Attila

by William Napier

  The lean, cruel-visaged bowsprit eased alongside, a slanted eye painted either side of the beaked prow like that of the silent sea-monster it was intended to represent. The Saxon longship sat lower in the water than the bulky merchant vessel, cutting barely a wave through the glassy sea.

  As they hove to and came alongside, the Saxons at least pulled in their vicious-looking iron-bound cathead: that deadly beam which projected sideways from the prow of a warship, and which could sweep close alongside any boat that was its prey and smash every oar to pieces as it passed.

  The Saxon captain called out a word or two, and the sharp-beaked corvus, or ‘raven’, slammed down from the back of the longship, its iron-toothed underside biting into the deck of the merchant vessel.

  The men lined up and began to cross, led by their burly captain swinging a hand-axe, when they suddenly stopped in bewilderment. Gamaliel was blocking their path, his yew-staff rooted firmly in the planking of the corvus. Only a fraction of a second before, they could have sworn they had seen the old man in the bow of the boat, but now here he was, his eyes boring into them with an intensity that made even these hardened sea-wolves falter. He thumped his staff down on the wooden planks.

  ‘Do not step aboard this ship,’ he said quietly. ‘Raise the corvus again, go back, and sail on.’

  Lucius stepped up beside him, his hand on the pommel of his sword, but Gamaliel ignored him.

  The captain gave a roar of laughter, but already there was a strange uncertainty in his eyes. ‘You’re in no position to give orders, old man. Now step out of the way or I’ll have you beheaded over the gunwale and your greybeard old head jammed on our bowsprit for decoration.’

  His men laughed, too. But their hearty laughter was drowned by the roar of Gamaliel’s voice, of such a volume that the laughter thinned out and died. Holding his staff out before him, the old man bellowed, ‘Then you are bound for Hell!’

  The captain reeled back, enraged both by the old man’s words and, even more, by the unsettling, indefinable aura of power that emanated from him. It should have been the easiest thing in the world simply to step up and lop the old fool’s head off with a single swing of his axe. And yet, and yet . . . he knew that he could not do it, and his heart burnt with rage at this unaccustomed feeling of powerless-ness.

  He shouted back, hearing even as he did so the weakness and irresolution of his voice compared to the bewildering storm-blast of the old man’s roar.

  ‘Vex me not with your talk of Christian punishments, old man. I would not so much as wipe my arse with the teachings of the Christians and their yellow-livered morality of slaves.’

  With that the Saxon began to advance, and something terrible happened. Gamaliel also advanced, taking a step towards him; and Lucius, close behind the old man, heard his footfall on the narrow planking. But it was not the light, tremulous footfall of an old man. It was more ominous than that, and far, far heavier than it should have been. The gangplank shivered under its weight.

  Lucius craned to look at Gamaliel, but only for a fraction of a second before he had to glance away again. Something in the old man had changed, which the soldier could barely comprehend and hardly wanted to. His blood ran cold. Even on the sea-air, he thought he could smell the odour of rank, carnivorous breath. Below the ship, the tall shadow of Gamaliel was cast across the water, broken and rippling on the waves. To Lucius’ horrified eyes, it looked less like the outline of a man than that of a monstrous, rearing bear . . .

  He stumbled back from the hulking, brooding shape that blocked the corvus, and his gaze fell on the Saxons opposite. He had never seen such expressions of blind fear, as they faced whatever it was that looked out at them from underneath the shadowy cowl of what had been Gamaliel. Their limbs rigid with terror, they started falling back, knocking into each other in their haste to retreat. Lucius, still unable to look directly at the massive shape before him, saw its shadow on the surface of the sea shrink back to resemble Gamaliel’s again, and he heard his voice once more, strong and calm.

  ‘Now, tell me: what of the Celtic slaves that were taken from the coast of Dumnonia in the summer? Whither were they bound?’

  The Saxon warlord was babbling with terror, forcing his way back onto his ship between his desperate men.

  ‘To Colonia Agrippina! All that batch went to Colonia Agrippina. You still get good prices on the Rhine.’ Then he turned back to his men and with a panic-stricken cry ordered them to raise the corvus and lower the sail. He gave no hint of direction, but there was no need. His men understood. Anywhere, anywhere away from this haunted and unholy vessel.

  Without another word the Saxon sea-wolves winched back the corvus, pushed off from the side of the merchant ship, and set their course nor’easterly with full sail. Not a man aboard dared look back. And at no point later that day, or in any of the days to come, did any of the Saxons dare to mention the subject of the weird old man again. For their hearts chilled within them at the memory of him, and the eyes of their minds were filled with images of terror.

  The Gwydda Ariana sailed east for the many mouths and sandbanks of the Rhine. Towards evening the last of the fogbanks finally lifted and the wind picked up again from the south-west, and they made good speed.

  Lucius sat in the prow of the boat, pretending to whet his sword-blade, but his strokes were listless and ineffectual. Gamaliel sat near him. After a while, seeing the terrible weight upon the young man’s shoulders, he said quietly to him, ‘In the world you shall have much tribulation. But be comforted: I have overcome the world.’

  Lucius stared at him wordlessly.

  ‘She is well,’ said Gamaliel softly. ‘She and the child will be well.’

  Lucius started. ‘How did you know what I was thinking about?’

  ‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ Gamaliel smiled. ‘Besides, if I had a wife such as yours, I’d be thinking about her all the time, too.’

  ‘Were you ever married, Gamaliel?’

  ‘Well, there was a young Athenian girl once . . . but her father disapproved of me. I was working as a nocturnal water-carrier at the time, studying philosophy by day at the Lyceum. Not the sort of husband he had in mind for his beloved daughter.’

  Lucius smiled vaguely. Here was his old, absent-minded friend Gamaliel again. And yet, and yet . . .

  At last he dared to ask, ‘Gamaliel, what happened back there with the Saxon pirates?’

  He knew he’d not get a straight answer, of course. And he didn’t.

  ‘Ah,’ said Gamaliel. ‘These powers pass through me, but they are not my powers. They only pass through me, like the wind through the leaves.’

  ‘Stop riddling. Whose powers?’

  ‘The one thousand and one names of the autumn wind in the leaves,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Now stop pretending to sharpen that sword and go to bed. We’ll be at the mouth of the Rhine by sunrise tomorrow.’

  The Gwydda Ariana set them down at a damp wooden trading station on the marshy banks of the Rhine delta, and soon after that they found a river-boat to take them south.

  They sailed upriver, through the great trading-city of Lugdunum Batavorum, and into Colonia Agrippina. There they questioned every slave-dealer they could find, and their hearts sank at the news. Many of the Celtic slaves from this summer’s raiding season had been bought by Frankish warriors newly enriched from their raids into Belgica and Gaul. But some of the Franks had been waylaid in their turn by warbands marauding in from the east. By eastern horsemen, on shaggy little steppe ponies . . .

  Gamaliel sat all night gazing into the fire, while Lucius slept fitfully, restless with despair.

  At dawn, the old man raised his head and said, ‘We go east.’

  They sailed on up the great Rhine river, through the grim frontier cities of Vangiones and Argentoratum, and on south. At last they disembarked upon the eastern shore, and crossed through the Alemanni’s wild country, which they called the Black Forest. Many were the dangers they faced and the hardships they endured there,
among the dark pines and in the sullen, smoky villages. But they set their faces grimly and went on, and came at last to the banks of the Danube, where they took ship again for the east: a river-barge taking Moselle wine down to Sirmium and the road to Epidaurus. At every encounter they questioned closely those they met, and most thought them mad to be trying to find a single slave somewhere in, or even beyond, the greatest empire known to man. But occasionally, just occasionally, they caught glimpses, heard echoes, and their hearts told them to press on.

  ‘We should never abandon hope,’ said Gamaliel.

  ‘Even though hope has long since abandoned us?’ said Lucius sourly.

  Gamaliel looked at him with a flash of anger in his eyes, and Lucius bowed his head, a little ashamed. Gamaliel often repeated the words of Christ, that despair was the greatest sin of all; but he had no need to repeat them now. Lucius remembered those strange and startling words, and said no more about abandoning hope.

  ‘I am not greatly interested in the finer points of philosophy and theology, as you know,’ said Lucius. ‘So-called wise men drowning in the swamp of their own words, words, words.’

  Gamaliel sighed. ‘I came to that conclusion myself a while back,’ he said. ‘I think it was when all Athens got excited over the logical paradox of the Pseudomenos - The Liar.’

  Lucius looked blank.

  ‘Quite,’ said Gamaliel. ‘That is to say: if I say, “I am lying,” then if I am lying, I am telling the truth. And if I am telling the truth, I can’t be lying. And yet if it is the truth, it must be true that I am lying. And yet again, if I am—’

  ‘Stop, for pity’s sake. My head’s hurting.’

  ‘Well, you see my point.’

  Lucius wasn’t sure he did, but he said nothing. He was used to the old vagabond’s ways, as rambling and discursive as his wanderings over the wide earth; and with their own kind of foolish, ungovernable wisdom, somewhere underneath the patched old cloak and the moth-eaten Phrygian cap.

  ‘My old friend Chrysippus,’ Gamaliel went on, ‘not a bad philosopher in his way - a Stoic, you know, and pupil of Cleanthes - wrote six books on the matter of the Pseudomenos. And another, Philetas, wasted himself to death with anxiety over it. I think it was then that I began to feel sceptical about the . . . the purely intellectual approach to life. There was much to be said for the more pragmatic wisdom of my old friend Crates. A sensitive young student of his, one Metrocles, once - there is no polite way of putting this - once broke wind thunderously in the agora one day, to the general mirth and ridicule of hundreds of his fellow citizens. They could be very cruel in their humour, those Athenians. They even began to suggest that he might have to quit Athens altogether in his shame, and nicknamed him μετρκληs μετκs.’

  Gamaliel chortled to himself, a little shamefacedly.

  Lucius looked unimpressed.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the old man. ‘It’s a Greek pun.’

  The soldier shrugged. ‘It’s all Greek to me. But - not wishing to be rude or anything - but does this story have a point, at any point?’

  ‘Ah, yes, well. You see. Now. So there’s Metrocles, covered in shame at having - emitted such a stercoraceous effluvium in this unfortunate manner. Fundamentally embarrassed, you might say!’ Again, Gamaliel chuckled. ‘So Crates, to show how ridiculous it is for any man to be ashamed of what is, after all, a perfectly natural bodily function, promptly devoured five pounds of lupins - which, as you know, are powerfully flatulofacient, if not downright poisonous - and went about eructating at all the greatest men of Athens for the next week. Metrocles saw the point, and ceased to feel any shame.’

  ‘Hm.’ Lucius still wasn’t quite sure that he saw the point.

  ‘Anyway,’ resumed Gamaliel. ‘Philosophy aside, you were wondering . . . what?’

  ‘I was thinking about what you said about hell: that a man may still be redeemed by good deeds, even a man such as that murderous Saxon there.’

  Gamaliel too grew serious. ‘How could eternal punishment treat with justice?’ he said gently. ‘I knew one of those theologians you speak of once - a man better than most, in fact. A neat little Egyptian; Origen, he was called. He is principally remembered now for having emasculated himself with a knife, the better to serve Christ.’

  ‘Idiot,’ said Lucius.

  Gamaliel ignored this untheological interjection. ‘He took the teachings of the Son of Man a little too literally, perhaps. But far more interesting was his own teaching on hell. He said that eventually, all would be forgiven. He said that even the Devil himself would one day repent, and his shriven soul be admitted to the mansions of heaven.’

  ‘Well.’ Lucius gouged his knife into the wooden bulwark of the boat. ‘I learn something new every day.’

  ‘Keep your eyes open and your heart humble,’ said Gamaliel, ‘and you will learn a thousand new things every day.’

  One morning, as they passed Augusta Vindelicorum on the southern shore, Gamaliel found Lucius staring down into the brown and turbid waters of the great river. When he raised his eyes, Gamaliel saw that they were bright with tears. The old man laid a hand on his shoulder to comfort him, but Lucius only shook his head and smiled and said he was not sure if he had dreamt it or not, but he thought he had heard a boy on the farther bank of the river whistling a certain tune. It was the same tune that Cadoc used to whistle every morning, as he pottered around in the yard at home, scattering meal for the chickens, or as he sauntered through the woods and fields of Dumnonia, hand in hand with his sister.

  Lucius looked up at Gamaliel. ‘Is it possible?’ he said. ‘That we are following even the trail of a song?’

  ‘Anything is possible,’ said Gamaliel, ‘except for a one-armed man to touch his elbow.’ He slapped Lucius jovially on the back. ‘Perhaps it has been laid down for us, even to follow a boy’s whistle.’

  Led thus by strange and unexpected clues, they followed the river east. To starboard lay the empire, and to port stretched the tribal lands of the north: the contested and warlike lands of the Hermunduri and Marcommanni, the Langobardi and Cattameni, and still other tribes whose names were yet unknown. They passed through the frontier towns of Lauriacum, Vindobona and Carnuntum, their mighty legionary fortresses rising sheer from the banks of the southern side, and they came to the great bend in the river where it turns south into Illyria, with the wild lands of Sarmatian Jazyges and then vast and unmapped Scythia beyond. There they disembarked, having heard another clue which seemed to Lucius both tantalising and terrible but barely seemed to surprise Gamaliel at all.

  ‘These things happen,’ he said equably.

  In a smoky wine-shop full of drunken frontier soldiery, they had heard a blind Scythian beggar singing a haunting tune. They questioned him, and found out his name, and heard that he had been blinded by his own people for spying on the king’s concubines when they were bathing. He had been driven out into the wilderness to die like an animal, but had found a refuge of sorts here in the borderland between Scythia and Rome, singing cracked tunes in taverns and brothels for coppers.

  Gamaliel and Lucius looked at each other over their cups of foul wine, and Lucius said he had had dealings with some of that tribe before.

  Gamaliel nodded. ‘So have I.’

  They tightened their belts, hitched up their packs, and set off across the grassy plains of Scythia, for the famed black tents of the most dreaded tribe of all.

  16

  THE LAST FRONTIER

  Throughout the heart of the bitter winter, Attila and Orestes struggled on through the towering white mountains of Noricum, lips chapped and bleeding, snowflakes on their eyelashes, their hands and feet bound with no more than rags. Whenever they found wild berries or trapped game, they divided every mouthful precisely between them, so that even if they were both slowly starving, they would at least starve at an equal rate. Every night, crawling into whatever shelter they could find or improvise - usually no more than a rough bivouac of silver fir branches - they unwrapped
the sodden cloths from each other’s feet, and rubbed life back into them. Then they slept side by side, shivering through the night. In the freezing dawn, their bodies were as stiff and unbiddable as old men’s. They said nothing, but each dreaded waking one morning to find the other dead. They both prayed that if one should die, the gods would take the other, too, in the same instant, to the sunlit lands beyond the dark river.

  One morning, as they brushed past under the low branches of a firwood, there came a soft, slithering sound from above, and an entire shelf of snow was dumped on Orestes’ head and shoulders. When he had pushed back his hood, and wiped the stinging snow from his eyes, Attila was grinning at him.

  ‘What are you grinning at, you idiot?’ he gasped.

  ‘It’s melting,’ said Attila, still grinning. ‘It’s thawing.’

  When Orestes understood what he was saying - that they had made it - they threw their arms round each other, and howled in triumph at the bare blue sky above, while more snow slithered from the branches of the silver fir above and fell upon them both. A cloak of soft white snow over their heads and about their shoulders, equally and without distinction.