The Gathering of the Storm

EPILOGUE

The Crossing

A boy was fishing on a small tributary of the Danube, that great river of ever-changing colours, now a warm and limpid green in the early summer sun. He was not fishing very hard. The river was so beautiful, nature at the full, a peaceful pastoral scene. He trailed his hand in the clear water. Among the reeds, a dabchick was sitting on her floating nest, incubating six neat white eggs. Surely they would hatch soon. The boy wondered if he would see it. Everything was being born today, everything was coming to life. The dabchick’s partner was diving for stickleback. Trout were jumping, and the air was full of waterflies and of butterflies of brilliant yellow and blue. A ladybird was a splash of blood on reedmace close to, spoonbills swept the shallows farther off. House martens were coming down to the river’s edge to pluck up little beakfuls of mud and fly back to build their artful nests under the eaves. Marsh marigolds nodded their great golden heads at the water’s edge. It was such a peaceful scene.

The boy was almost asleep, face turned upwards to the sun, when a kingfisher flashed past in a dazzle of emerald and blue, and he lifted his head. And then he stared, open-mouthed. He might be dreaming – he wished he was. But he felt the wooden boards of the boat hard enough beneath him. He wasn’t dreaming. This was real.

Then he was reaching for the oars and tearing at them in pure panic, whimpering to himself under his breath.

No more than two hundred yards upstream, having already crossed the great Danube, the Hun army was fording this tributary to fall on the town of Margus. There was no numbering them, nor describing the way they looked.

At their head rode Attila, face set like stone. Not far behind him rode the witch Enkhtuya. On a leather thong round her neck hung two small severed hands, and from her saddle, tied by its hair, hung the head of the idiot child, eyes closed and mouth agape.

‘Sir, the Huns have crossed the Danube. They have fallen on Margus Fair.’

‘Very well.’ Aetius nodded and turned away.

All was now ready. It was time to begin.

It was time for the End to begin.