Attila

4

Attila was preparing to ride out one morning with Orestes, each of them astride one of the squat, large-headed little Hun horses, when Aetius and his dark-eyed slaveboy came riding back into camp.

‘You’ve been hunting already?’

The Roman boy pulled a duck from his shoulder bag.

Attila sneered. ‘A day’s ride, and we’ll be in boar country. There’s a wooded valley to the north-east. We’ll stay the night and hunt tomorrow. But’ – he reached over and flicked the quiver that hung from the Roman boy’s shoulder – ‘you’ll need more than your little boy’s bow and arrows.’

Aetius glanced down and saw the heavy spear slung along the belly of Attila’s horse. He rode off without another word, and a few minutes later reappeared, riding out of the camp with a long ashen spear, a thick iron cross-bar just below the long, pointed head: a boar-spear, to stop the animal’s furious charge. For it wasn’t unknown for a boar to receive an ordinary spear in its side and yet push its way onward, screaming, right up the shaft to rip open the horse’s belly with its six-inch tusks, even in its bloody death-throes.

Attila narrowed his eyes as the Roman approached, his silent, faithful little slave behind him.

‘Come on, then,’ he said to Orestes. ‘He’ll have to catch us up.’

Driving his heels hard into his little pony, he set off at a gallop across the bright green grasslands of the unfenced and endless steppes.

By the end of an unremitting day’s ride, when they reached the edge of the wooded valley, all four boys were exhausted, though none would show it. They said little as they made camp in the shadows of the trees, dragging up firewood and building themselves a comforting orange glow.

‘You, boy,’ said Attila to Aetius’ slave, ‘bring more firewood up to last the night.’

The boy trotted off to do his bidding.

Attila nodded. ‘He’s good.’

‘He’s very good,’ said Aetius.

‘What people?’

‘He’s a Celt – British.’

‘Ah. Good fighters once.’

‘Good fighters still.’

‘And he understands Hunnish.’

‘He speaks and understands Hunnish, Latin, Celtic, Saxon, Gaulish, and some Gothic.’

‘Educated, for a slave.’

‘He wasn’t always a slave.’

The boys stared into the fire for a while, wondering how else they could compete. Then Attila said, ‘Here, have some of this.’ He passed over a leather flask.

‘What is it?’ asked Aetius suspiciously.

‘Kind of fermented sheep’s milk.’

‘Not koumiss again?’

Attila shook his head. ‘No, it doesn’t get you drunk. It’s just sheep’s milk that’s gone sour, sort of. It keeps well in hot weather.’

Aetius put the neck of the flagon cautiously to his lips and tasted. An instant later he held the flagon aside and spat his mouthful of the stuff straight into the sizzling fire.

Attila roared with laughter and took the flagon back.

Aetius wiped his lips, an expression of revulsion on his face. ‘What in Hades was that?’

Attila grinned broadly. ‘We call it yogkhurt.’

‘ Yogkhurt?’ repeated Aetius, even more gutturally.

Attila nodded.

Aetius shook his head. ‘Sounds as bad as it tastes.’

The next day they went looking for boar. They picked up a spoor very soon – telltale footprints of two main toes, with two barely visible either side – but lost the track in the dense undergrowth where their horses couldn’t go. Later they found what looked like a wallow beside a fallen treetrunk. Attila dismounted and gave a low whistle, crouching beside the treetrunk, running his fingertips over the bark.

‘What is it?’

‘These grooves. They’re deep.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a big one.’

They rode on.

‘It’ll be lying up somewhere,’ Attila called back. ‘We’ll have to flush it out.’

‘I can smell something,’ said Cadoc.

Attila turned and stared at the slaveboy. ‘You have boar in your country, as well as perpetual rain?’

The boy nodded. ‘Many boar. In the autumn, up in the beechwoods, we-’

The boar came screaming out of nowhere. It flashed across Attila’s mind, even as he glimpsed the great, bristling curve of its back as it charged snorting towards them, that it must be a mother and they had stumbled on her close to her litter. No ferocity in nature like the ferocity of a mother protecting her young. But then he registered the boar’s size, the length of its tusks – eight inches? nine? – and his ears registered the thunderous galloping of its small hooves across the clearing, carrying its massive weight of four hundred pounds or more His ears were filled with a more dreadful sound, of a horse screaming. He was lying face down on the forest floor, his mouth full of a mulch of last year’s leaves. His horse was writhing in agony across his legs, as the huge boar worked furiously away on the other side, opening up the horse’s belly with lightning-quick slashes of its terrible tusks.

The three other boys dismounted in an instant, and Aetius scrabbled desperately to drag his spear from its sling. At any moment the boar might tire of tearing the horse’s guts from its stomach and turn its beady little eyes and monstrous tusks on them. Or on the other boy, trapped and helpless beneath his dying horse. If the boar trotted round and began to work on him, he would be dead in seconds.

The boar stopped, and there was silence in the glade but for the thrashing of the dying horse. The boar raised its massive head. Aetius thought it might weigh four hundred and fifty, even five hundred pounds. It was the biggest boar he had ever seen; bigger than any in the arena, in the forests of Silestria, anywhere. The stench of it filled the forest glade with a thick, dark musk, and its cruel off-white tusks, gleaming through the dripping blood and the tendrils of torn intestine from the disembowelled horse – nine inches long was perhaps an underestimate.

The boar stared at them for a little while longer, its flanks heaving furiously as it got its breath back, unhurried and unafraid. Then it sensed movement beside it, and suddenly was afraid again, and hot with rage. It turned to gore the horse. But it wasn’t the horse, it was something else.

Snuffing the air, the boar galloped round to where Attila lay trapped and twisted, lying there helpless in last year’s leaves, and moved furiously towards the fallen boy with lowered tusks.

The Celtic slaveboy moved as fast as a forest animal. He slithered in the horse’s spilt guts, scrambled over the mound of its open belly and thrust his sword into the boar’s flank, just as the first swipe of its tusks opened up a deep cut across Attila’s back. The blade went in less than an inch, but it was enough. The boar turned on him, screaming with fury, and drove straight at him. But Cadoc slipped back over the dead horse and the enraged boar drove its tusks uselessly into dead flesh again. Then it felt a far deeper, more terrible wound along its back, penetrating deeply into its tough old bristling hide. It whipped round on its neat little hooves and saw Aetius. The Roman boy pulled the spear free again and braced his back against an ancient beechtree. The butt of his boar-spear was braced deep among the roots, for a boar that size would knock a man and spear aside like gossamer if they were not rooted in the ground like the roots of an oak.

Out of the corner of his eye, Aetius saw the Celtic slaveboy about to scramble over the horse again and try to attack the boar from behind.

‘No, Cadoc!’ he cried. ‘Let him come to me.’

The boar eyed Aetius a moment longer, its ears deaf to their human cries, filled only with the furious bang of blood in its brain. Then it charged.

The thick ashen spear snapped in two like a twig with the force of that five-hundred-pound weight, and Aetius threw himself aside only just in time. But in its mad unheeding charge, the great boar had also driven its own chest deeply onto the spearhead, which was buried up to the crossbar in its lungs and killing it. The boar reeled back, squealing, and fell to one side, slashing at its invisible tormentors, bright pneumonic blood frothing and spraying furiously from its champing jaws. It struggled to its feet again, but then its hind legs collapsed, its forefeet still planted unyielding in the soft forest floor.

Aetius crawled to his feet, dazed and shaking, and saw two boys – the two slaveboys, both acquainted with the lash and chain of their masters – creep towards the dying boar from either side, small blades in their hands. Aetius shouted ‘No!’ to them, for the boar was dying anyway, and yet, even in its last moments, it might turn that massive, bristling head and slash a man open from navel to throat. But the two slaveboys for once ignored the command of the master, and moved in closer, carefully avoiding that slowly swinging, bloody head. As one, they pounced forward and drove their blades into the creature’s body, Cadoc’s blade going deep into its tough, muscled neck, and Orestes’ slipping between its ribs. Still the boar swung its head, butting Cadoc and tossing him back into the leaf litter as if with mild irritation, but making no contact with its terrible tusks. Its mad ferocity was draining away now with its blood. It lay down in the leaves, and gave another heave of its blood-soaked flanks, and then after a long while another. And then it died.

Aetius steeled himself and tried to shut his nose against the stomach-turning reek of the disembowelled horse. He grasped it by its hind legs, ready to drag it off the fallen boy, and shouted orders to the slaves to take hold likewise. But from the other side he heard a cry, and there was Attila. He had hauled himself free, and although he clutched the back of one thigh, where he felt he had twisted a tendon, and he could sense the back of his shirt soaked where the boar’s tusk had razed through the skin of his back, nevertheless he was only slightly hurt, and too full of the furious thrill of the danger to feel real pain yet.

In that instant the mood of the four boys changed, and they were suddenly dancing around in the forest glade as four equals, slapping one another’s hands and punching the air, whooping like the most barbarous tribesmen in all of Scythia. They hopped and hollered round the huge, bloody mound of the slain boar, and seized their swords and their broken spears again and stabbed at it ceremonially as they circled. They shouted defiance at the boar’s ferocious soul, and even at the unknown gods who made such a creature of blood and horror and set it on the earth with a smile to be a terror and a torment to all men. They smeared themselves and one another with boar’s blood, and then a primordial paste of boar’s blood and moist forest earth, and howled at the high blue sky glimpsed through the waving light green leaves of the springtime canopy. Four different languages chaotically mingled, Greek and Celtic, Latin and Hun, but all crying the same angry defiance, the same bloodstained defiant triumph over life and death.

At last they fell exhausted to the forest floor and gradually regained their breath, their composure, and their awareness of difference and hierarchy. As their hot blood cooled, and their taut-strung limbs relaxed, they even said prayers, each of them. They prayed to the spirit of the boar, begging forgiveness, and to those nameless spirits behind the curtain of the world who made the boar, who bent and formed its curved spine in their iron hands, set with black bristles, who made its thundering hooves, and shaped its terrible ivory tusks.

Attila ordered the two slaveboys to make a fire, and began to slash the boar’s flanks, pulling away the thick hide to reveal the dark pink flesh, the meaty haunches of its powerful hind legs. They spitted the meat on greenwood twigs and roasted them over the fire. Despite the boar’s vast size, the four ravenous boys still made considerable inroads into its carcass, before they sank back into the leaves, unable to eat a mouthful more, and fell asleep.

When they awoke it was growing dark. They warmed themselves by building up the fire, by roasting yet more meat, although none of them felt they could eat another thing, and by taking it in turns to hack at the boar’s massive neck. With only their lightweight swords it was hard work, and each boy hacked himself to the point of sweating exhaustion.

‘But we can’t leave it here,’ said Orestes. ‘They’ll never believe us.’

It was strange that he, like Cadoc, now presumed to speak his opinions before the masters asked for them. But an ease had settled over the four that would not have been possible in court or camp.

Attila nodded. ‘All that meat’s going to waste, anyhow. But we have to take the head back.’

After nearly an hour of hacking and slicing through hide, sinew, muscle and bone, at last the mighty head fell free of the neck. There was some discussion about how to get it back, for the head alone must have weighed nearly two hundred pounds. At last it was decided to build a rough travois of strong hazel sticks, drag the boar’s head onto it, make it secure with more hazel twigs hooped over the top, and haul the travois back to the camp of the Huns, changing ponies every hour or so.

‘We’ll be the heroes of the People,’ said Orestes excitedly.

‘The envy of every man there,’ said Cadoc.

‘And the dream of every woman,’ chuckled Attila.

The other three all looked more or less embarrassed.

Attila grinned. ‘What, none of you have ever done it? To a woman?’

The two slaveboys flushed deeply. Aetius shook his head.

Attila settled back and grinned. ‘Well, well.’ It was good to feel powerful. He liked that feeling. After a while he said, ‘So you miss home?’

Aetius looked up and saw he was talking to him.

‘You pine for Rome?’

Aetius pulled a face. ‘I miss Italy,’ he said. ‘Rome is-’

‘Rome’s a cesspit,’ said Attila.

‘And you escaped it.’

‘I escaped it,’ said Attila. ‘No offence, but… your soldiers are useless. Mostly.’

The two boys eyed each other a little warily, then Attila laughed. Aetius didn’t.

‘And you,’ said Attila, rolling onto one elbow and waving regally at the two slaveboys. ‘You two. You’ll go free and laden with gold the moment we get back to camp.’

They stared.

Orestes stammered, ‘But – but I’ve nowhere else to go.’

Attila said seriously now, ‘You want to stay, Greek boy? Stay with the dreadful Huns, who eat raw meat and never have baths and refuse to bow to the meek dying and rising god of the Christians?’

Orestes looked down.

‘Then stay you will,’ said Attila. ‘But slave no more.’

Aetius was sitting cross-legged opposite Attila, watchful and wary as ever. He thought how like a king the boy already sounded, grandiloquently dispensing judgements and freedom and gold to left and to right with regal carelessness and magnificence.

‘And you,’ said Attila, turning to Cadoc, ‘you’ll go free, too. You almost saved my life.’

‘I did save your life,’ blurted Cadoc indignantly.

For a moment Attila stared at the dark-eyed slaveboy, and Aetius wondered if he might not erupt in fury at this impertinence, like his fiery uncle. But then he laughed, and they all relaxed. None of them wanted to see Attila lose his temper.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You did save my life. And my uncle will lade you with so much gold in gratitude that you won’t even be able to walk out of the camp!’

It took two ponies to drag the leaden weight of the boar’s head on its hazelwood travois. Two of the boys rode, and two of them walked, swapping places every hour or so. The three others tried to insist that Attila, at least, should ride, with his torn thigh muscle and his cut back, but he insisted on walking his fair share like the rest of them.

It was an arduous progress, and it was late the following night when they made it back into the camp of the Huns, so only the few warriors on nightwatch greeted their return.

But the next morning when people awoke and came blearily out of their tents, there in the middle of the camp, set on the back of a high-wheeled wagon to exaggerate its size still further, was a monstrous boar’s head, as big as any man or woman of the People had ever seen. Beneath the wagon lay four exhausted, grimy, travel-stained boys, huddled together under a heap of coarse woollen horse-blankets, fast asleep.

The people gathered around in open-mouthed amazement, some of the bolder reaching out to touch the boar’s great muzzle, or even tap its white fangs with their knuckles where its bloody jaws hung open. And they began to murmur among themselves.

The boys awoke to the sound, and crawled out from under the wagon and stood and stared. When they realised what was taking place, they began to grin and accept the many slaps on the arm or back, and agree that, yes, it was a terrific, and incredibly dangerous, feat that they had managed. They had slain the Monstrous Boar of the Northern Woods, and dragged it, or at least its severed head, all the way home to show the People with their own disbelieving eyes.

Two burly men of the tribe plucked Attila into the air, set him on their shoulders, and began to parade him around, while the women sang and ululated in praise of his great feat of arms. Other men had killed boar, they sang, but Attila had killed the King of the Boar. The sun shone bright from the bold eyes of Prince Attila. Surely there was no warrior in the land like Prince Attila.

Some of the women called out bawdy comments, saying that they would be happy to have a son by him any time, if he cared to visit their tent one night… Attila grinned and waved and lapped it up, his injured thigh and back forgotten for the moment. Meanwhile, the other three tried not to look too resentful: their contribution to the death of the boar was wholly ignored in favour of the People’s prince. Then the parade suddenly came to a halt, the singing died away, and an ominous silence settled heavily upon the crowd.

There stood King Ruga, flanked by his personal guard. He did not sing and ululate at his nephew’s great achievement. He did not hail him as the killer of the King of the Boar, or declare that the sun shone bright from his bold eyes. He stood grimly before him, folded his beefy arms across his chest, set his face grimly, and said nothing.

Attila slid down from the men’s shoulders, wincing as he took his weight on his torn thigh muscle again, and stood before him.

‘We slew a boar,’ he said, waving at it as casually as he could.

Ruga nodded. ‘So I see.’

‘And the slaveboys and the Roman boy, they slew it, too. In fact, they saved my life. The debt of the Royal Blood of Uldin is upon their heads, and I have given them their freedom.’

Ruga was silent for a long while. Then he repeated slowly, softly, ‘You have given them their freedom?’

Attila nodded, hesitantly, his eyes falling away from the king. ‘That is to say… ’ His voice weakened and tailed off. He knew he had made a mistake.

The voice of Ruga roared out across the circle, and the very sides of the surrounding black tents shivered under the blast, and as he roared he strode towards the suddenly cowering boy. ‘It is not yours to give a slave his freedom! It is in the gift of the king!’ With a gigantic backhanded swipe of his fist he knocked Attila into the dust. ‘Unless you think that you are an equal of the king, now? Is that it, boy?’ He planted his felt-booted foot hard on the boy’s chest, knocking the wind from his lungs, and roared again, ‘Is that it? Boar-slayer? Upstart? Malformed whelp from your mother’s womb?’

All Attila’s ardent spirit died under the righteous wrath of his uncle, and he turned his face into the dust and did not reply.

Suddenly Ruga looked across at the Roman boy, and the people were baffled. A few had glimpsed what Aetius had done, as had the hawk-eyed, bearded king. Almost despite himself, Aetius had taken a step forward when he saw Attila knocked to the ground, and his hand had reached for his sword.

Little Bird, with his bird-bright eyes, had seen, and seemed to think it funny. ‘White boy draw a sward, father! White boy draw a sward!’

‘Peace, madman,’ growled Ruga, brushing the capering fool aside. ‘You talk of nothing.’

‘Everything is nothing,’ said Little Bird sulkily, and sat in the dust.

Ruga turned his lowering gaze back to Aetius. ‘Approach me with your weapon, would you, boy?’ he rumbled.

Aetius faltered and stopped, but he did not step back. And he said, so quietly that only the very closest could hear, ‘Do not hurt him.’

‘Do you give me orders, boy? The days when the Huns took orders from the Romans are long gone. Aye, and if I were to mete out just punishment to you, for the sins that your people committed in their maltreatment of this boy, this prince of the royal blood – for all his impudence – I would have you stripped of your skin in a trice, and your bleeding carcasses dumped on the anthills of the steppes to be picked clean down to its meagre bones! A pretty death for such a high-born boy, eh? Eh? Answer me, boy.’

But Aetius said no more. He took a single step back, dropped hands at his sides, and lowered his eyes to the ground.

The people looked warily on, anxious lest the king’s wrath should turn against them, too. He was only one man, and they were thousands, and tens of thousands, yet the will of Ruga, like the will of all the kings of the Huns, and perhaps all kings among men, was as real and powerful as an iron rod on your back, and none but the very strongest might oppose it.

Ruga stepped back from Attila and looked angrily around at his people. None met his gaze.

At last he gestured at his prostrate nephew, and said to his guards, ‘Take him and his dear Roman boyfriend, too, and lash them to the wagon out on the plains. The two slaves – and they are slaves still – they shall serve in my tent henceforth, And woe betide you,’ he called across to the wide-eyed Orestes and Cadoc, ‘if you should spill so much as a drop of koumiss when you refill my royal goblet, do you hear?’

Ruga turned on his heel and strode back to his great adorned pavilion, and the chastened people shuffled slowly away. The two slaves crept uncertainly after the king.

And the two boys, Roman and Hun together, were led out by a group of spearmen, and walked for three miles across the baking steppe, until they came to a high flatbed wagon, the grass grown long about its solid wooden wheels. There they stripped the boys naked, and lashed them flat on their backs across the bed of the cart, even their necks and heads tied so tightly that they could not turn away from the sun. And they left them there, to burn and then freeze for a day and a night.

‘Well,’ said Attila companionably, when the guards had ridden away back to camp and they had only the whispering wind and the burning sun for company.

‘Well,’ said Aetius.

‘Here we are.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Are you thirsty?’

‘Of course I’m thirsty. Have you got any water?’

There was a pause. Then for some reason, from the fear before and now the long pain of the day and the night that lay ahead of them, they began to laugh. They laughed hysterically, until the tears ran over their cheeks.

Attila said, ‘Stop, stop, we need to conserve our water,’ but they only laughed the more.

Eventually the laughter died on their lips, and the tears dried on their cheeks, and they fell silent.

The sun burnt down. They screwed their eyes shut, but the red and orange sun cooked through their lids. Their lips began to dry and crack, and their cheeks and foreheads to burn.

‘Keep your mouth closed,’ said Attila. ‘Breathe through your nose.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Aetius.

‘We’ll survive this.’

‘Damn right we will.’

Towards dusk they heard a sound in the long grass, not far away. For a moment they hoped it might be the guards, come back to release them, Ruga having relented of his harshness. But no, Ruga never relented of his harshness.

‘What is it?’ croaked Aetius, his throat as rough as the skin of a shark.

Attila snuffed the air, and his insides gave a lurch of fear. ‘Golden jackal,’ he whispered. ‘Pack of them.’

The Roman cursed, the first time Attila had ever heard him do so, then said, ‘Can they get up?’

Attila tried to shake his head, but of course he couldn’t. ‘Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Make a loud noise if they do.’

As dusk settled over the vast and lonely plains, the two boys lay in taut silence, hearing and smelling the rank hot smell of the golden jackals as they snuffled round the wheels of the cart, raising their damp noses into the air and sniffing the warm, salty aroma of sunburnt human flesh.

Although unable to raise or turn their cruelly bound heads, the boys knew that the jackals were just below them, their slender, powerful jaws drooling, slavering into the long grass. And both boys imagined the same thing: the feel of those sharp white teeth as the creatures tore at their stomachs, pulled the skin aside, and delved their long muzzles into their innards, devouring their rich, bloody livers and spleens as they lay there, still alive. Or the jackals nuzzling lower, and feeding on their sunburnt, exposed…

Whether it was simply a warm gust of air, or whether it was truly a jackal, its forefeet up on the side of the wagon beside his head, its hot canine breath wafting over his face, Attila would never know. But with sudden urgency he said, ‘Now – shout!’

The boys broke into a frenzied shouting, as loud as their blistered and sun-parched throats could manage. When they stopped shouting they could still hear the distant whimpering and yikkering of the jackal pack, far off now and curving away into the feathergrass.

But they would be back.

Throughout many more hours of dusk and night, Attila and Aetius lay side by side, driving the jackals away with their panicked, grating voices raised to shouts. It would be only a matter of time before the jackals realised that shouting was all they could do, and then… But the jackals never did realise.

Flies and mosquitoes came out and bit them from head to toe. Moths fluttered up from the long grass and sipped the crusted saltwater that lay on their skins. Towards dawn both boys were shivering so badly in the chilly steppeland night, that their chattering teeth sounded like the call of two giant cicadas in the day.

But they had survived. Dawn was coming up, surely – and soon the warriors would come to unbind them, and sling them semi-conscious across the croups of their horses and ride them back into camp.

As the first pale grey of the dawnlight washed up over the steppes from the east, Attila lay in a pained, wretched half-dream, and he thought he dreamt of a voice he knew, saying, ‘Don’t tell me – you’re in trouble again.’

In his dream, he opened his eyes, and looked up at the swimming, familiar face above him, and croaked, ‘Don’t tell me you travelled all this way, just to see me.’

Then the face was grinning, upside down over him so that it looked all wrong, and a sharp blade was cutting the ropes that bound him, and the blood was flooding back with agonising needles into his bloodless hands and feet and flowing hotly under the skin of his scalp.

Aetius was cut free, too, and after some minutes of gasping and rubbing their wrists, the boys were offered water in leather flagons. They tried to guzzle it down, but the flagons were snatched back after only a mouthful each. Only then did they sit painfully up, and stare at their rescuers.

‘Is it really you?’ said Attila at last.

‘It really is,’ he nodded.

‘And you didn’t come here just to see me.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I came here to see my boy. And to take him home.’

‘Your boy?’ Slowly it dawned on him. ‘The slave? The Celtic boy?’

He nodded.

‘But,’ blurted Attila, ‘but he saved my life!’

Lucius grimaced. ‘Like father, like son,’ he said laconically.