Attila

5

When the boys’ limbs at last felt mobile, they climbed down stiffly from the cart, and Lucius chucked them each a tunic to put on.

‘I know some of you barbarians fight stark naked,’ he said, ‘but. .. ’

‘I’m no barbarian,’ said Aetius haughtily and in perfect Italianate Latin, far more correctly accented that Lucius’ own, with its soft, Celtic burr.

Attila grinned and pulled his tunic on over his head.

‘And you are…?’ asked Lucius.

‘Aetius, son of the late Gaudentius, master-general of cavalry on the Pannonian frontier.’

Lucius was taken aback. ‘I knew something of your father. He was reputed a good commander.’

‘He was,’ said Aetius stiffly.

‘Well,’ said Lucius. ‘And you are a hostage of peace here with the Huns? They are keeping you well, clearly.’

Attila snapped, ‘Rather better than the Romans keep their hostages, I think.’

Lucius was silent.

‘And who’s he?’ said Attila, jerking his head at Lucius’ silent companion.

‘Cievell Lugana,’ said the old man with the long grey beard. His eyes twinkled at the boy, not unkindly. ‘At least, that is what I am called today.’

Attila eyed him curiously, then shrugged and turned towards the camp. ‘Your son,’ he said. ‘And there’s another slave. They’re in the great pavilion of the king. At least, they’ll be sleeping round the back. Take them both – take Orestes, too, my slave.’

Aetius looked sharply at Attila, but Attila looked back calmly. ‘It is better for him,’ he said. ‘It will not be easy for me here henceforth.’

Lucius considered for a while and then said, ‘We’ll see.’

They left their horses tethered lightly to the wagon, and they crept in silence and darkness towards the camp of the Huns.

Cadoc was dreaming, huddled under a fleabitten horseblanket at the back of the king’s pavilion.

The old man who called himself Gamaliel, or Cievell Lugana, and by many other names, smiled over him and murmured, ‘Time to wake up, song-maker, bird-catcher, Dreamer of Dreams, of the line of Bran, with the words of the world on your lips… ’

Lucius knelt and shook Cadoc awake, and the boy opened his eyes wide, and flung his arms round his father’s neck. And they both wept, even as the father held his hand clamped over the boy’s mouth for silence.

When the little group of six emerged round the front of the king’s pavilion, there were torches burning, for the dawnlight was still dim and cold and grey. They were surrounded by a hundred warriors or more, arrows knocked to their bowstrings, arrowheads gleaming coldly in the torchlight. For though the camp of the Huns might stand without walls, no group of armed strangers could creep in under darkness and not be noticed by the keen-eyed spearmen on watch.

For the second time in a day and a night, Attila faced his uncle in defiance, but this time he was one of six and he had more to fight for than merely his own pride. Lucius had come on an unimaginable journey this far to take back his abducted son, and he would not let him go home empty-handed.

There was a breathless silence across the camp of the Huns, and over the natural arena formed by the ranks of watching tribespeople, spellbound at this moment of terrible drama. All eyes switched back and forth between the small figure of the boy Attila and the hulking, bear-skinned figure of his uncle, King Ruga. The crackling battle of wills taking place between them was almost visible in the air in its intensity.

‘Uncle… ’ began the boy at last.

‘You have led armed strangers into my kingdom,’ said Ruga. ‘You have shown them the way into my camp. You have brought them to the felt walls of my pavilion with their swords drawn. You would see me slain in my sleep like a beast, Attila?’

Attila tried to protest, but Ruga spoke over him. ‘You have betrayed the People, O my nephew and my blood. You have opposed my word, and you have shamed and humiliated me before all the warriors of the tribe.’

The boy never flinched, though by the law of the tribe any man there could have drawn a knife at any moment and slain him where he stood, for he was a pronounced traitor. But he did not stir.

Then King Ruga did a very strange thing. Slowly and, some who watched might have said, with profound sadness, he walked over to the boy, who remained unmoved and seemingly unafraid. The burly, full-bearded warrior-king reached out and laid his hands on the boy’s shoulders. He looked down at him with an expression that appeared to mingle anger, pride, sorrow and the deepest affection. And then he said, in a soft, deep, rumbling voice that few who strained to listen could hear, ‘Your brother Bleda is a fool, Attila.’

The boy looked up then.

Ruga held his shoulders more tightly. ‘I would have made you my heir,’ he whispered. He blinked his bleary eyes and said even more softly. ‘I would have given you everything. I would have given you my kingdom and my nation, and dominion over the steppelands from the Holy Mountains to the shores of the Roman River. For never will I have sons of my own, nor know another to match your matchless spirit. And now, instead, I should order you put to death… ’

Ruga turned away, and his broad, fur-clad shouders seemed to slump, like the curved, weakened shoulders of an old man.

‘Let them go,’ he said. ‘Let them all go – except Prince Attila.’

Just then, when it seemed that the ordeal was over and the grim sentence was passed, a blur of a figure came tumbling over in the dust towards the king, and sprang to his feet in the centre of the circle. It was Little Bird, and all his attention was on Gamaliel.

‘Why, father, do not set free this old fool here with the long grey beard!’ he cried. ‘For he knows too much, too much. He is come to torment me, to torment all of us, with his wise and grave old sayings, about how the gods are just. His words are like flies which bother my weary ears.’

Ruga turned back and stared in dim puzzlement at this encounter between his fool and the one among the strangers whom he had marked least.

‘If the gods are just, old fool,’ went on Little Bird, capering round the still and silent figure of Gamaliel, ‘they are also unjust. You forget, you forget, you grow old and muddle-headed in your wise and serious dotage. Do the gods weep to see the man on his cruel cross, with the Christians kneeling adoringly at his feet? They weep and they mourn, and then they turn round and bare their arses and fart in his bleeding face.’

Gamaliel only looked on, grave and unblinking, at the dancing, mocking Little Bird, and said never a word.

‘If God is a creator, He is also a destroyer. If God is a God of love, He is also a God of hate. You know it is true, old beardy fool, which is why you say nothing and cling to your flyblown old words of comfort and lies. Comfort and lies is all you dispense, old fool, like a quack of a doctor in the marketplace, selling flavoured mare’s piss for a panacea.’ Little Bird spun round on the spot and pointed at Attila. ‘Will the gods reach down and save the broken-hearted exile-boy sent away all unjustly under the grinning sky?’

‘Mind your words, fool,’ growled Ruga, but Little Bird paid him no heed.

‘They will not, and you know it. The exile-boy will ride broken-hearted away, and the gods will not reach down and save him, not until my mother gives birth to piglets, and the moon falls down from heaven. You know it is true, old beardy fool, and I speak the way of the gods. It is time you paid another visit to the Old Man of the Mountains, old wanderer, old fool. Your wits are grown flyblown and mouldy as a month-dead mule.’

Little Bird pointed unexpectedly at Cadoc, standing timidly near his father. ‘You are wise, dark-eyed boy. For he there loves his little sword, and he there loves his city, and he there holds the fate of the world in his ballbag, but you there hold the fate of the world on your lips. And words make the world, they do, for words are the movers and shakers of the world for ever.’

Attila and Orestes shivered at these last words, but Ruga stepped forwards and cried, ‘Enough!’ This untouchable shaman and fool, Little Bird, drove his mind to a spinning distraction sometimes.

‘It is never enough, my father!’ cried Little Bird, skipping across to where Ruga stood, and kneeling in exaggerated obedience. ‘Never enough!’ With that he curled up in the dust at the king’s feet, and appeared to fall fast asleep.

Ruga reiterated his commands, and not even Lucius or Gamaliel dared to argue with them. The king’s violent and uncertain temper was plain to see, even at his most bowed and sorrowful.

The five – Lucius and Gamaliel, Aetius, Cadoc and Orestes – were escorted from the camp by spearmen. They stopped and looked back once. Their eyes met the eyes of the Hun prince, and everything was said in that wordless exchange. And then they were gone.

The prince should have been put to death. The whole tribe knew it, and yet the whole tribe knew why he was not. They had seen the way their king had looked on him. They had seen a bitter, remorseful affection, even love, in the harsh king’s eyes, which they had never seen before. And they knew that Ruga would never give the order for the prince to be put to death.

Later that day Attila was given a horse to ride and provisions for seven days. He was held down by two strong men while one of the priests leant over him with a bronze knife, and cut three deep slashes in his forehead. The boy gritted his teeth and strained against the men’s grip, but he made no sound.

Then he was helped up, trembling, onto the horse. The priest washed his hands clean of the blood-guilt in a bowl of water. He sprinkled some of the water in the direction of the mounted boy, and proclaimed the sentence before all the assembled tribe.

‘For thirty summers and thirty winters you will ride out alone, wherever you choose. But you will not come into the country of the Black Huns, neither into the country of the White Huns. For they are your People, whom you have betrayed. You will ride alone and none shall own you. If you try to return into the country of your People, whom you have betrayed, every man’s hand shall be against you, and every man’s sword arm shall be raised upon you, and every woman’s and every child’s cry shall betray your presence. To mark your exile, you have been cut upon the forehead with the tripartite mark of the traitor. Now ride forth, with none for company but your own sin-stained soul.’

And the boy rode out into exile.

None was permitted to look out after him, or even speak of him again. For the People, their prince had ceased to exist.

Yet speak of him they did. At the wooden watertrough later that day, the women said among themselves, ‘He will return.’ One old woman looked out across the steppes to the east, and crinkled her eyes, and saw in her mind an image of that strange, fearless boy riding away across the endless grasslands, the hooves of his horse stirring up the dust of the plains as he rode. She nodded and said again, ‘He will return.’

After riding all morning eastwards, the broken-hearted exile came to the grave-mound of his father. And there on the grave-mound sat Little Bird, cross-legged, rocking back and forth, his top-knot swaying comically as he conversed with his only friend, the wind.

The boy sat his horse and said nothing.

It was death for any of the tribe so much as to look at the cursed exile, let alone speak to him. But Little Bird was different and under the protection of the gods. He spoke to Nameless-Under-a-Curse as blithely as he would speak to anyone.

‘Give directions to Little Bird,’ he sang. ‘Give directions to a seedhead of feathergrass on the wind. The result is much the same.’

Little Bird talked always as if about himself, but really he talked about the People. He talked of tragedy with a laugh, and he spoke mournfully of the most ludicrous and trivial things. He rode into camp facing backwards on his horse, he dressed as a woman, he danced and clapped his hands at children’s funerals. He said that it was all one: that the gods bled when mankind bled, but they laughed when they bled, too.

Now he seemed to think the exile of Attila was amusing in the extreme. He joyfully sang one of his little songs.

‘Under the earth I go

On an oakleaf I stand

I ride on a filly that never was foaled

And I hold the dead in my hand.’

The boy heeled his horse and began to walk wearily on.

‘One day, when you were a baby, baby piglet… ’ Little Bird called after him.

Attila hesitated, sighed, then drew in his horse. ‘What?’

Little Bird grinned tormentingly. ‘One day, when you were a boy – do you not remember? You and your brother, Bleda with the Brain like a Grass-Grain, went out to play in the woods. We were camped near the marshes of the Dnieper in those days. Do you not recall, little father?’

Attila shook his head.

‘And in the woods, you met an old woman,’ went on Little Bird liltingly, ‘you met an old woman with a wart on the end of her nose, a wart the size of a molehill. But that, I admit, is by the by. And maybe I’m making it up altogether. Maybe I’m making it all up altogether.’

The boy waited patiently. His horse shook its head free of flies and waited likewise.

‘Anyway. The woman smiled her ghastly smile – and a bat flew out of her mouth as she smiled! And she creaked and croaked and pointed her pointy old finger, and she told you and your arse-brained brother that the first of you to run back and hug your mother – your mother was still alive in those far-off days, little father, and very beautiful and lovesome she was, too-’

The boy did not flinch.

‘-that the first of you to run and hug your mummy would be king of the world. Now, if some droopy nosed old beldame, and with droopier milk-sacs by far, I fear – if such a noisome old dame, as I say, were one day to accost me in a bat-haunted forest and tell me to run and hug my mother, I might think twice before doing her peculiar bidding. But not you, O innocent, boyish little chap that you were in those days, nor your galumphing, arse-brained brother. So you both set off running, in your quest to become kings of the world. And your galumphing, arse-brained brother gets to your mother first, where she is sitting so beautiful on a rug in the sunshine and carding sheep’s wool, or whatever it is that women do all day. And much startled was she to get a hug all out of the blue that way from Bleda her arse-brained son. But you, O noble princeling, were way behind, for you had fallen flat on your pug. Or perhaps your not so arse-brained-as-he-looks elder brother had tripped you up as you ran? For I never said that the world was a just and joyful place, little father. At all events – in falling – in falling, you seized two great handfuls of dust. And you stood and shouted to your brother that you had seized your mother earth. He looked back, did Prince Bone-Headed Bleda the Dim, and he saw your little joke, and oh! how he did scowl!’

Little Bird paused and regarded the boy on the horse with eyes which twinkled with strange, otherworldly amusement. ‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘What do you make of that tale, little father?’

Attila’s eyes lowered slowly towards the ground as he heard the madman’s words. Then he slowly reined his horse around, and began to ride on.

‘O King of the World!’ Little Bird cried, throwing a single blade of feathergrass like a spear futilely after him. ‘O Princeling! O Little Father of Nothing!’

As to the five, they took their separate ways.

Orestes vanished one night, soon after they had left the camp of the Huns, long before they crossed back over the Kharvad Mountains, and they never saw or heard from him again.

After fond farewells, Gamaliel went south towards Byzantium, where he said he had pressing business.

Aetius they said farewell to at the gates of a Danube fort, and he was taken from thence back to Rome.

Lucius and Cadoc, father and son, made the long, long journey home to Britain.

As to their home-coming, and the joy that was there in the eyes of Seirian, wife and mother, and in the upturned face of curly-haired Ailsa – it would take a pen greater than mine to do that scene justice. But I do not suppose that there has been such pure happiness often in the history of mankind.

There was only one more encounter before the exiled prince left the land of the Huns for ever.

Two more days to the east, on the horizon he saw a figure sitting on a horse. The figure did not stir. A full hour later, he pulled up alongside.

‘Stolen?’ he said, indicating the horse.

The other boy nodded.

Attila examined it. ‘Rubbish choice. It’s half spavined already.’

The boy grinned.

Attila grinned, too.

Master and slave rode on into the eastern steppelands together.

Once back in Rome, Aetius was adopted by a high-ranking, self-regarding but not unkindly senatorial family. In the autumn he was given a personal pedagogue, for it was felt that his manners and education must have fallen behind dreadfully during his time with the unwashed Huns.

The boy regarded the pedagogue with a certain aloof scorn. ‘Greek?’

The pedagogue nodded.

‘Ever travelled beyond the Alps? Ever fought in battle? Ever-’

‘Aetius,’ interrupted his adoptive father, ‘that is enough.’

‘No, master,’ said the pedagogue mildly. ‘It is true that I am neither a traveller nor a soldier. But not all men are born for the same tasks.’

Aetius considered for a moment, and thought it a fair enough answer. ‘What is your name?’

‘Priscus,’ said the pedagogue. ‘Priscus of Panium.’