Attila

by William Napier

  Soon they came down into the thinner snow-covering of the lower slopes, which in the summer would be the higher pastures for the sleek brown cows of that country. They even found the first raw shoots of greenery, and chewed the sprigs of yarrow and salad burnet that peeped from the long-hidden grasses. But though they no longer had to fight the bitter cold at every step, there were more villages now, more people to be avoided, more dogs set barking as they passed by in silence and darkness.

  After some days they passed along the ridge of hills to the north of the great lake of Balaton, and that evening they came down to its tranquil shores. Attila fixed up a wooden pole with some barbs cut from bone, and went gaffing for trout in the shallows. They baked the trout on hot stones and gorged until they could eat no more.

  Later that night, as he did every night, Orestes went a little way away among the trees, knelt down, leant his forehead against a cold, mossy trunk, and prayed for the soul of his departed sister. Then he returned to the campfire, his face alight and glowing, both radiant and calm, as if he had received comfort and solace even from the cold and glittering silence of the sky.

  They came to the gates of the city of Aquincum, and the bored vigiles, the nightwatchmen, allowed them entry without a word. Two ragamuffins from the country come to sell their paltry, stolen wares, or maybe themselves, who knew?

  The boys, of course, had come to Aquincum not to sell but to steal. They were nearly free, but still they had the great barrier of the Danube to cross. For that they hoped they could steal a boat or a raft, or perhaps stow away aboard a merchantman bound for one of the logwood trading-stations on the other side. And for that they needed to get down to the quayside.

  Aquincum was a grim little frontier town of timber and mud, with the stone frontier fort of the legion rising at one corner, near the river. The narrow streets stank of the shambles where the animals were driven in and slaughtered, of open drains, of the pigs crowded together in filthy backyards, and of the charcoal furnaces of begrimed and weary-looking coppersmiths working late.

  Approaching down the cobbled street was a group of drunks. So close to their longed-for goal, the boys had grown careless. Attila especially, feeling his princely blood stirring as he got closer to his homeland, and thinking of the astonished delight that would receive him amid the tents of his people, had grown proud and reckless. So when one of the drunks bumped into him, deliberately or not, he reacted as no fugitive and secret traveller should. For he had been in this situation before.

  ‘Hey, you fat oaf,’ he shouted, ‘watch yourself!’

  Suddenly the group of drunks didn’t seem so drunk. Rather more orderly, though the wine on their breath still stank, the five of them halted.

  ‘What did you say?’ demanded one.

  Orestes, standing a little way behind, glimpsed a flash of something beneath the man’s coarse woollen cloak. Something like steel, something like plate armour . . .

  Before he could stop himself, he cried out, ‘Attila!’

  Whatever fumes of wine had slowed the men’s minds and made unsteady their steps, vanished in an instant.

  The man wheeled on Orestes. ‘What did you call him?’

  Orestes began to back away, his face a torment of fear and guilt. ‘My master, my master,’ he groaned softly, ‘come away. Run away . . .’

  But the older boy’s hand was already reaching inside his ragged cloak, and he knew that everything they had travailed and suffered for, over so many weeks and months, would end now, in a damp and dismal backstreet of Aquincum.

  The drunks were clearly no drunks at all, but a squad of tough frontier troops who had merely thrown back a few goblets of wine to help their supper go down. Furthermore, they were led by a keen-witted optio who actually read the despatches from legionary headquarters in Sirmium, and knew that the whole of this stretch of the river was under orders to be on the lookout for a fugitive Hun boy with distinctive blue tattoos and scars on his cheeks. A prince of the royal house of King Uldin, and a most valuable hostage. A boy called—

  Attila’s sword was only half out of his scabbard when the optio placed two meaty hands on his shoulders and slammed him back against the wall of the gloomy street.

  ‘You, boy,’ he rasped, ‘your name?’

  Attila said nothing, his slanted yellow eyes glittering.

  The optio was about to rip the felt cap from the boy’s head, when he seemed to give a slight lurch backwards.

  ‘Sir?’ asked one his men, moving towards him.

  The optio fell backwards into his soldier’s arms, staring wildly up at the sky, black blood gushing from his gaping, wordless mouth and over his stubbled chin.

  And then Attila, the bloody sword still in his hand, was running down the street, dragging an open-mouthed Orestes after him. The soldiers’ wild shouts echoed from the high walls of the dank little street, and their hobnailed sandals rang on the cobbles as they pounded after them.

  The boys twisted and turned through the narrow backstreets and shadowy courtyards of the town, trying to find their way to freedom, which had seemed so close.

  ‘If we’re caught,’ panted Orestes, ‘you will . . . won’t you?’ He drew his hand across his throat. ‘I’m not—’

  ‘Save your breath,’ said Attila harshly.

  They pressed into the shadows of a wall behind some columns as the soldiers clattered past, their lungs aflame as they held their breath tight. Once the soldiers had gone, their breath exploded outwards and Orestes collapsed to his knees.

  ‘On your feet,’ hissed Attila.

  ‘Can’t,’ wheezed Orestes. ‘Just another—’

  ‘What happens to runaway slaves?’ demanded Attila cruelly. ‘Hands off? Eyes out?’

  Orestes shook his head. ‘Please,’ he whispered.

  Attila grabbed his arm and hauled. ‘Then on your feet, soldier. We’re nearly there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The quayside.’

  ‘How do you know which way?’

  Attila eyed him in the darkness. ‘Because land slopes down to a river, muttonbrain. Now let’s go.’

  They ran on, downhill through the streets wherever possible, until at last they could hear water lapping against wooden barques and wharves, and smell the damp, pervading smell of the mile-wide river. Rats scurried in the darkness. The boys slid out between two huge wooden wharves and saw the gleam of the Danube. On their side, occasional lights and torches burnt from the churches and wealthier houses of the city, but on the eastern bank and beyond . . . nothing. Not a light showed from the black plains out there. Overhead, the uninterrupted, silvery shimmering of the Milky Way, the brilliant winter stars of Orion’s belt, and gleaming Sirius, the Dog Star, bringer of storms, rising and burning more brightly than any earthly light.

  ‘There,’ breathed Attila. ‘There.’

  They slipped down to the quayside and saw not a soul about. A cat mewed on one of the tethered grain-barges where it had been ratting, and eyed them pitifully and crept away. They approached the barge. It might be big enough for them to hide aboard somewhere, under some filthy and neglected canvas, or even inside a stinking coil of sodden rope.

  There came the sound of horses’ hooves in the night, and they froze. Torchlight gradually spread along the ground from round the corners, and at last, at either end of the quay, they saw troops of frontier cavalry, as many as forty or fifty men. Attila, still clutching Orestes’ arm, made to run for the wooden quayside and hurl them both into the river. But a pair of cavalrymen spurred instantly into a gallop, and one hurled a Batavian net over the boys. They stumbled and fell, struggling as helplessly as flies in a web.

  They were dragged to their feet and struck sharply across the face for good measure.

  The commanding officer, evidently senior, with cropped white hair and a brutal, unflinching stare, ripped Attila’s cap from his head and ran his stubby fingers over the welts of the boy’s tattooed cheeks.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Attila. You have c
ome a long way.’

  The boy spat in his face. The officer instantly struck him, so hard that his head spun round and he reeled back. But he did not fall. The officer was surprised. Such a blow would have felled most grown men. When Attila’s head had cleared enough for him to see again, he stepped back in front of the officer and stared him in the eye.

  Wiping the spittle from his face, the officer nodded at Orestes. ‘And who’s he?’

  Attila shrugged. ‘No idea. Just some hanger-on. Pain in the arse.’

  Orestes said nothing, but as he was dragged away by two guards his eyes never left the sullen, unsmiling figure of Attila.

  ‘Give him a good kicking and throw him out of the city gates,’ said the officer. He paid no further attention to Orestes. All his attention was on Attila, and all his thoughts were of imperial gratitude, of speedy promotion, of donatives of silver and gold and finest Samian ware . . .

  ‘Manacle him hand and foot,’ he said at last, ‘and bring him to the fort. No more beating - I want some answers from him. This one knows more than he lets on.’

  Orestes lay gasping in the mud for some time, he didn’t know how long. When he tried to stir, he ached all over. His arms and shoulders felt bruised to the bone, and one flank hurt deeply every time he took in a lungful of air. His buttocks almost cramped with pain, his legs, his feet . . . Even the roots of his hair still stung, where he had been wrenched about by the guffawing soldiers.

  Worse than all this, his heart ached with loss. Attila had been everything to him. He had never felt so utterly alone in his life.

  At last he crawled to his feet and walked slowly away from the city, to the open fields alongside the river. The river was so wide, so dark. He could never swim it. He limped on through the night until he came to a creek. And there among the reeds and the nodding bulrushes, miraculously, tied up to a half-rotting landing-stage, was an ancient wooden boat with a single wooden oar lying in it, gently sliding to and fro in the wash from the river. They needn’t have bothered with Aquincum.

  Orestes crept down to the creek, and a surprised moorhen erupted from the reeds and beat away across the dark river, setting his heart thumping anew with fright. He stepped painfully into the boat. It was taking in water slowly, an inch or two swilling muddily in the bottom, and it stank of old fish. It would be no easy matter to move and steer the boat with a single oar, and maybe bail, too, with only his cupped hands, across a mile of the great flowing river. But it was a boat, for all that, and a boat meant freedom.

  He squatted in the bottom of the boat, the muddy water oozing over his bandaged toes, clutched the end of the flatboard oar, and brooded. That stinging denial of Attila’s, was, he knew, his salvation. That was why he sat here now, on the verge of reaching freedom in the ungoverned lands on the farther shore. While the tattooed boy who called himself a prince was incarcerated in a locked and bolted dungeon reeking of ordure, somewhere back in the city, being ‘questioned’ by his unsmiling captors.

  Orestes looked up at the clear winter stars. Did they care what happened to him or the other boy? Did they care what he did next? Did it matter if they cared or not? When he looked down the stars still shimmered at him inescapably from the surface of the black water. They would not leave him alone.

  At last he sighed, laid the oar down against the side of the boat, and stepped painfully back out onto the slimy bank of the creek. He crept up through the reeds and the galingale, and limped slowly back towards the city.

  Attila was manacled hand and foot, as the burly white-haired officer had ordered, and half dragged, half carried up a narrow, spiralling stone staircase to a small upper room with a single, strongly barred window. There he was set down upon a stool, and two guards stood by him with spears set firmly in front of his darting eyes.

  After a few minutes, fresh from his dinner, the white-haired officer came strolling in and ordered the door to be shut behind him. He was still mopping his mouth with a linen napkin, and his demeanour was more relaxed now that he had a bellyful of food and wine.

  ‘Just wait till my people hear how I have been treated,’ hissed Attila, before the officer could say a word. ‘Just wait till my grandfather Uldin hears. He will not endure such an insult to his blood.’

  The officer raised an eyebrow. ‘Who says he will ever hear of it? You are escaping no further now. Your next stop, and your place of residence for a long, long time to come, will be the imperial court at Ravenna.’

  ‘Never,’ said Attila. ‘I will die first.’

  ‘Spoken like a man,’ said the officer. Despite himself, he was beginning to admire, or at least enjoy, the lad’s sheer, naked ferocity. As one might enjoy the spectacle of a wolf-fight in the arena.

  ‘Neverthless,’ he went on, ‘that is where you are bound - and with the agreement of your people, don’t forget. You are a hostage. It is all a perfectly civilised arrangement.’

  ‘Civilisation,’ spat the boy. ‘I’ve been there before. Give me anywhere else but civilisation.’

  The boy and the man eyed each other in silence for a while. Then the boy looked away.

  The officer said, ‘I have never been far beyond the river. Just the occasional punitive expedition when the Alamanni or the Marcomanni have got uppity. Tell me about your country beyond.’

  My country? thought Attila. How would you understand my country? You Roman, with your mind as straight and unwavering as a road? How to describe to you, you oaf, my beloved country?

  He took a deep breath, pulled at his cruel wrist-manacles, and settled his hands in his lap. He said, ‘My country is a land without boundaries or frontiers or armies. Every man there is a warrior. Every woman is the mother of warriors. Cross the grey Danube and you are in my country, and you may ride for weeks and months and never leave it. There is nothing there but the green, green grassland of the steppe, feathergrass and hare’s-tail grass as far as the eye can see. As far as the eagle flies, a hundred days’ riding eastwards into the rising sun, it is still the green grassland of my country.’

  ‘You have an active imagination, boy.’

  Attila ignored him. He could no longer see him, or even the dank walls of the dungeon around him. He could see only what he described.

  ‘In March,’ he said, ‘the grasslands flash young and green like the kingfisher’s breast on the Dnieper. In April they are purple with saxifrage and vetch, and in May they are yellow, like a brimstone’s wings. There, many days’ riding beyond the steppes, which are a thousand times the size of your empire, with never a fence or a barrier or a plot of land that is owned or fenced in, nothing to stop you galloping all day and all night, as far as you want, as if you and your horse were flying . . . There, there is a freedom such as no Roman has ever known.’

  The officer stood very still. The two guards did not move. They listened.

  ‘Beyond the steppes, there rise the white mountains, where the souls of the holy men are fed when they go to dream and commune with the ancestors. Beyond the black waters of Lake Baikal, and the Snow Mountains, and the Blue Mountains, are at last the Altai Mountains, the soul and navel of the world, where all men must go who would be wise or powerful. The high Altai are seen for many days’ riding, high over the plains and the eastern deserts. They are the home of all magicians, all shamans and holy men, and all who hold converse with the Eternal Blue Sky since time began. They say that even your god Christ walked there, in the time before his time of sacrifice.’

  He fell silent. It was blasphemy that he had spoken. He would say no more, for even to talk of the Altai was treachery to any who did not know.

  After a long pause, the officer said quietly, ‘And I always heard that the Huns had no poetry.’

  ‘The Huns have poetry,’ said Attila indignantly, ‘but they entrust it not to paper but to memory. All that is holiest and most dangerous is entrusted to memory alone.’

  The officer was silent again for a while. Then he nodded to the two guards and they opened the door. With a sombre tread he w
alked from the room, and left the boy to his dreams of his unknown country.

  Attila lay on his side on the lumpy straw pallet, comfort impossible with his arms wrenched behind him and his wrists manacled. They had said he would be unmanacled tomorrow. But tomorrow was tomorrow.

  He could see the bright winter stars through the bars of iron: green and twinkling Vega low on the horizon, and Arcturus, and brilliant Capella. And then he heard the high, distant cry of a sparrowhawk. It came from far below, near the ground, which was wrong, and in the middle of the night, which was even more wrong. A sparrowhawk’s cry, like that of all birds of prey, was a cry of power and triumph, as it wheeled high in the sky in the bright day, and surveyed all the earth below it as its kingdom. He tensed and strained his ears, and after a while the cry came again. Not a real sparrowhawk: it couldn’t be. It was a boy with a shiny blade of grass trembling between his taut thumbs . . .