

  He staggered towards the boy, but it was hopeless. The boy skipped out of his way with ease. Borus turned and reached a bloody hand towards him, more as if he were pleading than threatening.

  Attila stopped again and stared back at him. Then he turned and said to the crowd, softly, his voice never raised, his eyes scanning each of their horror-stricken faces, ‘If you do not let me go now, I will kill every one of you.’

  This time, they heard his words.

  The crowd - as many as fifty or a hundred people - seemed to be in collective shock. Absurd though the boy’s threat was, something about the way his alien, slanted eyes glittered in that barbaric, blue-scarred face, allied to the steadiness of his arm, which extended the short blade of the fruit-knife towards each of them turn, slowly revolving, silenced them all. There was something about him, as they said later . . .

  As the quiet, implacable force of his threat sank in, the crowd actually began to part before him, like the sea parting before the God-driven command of Moses. And there is no doubt that, incredible as it would seem, the boy would indeed have walked away from them at that moment, leaving his huge opponent kneeling in the dust, looking like a man who has just wrestled with an angel; like Jacob at the brook Jabbok, wrestling with his unknown antagonist blindly in the night, never knowing that his opponent was of God.

  But the uproar had by now come to the notice of the city guard, and as the sullen, bewildered crowd began to make way for the boy, a voice of a different stamp altogether rang out in the midnight air.

  ‘Clear the way there, clear the way! Come on, you drunken scum, get out of my way.’

  Sensing a different danger, the boy turned on his heel and held his dagger out again.

  The crowd parted, and there stood no drunken street-bully. There stood a tall, grey-eyed lieutenant in the chainmail uniform of one of the Frontier legions, with a ragged scar across his chin and a scornful smile playing on his lips. Behind him stood a dozen of his men.

  The lieutenant was surprised to find that the cause of all this ruckus was this one small, dusty, bloodstained boy.

  For a moment, the boy extended his knife-hand towards the soldiers themselves - all twelve of them.

  The lieutenant glanced at the crop-headed, tough-looking man by his side. ‘What do you reckon, Centurion?’

  The centurion grinned. ‘The lad’s got spirit, you’ve got to admit, sir.’

  The lieutenant looked back at the boy, his right hand resting easily on the pommel of his sword. He didn’t trouble to draw it, and when he smiled his eyes were as cold as ice.

  ‘Drop it, son,’ he said quietly.

  Attila returned his gaze for a moment. Then he sighed, straightened and dropped the knife at his feet.

  The lieutenant turned to his men. ‘You, Ops, Crates, tie him up, arms behind his back.’

  Still kneeling in the dust, Borus saw the boy being tied, and he relaxed, and felt his legs trembling, and then he stretched out his arms and fell, and lay in the dirt. His head was throbbing. He rolled half over. His mouth felt bitter, metallic, and his back felt strangely cold. He was bewildered. His eyelids kept drooping, he didn’t know why, and his limbs ached and tingled. He prayed. He could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs - or fluttering, rather, like a bird trapped and panicking in a bone cage. He gazed into the stars above and prayed to every god he could name. His eyesight blurred, and it seemed to him as if every star was growing into a radiant circle of light. He prayed to Mithras and to Jupiter and to Isis and to Christ and to the very stars themselves.

  The stars looked silently down.

  ‘And you,’ the lieutenant called to Borus, ‘get home to your wife. That wound needs seeing to.’

  Borus didn’t stir.

  One of the soldiers went over and knelt beside the fallen man and touched his fingertips to his neck. Then he stood up again. ‘He’s dead, sir.’

  ‘Why, you little—’ roared a man in the crowd, ‘I’ll—’

  Two soldiers blocked his way with crossed spears, and one knocked him sharply back with a kick to his midriff.

  But the crowd’s mood had turned ugly and belligerent.

  ‘You murdering swine!’ screamed an old woman.

  ‘Slit his dirty neck!’

  ‘String him up! Look at him, the little demon, look at that look in his eye! He’ll kill us all, give him half a chance!’

  Several women in the crowd crossed themselves. A man clutched the bluestone he wore round his neck to ward off the evil eye.

  The lieutenant regarded his captive. ‘You’re popular,’ he murmured.

  The boy glared up at him with such unabated ferocity that even the lieutenant was momentarily nonplussed. Then he demanded his name.

  The boy ignored him.

  ‘I asked you,’ repeated the lieutenant, leaning down, ‘what is your name?’

  Still the boy ignored him.

  From the angry crowd, a voice cried, ‘He said his name was Attalus or some such.’

  ‘Attalus, son of Turda, son of Arse-Lick,’ cried another.

  For the first time, the lieutenant noticed the blue scars on the boy’s cheeks, eerily visible in the sidelong torchlight.

  ‘Not . . . ?’ he wondered softly. He turned to his men. ‘Lads,’ he said, ‘I think we could be in for a little donative.’ He turned back to the boy. ‘Strip.’

  The boy didn’t stir.

  The lieutenant nodded, and one of his men stepped forward, gripped what remained of the boy’s tattered tunic at the neck, and ripped it down to the waist.

  The crowd gasped. They had never seen anything like it.

  The boy’s back was decorated with the most fantastic swirls and curlicues, weals and welts, some made by needles and blue ink, some more cruelly cut in with a knife and then sewn up with a horsehair in the wound to ensure that the scar remained bold and prominent. It was the way of the Huns.

  Not Attalus. Attila. The fugitive.

  Princess
Galla Placidia would be grimly pleased at his recapture. She seemed to have a strange obsession with the boy.

  ‘Well done, lads,’ said the lieutenant. ‘And the rest of you,’ he said, raising his voice again, ‘disperse. Or we’ll make you - which will hurt.’

  The crowd sullenly and reluctantly began to move away. One of them walked over to Borus and covered his face with a cloth.

  The lieutenant asked him if he knew the dead man. He nodded.

  ‘Then you’ll see to his corpse,’ he said.

  He turned back to his troop. ‘Right,’ he barked, ‘back to the Palatine. On the double.’

  ‘Word of advice,’ said the lieutenant affably as they marched back up the hill, the boy’s arms trussed tightly behind him like spatchcock chicken. ‘Next time you’re on the run, try not to attract so much attention to yourself by killing someone.’