Attila

13

The two boys walked for many days, climbing higher and higher into the towering Julian Alps. The weather so far was mercifully cool and clear, the air sharp and aromatic with the pines. They spoke little.

Late one afternoon, as the sun was going down in the west, they found themselves forced to descend rather than climb, because of the unassailable steepness of the surrounding mountains. They followed a narrow track which led down into a deep, dark valley where the evening mist was already beginning to settle. They muttered prayers and supplications to their gods under their breath, for each boy felt in his bones that this valley breathed the air of other worlds.

They came to the edge of a dark river which sang none of a river’s usual song of mirth and life as it ran, but flowed on in black, inky silence through the heart of the valley, muted and full of foreboding. The river’s edge was lined with the mournful, lamenting shapes of willow and aspen, and the mist gathered thick on the water. The boys stepped uneasily through dense growths of small, stunted oak and hawthorn, thickly hung with mosses and lichens that muffled the very air they breathed. Among the rocks grew maidenhair fern, and the pools were thick with marsh horsetail. Not a breath of wind was felt in that dank valley, and no birds sang. They felt that no human being had ever walked here before them.

At last, without a word being spoken, for fear of what terrible guardians of that unholy place their voices might awaken, they settled under the low branches of a tree for shelter, and wrapped their blankets tightly round them. Neither looked at the other, and both felt a profound desolation in their souls. The chilling mist folded in about them and they could see no more than a few feet in front of their faces. They longed to be away again, far away from this demon-haunted valley, to breathe the free, clear air of the mountaintops, and to see before them the long way to the North. But they knew they must first creep through this dread place, silent and unnoticed if they could, for someone, something, was watching them.

Attila was drifting off into fearful but exhausted sleep when at his side Orestes started up.

‘What was that?’ hissed Orestes, his hare-eyes staring.

Attila awoke fully and closed his fingers round his sword-hilt. ‘What?’

‘Through the trees. Over there.’

But they could see nothing except the eerie shapes of the trees through the wreaths of freezing mist. They looked a little longer, then Attila said, ‘It was nothing. Go to sleep.’

They settled down again and each pretended to be asleep. But both lay wide awake, their limbs trembling, and not only for cold.

The air around them stirred and whispered, ‘We are the Music Makers,

And we are the Dreamers of Dreams.’

The boys shot up and stared wildly around.

Attila, knowing they had been discovered, and feeling that familiar surge of contempt for any injury or death that might come – since come it must, one day – cried out into the all-enveloping mist, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

Orestes shrank to hear his companion yell out into the night so fearlessly, but Attila was emboldened by the hot surge of his angry and indignant spirit. He leapt to his feet, brandishing his bright, unsheathed sword and slicing it through the invulnerable mist and darkness.

‘Who are you? Come on out and show yourselves!’ He held his sword out before him, the muscles in his arms as tense as the blade itself. ‘Come on!’

The trees around them seemed to pause for a moment, contemplating this small, fierce boy in their midst. Then something happened to the mist between the trees. It drew apart, like a veil, and the gloom and closeness of that haunted valley, which had weighed upon the boys so heavily, lifted a little. There even seemed to be a source of light shining down upon them from above, stronger than any moon could be. They saw a figure standing among the trees a little way off, and were not afraid.

Orestes immediately thought it was Jesus, come to save them from the surrounding daemons of the mist. Attila thought it was perhaps the ghost of his dead mother. But the figure in its long white robe came nearer, and they saw that it was a young girl, her hair braided like that of a priestess.

She came closer still and stopped before them. ‘She plays in a sunlit field,’ she said softly, her pale grey eyes never leaving the eyes of Orestes.

‘Wha – what?’ he stammered.

She reached out and laid her hand on his head, and pushed him down with some force. Orestes knelt at her feet, and the girl said, ‘Rome bore her, Aquileia destroyed her, Aquileia will be destroyed. But now we see her. She plays in a field of buttercups. And now her mother comes to her and finds her, and they run down to a clear stream. She has made a necklace of daisies for her mother. See how her mother is laughing. And there is a cow, we see a brown cow with glossy flanks, and Pelagia pats its damp nose and laughs.’

Attila saw with wonder that tears were coursing down Orestes’ cheeks.

‘She is happy now,’ said the girl. ‘So happy.’

A breath of wind blew around them for a moment, and the mist cleared. A gleam of pale sunshine came through from the skies above, for night had passed – in a matter of minutes, it seemed – and the sunshine fell on the kneeling boy, haloing him in the pale gold of dawnlight.

There was a long silence. At last the girl took her hand away from Orestes’ forehead and slowly he stirred, as if awakening from a long sleep.

The girl turned and walked away into the mist-shrouded trees.

‘Wait!’ cried Attila.

She walked on.

‘Come on,’ he yelled, grabbing Orestes by the arm and hauling him roughly to his feet.

The two of them stumbled after her into the mist. As they ran, barely able to see the trees before them, they heard the soft voice again, but now it sounded like a mysterious chorus of voices chanting in unison.

‘We are the Music Makers,

And we are the Dreamers of Dreams,

Wandering by lone sea breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.’

At last they emerged from the dense mist of the woods, and ran out into a sunlit glade beneath a black, overhanging cliff that towered above their heads. There was the dark opening of a cave at the base of the cliff, and beside it grew a tree which, in the sudden break of early morning sunshine, looked as if its boughs were golden. Attila ran headfirst into the tree before he could stop, and snapped off one of its delicate lower branches with the force of his onward rush. The girl, who had paused in the mouth of the cave, glanced back over her shoulder. When she saw what he had done, the trace of an enigmatic smile crossed her face.

‘Well,’ she said, as if something had been confirmed for her. Then she looked across at the panting Greek boy. ‘Thus far and no further for you, greatest friend and greatest betrayer.’

Orestes scowled. ‘What do you mean, “betrayer”?’ he said.

‘Greatest friend unto death, and greatest betrayer thereafter.’ She stretched out her arm towards him. ‘O little father of the last and least, sleep now.’

Without fuss or drama, Orestes trotted over to the edge of the glade where the sunlight caught the edge of the trees, lay down, and instantly fell asleep.

The girl looked at Attila, and the smile vanished from her face. ‘This is for you alone,’ she said. She turned and walked into the cave.

At first Attila could just make out the dim white shape of the girl ahead of him, as silent and flowing as a ghost through a graveyard. But very soon it was so dark that he could not even see that much. He simply kept walking, as if into a void, trusting that it was his destiny to do so.

‘Follow on, Attila, follow on,’ chanted the girl mockingly from somewhere ahead, deep in the darkness of the mountains. ‘For surely you will never follow another again! O leader, O conqueror, O great lord and king!’

The boy did not reply, but followed as bidden.

The walls of rock around him echoed to voices, the girl’s voice and manifold voices chanting in the same tone and time. They hailed him, the voices echoing from the dank walls of the mountains, in a tone that he feared, for there was both mockery and supreme knowledge in those chanting voices combined.

‘All hail, Attila, son of Mundzuk, Lord of All and None!’

‘O Lord of the World from the rising to the setting of the sun!’

‘The Eagle and the Serpent fought, and fell in Italy!’

‘O Lord of the World from the desert to the shores of the Western Sea!’

The voices grew louder, echoing bewilderingly from every direction as he stumbled on, gritting his teeth in grim defiance, sometimes stumbling against the walls of the passageway and grazing his arms and legs against the cruel and jagged rocks, speckled with mica. His head spun with the words that tumbled in the dank air around him, but he was determined, as determined as ever, not to surrender to fear or force, or ever to halt or turn back.

‘In the time of the Seven Sleepers, Lord of All!’ cried the voices in deafening unison.

‘In the time of the shaking of the City of Gold, Lord of All!’

‘In the time of the Last Battle, Lord of All!’

Abruptly the clamour of the voices died, and he saw ahead of him a cave, lit with flickering torches and with a low fire burning in the centre, and a single voice whispered in the air around him. The voice was soft and pitying and maternal, and his heart was torn by its sound, for something told him that it was the voice of his mother.

‘O Attila,’ whispered the woman’s voice, ‘O Little Father of Nothing.’

The boy emerged shaken into the torchlit cave and found the young girl standing opposite him with both arms outstretched.

She stepped across the fire to him and closed his eyelids with her thumbs. Then she leant close to him and spat once upon each eyelid. She took up a handful of ash from the edge of the fire, and blew it in his face. When he opened his eyes he was blind. He cried out in fear, but she only told him to sit.

‘Seeing eyes be blind, that blind eyes may see!’ she said harshly.

Trembling with fear, but still determined neither to weep nor to flee, he sat awkwardly down on the hard stone ground. The air was filled with words, and his blinded vision was filled with images. Images of battle, of cities burning, and the thunderous sound of horses’ hooves on the plains. He started in shock when he heard the girl’s voice, for now it sounded as ancient and hoarse as if it came from the ancient Sibyl herself. As ancient as Tithonus, who asked for eternal life but not eternal youth, and was granted it, until he grew so old and tiny and withered that he was no more than a chirruping cricket in the grass.

‘I have more memories than a thousand years,’ croaked the voice.

Even in the depths of the mountain, a soft whisper of wind seemed to sigh back among the rocks.

The ancient voice in the cave said,

‘Four will fight for the end of the world,

One with an empire,

One with a sword,

Two will be saved and one will be heard,

One with a son

And one with a word.’

Although dizzy with fear and disorientation, Attila nevertheless felt a thrill of excitement run down his spine. He had a dim sense that he had heard these words before, though he could not remember where, and he found himself thinking of Aeneas’ journey to the underworld, which he had once studied wearily under the stern eye of his Greek pedagogue. Now he had the uncanny and terrifying sensation that Virgil’s great work was not merely poetry but history, and that the story had gone into reverse, falling backwards into chaos and the fiery abyss – and that he was part of it all…

In perfect consonance with his thoughts, the cracked voice in the cave spoke again, saying, ‘They will call you Anti-Christus, the Scourge of God, but they do not understand. You are not Anti-Christ. You are Anti-Aeneas!’ She cackled madly, and told the boy to open his eyes. He did so, feeling the sticky mess of spittle and ash parting over his eyelids. And then his eyes flared wide with horror, as he saw the ancient thing that sat before him in that unhallowed cave.

It was a haggard crone, toothless, blind and unimaginably old. Her ancient, clawed hands trembled in the firelight, and rheum ran from her blind white eyes and stained the furrows of her parchment cheeks like snailtrails. She wore tattered robes as grey as ash. She spat into her withered palms, and her spittle was as thick and black as tar. She looked up at him, and her watery old eyes gleamed sightlessly. ‘To build a new city you must first destroy the old!’ she cried. ‘But keep the stones perhaps for your foundations!’ She paused and when she spoke again her voice was more grave and rasping. ‘But remember this, and this above all.

‘By a King of Kings from Palestine

Two empires were sown,

By a King of Terror from the east

Two empires were o’erthrown…’

She leant forward, and scooped up some ash from the edge of the fireside. Through the dancing flames, her mouth made a toothless, lipless O.

‘Only youth is beautiful,’ she croaked, more softly. ‘But old age is sometimes wise.’

She threw the ash back into the fire, and the cave filled with black smoke. Attila coughed and choked and scrambled to his feet, searching blindly for the exit. But it was useless. When the air cleared again and the torchlight gleamed once more through the dust, he saw only a young girl sitting cross-legged against the wall opposite, her head bowed, as if she were sleeping. Her hands rested tranquilly upon her knees, and they were the smooth, soft, delicate hands of a young girl.

He snatched a torch from the wall, and turned and ran back along the passageway to the upper air.

There was bright sunlight in the glade, and Orestes lay sleeping as peacefully as a little child. Attila shook him and he rubbed his eyes and stared around. When he remembered, a shadow passed over his face, but no more.

He said to Attila, ‘Your face is a right mess. You need a wash.’

Attila looked away.

‘Is she… Has she gone? And the voices?’

Attila nodded. ‘They’ve gone.’

Orestes tore up some grass. ‘What did you hear from them?’

‘Everything. And nothing.’

Orestes got to his feet.

Attila said, ‘We should move on.’

As the two boys walked down the valley in the bright winter sunlight, the voices came to them again, sighing through the trembling aspen leaves by the dark and silent river.

‘We are the Music Makers,

And we are the Dreamers of Dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

And Babel itself with our mirth;

And o’erthrew them with prophesying

To the old of the new world’s worth;

For each age is a dream that is dying,

Or one that is coming to birth.’

The boys said nothing to each other, as if neither of them had heard. They bowed their heads and walked on.

At last they ascended out of the haunted valley, and began to climb a steep, rocky slope, into the high mountain passes. The slope caught the full force of the winter sun, and was hot even at this time of year, the air rising off the rocks and into the deep blue sky above. Attila paused for breath and gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky, the home of Astur his father. And there hung a lammergeier: lamb-stealer, bone-breaker, greatest of all the European vultures, almost motionless on the thermals that arose from the sun-heated mountainside. His great wings outspread twelve feet or more, and his head turned slightly from side to side as he surveyed the world beneath him with his bright, fierce, fearless, all-conquering eyes. That god of the sky. That god-made Lord of the World, from the rising to the setting of the sun.

O Little Father of Nothing…

‘Come on,’ called Orestes from ahead.

What did it all mean? What did the gods want? Other than to be entertained, perhaps, by the sorrows and deaths of men?

Attila lowered his gaze and looked ahead at his friend, and walked on.