Attila

by William Napier

  ‘Follow on, Attila, follow on,’ chanted the girl mockingly from somewhere ahead, deep in the darkness of the mountains. ‘For surely you will never follow another again! O leader, O conqueror, O great lord and king!’

  The boy did not reply, but followed as bidden.

  The walls of rock around him echoed to voices, the girl’s voice and manifold voices chanting in the same tone and time. They hailed him, the voices echoing from the dank walls of the mountains, in a tone that he feared, for there was both mockery and supreme knowledge in those chanting voices combined.

  ‘All hail, Attila, son of Mundzuk, Lord of All and None!’

  ‘O Lord of the World from the rising to the setting of the sun!’

  ‘The Eagle and the Serpent fought, and fell in Italy!’

  ‘O Lord of the World from the desert to the shores of the Western Sea!’

  The voices grew louder, echoing bewilderingly from every direction as he stumbled on, gritting his teeth in grim defiance, sometimes stumbling against the walls of the passageway and grazing his arms and legs against the cruel and jagged rocks, speckled with mica. His head spun with the words that tumbled in the dank air around him, but he was determined, as determined as ever, not to surrender to fear or force, or ever to halt or turn back.

  ‘In the time of the Seven Sleepers, Lord of All!’ cried the voices in deafening unison.

  ‘In the time of the shaking of the City of Gold, Lord of All!’

  ‘In the time of the Last Battle, Lord of All!’

  Abruptly the clamour of the voices died, and he saw ahead of him a cave, lit with flickering torches and with a low fire burning in the centre, and a single voice whispered in the air around him. The voice was soft and pitying and maternal, and his heart was torn by its sound, for something told him that it was the voice of his mother.

  ‘O Attila,’ whispered the woman’s voice, ‘O Little Father of Nothing.’

  The boy emerged shaken into the torchlit cave and found the young girl standing opposite him with both arms outstretched.

  She stepped across the fire to him and closed his eyelids with her thumbs. Then she leant close to him and spat once upon each eyelid. She took up a handful of ash from the edge of the fire, and blew it in his face. When he opened his eyes he was blind. He cried out in fear, but she only told him to sit.

  ‘Seeing eyes be blind, that blind eyes may see!’ she said harshly.

  Trembling with fear, but still determined neither to weep nor to flee, he sat awkwardly down on the hard stone ground. The air was filled with words, and his blinded vision was filled with images. Images of battle, of cities burning, and the thunderous sound of horses’ hooves on the plains. He started in shock when he heard the girl’s voice, for now it sounded as ancient and hoarse as if it came from the ancient Sibyl herself. As ancient as Tithonus, who asked for eternal life but not eternal youth, and was granted it, until he grew so old and tiny and withered that he was no more than a chirruping cricket in the grass.

  ‘I have more memories than a thousand years,’ croaked the voice.

  Even in the depths of the mountain, a soft whisper of wind seemed to sigh back among the rocks.

  The ancient voice in the cave said,

  ‘Four will fight for the end of the world,

  One with an empire,

  One with a sword,

  Two will be saved and one will be heard,

  One with a son

  And one with a word.’

  Although dizzy with fear and disorientation, Attila nevertheless felt a thrill of excitement run down his spine. He had a dim sense that he had heard these words before, though he could not remember where, and he found himself thinking of Aeneas’ journey to the underworld, which he had once studied wearily under the stern eye of his Greek pedagogue. Now he had the uncanny and terrifying sensation that Virgil’s great work was not merely poetry but history, and that the story had gone into reverse, falling backwards into chaos and the fiery abyss - and that he was part of it all . . .

  In perfect consonance with his thoughts, the cracked voice in the cave spoke again, saying, ‘They will call you Anti-Christus, the Scourge of God, but they do not understand. You are not Anti-Christ. You are Anti-Aeneas!’ She cackled madly, and told the boy to open his eyes. He did so, feeling the sticky mess of spittle and ash parting over his eyelids. And then his eyes flared wide with horror, as he saw the ancient thing that sat before him in that unhallowed cave.

  It was a haggard crone, toothless, blind and unimaginably old. Her ancient, clawed hands trembled in the firelight, and rheum ran from her blind white eyes and stained the furrows of her parchment cheeks like snailtrails. She wore tattered robes as grey as ash. She spat into her withered palms, and her spittle was as thick and black as tar. She looked up at him, and her watery old eyes gleamed sightlessly. ‘To build a new city you must first destroy the old!’ she cried. ‘But keep the stones perhaps for your foundations!’ She paused and when she spoke again her voice was more grave and rasping. ‘But remember this, and this above all.

  ‘By a King of Kings from Palestine

  Two empires were sown,

  By a King of Terror from the east

  Two empires were o’erthrown . . .’

  She leant forward, and scooped up some ash from the edge of the fireside. Through the dancing flames, her mouth made a toothless, lipless O.

  ‘Only youth is beautiful,’ she croaked, more softly. ‘But old age is sometimes wise.’

  She threw the ash back into the fire, and the cave filled with black smoke. Attila coughed and choked and scrambled to his feet, searching blindly for the exit. But it was useless. When the air cleared again and the torchlight gleamed once more through the dust, he saw only a young girl sitting cross-legged against the wall opposite, her head bowed, as if she were sleeping. Her hands rested tranquilly upon her knees, and they were the smooth, soft, delicate hands of a young girl.

  He snatched a torch from the wall, and turned and ran back along the passageway to the upper air.

  There was bright sunlight in the glade, and Orestes lay sleeping as peacefully as a little child. Attila shook him and he rubbed his eyes and stared around. When he remembered, a shadow passed over his face, but no more.

  He said to Attila, ‘Your face is a right mess. You need a wash.’

  Attila looked away.

  ‘Is she . . . Has she gone? And the voices?’

  Attila nodded. ‘They’ve gone.’

  Orestes tore up some grass. ‘What did you hear from them?’

  ‘Everything. And nothing.’

  Orestes got to his feet.

  Attila said, ‘We should move on.’

  As the two boys walked down the valley in the bright winter sunlight, the voices came to them again, sighing through the trembling aspen leaves by the dark and silent river.

  ‘We are the Music Makers,

  And we are the Dreamers of Dreams,

  Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

  And sitting by desolate streams;

  World-losers and world-forsakers,

  On whom the pale moon gleams:

  Yet we are the movers and shakers

  Of the world for ever, it seems.

  We, in the ages lying

  In the buried past of the earth,

  Built Nineveh with our sighing,

  And Babel itself with our mirth;

  And o’erthrew them with prophesying

  To the old of the new world’s worth;

  For each age is a dream that is dying,

  Or one that is coming to birth.’

  The boys said nothing to each other, as if neither of them had heard. They bowed their heads and walked on.

  At last they ascended out of the haunted valley, and began to climb a steep, rocky slope, into the high mountain passes. The slope caught the full force of the winter sun, and was hot even at this time of year, the air rising off the rocks and into the deep blue sky above. Attila paused for breath and gazed into
the Eternal Blue Sky, the home of Astur his father. And there hung a lammergeier: lamb-stealer, bone-breaker, greatest of all the European vultures, almost motionless on the thermals that arose from the sun-heated mountainside. His great wings outspread twelve feet or more, and his head turned slightly from side to side as he surveyed the world beneath him with his bright, fierce, fearless, all-conquering eyes. That god of the sky. That god-made Lord of the World, from the rising to the setting of the sun.

  O Little Father of Nothing . . .

  ‘Come on,’ called Orestes from ahead.

  What did it all mean? What did the gods want? Other than to be entertained, perhaps, by the sorrows and deaths of men?

  Attila lowered his gaze and looked ahead at his friend, and walked on.

  14

  THE LAST OF THE LEAVES

  On a gusty autumn day, Lucius led Tugha Bàn ashore at Noviomagnus, and went to the customs house. A few minutes later he returned and paid the captain in full for his passage. The captain grunted, bit the coins and slipped them into his leather purse. He wished the horse-lover well. The horse-lover wished him likewise and vanished into the crowds on the quayside.

  He rode west down to Dumnonia. The roads were still good, and he felt no fear of bandits. Here, on the far fringes beyond the empire, all seemed peaceful. Britain was returning to being no more than a fog-bound little island off the shoulder of Europe, forgotten and at peace. Lucius grinned to himself. It suited him well.

  The weather was mellow and there was soft autumn sunlight on the brambles and gleaming on the ripe clusters of blackberries and elderberries as he rode down the narrow lanes towards his own beloved valley, stretching down to the glittering silver sea. Tugha Bàn whinnied with delight, and her flanks rippled and quivered, as she smelt the familiar earth where she had been foaled. The soft autumn wind whispered through the oakwoods and the hazel stands and answered her whinnying with its own wordless rapture.

  At last he came to his long wooden house, and she appeared in the doorway in her plaid apron, and everything slipped from his grasp, every stern control and strong reserve. He practically fell from his horse, in most ungainly and unsoldierly fashion, and by the time he had found his feet she had flown across the farmyard, faster than it was possible for any woman to move. But her feet did not need to touch the ground. She flew like a homing swallow through the air. Then they were in each other’s arms, and it would have been impossible for even the strongest team of horses to pull them apart.

  It was many long minutes before the sounds they made to each other made any sense or formed into words, and many of these were repetitive sounds, murmuring echoes: each other’s name, repeated over and over again, as if to confirm the miracle of their being there together; and the soft Celtic word ‘cariad’, whispered time and time again between their kisses.

  ‘Ciddwmtarth, cariad . . .’

  ‘Seirian, cariad . . .’

  At last they stood back from each other, unable to let go of each other’s hands, but able at least to look into each other’s eyes without their own eyes blurring, or needing to cling to each other again.

  Over her shoulder he saw a little girl with big dark eyes and a mop of dark curls, peeping out of the doorway shyly at him. It was Ailsa. He went to pick her up, but she ran from him. He laughed and turned back to Seirian, and froze to the spot. Her expression . . .

  ‘What is it?’ he demanded. And then ‘Where is Cadoc?’

  She crumpled into his arms again, but this time there was no joy or peace in it at all.

  They sat late into the night by the light of one flickering tallow candle, their hands entwined, and their hearts finding some comfort in the steady, childish breathing of Ailsa nearby in her wooden bunk.

  The candle flickered dangerously, and they dreaded it. They dreaded it going out in front of them, and both prayed in their hearts that it should keep burning for ever. Seirian felt the guilt within her, weighing her down with a great grey weight inside. And Lucius felt repeated surges of red anger, which he shoved back down indignantly: ridiculous and shameful anger, as if his wife were somehow to blame for what had happened. They tried to talk, in stumbling, broken sentences.

  ‘I did write,’ he said, ‘but . . .’

  ‘The cursus is finished,’ she said. ‘Not even Isca gets letters now, they say.’

  ‘But you knew I’d come back.’

  She nodded. ‘I always knew. I’d have known if anything had happened to you.’

  He felt stung and angry afresh. Why had he not felt what had happened to Cadoc? But that was the difference between men and women, he thought. Women were linked by silver threads, more fine than spiders’ silk, to all those they truly loved. Men had no such threads; or if they had, the threads withered and fell away with indifference; or men broke them irritably, feeling their responsible weight as something far heavier and more restrictive and punishing than the light gossamer silk that women felt. To women, those threads were as sweet a burden as a baby in the womb.

  ‘About two months ago,’ she said, ‘you were very ill. I trembled all night, and in the morning my back was covered in weals.’

  He nodded. The night he had been beaten in the cells of the Imperial Palace. But he would tell her nothing of that. ‘I am well now,’ he said.

  ‘And will you go away again?’

  ‘I will have to go away again,’ he said.

  She nodded and looked down and tears fell to her apron.

  ‘But at last I will be back,’ he said. ‘We will be back.’

  She nodded. ‘And we will wait for you both.’

  They slept in each other’s arms all night, clinging together in silent desperation, and feeling the dark space between them that was their vanished son. An aching void which could not be ignored or filled.

  Lucius arose before dawn and climbed the hill behind the cottage. Mercury, herald of the sun, hung like a tiny lamp in the eastern sky, and he knew that Britain was not simply a peaceful, isolated, fog-bound and forgotten island off the shoulder of Europe. For history and the world would keep breaking in; and there wasn’t a tribe in all the world, not even in the remotest mountains of Scythia, which did not know the weapons of war.

  Tugha Bàn stood peacefully asleep in the paddock behind the cottage, a grey ghost. Lucius felt an overwhelming sense of all the other lives that had been lived in this valley, all the other joys and tragedies of the families who had farmed this land and loved these hills and woods. And of all the people, all the parents and children to come, in the next hundreds and even thousands of years, with their new languages and their strange gods. His mind reeled at the thought. So many people, so many stories, and none of them would leave behind more than a scratch upon the earth of Dumnonia, a six-foot scratch in the rich red earth. And that, too, would soon be grown over and forgotten.

  His mind came back to the present, and the all-consuming now that must be lived in and embraced for everything it was. Every moment was miraculous, a wise man had once said to him, no matter how terrible. Life itself was a miracle. The sun showed a gold rim over the horizon, its light coursing along the tops of the oak trees on the ridge like molten gold, and he raised his face to its distant heat and prayed for help. He prayed to the unknown rulers of the universe for help in this time of sorrow and direst need.

  When help came, it came not as a radiant young god in a chariot of the sun, riding down from the heavens; nor as a white-robed goddess, stepping silently through the trees towards him in her golden sandals. It came in the form of a mere mortal: a battered old man in a moth-eaten Phrygian cap, who marched doggedly up over the crest of the hill from the north, with a twisted old yew-staff rapping along the flint-strewn chalk-track as he walked.

  Lucius stared, his prayer barely out of his mouth. ‘It can’t be,’ he whispered.

  The figure came closer. An old, old man with a long grey beard, but nevertheless walking vigorously now that he was on the downward slope, with long, rangy strides, as fitted his frame,
which was a lean and sinewy six feet or more. Apart from the knobbly yew stick he clutched in his right hand, he went unarmed. But even his walk had an unmistakable stamp of authority and purpose. And then he raised up his face when still afar off, and Lucius thought he even saw the twinkle in those deep-set, hawk-like eyes.

  ‘Gamaliel,’ he whispered.

  The old man saw Lucius and smiled. They clasped each other’s arms.

  ‘Lucius,’ said Gamaliel.

  ‘Old friend,’ said Lucius.

  Gamaliel smiled, but Lucius was too overwrought to do more than stare, and cling.

  Seirian appeared. The old man embraced her and kissed her, and held her back from him and gazed at her from under his bushy grey eyebrows.

  ‘Ah Seirian, Seirian, fair maid in a million,’ he sighed. ‘If only I were a few centuries younger . . .’