The Gathering of the Storm

PROLOGUE

Thirty years passed after the Hun boy, Prince Attila, was sent into exile, and the world knew an uneasy peace. What he experienced during that exile in the unimaginable wastes of Scythia, with only his faithful Greek slave Orestes for company, none can tell. But one can surmise well enough. For scripture warns us that man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward. And exceptional men are born to exceptional sorrow.

In the first volume of my chronicle, I, Priscus of Panium, told of Attila’s boyhood as a hostage in Rome, of his escape and flight through an Italy ravaged and laid waste by the Goths, and of his doomed return to his Hun homelands. In this, my second volume, I shall tell of what came thereafter: of Attila’s return from the haunted wilderness, and the blood-darkened day on which he made himself king; and of how he gathered all the tribes of his own and kindred peoples and welded them into an army vast and terrible enough to fulfil his final ambition. To turn upon the Empire of Rome, that hated Empire which had tormented his boyhood, destroyed his youth, and humiliated his people during the long years of his exile. To make all ready for his long-meditated and apocalyptic vengeance.

Then let our story resume.