Attila

by William Napier

  ‘You leave my wife alone,’ said Lucius.

  Gamaliel leant forwards and gave her another kiss on the cheek and then stood tall again. ‘I’m more than a little peckish,’ he said. ‘Do you have any oats simmering away? You know how I like my porridge.’

  Seirian stoked up the fire in the hearth and set milk-and-water to simmer, stirring in fine oatmeal when it began to steam. They sat with steaming bowls of porridge on their laps, the porridge running with thick yellow cream, and ate in companionable silence. The winter birds twittered in the bare branches outside, hopping from twig to twig and coming down into the yard to peck for scattered meal.

  Eventually they set their bowls aside, and Lucius and Seirian between them told Gamaliel as much as they could.

  He nodded. ‘We will find him. We must.’

  ‘But how?’ asked Lucius. ‘Where do we begin?’

  Gamaliel, typically, did not answer the question directly. ‘We begin where we begin. But we will find him. I feel it in my water.’ He looked especially grave. ‘I read it in the patterns of my porridge.’

  Lucius couldn’t help grinning. Gamaliel the wise man, older than the green hills of Dumnonia. Gamaliel the hooded and cloaked wanderer of the wilderness, the great traveller and sea-voyager, who had been as far as the fabled Empire of China and back, so they said. Gamaliel, who had lived for a thousand years or more, and talked calmly and inscrutably of how he had known Julius Caesar, and how the great dictator used to cheat at draughts; or spoke of Socrates’ rather unpleasant personal habits, as if he had known him personally; and even of Alexander the Great, and how he had been his tutor, ‘and a far more useful one to him than that old Stagirian pedant Aristotle. Do you know, he once tried to persuade me that if a camel mated with a panther it would produce a giraffe? Preposterous!’

  Gamaliel the story-teller, riddle-maker, joker, trickster, and holy fool, who wore his wisdom as lightly as his moth-eaten Phrygian cap.

  ‘Now then,’ said Gamaliel, settling back. ‘I believe you have the last of the Sybilline Books.’

  Lucius gaped at him. He had almost forgotten the scrap of parchment that General Stilicho had given him. It seemed so long ago. ‘How in the Name of Light do you know that?’

  ‘I know everything,’ said Gamaliel mildly. ‘Well, almost everything. Everything that is worth knowing, at any rate. Unlike that logic-chopping, platitudinous dolt Aristotle of Stagira, with his ridiculous genera and his probabilistic enthymemes—’

  ‘Look, leave your dead Greek philosophers out of this, will you?’

  Gamaiel harrumphed and crossed his arms. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘You do have the last of the leaves, I trust?’

  Lucius nodded. ‘But what has this to do with finding my son?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Everything.’ He laid his hand on Seirian’s arm and said gently, ‘Now, my dearest, tell me everything that happened.’

  She took a deep, brave breath and began.

  She had been sitting on the beach with Ailsa, looking for seashells, when the Saxons came. Cadoc was out in his beloved little coracle, the tiny hazel frame covered with freshly tarred oxhide and rather grandly named the Seren Mâr, the Star of the Sea. He was letting down freshly baited lines and hauling in mackerel, as obliviously happy as only a busy boy can be, when his mother shaded her eyes and looked to the clear horizon, and saw a square sail bellying in the southerly wind. She watched it for some time as it came closer, and when it was only a mile or two offshore and closing fast she saw that the device on the sail was no eagle, as she had thought, but a crudely stitched wolf in black.

  In an instant she was on her feet with Ailsa in her arms, screaming to Cadoc to come in. In her desperation and terror, it seemed to her that the boy moved terribly slowly, reeling in his last line, looking back over his shoulder in some alarm, but not enough, never enough. The young never fear the world enough, and the old fear it too much.

  Seirian had to make the most dreadful of choices: whether to take to the hills and the woods at once, hand in hand with Ailsa, or to stand and wait in agony while her eleven-year-old son rowed slowly in to shore, and to risk all three of them being captured, or worse. She chose to flee with Ailsa, praying to the gods that her sharp-witted son would make good his escape. She was halfway up the west cliff towards the dense hazelwoods when the Saxon pirates’ ship crashed onto the beach, its cruelly beaked prow cutting into the shingle as a sword would cut through the edge of a poor man’s shield.

  Their first sport was to catch the young Celtic lad who was scrambling up the beach ahead of them, having stopped to tie his coracle to a keg-post in case of summer storms. How the Saxons laughed. They slashed the oxhide of the coracle into ribbons with their great longswords as they ran past, and they caught the boy at the top of the beach, knocked him to the ground with their cowhide shields, and shoved him headfirst into a hessian sack. They tied him up in the sack like a trussed fowl, and left him screaming there on the beach, while they roared on into the village to see what they could find.

  They found a woman at a quern and her daughter salting fish nearby, and they raped them both, but they killed only the mother. They took the daughter with them, bleeding, bound and gagged. They killed a family in another longhouse up the valley, and slew all their cattle, but took one young heifer for meat aboard ship. They burnt a couple more houses, and a Christian chapel - they hated Christians and their pious houses. That done, rather disconsolately, with only a single noisy heifer and a couple of slaves to show for all that effort, they made their way back to the beach and pushed off into the small waves of the Celtic Sea, tacking eastwards for another raid further up the coast of the white cliffs.

  When at last Seirian had finished, Gamaliel let go of her hand and stood up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Seirian, my dearest, we should walk.’

  Lucius stood up, too.

  Gamaliel shook his head. ‘You stay here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Lucius indignantly.

  ‘When we are gone,’ said Gamaliel, ‘take the last of the leaves, and learn everything that is there. Learn it all.’

  ‘Learn it?’ repeated Lucius. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘For the sake of the future,’ said Gamaliel. Then he smiled, at his most infuriating and enigmatic, and chanted in a low, soft voice,

  ‘“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.
<
br />   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 of 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.