Attila

12

They came down from the mountains and crossed the plains of the Po in the frosty start of the new year. Attila dreaded leading them up into the towering white peaks of the Julian Alps at such a season, but they must move on. They had made it so far because there were so many refugees on the roads, so many alarms and rumours sweeping the country, so many tales of the Goths, and even the dreadful Vandals, still on the warpath, and the emperor going mad in his marsh-bound palace.

No one had stopped to question three ragged children on the road along with all the others. Yet. But it only needed one soldier to block their path with his spear, to demand of the oldest boy why he kept his face covered, and to rip the rags away and see his bright, tattooed cheeks, and his slanted, leonine eyes. It was well known what punishment was meted out to runaway slaves, no matter what their age might be. First, the letters F U G would be branded with a red-hot iron on their foreheads, for fugitivus. Then the real punishments would begin…

They must press on. They would not be safe until they had crossed the snowy peaks of the Julian Alps and the mountains of Noricum, and come down into the Pannonian plain, and finally crossed the wide brown waters of the swollen winter Danube to freedom.

They passed by Verona, and keeping near to the flat coast passed by east of Patavum. At last they halted by the roadside, weak with hunger and weariness, and a cold wind blew in from the lagoons to the east, and from the mountains of Illyria beyond. The three children shook with hunger and fatigue, and the little girl was racked with coughing, as if her very ribs would break. Orestes had asked again and again if they couldn’t steal some horses, but Attila replied that they would draw too much attention to themselves that way, now that they were out on the more populated plains of the Po. They must walk on, like all the other thousands of nameless fugitives on the roads of Northern Italy. But they could not walk on. They were exhausted.

As they rested, a great gilt carriage, flanked by numerous bodyguards, came down the dusty road, heading for the famous city of Aquileia on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. It drew up alongside the huddled children. Inside sat a handsome, clean-shaven man with gold signet rings flashing on his fingers. He stared at them for a little while, and a smile gradually crept over his face. Pelagia, at least, smiled back, and then had another fit of coughing. The man touched his hand to his mouth, and began to question the children from within his carriage. At first the two boys were wary and suspicious, and only wished that he would leave them alone. But after a little while he won their confidence, and even Attila, usually so acutely sensitive to danger, was taken in; perhaps his senses were dulled by hunger and exhaustion. After a few minutes, the children were persuaded and taken with the wealthy man and his train into Aquileia.

A few wealthy men, a very few, might put themselves out in a charitable way for a trio of travel-sore little guttersnipes, none too sweet-smelling, and coarse in their manners and address. But the great majority of such men, suddenly overcome by an apparent excess of charitable feelings which they have signally failed to display hitherto, will have another, rather less amiable motive behind the benevolent mask of their charity. So it was with this man, the richest citizen in Aquileia, a merchant and dealer in everything from horses to ships, from cinnamon to silk, from pepper to papyrus to perfumed beeswax candles. Surprisingly, perhaps, given what transpired later that day and on into the night, in his private bath-houses at his villa in Aquileia, guarded at every entrance by his expressionless, highly paid bodyguards; surprisingly, given what he called his ‘Tiberian theatricals’, which the three children were forced to enact, sometimes at the point of a dagger, for his purring delectation; surprisingly, this good citizen was also a family man. Indeed, he was the head and paterfamilias of the Neriani, a clan who had dominated the finances and politics of that wealthy trading city on the shores of the Adriatic for generations, and would continue to do so for a generation more – until a whirlwind came out of the east, and visited Aquileia with a punishment as terrible as any city has suffered in history.

No one ever understood the motive for that atrocious punishment, a punishment Carthaginian in its finality. It might have been better understood if those who were baffled by it had seen that rich merchant on the road to Aquileia, taking the two poor vagabond boys and the little girl into his carriage, and flattering them with promises, soothing them with candied sweetmeats and little goblets of honeyed wine.

After Aquileia, bound and blindfolded, the three children were galloped out of the city gates in the middle of the night, and dumped some miles away beside a remote farmtrack. There they were left to die – for it was extremely unlikely that they would find the strength and will to crawl along the track until they could find at least the edge of a stone sharp enough to fray the vicious cords that cut into their wrists. But strength and will they did find, under the furious urgings of the eldest. Once free, they stumbled some way in the starless darkness, and finally collapsed together in a half-ruined sty, to dream their dreams or their nightmares until dawn.

None of them spoke that night, nor all the following day. None of them ever talked about Aquileia again. Orestes and Pelagia trudged wearily on up the track to the north, and the cool, clean air of the mountains across the plains of the Po. There they would find crystal-clear streams to wash in. But Attila looked down at his wrists, at the blood still oozing through the abused and broken skin where the flaxen cords had cut in. Then he turned and looked back at Aquileia, reclining richly in the bright winter sun: the Bride of the Sea, the Queen of the Adriatic. And he swore in his heart that one day he would return and that his return would be the stuff of that city’s nightmares. His heart was set as hard as stone. One day…

The two boys recovered in time, at least in their flesh. But Pelagia did not.

They had gained the foothills of the Julian Alps, and washed that day in a freezing but clear mountain stream. In the cold frosty night Attila awoke to the sound of Pelagia’s rasping cough. Orestes was already awake beside her, his face drawn with worry.

‘It’s too cold for her,’ he said. ‘It’s her lungs. We need shelter.’

‘Tomorrow night, maybe,’ said Attila. ‘There are no lights in this valley for miles. There’s no choice.’

Orestes watched his sister cough and gasp for breath. After a little while, he drew off his own blanket and laid it over her. Then he curled up against her and closed his eyes and began to shiver.

Attila watched a while longer. Then he drew off his own blanket and got up and went over and laid it over her likewise. He lay down on the other side of her, and closed his eyes, and began to shiver.

Some nights they begged successfully for shelter, or the suspicious country people allowed them at least to sleep in their barns, and gave them a bowl of vegetable pottage at dawn. Some days Pelagia seemed better. And some days not. One morning she awoke and coughed so violently that flecks of blood flew from her mouth and spotted her hands and arms, and she wept with fear. Her brother cradled her to his chest and said that she would get better soon. When spring came and when it got warmer, she would feel better. It was just a winter cold. She looked at him with her huge, orphan eyes and said nothing.

Not long afterwards, Attila awoke to the early dawn and saw Orestes sitting beside his sister, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms hugged tightly round them. Attila called to him, but Orestes didn’t stir. He called again, and finally the Greek slaveboy looked up. His face was streaked with tears.

They dug a shallow trench as best they could, and laid Pelagia in it wrapped in a blanket. They found sprigs of rowan and gorse to cover her, and laid rue and the red berries of bryony around her gentle head, and heaped the earth over her. Orestes wept uncontrollably. Attila went into the woods and found a flat piece of bark. He handed it to Orestes with his pocket knife and went away again.

A few minutes later the slaveboy was ready to leave. Attila went over to the small grave of sad dimensions, and read the lettering on the bark: ‘ Pelagia, much beloved, sleeps with her parents now’.

Attila showed Orestes another piece of bark that he had painstakingly carved with the point of his sword. In one corner was a rough outline of a bear, and below it was an old epitaph on a young slavegirl, which his Greek pedagogue had made him learn by heart and which now came back to him in all its simple, heart-wrenching force: ‘ Rest on her lightly, earth and dew, She put so little weight on you.’

Orestes wiped the tears from his eyes and nodded. Attila went over and laid the inscription at the other end of the grave. He bowed his head and said a prayer to his father Astur, the Father of All. Then he went back and stood beside Orestes and waited until he was ready. They walked on together into the mountains.