Attila

10

It was no more than a circle of wooden huts round a well, with a big haybarn to one side and an ancient timber longhouse to another. His ears had heard aright: there was laughter and song, and they came from the longhouse.

He tethered his horse in the shadows at the edge of the wood, and crept over to the longhouse. Pulling himself up on an upended chopping block, he craned to see through the open window.

Inside a feast of abundance met his eyes. His stomach felt more pitifully hollow than ever, and his mouth flooded with forlorn expectation. Within the building sat the entire population of the village, as many as a hundred peasants with rubicund faces, laughing and singing, drinking and gorging themselves in celebration, by the light of a score of rush torches. It was too late for the harvest celebrations, surely; but in the country districts, it was well-known that an excuse was found for a drunken celebration at least once a week, especially as the year sank into the gloomier months of winter.

Clay wine pitchers were being passed around, and flat osier baskets piled high with rolls of coarse but wholesome bread. Two great pigs, fattened up beautifully on the acorns that they had foraged in the oakwoods in the hills for the past few weeks, were turning golden-brown and shiny with fat on the blackened iron spits. The face of the gasping turnspit at their side was almost as golden-brown and greasy as they, but he was grinning from ear to ear at the thought of all that delicious roast pork to come, the flesh juicy and slightly nutty to the taste.

Huge bowls of clay or olivewood bore mounds of steaming winter vegetables, roast parsnips and turnips, roast chestnuts, winter kale, bowls of lentils cooked with soft goat’s cheese, various kinds of cured hams and sausages, roast and boiled partridge and pigeon from the woods, and after that apples, pears, apricots and plums in abundance, their skins shining plumply in the torchlight.

Suddenly the barn door beside him flew open, and the boy froze. There appeared a plump, middle-aged woman, wheezing out in the cold night air, her face glowing with good food and rather too much wine. Oblivous of the boy standing as still as a statue on the chopping block, she leant one hand against the barn wall, squatted down, hitched up her voluminous skirts, and began to pee noisily. When she had finished, she wiped herself with the hem of her skirts, and heaved herself upright. Only when she turned round did she see the boy frozen there, and give a little gasp of fright.

‘Jove bless us and save us, I thought you was a robber or something.’ She peered at him more closely. ‘What you doing out on a raw night like tonight?’ She pushed his shoulder and turned him to face her. ‘Looking hungrily in at our feast like a wolf off the hills, are you? Or maybe eyeing our young daughters – though you hardly look old enough for that kind of caper.’ And she gave a great belly laugh.

Attila had already decided he would neither fight nor flee, but wait and see what happened. And sure enough, after a moment’s thought, the woman said, ‘Well, you best come in and have some of ours, anyhow. Wouldn’t do to have a lonely traveller turned away from our door on a night like this. We’d soon be hearing the drums of You-Know-Who in the hills.’

And with that mysterious deprecation, she laid her plump hands on his shoulders and propelled him inside.

The assembled company looked curiously, some even suspiciously, at this newcomer with his hair tied up in a barbaric top-knot on the crown of his head, his slanted, glittering yellow eyes that gave away nothing, and his scarred and tattooed cheeks the colour of the night-sky. Several of them speculated about his origins, right under his nose.

‘He’s from the hills,’ said one, ‘from the south. Full of belly and empty of head, they say.’

‘No, he’s no Sabine,’ scoffed another. ‘He’s from the east, from the marshes. Look at his fingernails. He’s a fish-eater, morning, noon and night.’

Attila himself said nothing, and no one thought to ask him directly.

Another speculated that he might be from further south still. From Sicily, even.

‘Sicily?’ cried the first. ‘Hark at him, Sicily, indeed! What did he do, swim here?’

And after that, no one seemed to mind much where he came from, as long as he accepted their endless proferrings of meat, and bread, and wine, and more meat, and more wine…

The woman who had brought him in from the cold sat him between herself and a girl she said was her daughter, a well-fed, rosy-cheeked girl of about seventeen or eighteen. Not only was she better-fed than the wretched starvelings in the city but, like all the people here, she was also purer-skinned and brighter-eyed. Her light brown hair was drawn back from her brow with a ribbon of plain white wool, and she wore a simple white woollen tunic belted round the middle. The front of the tunic was deeply slashed, showing her plump young breasts and the shadowy cleavage between. The boy kept his eyes shyly fixed upon the food in front of him.

‘I know, she does show them off doesn’t she?’ cried the girl’s mother, seeing his discomfiture with great amusement.

‘Mother!’ said the girl.

Beyond this girl sat another, rather thin and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes. She said nothing, but Attila felt her gaze upon him, and once or twice he glanced along at her. Eventually he smiled, and she smiled back. Then she looked shy again and turned away.

‘Fresh meat, y’see,’ leered the old man across the table with the spittled mouth and the unshaven chin. ‘All the girls’ll be after you this e’en. Nice bit of fresh meat in the village. Who’d want an old smoke sausage like I, when there’s a nice bit of fresh meat going begging!’

The woman squeezed Attila’s thigh under the table, and said, ‘How old are you, boy?’

‘Fourteen. Fifteen this snowfall.’

‘I know what you’re thinking, you little wanton,’ she scolded, leaning across and slapping her daughter on the back of her hand. ‘Old enough, I warrant.’ She grinned at the boy and squeezed his cheeks. ‘Look at you, all ragged and drawn – thin as a winter gnat you are. You need some good old local hospitality, dearie, you do. A bit of meat inside you, and some good few cups of wine. I know I likes a bit of meat inside me whenever I can get it. And maybe a bit of the other kind of hospitality too and all later on!’ She rocked back and forth on her bench with laughter.

‘You ever been kissed, then?’ asked the girl.

The boy looked down at his plate. ‘Yes,’ he said defensively.

‘Aw, bless,’ said the girl. ‘And you know what the Saturnalia is for, don’t you?’

He didn’t. But he was about to find out.

The great double doors at the end of the longhouse creaked open and, to deafening cheers and hallooes from the assembled villagers, in came a procession of men and women bearing a train of crudely carved but unmistakable images. First came a rather stately matron carrying a statue of Priapus sporting a huge jutting phallus, carved from olivewood and seemingly oiled specially for the occasion. Priapus, the little grinning god of fertility, stood on a bed of winter berries, elderberries and hips and haws, and his proud phallus was lovingly decorated with wreaths of broom and ivy. Several of the women leant forward to kiss it as it passed by. Next came a tall, dark-skinned man bearing a primitive but rather touching statue of the mother goddess, Cybele, seated and in long robes, suckling her infant son, whom she cradled on her knee. Many people reached out to touch the magical statue. There followed more villagers with long poles garlanded, or hooked with lanthorns, singing and cheering as they walked round and round the long tables, while everyone else fell in behind them. Children ran and squealed and scurried in every direction, breathless and laughing with excitement.

One red-faced man leapt up on the table and raised his wooden goblet to the rafters. ‘To fertile fields and fat old pigs for another sunny year!’ he cried, and he tossed back his goblet, draining a full sextarius of warm red wine in a few mighty gulps. All joined in the toast at the tops of their voices.

The boy watched and took everything in, his slanted yellow eyes missing nothing, although with some astonishment. Among his own people, as among all lean, ascetic nomad peoples, matters of fertility were kept much more veiled. But among settled peasants and farmers who work on the land, fertility and the copulative act went easily together, and were regarded as essential to the fecundity of the earth. They saw the animals copulate freely, the only outcome of which was a happy one, the birth of new lambs or calves; and they saw no reason to conduct themselves otherwise. For a woman to give herself to a man, husband or no, was seen as an act of pure generosity – indeed, it was regarded as positively unhealthy among these folk not to engage in intercourse at regular intervals.

No wonder the unworldly and nature-fearing Christians of the city condemned all those who did not follow their god as pagani, which meant simply ‘country-dwellers’. The people who dwelt in the fertile southern valleys of the empire had long been most resistant to that gaunt, grim-visaged, sin-obsessed desert-religion from the east; and long would remain so. Here, where greenery and the ancient gods still throve, fertility and the breeding powers of Nature were still worshipped above all else.

More wine flowed from freshly unstopped barrels, and the village musicians began to puff away on their reed-pipes, or saw away at their coarse-toned three-stringed lutes, and people began to dance and sing. They sang ‘ Bacche, Bacche venies!’ and ‘ In taberno quando sumus ’, and many other folk-songs of love and wine and the earth, which they had sung in these valleys before the grand poets in Rome ever put pen to paper.

Si puer cum puellula

Moraretur in cellula

Felix coniunctio!

Amore sucrescente,

Pariter e medio

Avulso procul tedio,

Fit ludus ineffabilis

Membris, lacertis, labiis!

If a boy and little girl

Tarry in a little room,

Happy is their copulation!

Love arises with elation,

Weariness flees far away

When they hide in bed to play,

And their nameless game begins,

Of sighs and whispers, lips and limbs…

‘O mercy, mercy!’ cried the old man with the spittled mouth and the unshaven chin, jigging around in the dance with the rest. ‘You take me back to my young sapling days, and I’m all of a frustration that my member will not perform as it did once, in the swelling springtime of my lust.’

At which everyone told him to pipe down, and said they didn’t want to hear about his member, or the swelling springtime of his lust. Someone poured a full goblet of red wine over his white locks, pronouncing that he was now anointed and blessed by Priapus himself. Whether the charm worked was unclear, but the wine trickled over his face and down his furrowed cheeks, and the ancient dancer licked it happily enough from his beard.

‘This time next year we’ll have a carving of a crucified man on the table,’ cried another wag.

‘You must be joking!’ many voices objected.

‘A jolly feast it’d be with that in the middle of it,’ called another.

‘No drinking, no fucking, no farting,’ roared another. ‘Thank Lord Jove I’m not a craven Christian.’

Attila felt his hand taken warmly in another and squeezed. It was the rosy-cheeked daughter, pulling him away from the crowd.

‘Come on, then,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a nice little hut just round the corner.’

The thin, pale girl watched them silently as they went. But the mother winked at them. ‘You treat him gently now, dearie,’ she beamed.

The night air was chill and the sky was clear, the stars shining coldly down from where their fires burnt eternally in the heavens. Attila felt his chest tighten with cold and fear, but his hand in the girl’s hand was warm as she led him over to a small straw-thatched hut near a cottage. His heart was thumping so loudly he thought she must be able to hear. She pulled open the rickety, cobwebbed door and drew him inside. He pulled the door closed behind them, but through the open window came enough pale moonlight for them to see each other’s faces: his drawn and nervous, but with jaw set firm at the prospect of this new and frightening journey; and her eyes sparkling with delight at the prospect of a new conquest.

‘I should know your name,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘No names. And you tell me no names neither.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ she said, and sighed. ‘Because I know you’ll be gone in the morning. So what’s the point?’ She smiled a little sadly. ‘Now then…’

She pushed him down and knelt with him in the hay, and leaning forward she put her mouth to his and they kissed. It was very silent. After a little while she slipped her tongue between his lips. Attila had been kissed before, of course, in greeting – even, revoltingly, by Eumolpus when they were first introduced – and on the lips as well, as was the custom in the Roman court. That was one Roman custom that no barbarian nation, and certainly not the Huns, would ever adopt.

But this was a different kind of kiss, thrillingly close and intimate, and he immediately felt a surge and warming of his blood. He kissed the girl breathlessly in return, their tongues running over each other, entwining, their mouths opening to each other, their hands reaching out to stroke cheeks and hair…

‘My, you are the greedy little one, aren’t you?’ she whispered. He could see her white teeth in the moonlight as she smiled. She lay back in the hay and pulled her shift up to her waist. She opened her thighs to him, and ran her middle finger, the index lascivius as physicians have named it (although perhaps rather lascivious of them to have done so) down between her ripe lips.

‘Come on then, my darling,’ she said softly. ‘And here, too,’ she said, pulling her tunic down off her slim shoulders and exposing her breasts, ‘touch me here too, here, put your mouth to my breast, kiss me there, and with your tongue, oh my darling, oh…’

Her sighs and gasps filled the air of the little hut; the boy was silent and enrapt, the girl whispering all the time as she guided him and stroked his tousled hair. ‘Oh I love that, I do love that, here, kiss them, take them in your mouth, gently, yes lick them like that, suckle them, oh that is so sweet, do they taste sweet to you, oh my darling, that feels so sweet, and there, oh yes, inside me, touch me there, oh sweet gods, oh I love you, my darling, I do love you…’

And as she sighed and gasped, she reached down and pulled up the boy’s tunic, and felt for his hard cock, and said nice things about how he might be small for his age but that wasn’t, that wouldn’t shame a grown man, that wouldn’t. She spread her thighs wide and guided him inside her and closed her thighs tightly round his waist, and together they made excited young love for a short while, before the boy shuddered between her legs and pressed his cheek against hers and hugged her tightly and tensed and gasped and then slowly relaxed in her arms, his face pressed against her breasts. A few moments later he was asleep.

She looked down and stroked his tousled hair. ‘Typical,’ she whispered.

‘And how was that, you little monkey?’ cried the girl’s mother, grabbing him round the waist. ‘You been outside with my daughter, I know you have, rifling through her treasures like a little bandit. I knew you for a little robber the moment I saw you outside. And I know what you’ve been up to, smile like that, like puss with the milk. Like a hedgehog at a young cow’s udders, look at you, almost licking your lips you are.’

‘Mother, don’t embarrass him,’ said the girl.

‘Embarrass him? He knows well enough what he’s been up to,’ she laughed. ‘And I know what he’s been up to, too, eh? Boy that age, I bet you’d be up for another feather-bed jig later on, eh, my sweet-heart? How’s about something a little more grown-up later on tonight, hey? A bit of a lying-down dance with her old ma, eh? A bit of moaning at the ceiling and groaning at the moon?’

‘Mother!’ cried the girl in outrage.

And then the bawdy peasant-woman was away, whirling among the dancers with flushed cheeks and saucy eyes, her clay cup of wine held high in the smoky air.

Attila and the girl sat down at the table again, both hungry after their exertions. Under the table he took the girl’s hand and squeezed it tight. Save me, he thought. The girl squeezed back and leant over and whispered in his ear, her slim hot hand resting on the back of his neck, ‘You sleep in my bed tonight, don’t you worry.’

There was more formal dancing, with lines of men and women advancing towards each other, exchanging kisses in the centre of the hall and retreating again, with giggles and mock-bashfulness, eyes shyly averted even from those who had shared their beds the night before.

Then with still greater dignity, and with all the happy solemnity of the old pagan spirit, the little wreathed olivewood Priapus was taken up, and the whole village processed outside to the edge of the woods, where there stood a simple stone shrine. Within, lit by two precious beeswax candles, stood a naked statue of the Great Mother, smiling distantly, with benevolence and power, upon her simple devotees. Both men and women took it in turns to kiss the phallus of Priapus, before the little god was laid reverently between the Great Mother’s thighs. A white woollen veil was drawn over the pair, and they were left in discreet privacy for the night, to couple and so to ensure that the Earth herself should be born again in the spring.

No sooner had the villagers stepped back from the shrine, and bowed their heads one last time to their beloved deities, than there came a hoarse cry through the night air, from the hills above. The frenzied words cascaded down upon them, in a voice as cracked and dry as the wind in dead leaves.

The girl leant close to Attila, so that her soft hair tickled his cheek deliciously, and whispered, ‘It’s a local madman called Holy John.’

The boy nodded. ‘We’ve met,’ he said.

‘Idolators! Fornicators!’ cried Holy John. ‘May Christ have mercy upon all your Christless and unshriven souls! For ye dwell in the very mouth of hell, and are mired in the very mire of the devil’s own bowels in all your lusts and filthy fornications.’

The people looked at each other and guffawed merrily. Some even began to dance, as if his words were a kind of irresistible music.

‘Holy John,’ they cried, raising their foaming mugs of wine as if in salutation. ‘Holy John, come down from the mountain. Welcome to our Feast of the Great Mother, Holy John.’

There was a scuffling in the woods above, and the old man appeared, standing on a jutting rock, looking more wild-eyed than ever, Attila thought. He wore a long, begrimed habit of coarse brown-stuff, his grey beard was matted, and his thin lips worked in a fury. Even from this distance, the boy thought he could smell the old man’s rank odour: many hermits took literally the injunction of St Jerome: that those who have washed in the blood of Christ have no need to wash again.

‘Woe unto you, O Israel, for your filthiness is in your skirts. And, as the prophet Ezekiel saith, you have committed harlotries, and have lusted after your paramours, whose members are like the members of donkeys, and whose emissions are like the emissions of stallions.’

‘Where? Where?’ cried one of the women in the crowd. ‘I could do with some of that!’

‘Wherefore I say unto you-’

But already Holy John upon his rock was being besieged, first by loud obscene cries, so that his cracked and ancient voice was drowned, and then in person, by the girl’s mother, who to the approving roar of the onlookers hauled her considerable bulk up onto the rock below Holy John, and tried to lift his skirts.

‘Away from me, thou Scarlet Woman!’ cried Holy John, trying frantically to hold down his habit which she had hauled up over his scrawny, scabbed old knees, and he continued to preach with what dignity he could muster. ‘Avaunt thee, O thou Jezebel, without sense or shame!’

The crowd was in uproar, until eventually the two of them, hermit and peasant woman, came shuffling in a close-knit but inelegant dance to the edge of the rock and fell in a heap into the crowd below. Some of the sturdier younger men tried to catch them as best they could. No harm was done, and soon Holy John was staggering to his feet again. He retrieved his staff in a fury, and was about to stride off to a safe distance at the edge of the forest when his blazing eyes fell on the face of Attila who stood nearby, watching with great interest.

Holy John seemed horror-struck. His bony forefinger pointed, trembling, at the startled boy. ‘Behold, behold, for the End of Years is upon you!’ he cried.

The crowd fell silent, curious and a little taken aback by the sudden note of fear in the hermit’s voice.

‘For is it not written, in the Book of Daniel, that the king’s daughter of the south shall come to the king of the north, to make an agreement? Aye, and has this not happened in our time, with the daughter of the late Emperor Theodosius, whom they call the Princess Galla Placidia, wedded now to the King of the Goths?’

The crowd stirred and looked uncertain. Such news meant little to them, but a prophecy fulfilled meant much. Attila looked struck by the news: he took a gasp of air, scowling in a fury at some private vision before him.

‘Aye, and is it not written, in the same Prophecy of Daniel, that at the End of Years, a Prince of Terror shall come from the North, and shall utterly destroy you? For he shall come like a whirlwind, with chariots and with many horsemen, and shall overthrow the kingdoms of all the world. And he shall do according to his will, and shall magnify himself above all gods, and shall speak marvellous things even against the God of gods; for he shall magnify himself above all.’ Holy John’s voice rose to a demented shriek, and his finger trembled even more violently in the boy’s face. ‘And upon his face are the marks of his violence. See, see: he comes. He comes!’

At which the boy, to the stunned surprise of the assembled villagers, lashed out and struck the holy man a terrific blow across his face. Holy John staggered backwards, but he did not fall. He leant, gasping, on his staff a little while, blood trickling from his mouth and over his beard. Then he turned and stumbled away until he reached the shadowy edge of the forest. In the gloom they could hardly see him, and wished to see him no more. But still they heard his ancient, dried-out voice, taunting them.

‘Oh, ye are the children of very daemons. Ye are all in the devil’s own mouth, and shall be damned perpetually. And your gods and goddesses are the devils out of hell, one with Moloch and Ishtar and Ashtaroth, whom I shall not name before the Most High God, but Great Whores all, whose only worship is itself a whoring and a fornicating and a revelling in the filthiness of women and of…’

But at this the mood turned ugly. The people of the village were merrily impervious to the insults that Holy John or his fellow Christians hurled at them personally, but could not bear such attacks upon their most treasured mysteries, least of all on the night of the Feast of the Great Mother, and within the hearing of the goddess herself. No matter how festive their mood, they would not countenance Holy John coming down from the mountain and calling their beloved Great Mother, who gave them life and fed them all, a whore. Some of the younger men ran towards Holy John with a mind to give him a beating and a lesson. The old man evidently decided that, on this occasion at least, the one true and vengeful Lord God of Israel could not be relied upon to pluck him out and miraculously save him from this sinful crowd of idolators and fornicators, as He had once saved the Prophet Daniel in the lions’ den. He swirled round and, with a surprising turn of speed for a man of his years, dashed away into the woods and was lost to sight.

The girl and Attila walked slowly back towards the village, side by side.

‘Why did he say that to you?’ she asked. ‘About the End of Years and everything?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

She glanced sideways at him. ‘Where are you from, anyway?’

There was a pause, and then he said, ‘From the north.’ He grinned wolfishly at her in the darkness. ‘A Prince of Terror from the North.’

She eyed him sceptically, and took his hand again. ‘Come on then, my Prince of Terror. Time for another conquest.’

What he hadn’t realised was that, in these poorer parts, although the girl had her own pallet to sleep on, her entire family slept in a single room, up above the animals. Fortunately, perhaps, her entire family consisted of only her mother and her younger sister, the thin, pale, watchful girl with the dark-shadowed eyes. The father had died some years back of a wasting fever.

So that when he and his new love were just reaching the heights of transport, he looked over to see both her sister and her mother lying close by, watching with smiles on their faces, and even whispering to each other about what was going on.

‘Mother!’ cried the girl, covering them both with a sheet.

‘We can still hear you, even so!’ cried her mother.

Despite the proximity of the other two females, however, the boy and girl had only an hour or two of fitful sleep that night, and both looked flushed and tired in the morning.

Before the boy took his leave, the girl and her mother gave him a cloth-wrapped bundle of fresh bread, smoked sausage, dried apricots and figs. There was no sign of the younger sister.

‘There’s a horse tethered at the edge of the wood, round to the west,’ said the boy. ‘About half a mile away.’

‘Whose horse?’ said the mother suspiciously.

‘Mine, of course,’ he said. ‘Only I don’t want it any more. You have it.’

‘How far away did you st-did you get it from?’

‘A long way away,’ said the boy. ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. It’s a good horse.’

‘Well, the Goddess bless you,’ said the woman, still a little uncertain. ‘What’ll you do for the journey?’

‘Oh, I’ll soon st-I mean, find another.’

The woman tutted and muttered a protective oath. The girl just smiled. Her Prince of Terror, her tattered outlaw.

The sun was rising in the east, the morning star its herald still visible, and the cockerels were still crowing, when the boy left them waving after him at the cottage door.

The younger sister was waiting for him in the woods beside the path leading north into the hills. The low eastern sun slanted in through the trees, pouring coppery light over the ground padded with fallen pine-needles.

She leant back against a tree. Not a word was spoken between them. How frail she looked compared with her buxom sister, gazing up at him with her large, pensive eyes. When she raised her arms for him to take off her shift, she started to cough painfully. Her breasts were small and tender, her hair long and lank but sweet-smelling, for she had brushed it with rosemary water that morning, before dawn, for him.

She lifted her long hair in her slim hands and trailed it round the back of his neck, smiling shyly. They kissed. Her smile was wan and faraway. She touched his scarred cheeks. They kissed again. A little patch of her long dark hair was grey, just above her ear, as grey as an old woman’s. He touched it gently. She tried to push him away but he stroked her hair again, with its strange grey mark.

At last she whispered, ‘My sister is more beautiful.’

But he shook his head and kissed her again.

She looked into his eyes, the gold-flecked, slanted eyes of this strange, alien boy with the blue tattooed cheeks. She saw his desire for her, and at that her own desire burnt, too. She leant back against the sun-warmed treetrunk, wondering with a thrill at her own shamelessness, and slowly drew up her skirt, her eyes downcast.

Afterwards, as she walked down the path to the village, she looked back over her shoulder. He took a step after her, quite unconsciously. In that moment, even his deep, deep longing for home was overcome by his longing for this thin, pale girl with her large, sad eyes. It was as much as he could do to stop himself running after her and, and.. . With the other girl he had felt a hot, mind-numbing surge of his blood, but with this girl he felt it in his heart – and how it ached, so painful and so sweet. She smiled and waved to him, and he waved back. She turned away and walked on down to the village.

He looked after her for a long time, even when she had vanished from sight. He wanted to run after her and protect her from other men, and monsters, and daemons, witches and storms, and whatever else might ever come to threaten her gentle flesh. He wanted wolves and bears to appear from the forest, so that he could run after her and protect her, draw his sword and kill them all in front of her, even if he should die himself in doing so. It would be such a sweet death.

Eventually he turned back and began to ascend the long path to the north.

When he at last emerged from the woods on to the free, grassy, wind-blown hills, his heart leapt furiously within him, and his heated blood surged again. He flung his arms wide to catch the burly, buffeting wind, and he bellowed over the pale, wintry valley below that he wanted to conquer the whole world, and have every woman in it. Then he ran madly on until the air grew chill and seared his lungs, and drove his blood more and more madly through his veins, laughing and roaring as he ran higher and higher into the mountains.

Early one morning, not long after Attila had left the village, a troop of soldiers rode in from the Palatine fort near Ravenna. They were led by an officer with a face so scarred and lopsided that he made the children cry and run from him. Even the ragged dogs of the village yelped and hid under carts or in the shelter of cottage doorways.

He called his troop to a halt in the centre of the village, beside the thatch-roofed well. The people emerged from their humble dwellings spontaneously at this new arrival, murmuring among themselves. He said not a word but only held his hand up. His fingers were heavy with signet rings. The people fell silent. His horse stepped sideways and its breath trumpeted into the frosty air. The officer looked around and then spoke.

‘We are here on the orders of General Heraclian. You have entertained a fugitive from Roman law in this village. A boy of some fourteen summers, with barbarian tattoos on his cheeks and his back. Where is he?’

The people tried not to look at each other, but some failed. The officer saw everything. He turned to his burly decurion and nodded. The decurion vaulted from his horse, strode over to the nearest hut, and emerged a few moments later with a flaming brand taken from an open fire.

‘I will not ask a second time,’ said the officer. ‘Answer me.’

The plump-faced miller said, ‘We know of no such boy, Your Honour. We are only simple-’

The officer nodded to two more of his men. ‘Bind him.’

They dismounted and seized the miller’s arms, wrenched them behind him, and tied them tightly with coarse rope. The miller, strong man though he was, could not suppress a muted howl at the agony he felt.

The other villagers eyed each other in open fear, but none of them could bear to betray one who had so recently been their guest. Every custom and law of hospitality rebelled against it. Inwardly, even now, they braced themselves for the inevitable punishment they would suffer for their insolent silence. They had had dealings with the enforcers of Roman law before, when they came round each season to collect the village’s meagre but hard-felt contribution to the imperial exchequer. Every taxation left them a little poorer, a little more bitter. Nothing they paid in tax ever came back to them, in kind, in protection, in security. They saw nothing for their money. Only their quiet, unknown valley kept them safe from the depredations of the wider world. Except when the representatives of the Roman state came to visit.

The officer read the situation with cruel exactness. He kicked his horse and rode over to one of the barns, lifting a spear from the grasp of one of his troopers as he passed. In the doorway of a barn crouched a furry, tatty-eared little dog, his brown eyes never leaving the lieutenant for a moment. But even so he was not quick enough. As the officer rode by, with an icy nonchalance that appalled even the most tough-minded of the villagers, he jabbed the point of his spear downwards and impaled the dog on the end, then wheeled and rode back towards the centre of the village square, the poor creature howling with its last breath as he came.

The officer rested the spear with its horrible load on the edge of the well, blood dripping slowly from the dog’s body and darkly staining the stone lip of the well.

‘No!’ cried one or two of the villagers, stepping forwards, unable to believe that anyone could be so savage.

The officer said, ‘The boy?’

They stopped in their tracks, and hung their heads in anger and shame, and said nothing.

The officer looked back at the dark mouth of the well. And then he drew back his arm, and scraped the blood-soaked corpse of the dog from the end of his spear. The clotted mass of fur and blood rested for a moment on the lip of the well, and then rolled and tumbled over. A moment later they heard a heavy splash, and the whole village gave a low, collective moan.

The officer turned to his decurion, who still carried the flaming brand. ‘Fire the haybarn,’ he said evenly.

At this the girl’s mother waddled forward in a fury, unable to contain herself. She screamed at the officer that he was a disgusting pig of a man, and a disgrace to humankind, and that surely the gods and the goddesses who looked down, would-She was cut short by a swingeing backhanded blow, the officer’s heavily ringed fist sending her spinning to the ground.

‘Mother!’ cried the girl, running forwards.

‘I’m all right, m’dear,’ she mumbled, struggling up from the dust, her mouth bleeding profusely. ‘Unlike this disgusting pig of a man will be soon enough, God willing.’

‘Sssh, mother, please,’ pleaded the girl.

The officer ignored her.

The woman was helped away by her daughter. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that tooth he’s knocked out was giving me grief anyhow. Hurt like crazy in me poor old skull, it did.’

No one else had the courage, or the foolhardiness, to protest openly, much as they might admire their neighbour for her sharp-tongued bravery. But in their hearts – those hearts as sturdy and enduring as the hearts of peasants everywhere – the more they saw their liberty abused and their property destroyed, the more silently, woodenly rebellious they became. At the outset, one or two of them might have considered telling soldiers which path the barbarian boy had taken into the mountains, in exchange for a quiet life. But now not one of them would dream of it. Their water might be polluted, their precious winter fodder for their cattle might be burning before their eyes, and the great haybarn, which had taken the whole village two weeks of hard labour to build, might be reduced to ash. But not one of them now would co-operate with these wretched, bullying minions of the state.

The soldiers did not stay to watch the barn burn to the ground. Once the flames had taken inextinguishable hold, they regarded their work as well done.

The officer looked over the cowed but undefeated villagers. ‘We will be back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And then you will tell us what we want to know.’

The villagers huddled together more closely than ever that night, but not a voice was raised in dissent. They would take whatever was meted out to them, and they would say nothing. Nothing would break them.

Some say that the peasants and country people have no sense of honour, and care only for brute survival. They say that a peasant will do anything, say anything, swear any oath or betray any friendship, to save himself and his family and his few precious animals. And it is true, perhaps, that honour is a virtue that only the rich can afford. A poor country girl in the city is quickly obliged to choose between her honour and her life. But in place of honour, the peasant nurtures a passion less overt, but every bit as fierce and intractable: a loathing for being told what to do.

General Heraclian’s soldiers did not return the next day. Nor the day after that. Their promise to do so had been only an idle threat, intended to terrorise recalcitrant villagers and remind them of their lowly status in the heaven-appointed scheme of things. The troop had already moved on after the barbarian boy, taking up fresh trails where they could. The villagers set about rebuilding their barn, draining and cleaning their well, gathering and drying what further winter fodder they could from the surrounding land that kept them. They would not see the soldiers again until the spring and the next levy of taxes. Meanwhile they could live in poverty and peace.