The Scourge of God

At the foot of this platform Attila waited on a couch far more comfortable than the simple chair on which he had received us. Running the length of the hall from the couch to the door was a banquet table. As the guests entered, each was presented with a golden cup that was filled with imported wine. Then we all milled awkwardly, the finely dressed Romans clustering together amid Huns, Germans, and Gepids, all waiting for assignment to sit. I noticed that Edeco was murmuring something to Bigilas as they waited, again as if the two were almost equal in rank. The translator nodded expectantly. Maximinus noticed it, too, and frowned.

Finally Attila commanded us to sit, his Roman-born minister Oenegius on his right and two of his sons, Ellac and Danziq, on his left. The boys looked subdued and frightened, with none of the boisterous energy you would expect of their early teen years. We Romans were told to sit on the left as well, Maximinus closest to the table’s head and I at his side to take any notes that were necessary. Then the other Huns took their places, each introducing himself in Hunnish. There was Edeco, Onegesh, and Skilla, of course. But there were many other chiefs too numerous to remember, bearing such names as Octar, Balan, Eskam, Totila, Brik, Agus, and Sturak. Each boasted briefly of his deeds in battle before taking his place, most of their stories referring to defeats of Roman soldiers and sackings of Roman cities. Behind them were more horsehair standards of the Hun tribes with a bewildering thicket of names such as the Akatiri, Sorosgi, Angisciri, Barselti, Cadiseni, Sabirsi, Bayunduri, Sadagarii, Zalae, and Albani. Those spellings are my own, for the Huns of course had no written language and their tongue twists Latin and Greek.

Strapping male slaves who wore iron collars like hounds and had arms as thick as roof beams bore the night’s food to us. The vast platters of gold and silver were heaped with fowl, venison, boar, mutton, steak, fruit, roots, puddings, and stews. Women served wine and kumiss, and they were without exception the most beautiful women I had ever seen—more beautiful, even, than the maidens chosen to grace Constantinople festivals. How my haughty Olivia would be put in the shade by these blossoms! All were captives; and they bore the looks of their homelands, from Persia to Frisia—their skin as dark as mahogany or as translucent as white alabaster, their hair the color of linen, wheat, amber, mink, and obsidian, and their eyes the shades of sapphire, emerald, chestnut, opal, and ebony. The Huns paid their feminine grace no special heed, but we Romans, except Maximinus, were as transfixed by these captive ornaments as we’d been by the women in Anika’s house. I confess to wondering, and hoping, if the same hospitality would be offered here. If so, I was determined to sneak away from the old senator long enough to take advantage of it!

How desperately I longed for a respite from constant male companionship, and my body seemed fit to explode. I remembered Skilla’s friendly warning.

One of the women I recognized as the dark-haired girl by the gate, whose rare beauty was magnified by her look of intelligence, fire, and longing. This evening she was so light-footed that she seemed to float as much as walk, and I could have sworn that she peeked at me occasionally as my gaze followed her around the room.

“For a man who said he didn’t want to lose his head around the Huns, Jonas, I fear it will twist off completely if you keep craning to watch that serving wench.” Senator Maximinus was looking agreeably and blankly at a Hun across the table as he gave this quiet scold in Latin.

I looked down at my plate. “I didn’t think I was that obvious.”

“You can be sure that Attila notices everything we do.”

The kagan was again dressed more simply than any man or woman in the room. He wore no mark of rank or decoration. He had no crown. While his warlords feasted from captured gold plate, he ate from a wooden bowl and drank from a wooden cup, rarely saying a word. Instead of alcohol, he drank water. He disdained what little bread there was and touched nothing sweet. He simply looked out at the company with dark, deep-set, all-consuming eyes, as if a spectator at a strange drama. A woman stood like a pillar in the shadows by the bed.

“Who’s that?” I asked Maximinus.

“Queen Hereka, foremost of his wives and mother of his princes. She has her own house and compound but attends her husband at state functions like this one.”

Attila’s sons ate woodenly, not daring to look at their father or speak to the men around them. Then a third boy came in, nodded to his mother, and went up to the king. He was younger than the other two, handsome; and for the first time Attila betrayed a slight smile and pinched him on the cheek.

“And that?”

“It must be Ernak. I’m told he’s the favored son.”

“Favorite why?”

Rusticius leaned in. “Attila’s seers have foretold his empire will falter but that Ernak will restore it.”

“Attila will falter?” Now I was curious. First Rome is prophesied doom and now Attila. Competing prophecies!

“Looking at him tonight, it seems unlikely.”

“He’s to falter only after vanquishing us.”

Music started—a mix of drum, flute, and string—and the Huns began a round of rousing song. They sang from deep within their torsos, a strange, beelike humming, but it was hypnotic in its own way. While the instruments, noise, and growing drunkenness made translation difficult, I realized that most of the music again celebrated the slaughter of their enemies. There were ballads of triumphs over Ostrogoth, Gepid, Roman, and Greek, sung with no acknowledgment that all those peoples had representatives at the feast. The Huns conquered, and our injured pride was of no consequence.

Then came lighter entertainment: dancing women and acrobatic men, jugglers and magicians, mimes and comic actors. Attila watched it all with an expression as dour and flat as if he were watching the day’s shadows move on a wall.

The entertainment climaxed when, with a somersault, a dwarf rolled from the shadows and sprang up wearing a mock crown, bringing howls of delight from all the Huns except Attila. He was a grotesque little creature with dark skin, stumpy legs, a long torso, and a flat, moonlike face, as if an exaggerated caricature of how we Romans saw the Huns. He began prancing and declaiming in a high, piping voice.

“Zerco!” they cried. “King of the tribes!” Attila’s mouth had changed to a grimace, as if the jester’s was a performance to be endured.

“Our host doesn’t like the little one,” I murmured.

“Why?”

“The dwarf was the pet of his brother Bleda, who Attila doesn’t like to be reminded of,” Bigilas explained. “The freak was never a favorite of Attila, who is too serious to appreciate mockery. After Bleda died, the king made a present of Zerco to Aetius the Roman, a general who once lived among the Huns as a hostage. But Bleda had rewarded Zerco by allowing him to marry a slave woman and the dwarf pined for his wife, who remained here. Aetius finally persuaded Attila to take the jester back, and the king has regretted it ever since. He insults and torments the jester, but the halfling endures it so he can stay with his wife.”

“Is the wife deformed as well?”

“She’s tall, fair, and has learned to love him, I’ve been told. The marriage was supposed to be a joke, but the couple has not conspired with the mockery.”

The dwarf raised his arms in mock greeting. “The king of toads welcomes Rome!” he proclaimed. “If you cannot out-fight us, at least outdrink us!” The Huns laughed. He scampered over and, without warning, leaped into my lap. It was like the bound of a large dog, and I was so surprised I tipped over my wine. “I said drink, not pour!”

“Get off me,” I whispered desperately.

“No! Every king needs a throne!” Then he leaned, impishly sniffed Maximinus, and kissed his beard. “And a consort!”

The Huns howled.

The senator flushed red, and I felt stricken with embarrassment. What was I supposed to do? The dwarf clung to me like a monkey. I glanced wildly about. The woman who had caught my eye earlier was watching me curiously, to see my response. “Why do you mock us?” I hissed.

“To warn you of danger,” the dwarf replied quietly.

“Nothing is as it seems.” Then he sprang away and, laugh-ing maniacally, ran from the hall.

What did that mean? I was bewildered.

Attila stood. “Enough of this foolishness.” They were his first words all evening. Everyone fell silent and the gaiety was replaced by tension. The king pointed. “You Romans have presents, do you not?”

Maximinus stood, somewhat shaky from his embarrassment. “We do, kagan.” He clapped his hands once. “Let them be brought in!”

Bolts of pink and yellow silk unrolled against the carpets like the flash of dawn. Small chests opened to a shoal of coins. There was a galaxy of jewels scattered by Attila’s wooden plate, engraved swords and lances leaned against his bed platform, sacred goblets arranged on a bench, and combs and mirrors set on the skin of a lion. The Huns murmured greedily.

“These are tokens of the emperor’s good faith,” Maximinus said.

“And you will take back to him tokens of mine,” Attila said. “There will be bales of sable and fox, blessing bundles from my shamans, and my pledge to honor whatever agreement we come to. This is the word of Attila.”

His men rumbled their approval.

“But Rome is rich, and Constantinople the richest of its cities,” he went on. “All men know this, and know that what you have brought us are mere tokens. Is this not true?”

“We are not as rich as you belie—”

“Among the People of the Dawn, treaties are marked by blood and marriage. I am contemplating the latter and want proof of the former. Emperor after emperor has sent the Hunuguri their sons and daughters. The general Aetius lived with us when I was a boy, and I used to wrestle with him in the dirt.” He grinned. “He was older, but I beat him, too.”

The assembly laughed.

Now Attila pointed abruptly at Bigilas. “You, alone among the Romans who have come to us, have a son. Is this not true?”

Bigilas stood in seeming confusion. “Yes, my lord.”

“This boy will be a hostage of your good faith in these negotiations while we talk, no? He will be evidence that you trust Attila as he trusts you.”

“Kagan, my son is still in Constan—”

“You will go back to fetch him while your companions learn the ways of the Hun. It is only when your boy gets here that our negotiations can conclude, because only then will I know you are men of your word: so faithful that you trust your son to me. Understand?”

Bigilas looked at Maximinus. Reluctantly, the senator nodded.

“As you order, kagan.” Bigilas bowed. “If your riders could send word ahead . . .”

“Some will accompany you.” Attila nodded. “Now, I will sleep.”

It was his announcement that the evening was over. The guests abruptly stood as if on a string and began moving out of the hall, the Huns pushing their way first with no pretense at politeness. The banquet had ended abruptly, but our stay was obviously just beginning.

I glanced around. The intriguing woman had disappeared. Nor was Hun sexual hospitality about to be offered, it seemed. As for Bigilas, he did not look as downcast at this sudden demand as I’d expected. Did he want to return to Constantinople so badly? I saw him trade a glance with Edeco.

I also spied Skilla, watching me from the shadows at the far end of the hall. The young man smiled mockingly, as if knowing a great secret, and slipped through the door.

XI

I

A WOMAN NAMED

ILANA

Let me get the water, Guernna.”

The German girl looked at Ilana with surprise. “You, Ilana? You haven’t wanted to soil your pretty little hands with wood and water since you got here.”

The maid of Axiopolis took the jar from the German and balanced it on her head. “So much more reason for me to do it now.” She smiled with false sweetness. “Maybe it will help quiet your whines.”

As she left Suecca’s house to walk to the Tisza, Guernna called after, “I know what you’re doing! You want to go past where the Romans are camped!”

It was late morning after the banquet, and the encampment was finally stirring. Ilana hoped the young Roman was awake. The bright reds and blues of the embassy tents were a vivid contrast to the browns and tans of barbarian habitation, making them easy to find, and the hues made her long for the colorful paints and bustling bazaars of civilization. It was astonishing what quiet passion the arrival of the Roman embassy had stirred in her. She’d been half dead, going through the motions of the days and half resigned to union with Skilla. Now she was seized with fresh hope, seeing an alternative. Somehow she had to convince these Romans to ransom her. The key was the embassy scribe and historian who’d followed her around the banquet room with his eyes.

A year before, the thought of such calculation would have horrified Ilana. Love was sacred, romance was pure, and she’d had a queue of suitors before settling on Tasio. But that was before her betrothed and her father had died, and before Skilla seemed determined to marry her and stick her forever in a yurt. If she acquiesced she’d spend the rest of her days wandering with his tribe from pasture to pasture, bearing Hun babies and watching these butchers bring on the end of the world. She was convinced that ordinary Romans had no idea of the peril they were facing. She believed this because until her own former life had ended, she’d had no idea as well.

Ilana had donned the Roman dress she’d been captured in for this occasion, and carefully washed and combed her hair.

A Hun belt of gold links helped emphasize her slender waist, a medallion the swell of her breasts, and Roman bracelets on the raised arm that balanced the jar caught the light of the sun and called attention to her errand. It was the first time since her capture that she’d really tried to look pretty. The jar was seated on a round felt cap on the crown of her head, the posture needed to bear it giving a seductive sway to her walk.

She spied the Roman to one side of their cluster of tents, brushing a gray mare. He seemed handsome enough, curious, and, she hoped, necessarily innocent of female motive. She walked by his field of vision while staring straight ahead and for a moment feared he might ignore her, so intent he seemed on combing his damned horse. She’d have to try again when returning from the river! But, no, suddenly he straightened abruptly and just as he did so she deliberately stumbled and caught the jar as it toppled from her head. “Oh!”

“Let me help you!” he called in Latin.

“It’s nothing,” she replied in the same tongue, trying to feign surprise. “I didn’t see you standing there.” She clutched the clay jar to her breasts like a lover.

He walked over. “I thought you might be Roman from your look and manner.”

He seemed almost too kind, not yet hardened by life’s cruelties, and for a moment she doubted her plan. She needed someone strong. But at least he would take pity!

“I saw you serving at the banquet,” he went on. “What’s your name?”

“Ilana.”

“That’s pretty. I am Jonas Alabanda, of Constantinople.

Where are you from?”

She cast her eyes down, purposely demure. “Axiopolis, near the Black Sea. The city the Greeks called Heracleia.”

“I’ve heard of it. You were captured?”

“Edeco conquered it.”

“Edeco! He’s the one we rode here with from Constantinople.”

“The warrior Skilla caught me and brought me here on his horse.”

“I know Skilla as well!”

“Then we have even more in common than our empire.”

She smiled sadly.

He held out his arms. “Here, let me help carry that.”

“It’s woman’s work. Besides, it’s not heavy until full.”

“Then let me escort you to the river.” He grinned. “You look like more enjoyable company than Edeco or Skilla.”

This was going better than she’d hoped. They walked together, the quick companionship giving a sheen to the pleasant day, the grass suddenly greener and the sky bluer.

“You’re young to be on such an important mission,” she said. “You must be wise beyond your years.”

“I merely speak Hunnish and enjoy letters. I hope to write a history.”

“You must come from a good family.” She hoped he was rich enough to buy her.

“We’ve had some misfortune. I’m hoping this journey turns it around.”

That was disappointing. They reached the grassy riverbank, the Tisza lolling lazily, dried mud showing how much it had fallen since spring. She stooped to dip water, making her movements deliberately slow. “The journey has let us meet each other, at least,” she said.

“What house do you belong to here?”

“Suecca, wife of Edeco.”

He watched her stand and balance. “I will ask him about you, I think.”

Her heart soared. “If you could ransom me, I would serve the embassy on your way home,” she said, her words coming more quickly than she’d planned. “I can cook, and sew. . . .”

She saw the amused concern on his face and stopped. “I just mean I wouldn’t be any trouble.” The jar balanced on her head, she carefully began walking back, knowing that Suecca would miss her soon and probably be suspicious of why she’d uncharacteristically fetched the water. “I could tell you much about the Huns, and I have relatives in Constantinople who could contribute . . .”

She was desperate to bind him to her side. Yet even as she babbled, pathetically promising everything she could think of—how she hated to be a supplicant, and helpless!—there was a sudden rattle of hooves and a Hun pony burst between them, butting Jonas aside and spilling some of the water.

“Woman! What are you doing with the Romans!”

It was Skilla, astride his horse Drilca.

“I am only fetching water—”

Jonas grabbed the rein. “It was I who talked to her.”

Skilla pointed with his whip. “Let go of my horse. This woman is my uncle’s slave, taken in battle. She has no business talking to any free man without permission, and certainly not to you. If she doesn’t know that, then Suecca will make it clear!”

“You’ll not punish a Roman for talking to a Roman.”

There was low warning in Jonas’s voice, and Ilana realized there was some history between these two. She was both thrilled and apprehensive. How could she use it? How could she be so calculating?

“She’s no longer a Roman! And a slave has no business mingling with diplomats! She knows that! If she wants to be free, then let her agree to marriage!”

The Roman pulled on the reins, turning the horse’s head and making it sidestep. “Leave her alone, Skilla.”

The Hun lashed the hand that held his rein, put his boot on the Roman’s chest, and shoved. Jonas, taken by surprise, vaulted backward, landing in humiliation on his rear. Skilla wheeled and scooped Ilana off the ground, her jar falling and shattering. “This one is mine! I told you that!” She struggled, trying to scratch, but he held her like a child, his arm iron. “Keep to your own, Roman!” Jonas charged, but before he could reach Skilla the Hun yipped and galloped his horse away across the encampment, people whooping and laugh-ing as Ilana hung helplessly, her feet a foot or two off the ground, bouncing like a rag doll until he dropped her rudely in Suecca’s doorway. She staggered, breathless, while his exited horse turned in a circle.

“Stay away from the Roman,” he warned her, twisting his body to keep her in view as he struggled with his horse. “I am your future now.”

Her eyes were afire. “I’m Roman, too! Can’t you see that I don’t want you?”

“And I am in love with you, princess, and worth a dozen men like him.” He grinned. “You’ll see it, in the end.”

Ilana looked away in frustration. There was nothing more unendurable than to be loved by someone you didn’t want.

“Please leave me alone.”

“Tell Suecca I will bring her a new jar!”

Then he galloped away.

Never had I felt so humiliated or angry. The Hun had caught me by surprise and then disappeared, like a coward, into the sea of his people. I was certain Skilla had no real relationship to the young woman, whatever he might dream, and I was tempted to dig my weapons from the baggage and call the warrior out. But as a diplomat I knew I couldn’t start a duel. Nor, I admitted to myself, was I very certain I could beat him. In any event I’d risked Maximinus’s anger simply by talking to a girl. But she was Roman, pretty, and—if this was the one Skilla had boasted would marry him after she’d scratched him—in peril. For a person of my age and situation, it was a recipe for infatuation.

I brushed myself off, annoyed at the nearby Huns grinning at my embarrassment, and tried to think what to do.

“You can never win solely by fighting,” an oddly pitched voice said in Latin, as if reading my mind. “It requires thought as well.”

I turned. It was the dwarf who had performed the evening before. Zerco, they called him. What a little monster he was, waddling up from the trees where he must have been lurk-ing.

“Did I ask your advice?”

“What need to ask, when you so clearly need it?” Daylight made his visage even more pitiable: his skin too dark, his nose flat and lips wide, his ears too big for his head, his head too big for his torso, and his torso too big for his legs.

His back was partly humped, his hair a shaggy mat, and his cheeks beardless but pocked. All that saved him from repul-sion were his eyes, which were as large and brown as an animal’s but blinked with sharp intelligence. Perhaps Zerco was not the fool he seemed when performing.

“You were spying.”

“A clown has to observe the betters he wishes to mock.”

Despite myself, I smiled wryly. “You plan to mock me, fool?”

“I already did, last night. And between that maid leading you by the sword and that barbarian seating you on your rump, you’re doing a good enough job yourself. But I’ll pick on your Hun friend next, perhaps.”

“That Hun is not my friend.”

“Never be too sure who your friends and enemies are.

Fortune has a way of changing which is which.”

The dwarf’s quickness made me curious. “You speak the tongue of the Empire.”

“I come from Africa. Discarded by my mother as the devil’s joke, kidnapped and sold as a jester, and passed from court to court until I found favor with Bleda, whose idea of humor was simpler than his dour and more ambitious brother’s. Other men must work their way to Hades, but I’ve found it in this life.” He put his arm to his brow in a pan-tomime of self-pity.

“Someone said Attila gave you to Aetius, the general of the West, but you came back for your wife.”

“Ah Julia, my angel! Now you have found me out. I complain of hell but with her I’ve found heaven. Do you know that she missed me even more than I missed her? What do you think of that?”

I was baffled. Bigilas had said the woman was not ugly like Zerco, but I could not imagine what their relationship was like. “That she has peculiar taste.”

The dwarf laughed.

“Or that she looks inside the skin as well as outside.”

Zerco bowed. “You have a diplomat’s flair for flattery, Jonas Alabanda. That is your name, is it not?”

“So you are a spy.”

“I am a listener, which few men are. I hear many things and see even more. If you tell me something of Constantinople, I will tell you something about these Huns.”

“What could I tell you of Constantinople?”

“Its palaces, games, and food. I dream of it like a thirsty man dreams of water.”

“Well, it’s certainly grander than what we have here: the greatest city in the world now. As for the Huns, I’ve already learned that they’re arrogant, rude, ignorant, and that you can smell one before you see one. Beyond that, I’m not sure there’s much to learn.”

“Oh, but there is! If you fancy Ilana and despise Skilla, you should come with me.” He began walking north along the riverbank, in a rocking gait that was comic and pitiable at the same time, and I hesitated. The crippled and diseased made me uncomfortable. Zerco would have none of it.

“Come, come. My stature is not contagious.”

I slowed my own habitual pace to match his. Children ran after us, calling insults, but didn’t dare draw too close to the odd little monster and the tall, mysterious Roman.

“How did you come to be a jester?” I asked when he didn’t say anything more.

“What else could I be? I’m too small to be a soldier or laborer and too ill-formed to be a poet or a singer. Making fun of the great is the only way I’ve saved myself.”

“Including the noble Flavius Aetius?”

“It’s the most competent who are usually most willing to laugh at themselves.”

“Is that what you think of the famous general?”

“He actually had little use for entertainment, to tell the truth. He was not unkind or conceited, only distracted. He believes in an idea called Rome but lacks the army to restore it. So he fights one day, negotiates the next, buys the third.

He’s a remarkable man who almost alone is holding the West together, and of course his superiors despise him for it.

There is nothing incompetence hates more than virtue.

Valentinian will one day punish him for his heroism, mark my word.”

“He never marched to help the East.”

“March with what? The people tormenting your half of the Empire were the same he was hiring to keep order in his half—the Huns. They’d work for him and take from you. It sounds callous, but it was the only way he could keep the other tribes in harness.”

“What can you tell me of the Huns?”

“I don’t tell, I show. I help you to see. Learn to think for yourself, Jonas Alabanda, and you will be a hated, feared, and successful man. Now, first of all, look at this settlement along the river. It goes on and on, doesn’t it?”

“The Huns are numerous.”

“And yet are there more people here than in Constantinople?”

“Of course not.”

“More than Rome? More than Alexandria?”

“No . . .”

“Yet the man with the wooden bowl and cup, leading a people who don’t know how to sow, forge, or build—a people who prey on others to supply everything they have—

believes it’s his destiny to rule the world. Because of numbers? Or because of will?”

“They are great and terrible warriors.”

“Indeed. Look there.” We reached a point on the river opposite a meadow used for grazing and riding. Twenty Hun soldiers were practicing archery. They galloped one by one down the length of their meadow at full speed, plucked arrows from their quivers with deadly rhythm, and fired with frightening rapidity. Their target were melons, erected on poles fifty paces away, and so often did the arrows hit that the warriors roared and jeered only when one missed. Such an error was usually no more than a handsbreadth in either direction. “Imagine a thousand of them, thundering by a clumsy legion,” Zerco said.

“I don’t have to imagine. By all accounts it’s happened far too many times, and again and again we are beaten.”

“Keep watching.”

After each pass the galloping warrior rejoined the jostling, joking group and then took his turn again, hurtling across the meadow. After three or four sprints each, they sat, spent and happy.

“Watch what?”

“How many arrows do they have left?”

“None, of course.”

“How fast are their ponies now?”

“They’re tired.”

“See? I’ve showed you more than most Roman generals ever learn. That’s what I mean by thought: observation and deduction.”

“Shown what? That they can hit an enemy’s eye at full charge? That they can lope a hundred miles in a day when our armies march twenty on our best roads?”

“That in far less than an hour they are out of arrows on exhausted horses. That a cloud of arrows came from a handful of men. That their entire strategy depends on breaking the will of others quickly and without mercy because their numbers are limited and their endurance is nil. But if they have to fight not for a moment but for a day, against a unity that outnumbers them . . .”

“This was archery. They were trying to expend all their arrows.”

“As they might uselessly against determined infantry that stands its ground behind its shields. Horses are like dogs.

They will catch a fleeing man, but shy from one who stands his ground. An army that is a porcupine of spears . . .”

“What you’re talking about is the greatest of all battles.

Of fighting, after all, not just thinking.”

“Of course, fighting! But what I’m talking about is the will to fight your battle, not theirs. On your ground: low, armored, patient. Of waiting until your moment. And there is one other thing you should be thinking about as you watch their skill.”

“What’s that?”

“To match it, if you want to survive. Did you bring any weapons at all?”

“They’re in my baggage.”

“You’d better get them out and practice as the Huns do.

That, too, you should have deduced by watching them. You never know when you will need to fight, as well as think.”

The jostling, joking warriors across the river reminded me of the dwarf’s leap into my lap the night before. “You claimed that you were warning me of danger at the banquet.

That nothing is as it seems.”

“Attila invites you to talk of peace, but what Attila says may not be what he means. And don’t be surprised if he knows more about your companions than you do yourself, Jonas of Constantinople. That’s the danger I’m warning you of.”

Skilla let the wild galloping of his horse release his turbulent emotions. Riding without direction across the flat plain of Hunuguri was like shedding a particularly constricting and burdensome piece of armor. It was a draft of wind that left the complications of camp and tribe and women behind, and restored to him the freedom of the steppes. Attila himself spoke of the tonic of the grasslands. When in doubt, ride.

So why did they leave the steppes ever farther behind?

Until the Romans came, Skilla had been certain that Ilana would eventually be his. He alone had protected her, and when Attila won the final battle there would be no alternative. But now she had flirted with Jonas and dressed like a Roman whore. It enraged him, because he feared the scribe could win simply by being Roman. Skilla didn’t want a bed slave. He wanted the highborn woman to love him for what he was, not just make love to him, and it frustrated him that she remained stubbornly blind to the Huns and their qualities. The People of the Dawn were better than the hordes that squatted in their stone cities, braver, stronger, and more powerful . . . except that Skilla secretly felt uncomfortable and inferior around the foolish but clever Romans, and hated just that feeling.

That’s why seeing Ilana with Jonas had so infuriated him.

It was not just that the Romans could read the thoughts of other men by peering at their books and papers or that they wore fine clothes or built with stone that lasted forever. As near as he could tell, all their wizardry did not make them particularly strong or happy. They could be beaten in battle, worried constantly about money while having more of it than a Hun would ever need, were hapless at surviving away from their cities, and fussed about rank and rules in ways that would never occur to a truly free man. A Roman had a thousand worries when a Hun had none. A Hun did not grub in the dirt, dig for metal, labor in the sun, or go blind squinting in a dark shop. He took what he needed from others, and all men quailed before him. This is how it had been since his people began following the white stag west, conquering all they encountered. And their women shared their haughty pride!

Yet the Romans disdained him. They never said so, of course, lest he chop them down, but he could tell it in their looks and whispers and manners as they had journeyed from the eastern capital. His was the empire that was growing and theirs was the one that was shrinking, and yet they regarded the Huns as their inferiors! Dangerous, yes, in the way a rabid dog is dangerous, but not the Roman equal in anything that mattered, let alone their master. This stubborn confidence tormented him as it tormented his fellow warriors, because no amount of military defeat seemed to convince the Romans that the Huns were their betters. Only killing seemed to settle the issue.

Ilana was the most baffling of all. Yes, she had lost her father and the man she’d planned to marry, and been taken from her city. But Skilla had not raped or beaten her as she might have expected. He in fact had lent her a fine pony for the ride back to the heart of the Hun empire. What other captive had enjoyed such favor? He had fed her well, protected her from the attentions of other warriors, and brought her presents. If she married him she would be the first wife of a rising warlord, and he would plunder whatever luxuries she desired. They would have fine horses, strong children, and live in a society that would let them follow their whims to sleep, eat, ride, hunt, camp, and make love when they wanted. He was already beginning to gather his own lochus, or regiment, and his men would protect her from any harm.

He was offering her the world, for soon the Huns would be masters of it. Yet she treated him like a pest! Meanwhile, he had seen, at the banquet, how she cast covetous eyes at the young Roman who had nothing and who had done nothing.

It was maddening.

Skilla was annoyed that he was so attracted to Ilana.

What was wrong with the women of the Huns? Nothing, really. They were nimble, hard workers, and were bred to produce robust children in rugged conditions. They would both couple and bear children in a blizzard or a desert’s heat, it mattered not to them, and they were proud of their ability not to cry out in either instance. They could make a meal out of a stag or field mouse, whichever was available; find hearty roots in the mud by a riverbed; load a house into a wagon in a quarter of a morning; and carry twin skins of water from a yoke on their back. But they were also plainer, squatter, and rounder. They did not have Ilana’s grace, they did not have her worldliness, and they did not have the fierce intelligence that animated the Roman woman’s gaze when she became curious or angry. There was no need for a woman to be smart, and yet he found himself desiring exactly that quality in Ilana for reasons he couldn’t fathom.

There was no use for it! She represented that Roman arrogance he hated, and yet he wanted to possess that arrogance to assuage his own confidence.

His was a desire that was bewitching every clan and brotherhood, Attila had said. The Hun invasion of Europe had made his people powerful, but it was also changing them. The race was being diluted by marriage and adoption.

In the forests to the north and west, the horse was less useful. Men who once fought for the simple pleasures of fighting now talked incessantly of mercenary pay, booty, tribute, and the goods they could bring back to satisfy their increasingly greedy wives. Tribes that had wandered with the seasons were settled in crowded Hunuguri. Attila warned his warriors to be careful, to not let Europe conquer them as they conquered Europe. It was why he ate off plain wooden dishes and refused to adorn his clothing, reminding them of the harsh origins that made them hardier and fiercer than their enemies.

Every Hun knew what he meant. But they were also seduced, almost against their wills, by the world they were overrunning. While Attila ate from wood, his chieftains ate from gold plate, and dreamed not of the steppes but of the courtesans of Constantinople.

This, Skilla secretly feared, would destroy them. And him.

He must destroy Alabanda, take Ilana, and escape eastward. And the best way to do so was to wait for Bigilas to return with his son and fifty pounds of gold.

XII

I

A PLOT REVEALED

Diplomacy, Maximinus explained to me, was the art of patience. As long as talk went on, weapons were sheathed.

While weeks crawled by, political situations could change.

Agreement that was impossible between strangers became second nature among friends. So it did no harm to wait in the Hun camp while Bigilas backtracked to fetch his son, the senator assured me. “While we wait there is no war, Jonas,” he observed with self-satisfaction. “Just by coming here, we have helped the Empire. Simply by passing time, we are serving Constantinople and Rome.”

We tried to learn what we could of the Huns, but it was difficult. I was instructed to do a census of their numbers, but warriors and their families came and went so frequently that it was like trying to count a flock of birds. A hunt, a raid, a mission to exact tribute or punishment, a rumor of better pastures, a chase of wild horses, a story of a drinking den or brothel newly established on the shores of the Danube—any of these things could draw the easily bored warriors away.

The numbers I counted were useless anyway because most of the Hun nation was scattered far from where we stayed, a web of empire linked by hard-riding messengers. How many clans? None of our informants seemed able to make that clear. How many warriors? More than blades of grass. How many subject tribes? More than the nations of Rome. What were their intentions? That was in the hands of Attila.

Their religion was a tangle of nature spirits and superstition, the details jealously hidden by shaman prophets who claimed to foretell the future with the blood of animals and slaves. This primitive animism was combined with the pantheons of peoples overrun, so that Attila could proclaim confidently that his great iron relic was the sword of Mars and his people knew what he was talking about. Gods were like kingdoms to the Huns: to be conquered and used. Destiny was unavoidable, these primitive people believed, and yet fate was also capricious and could be wooed or warded with charms and spells. Demons could catch the unwary, and storms were the thunder of the gods, but luck was promised by a favorable sign. We Christians were considered fools to look for salvation in the afterlife instead of booty in this: Why worry about the next existence when it was only this one in which you had control? This, of course, was a misunderstanding of the entire point of my religion; but to the Huns the logical goal was to either make life with a woman or end it with war, and one had only to look at the savagery of nature to understand that. Everything killed everything.

The Huns were no different.

Their marriages were polygamous, given the surplus of women due to the ravages of war, with harems the reward for battlefield success. There were also concubines who lived in a social twilight between legitimacy and slavery and who sometimes wielded more influence over their vain masters than a legal wife. Battle death, divorce, remarriages, and adultery were so common that the packs of children who ran screaming through the camp seemed to belong to everyone and no one, and seemed as happy in this state as wolf cubs.

The Huns indulged their children and taught them horsemanship with the same earnestness that we Romans taught rhetoric or history; but they would also cuff them with the gruffness of she-bears or hurl them into the river to make a point. Privation was expected as a part of life, and practiced for with fasts, withheld water, long swims, the scorch of fire, or the prick of thorns. Wrestling was encouraged, and archery required. For boys there was no higher honor than to endure more pain than your companions, no greater delight than surprising an enemy, and no goal more important than blooding yourself in battle. Girls were taught that they could bear even more agony than men and that every fiber of their being must be dedicated to making more babies who would someday make still more war.

My guide to this martial society was Zerco, the dwarf seeming to enjoy watching the teasing and torture the children inflicted on one another, perhaps because it reminded him of the torment given people his size. “Anagai there has learned to hold his breath longer than anyone because he’s smallest and the others hold him under the Tisza,” the dwarf explained. “Bochas tried to drown him, but Anagai learned to wring the bigger boy’s balls, so now Bochas is more careful. Sandil lost an eye in a rock fight, and Tatos can’t shoot after breaking his arm, so he’s catching arrows with his shield. They boast about their bruises. The meanest they make their leaders.”

I was toughening myself. The journey alone had developed my muscles to an unprecedented degree, and here in Hunuguri there were no books. Composition of my notes took only a fraction of the day. Accordingly, I set about hardening myself like a Hun. I galloped over the treeless plain on my mare, Diana, improving my horsemanship.

And, as Zerco had advised, I dug out my heavy Roman weapons and began to practice earnestly. It made a strange sight for the Huns. My spatha, or cavalry sword, was heavier than the curved Hun blades, and my chain armor was heavier and hotter than their leather and bone lamellar armor. Above all, my oval shield was like a house wall compared to the small round wicker shields of the horsemen.

Sometimes Huns came to cross blades for practice and, if I could not match their quickness, neither could they break easily past my shield. They banged on me like on a turtle. I fought several to a standstill, and their initial jeers turned to grudging respect. “Getting at you is like getting at a fox in its den!”

The senator didn’t like this. “We’re an embassy, Alabanda,” Maximinus complained. “We’re here to befriend the Hun, not fence with him.”

“This is what Hun friends do,” I told him as I caught my breath.

“It’s undignified for a diplomat to fight like a common soldier.”

“Fighting is all the dignity they believe in.”

Meanwhile, Skilla’s intervention had only increased my interest in Ilana. I learned that he had been orphaned in the wars, taken in by his uncle Edeco, and had been promised Ilana by Attila himself once he had sufficiently proved his mettle in battle. In the meantime, she served Suecca. Had she agreed to this fate? He claimed that he’d saved her life, and she admitted that her acceptance of presents and protection signaled acquiescence. Yet his generosity also embarrassed her, and it was clear she felt trapped.

I wished I had something to match him, but I’d brought no gifts of my own. Certainly she was a striking woman, with an obvious interest in me as a possible rescuer. Yet she was wary of being seen with me, and I wasn’t sure if her interest went beyond my potential utility as a path to freedom.

I tabulated her movements, learning to cross paths with her when she emerged from Edeco’s household on errands, and she learned to expect me. She walked in a way that made me think of her body even when she was in the plainest and most shapeless clothes, and she smiled encouragingly at me even while seeming reluctant to linger. She knew we most want what we can’t have.

“Don’t submit to that Hun,” I told her in hurried moments. I liked the way her eyes shone as she looked to me as a savior, even while I wondered if I could ever actually help her—I had no money—or if she was using me.

“I’ve asked Suecca to keep Skilla away,” she said. “She’s disgusted at my ingratitude and Edeco is amused. These Huns view resistance as a challenge. I’m worried, Jonas.

Skilla is getting impatient. I need to get away from this camp.”

“I don’t know if Edeco would agree to let you go.”

“Maybe when your embassy negotiates and favors are being exchanged. Talk to your senator.”

“Not yet.” I knew her rescue would not make sense to anybody but me. I grasped her hand, even this slight contact thrilling me. “Soon Bigilas will return and opportunity will arise,” I promised recklessly. “I’m determined to take you with us.”

“Please, my life will be at an end if you don’t.”

And then Bigilas came back.

The son of Bigilas was a boy of eleven, dark haired and wide-eyed, who rode into camp with mouth open and spine tingling. How could he not gape at this horde of Huns whom Roman boys had exaggerated to mythic proportions? Young Crixus was proud that his father was playing so pivotal a role. He, Crixus, was the guarantee of honesty between the two sides! That his father had seemed troubled and distant on their journey north did not particularly surprise the boy: Bigilas had always been too self-absorbed to be either a proper father or good companion, but he moved with the greats and promised they would someday be rich. How many sons could say that?

When word of Bigilas’s return reached Attila, the king invited us Romans to attend him that evening. Despite his proclaimed patience, Maximinus was relieved. We’d been confined to Attila’s camp for weeks.

Once again the king of the Huns was on his dais, but this time there were far fewer retainers in his hall. Instead, there were a dozen heavily armed guards and Edeco, Skilla, and Onegesh: the Huns who had accompanied us.

Trying to ignore the Hun soldiers, I told myself that perhaps this smaller group was an encouraging sign. Here was private and serious negotiation, not diplomatic ritual and show. Yet I couldn’t help but feel greater unease than when I’d first come to the Hun camp, for I’d learned too much about Attila. His charisma was matched by his tyranny, and the humbleness of his attire masked the arrogance of ambition.

“I hope he’s in good humor,” I whispered to Rusticius.

“Surely he wishes to conclude things as we do.”

“You’ve had enough Hun hospitality?”

“Edeco has never forgiven me for standing up for us and speaking back during our journey, and I’ve felt his ire in the mood of his followers. They call me the Westerner, as if fundamentally different because I come from Italy. They watch me as if I’m on exhibit.”

“I think they’re just curious about peoples they’ve yet to enslave.”

Torches threw a wavering light over the scarred faces of Attila’s retainers. The king’s deep-set eyes seemed to have burrowed even farther into his head than I remembered, rotating to look at this figure or that like creatures peering from protective burrows. His odd, ugly, and impassive face made him difficult to read and, as usual, there was not a hint of a smile. This seemed unsurprising. I’d attended Hun justice councils where quarreling tribesmen took rival complaints; and Attila always adjudicated without emotion, his judgments harsh, strange, quick, and yet curiously fitting his grim people and his own stoic visage. Each judgment day he sat bareheaded in the bright sunlight of his compound courtyard, the quarreling or petitioning parties let in by turn. They would be peppered with hard questions, cut off if they protested too long, and then sent away with a decision from which there was no appeal.

There was no true law, only Attila. Often a wrong could be righted by konoss, that Hun practice of a transgressor paying the victim or his family with anything from a cow to a daughter. The Huns usually abhorred imprisonment, for which they had few facilities, and disliked mutilation, because it weakened potential warriors or mothers. But sometimes harsher penalties were applied.

For example, I witnessed Attila’s permission for a cuck-olded husband in a particularly humiliating case to take revenge by castrating the seducer of his wife with a rusty knife and then stuffing the severed privates into the organ of the woman who had lain with him, locked to her with a chain for the full cycle of a moon.

To steal a man’s horse on the empty steppes was tanta-mount to murder, and so a horse thief was ordered torn apart by having his limbs tied to the ponies he had stolen, their owner and his sons urging the horses slowly forward until his joints popped. Then he screamed in agony for an hour as the animals jostled in place: screamed, at Attila’s insistence, until all of our ears ached from it, as evidence of his power.

Finally the horses were whipped forward at Attila’s command, and it was with great difficulty that I didn’t retch. I was astonished at how far the blood spurted and how meaty and meaningless the scattered parts seemed once the victim was dismembered.

A coward in battle was ordered suspended over a pit of planted spears and each member of the unit he’d deserted was told to cut one strand away from the suspending rope. “Fate will decide if you betrayed enough to weaken the rope to the point where you fall into the pit,” Attila decreed. Because some of his former companions were hunting or on military missions, it took six days before all returned to camp and took their careful slice. In the end there were just enough strands that the rope barely held, and the victim was finally lowered, gibbering and feverish. His two wives sliced their own cheeks and breasts in humiliation before bearing him away.

Each of these incidents was reported and even exaggerated as Huns traveled through Attila’s empire. The kagan was just and yet merciless, fatherly and yet cruel, wise and yet given to well-timed rages. What would it do to a tyrant’s mind, I wondered, to order such punishments day after day, year after year? How would it shape a leader that only by doing so could he prevent his savage nation from sliding into anarchy? When did such acts take one out of the realm of normal conduct and into a universe that existed only in one’s own feverish, self-centered mind? He seemed not so much an emperor as a circus master with whip and torch, and not so much a king as a primitive god.

“This is your son?” Attila now asked, interrupting my thoughts.

“Crixus has come all the way from Constantinople, kagan,” Bigilas said, “as proof that my word is my bond.”

His manner seemed more unctuous and false than ever, and I wondered if the Huns noticed the shallowness of his sincerity or just passed it off as Roman habit. “He’s hostage for Rome’s honesty. Please, now hear our ambassador.” Bigilas glanced once at Edeco, but the Hun chieftain was as expressionless as stone. “I myself am your servant, of course.”

Attila nodded solemnly and looked at Senator Maximinus. “This demonstrates the trust I can put in the word of Rome and Constantinople?”

The senator bowed. “Bigilas has offered his own son as proof of our good will, kagan, reminiscent of how the God of our faith offered his. Peace begins with trust, and surely this reinforces your faith in our intentions, does it not?”

Attila was silent for so long that all of us became uneasy.

Silence hung in the room like motes of dust.

“Indeed it does,” he finally said. “It tells me exactly what your intentions are.” Attila looked down at Crixus. “You are a brave and dutiful boy to come all this way at the command of your father. You demonstrate how sons should behave. Do you trust the sire of your flesh, young Roman?”

The boy blinked, stunned at having been addressed. “I—

I do, king.” He searched for words. “I am proud of him.” He beamed.

Attila nodded, then stood. “Your heart is good, little one.

Your soul is innocent, I think.” He blinked once. “Unlike your elders.” Then he let his dark eyes pass over each of us in turn, as if seeing inside our hearts and selecting different fates for each of us. Instantly we knew that something was desperately awry. “It is too bad, then,” the despot rumbled,

“that your father has utterly betrayed you and that you must be tortured for his sins.”

It was as if the air had gone out of the room. Maximinus gaped like a fool. Bigilas went white. I felt confused. What treachery was this? Poor Crixus looked like he had not understood.

“We will uncoil your entrails like yarn and let my pigs feed on them,” Attila described without emotion. “We will boil your toes and your fingers, immersing them one by one so that you will know the pain of the last before we start on the next. We will cut away your nose, flay your cheeks, and break out your teeth in turn—one per hour—and cinch a thorny bramble around your privates and pull until they turn purple.”

Crixus was beginning to shake.

“What madness is this?” the senator croaked. “Why do you threaten a child?”

“We will do these things—and my wives will giggle at your screams, young Crixus—unless your father shows the honor that you have shown.” Now Attila’s dark gaze swung to settle on Bigilas.

“S-show honor?” stammered Bigilas. The guards, I saw, had quietly formed around us. “Kagan, what can you—”

“We will do it”—here Attila’s voice was rising to low thunder—“unless the translator here tells me why he has brought fifty pounds of gold from Constantinople.”

We other Romans turned to Bigilas in consternation.

What was Attila talking about? The translator looked stricken, as if told by a physician he was doomed. His legs began quivering, and I feared he might collapse.

Attila turned to his chiefs. “He did bring fifty pounds, did he not, Edeco?”

The warlord nodded. “As we agreed in the house of Chrysaphius, kagan. We searched the translator’s saddlebags just moments ago and brought it here for you to see as proof.” He clapped his hands once, a sharp report. Two warriors came in bearing sacks, leaning slightly from the weight. They strode to Attila’s dais and slashed open the sacks with iron daggers, releasing a shower of yellow metal.

Coins rolled at Attila’s feet.

The boy’s eyes were darting in confused terror. I could smell his urine.

“Edeco, you know what this gold is for, do you not?”

“I do, my kagan.”

“This is some monstrous misunderstanding,” Maximinus tried wildly, looking to Bigilas for explanation. “Another present sent by our emperor, as proof of—”

“Silence!” The command was as final as the fall of an ax.

It echoed in the chamber, ending all other sound. It was an order that made courage desert. What insanity had I enlisted for?

“Only one man here needs to be heard from,” Attila went on, “the one who can save his son by practicing the honesty he claims.”

Bigilas was staring at Edeco in horror and hatred. The betrayer had been betrayed. Edeco had never intended to carry out his promise of assassinating Attila, the translator realized. The gold was a trap. Now he fell to his knees. “Please, my son knew nothing.”

“And what nothing, translator, did the boy not know?”

Bigilas bowed his head miserably. “It was a mission en-trusted to me by Chrysaphius. The money was to bribe Edeco to assassinate you.”

Maximinus looked like he’d been struck by a German long sword. He reeled backward, his face pained. His mission, he understood instantly, was in ruins. What treachery for the chief minister to not tell him of this plot! The proud senator had been made a complete fool. Worse, it probably meant the end of us all.

“To murder me, you mean,” Attila clarified, “when I was most trusting and most defenseless—while I slept or ate or pissed. A murder by my most trusted warlord.”

“I was only obeying the will of my master!” Bigilas wailed. “It was all Chrysaphius! He’s an evil eunuch—every man in Constantinople knows it! These other fools were ignorant of the plot, I swear! I was to fetch my son and with him the gold . . .” Suddenly he swiveled toward Edeco, furious. “You gave your word that you were with us! You promised you would assassinate him!”

“I promised nothing. You heard what you wanted to hear.”

The translator was beginning to weep. “I was no more than a tool, and my son ignorant. Please, kill me if you must, but spare the boy. He is innocent, as you said.”

Attila’s look was contemptuous. A quiet that really only lasted moments seemed to us Romans to last hours. Finally he spoke again. “Kill you? As if your master would care? As if he wouldn’t send a hundred idiots to try again if he thought one of my generals was foolish enough to believe him? No, I won’t waste the moment’s work required to kill you, translator. Instead, you will walk barefoot back to Constantinople with your bag around your scrawny neck, its gold replaced by lead. You will feel each pound with every step of your bleeding feet. My escorts will ask Chrysaphius if they recognize the bag, and he will do so, or you will die.

Then you will tell Chrysaphius that you met ten thousand Huns and could not find even one who would raise his hand against the great Attila, not for all the gold in the world. This is what your Empire must understand!”

Bigilas was weeping. “And my son?”

“If he is foolish enough to go back with you, he may do so. Maybe he will become smart enough to despise you and find a proper mentor. Maybe he will eventually flee the corruption of his father and come live the clean life of the Hun.”

Crixus collapsed, holding on to his father as they both bawled.

“God and the Senate thank you for your mercy, kagan,”

Maximinus said shakily. “Please, do not let this blind foolishness destroy our partnership. The emperor knew nothing of this monstrosity, I’m sure! Chrysaphius is a vindictive plotter, all men in Constantinople know this. Please, let us make amends and start our talks—”

“There will be no talk. There will be no negotiation.

There will only be obeisance or war. You, too, will return to Constantinople, senator, but it will be backward on an ass, and my warriors will make sure your head is always pointed toward the land of Hunuguri as you ponder your foolishness.”

Maximinus jerked as if struck. The end of his dignity would be the end of his career. Attila, I was certain, knew this.

“Do not humiliate Rome too much,” the senator said in despair.

“She humiliates herself.” Attila considered. “You and the one who betrayed you can contemplate my mercy. Yet none dare raise a hand against Attila without someone being struck down in consequence. So he”—Attila pointed at Rusticius—“will die in place of his friend. This man will be crucified to rot and dry in the sun, and his dying words will be to damn to Christian Hell the greedy and corrupt companion who put him in such danger.”

Rusticius had gone ashen. Bigilas turned his face away.

“That is not fair!” I cried.

“It is your Empire that is not fair or trustworthy,” Attila said. “It is your country that treats some men like gods and others like cattle.”

Now Rusticius fell to his knees, gasping for breath like a landed fish. “But I have done nothing!”

“You joined with evil men you didn’t care to know well enough to discover their betrayal. You failed to warn me. By these omissions you doomed yourself, and your blood will be on your friends’ hands, not mine.”

I was dizzy with horror. “This makes no sense,” I tried, heedless of violating protocol. The simplest man of our party was the one who was being sacrificed! “Why him and not me?”

“Because he is of the West, and we are curious how such men die.” Attila shrugged. “I may decide to have you switch places. But for now,” he said, “you will remain as my hostage against the promise of the return of Senator Maximinus.” He turned to my superior. “For every pound of gold Chrysaphius was willing to spend to have me struck down, I want one hundred pounds in penance.”

“But, kagan,” gasped the senator, “that means—”

“It means I want five thousand pounds by autumn, senator, and only then will we talk peace. If you don’t bring it, there will be war and your scribe will have done to him exactly what I promised the young boy there, but done infinitely more slowly and painfully.”

The room was a blur, the earth seeming to have dropped from under me. I was to be left alone with the Huns, to watch Rusticius die? And then be tortured if Maximinus did not return with an impossible ransom? The treasury could not afford five thousand pounds of gold! We had all been betrayed by the fools Bigilas and Chrysaphius!

Attila nodded at me with grim satisfaction. “Until then, you are our hostage but a hostage who must begin earning his keep. And if you dare try escape, Jonas of Constantinople, this too means war.”

XIII

I

THE HOSTAGE

Something had gone horribly wrong.

Ilana had been so confident of rescue that she had actually packed and hidden a bag of clothes, biscuit, and dried venison to take with her when she left with the Romans.

Surely it had been a sign when the embassy rode into camp and she’d caught the eye of Jonas. God meant for her to be free and to return to civilization. Yet Guernna had run to her, smirking. “Come see your fine friends now, Roman!” Ilana had emerged into a sea of hooting and jostling Huns, some of them flinging vegetables and clods of earth at the three departing Romans. The old man was mounted backward on a donkey, his feet dangling and his fine gray hair and beard dirty and matted. His eyes looked hollow with defeat. Following on foot was the translator who had come back from Constantinople, staggering with a heavy sack around his neck that bent him like a reed. Roped behind was a boy who must be the translator’s son, looking frightened and ashamed. A dozen Hun warriors surrounded them as escort, including, she saw to her relief, Skilla. He must be leaving, too. But the Roman tents and baggage and slaves were all remaining behind, the latter conscripted into Attila’s army.

Where was Jonas?

“I heard they put one of them on the cross,” Guernna said gleefully, enjoying Ilana’s dismay. Guernna thought the Roman girl vain, aloof, and useless. “I heard he screamed more than a Hun or a German ever would and begged like a slave.”

Crucifixions took place on a low hill a half mile from the river, far enough so that the stench was not overpowering but near enough so that the cost of defiance was always apparent. One or two happened per week, as well as periodic im-palings. Ilana ran there, praying. Indeed, there was a new victim, whipped, bound, spiked, and so masked with blood and dirt that at first she had no idea who it was. Only after studying him anxiously did she discern that it was Rusticius, his eyes half hooded, his lips cracked like dried mud.

She was ashamed at her relief.

“Kill me . . .” He was rasping for breath, his own weight compressing his lungs. Rivulets of blood had dried brown on skin blistered from exposure.

“Where is Jonas?”

There was no answer. She doubted he could still hear.

She dared not grant Rusticius’s wish, or she would find herself hung beside him. Sickened by her own helplessness, she ran back to the camp, the crowd dissipated now that the humiliated Romans had left. Their tents had already been shared out as if the Romans had never existed. She came to Attila’s compound, breathless and tear-stained. “The young Roman,” she gasped to a guard. “Please . . .”

“Back like a pup, tied to his father.” The man sneered.

“Not the boy, the scribe! His name is Jonas Alabanda.”

“Oh, the lucky one. Hostage for more gold. Attila has given him to Hereka until we kill him. Your lover has become a slave, woman.”

She struggled to remain expressionless, her emotions a tumult of relief and despair. “He’s not my lover—”

“And when Skilla returns, you will be his.” He grinned. It was the rare tryst, feud, love affair, or rivalry that did not become gossip in the camp.

Hereka, Attila’s first and primary wife, lived in her own compound adjacent to Attila’s. Several dozen slaves and servants lived with her; and now Jonas had become one, forced to earn his keep by hewing wood, hauling water, tending Hereka’s herds, and entertaining the Hun’s primary wife with stories of Constantinople and the Bible.

Ilana tried to get in to see him, but Hereka’s gigantic Ostrogoth guards shooed her away. Her rescuer had become a prisoner and hope had evaporated, its memory like a kiss that could never be repeated.

It was two long weeks later that she spied him from a distance driving a Hun cart from the poplar and willow copses where the camp collected its firewood. The sun was low in the west, the sky pinking, when she took a water jar to once more give herself an excuse to walk to the track by the river to intercept him. The day had the warm sultriness of late summer, clouds of gnats orbiting each other. The Tisza River was low and brown.

Jonas reined the oxen when he recognized her, but he looked reluctant. She was surprised by how he’d changed.

His hair was matted with sweat from a day of chopping and gathering wood, and his skin had become deeply tanned.

Beyond that, he had visibly aged. His face was harder, his jaw stronger, and his eyes deeper and more worried. He had learned in an instant the cruelty of life, and it showed. He’d become a man. She found herself strangely heartened by his grim maturity.

His first words were not encouraging. “Go home, Ilana. I can do nothing for you now.”

“If Maximinus returns—”

“You know he won’t.” He shaded his eyes against the setting sun, looking away from the slight, pretty, helpless woman.

“Won’t your own father try to ransom you?”

“What little he could afford would mean nothing compared to the pleasure and object lesson Attila derives from making an example of me. And Rusticius died in innocence, while the creature that created this disaster goes home to Constantinople, a bag around his neck.” His tone was bitter.

“Bigilas’s master will punish him for failure.”

“While I eventually hang on a cross and you become bed slave to Skilla.”

Not slave, but wife, she wanted to correct. Was that her fate? Should she accede to it? She took a deep breath. “We can’t live expecting the worst, Jonas. The Empire won’t forget you. It was a crime to execute Rusticius, and Attila will sooner or later want to make amends. If we’re patient—”

“I can chop a lot of wood and you can haul a lot of water.”

There was a long dispirited pause, neither seeing an alternative, and then she laughed, the absurdity making her feel she was going insane. “How gloomy you’ve become!”

Her laughter startled him. He looked confused, then sheepish. “You’re right.” He sighed. “I’ve had another long day feeling sorry for myself.”

“It gets tiresome after a while.” Her grin was wry.

He straightened. Meek submission to barbarian will was not what Romans were taught. She watched him watching her, each trying to draw strength from the other. “We have to get away from here,” he said, obviously trying to force his depressed mind to think.

A glimmer! “Maybe we can steal some horses.”

“They would catch us.” He thought of his race with Skilla, and the Hun’s promise. “They’d send a hundred men.

It would be too humiliating for Attila to let us succeed.”

“I wish there’d been a real plot,” she said fiercely. “I wish Edeco had killed Attila.”

“I wish a thousand things, and find it as useful as spit.

Our only hope would be a head start, to go when they’re distracted. If Attila left on campaign—”

“It’s too late in the year for that. There’ll be no grass for the cavalry.”

He nodded. This girl was smart and observant. “So what should we do, Ilana?”

She thought furiously, knowing word of this conversation would reach Suecca. Yet this lonely and forlorn man was her only chance, unless she wanted Skilla. Despite Jonas’s despair there was something good at his core in an age when goodness was in short supply. “We should be ready for that distraction,” she said firmly. “My father was as lucky in business as he was unlucky in war, but he said luck was preparation that waited for opportunity. We need to know who we can trust and which horses we can steal. Who can help us, even a little?”

Now he pondered, and then suddenly brightened with an idea. He reached for the switch and lashed the ox forward, the cart jolting as he started. “A little friend,” he said.

It was dangerous to take Zerco into my confidence and yet who but the dwarf could help us? I was furious at the crucifixion of Rusticius and felt guilty at my own survival. I knew Zerco had no more love for Attila than I did. Indeed, the dwarf was both intrigued about the idea of our escape and thoughtful about its practicalities. “You can’t outrun them, even with a diversion,” he said. “They’ll catch you at the Danube, if nowhere else. But you might outthink them. Go north instead of south, for example, and circle to the west.

You need horses—”

“Roman, for endurance.”

“You saw the Arabians they’ve captured for breeding.

The Germans have big horses, too. The woman is going to slow you, you know.”

“She’s Roman.”

“This camp has a hundred captive Romans. What she is, is pretty and desperate, which is a dangerous combination.

Hoist your brain above your belt a moment and tell me what she is to you.”

I scowled. “Something Skilla wants.”

“Ah! Now that makes better sense. All right, then. You’ll need to take food so you can avoid farms and villages as long as possible, and you’ll need light weapons. Can you shoot a bow?”

“I was practicing until made hostage. I admit I’m no Hun.”

“It will be useful for hunting, at least. Hmmm. You’ll need warm clothing because winter is coming. Coin for when food runs out. A waterskin, hooded cloaks to hide your identity—”

“You sound like the commissary of a legion.”

“You need to be prepared.”

“You’re so helpful that I’m suspicious.”

The dwarf smiled. “At last you’re learning! Everything has a price. My help, too.”

“Which is?”

“That you take me with you.”

“You! And you talk of Ilana slowing me down?”

“I’m light, a good companion, and I’ve been where we need to go.”

This sounded like madness. “Can you even ride a horse?”

“Julia can. I ride with her.”

“Another woman!”

“You started it. Do you want my help or not?”

Ilana and I waited in an agony of impatience. The days were growing shorter, the land yellow and sleepy. Already there was a chill to the night and the first leaves petaled the Tisza.

When the weather turned, the barbarian tracks became soup, and travel became difficult. Yet one week and then another slipped by, and no opportunity to leave presented itself.

Hereka and Suecca kept sharp watch on us.

Twice we managed to meet for quick reassurance. The first time was at the river, dipping water and murmuring quickly before breaking apart, each of us trusting a person we scarcely knew. The second time was in a ravine through which a seasonal creek fed the river, its bottom dense with brush. Some Huns coupled there, I knew, away from the eyes of their parents or spouses. Now I drew her near to whisper.

These meetings had made her more precious, not less. I found myself remembering moments I didn’t realize I’d recorded: the way the light had fallen on her cheek by the river, the wetness of her eyes when she stared up at me on the wood cart, or the swell of breast and hip when she filled her jars at the river. Her neck was a Euclidian curve, her clavicle a fold of snow, her fingers quick and nervous with the grace and beat of a butterfly wing. Now I looked at her ear that gleamed like shell amid the fall of her dark hair, the parted lips as she gasped for breath, the rise and fall of her bosom, and wanted her without entirely knowing why. The idea of rescue and escape magnified her charms. To her, I was a comrade in a dangerous enterprise. To me, she was . . .

“Has the dwarf assembled our things?” she asked anxiously.

“Almost.”

“What payment does he want?”

“To go with us.”

“Do you trust him?”

“He could have betrayed us already.”

She nodded, her eyes glistening like dark pearls. “I think I have good news.”

“What?”

“There’s a Greek doctor named Eudoxius who Attila sent as an envoy. He’s returning and is only a day’s ride away, according to gossip. Some think the Greek is bringing important news, and it has been a while since the community feasted. Men have been sent to hunt, and Suecca has started us cooking. I think there’s going to be a celebration.”

“A Greek doctor?”

“Another traitor, fled to the Huns. It’s the end of the summer, and there’s an abundance of kamon and kumiss. The camp is full because the warriors have been returning for winter. They will hold a strava to celebrate the return of this Greek and drink, Jonas, drink themselves insensible. I have seen it.” She grasped my arm, straining toward me, her excitement making her quiver. “I think this is our chance.”

I kissed her.

It surprised her more than I thought it would, and she pulled away, not certain whether she welcomed my advance, her emotions playing across her face like the rippling of a curtain.

I tried to kiss her again.

“No.” She held me away. “Not until things are settled.”

“I’m falling in love with you, Ilana.”

This complication frightened her. “You don’t know me.”

She shook her head, keeping her purpose in mind. “Not until we’ve escaped—together.”

*

*

*

The news that Eudoxius brought back was secret, but his return excuse enough for a strava, a grand national party, or a celebration for as much of the fragmentary nation as happened to be camped around Attila at the time. It would welcome back the Greek doctor, mark the harvest that Hun vassals were humbly bringing to their masters, celebrate the humiliation of the treacherous Roman ambassadors, and commemorate a year in which the Huns had exacted a good deal of taxes, booty, and tribute with very little fighting. The relative peace, everyone knew, would not last forever.

The strava would take place when the leaves turned golden and the morning plain was white with frost and would last three days. It would be a bacchanalia without Bacchus—a festival of dance, song, games, jesters, lovemaking, feasting, and above all drinking that at its end would leave the participants sprawling. It was this excess that Ilana was counting on to aid our escape. By the end of the first night no one would notice we were missing. By the end of the third, no one would care.

Zerco promised to assemble the saddles, clothing, and food once the strava was well under way. There were Roman horses picketed in a meadow across the Tisza. I hoped to find Diana, but if not I would steal the strongest horse I could find. We would swim the river, saddle the animals, and ride north. Once well away we would cut west, following the northern bank of the Danube, and then cross into Pannonia and gallop for the Alps, eventually reaching Italy. From there we could take ship for Constantinople.

I could smell the streets of home.

Because tens of thousands of Huns, Goths, and Gepids were celebrating, the strava was held outside. A thousand flags and horsehair banners were erected, fluttering in the wind like a rising flock of birds. A hundred bonfires were built in huge pyramidal pyres. Lit at dusk, they were so bright that they turned the cloudy sky orange, and plumes of sparks funneled upward as if Attila was giving birth to new colonies of stars. Each tribe and clan had its own music. The camp’s celebrants migrated from one center of entertainment to the next, each host determined to outdo his neighbor in the volume of song and the quantity of drink pressed into wandering hands. Voices rose and dancing started. Then flirtations. Then fights. A few Huns were stabbed or garroted like fighting wolves, their bodies casually cast behind yurts to be attended to when the strava was over. Couples broke away for lovemaking, legs splayed, buttocks pumping, in anxious release before they became too drunk. The warlords and shamans drank mushroom and forest herb drafts and were so exhilarated by their visions that they pirouetted around the fires, roaring nonsense prophecies and staggering after screaming damsels who stayed maddeningly out of reach. Children wrestled, ran, stole. Babies cried, half ignored, until their own noise finally put them to sleep.

Both Ilana and I were required to serve. We dragged forth casks and amphorae of wine, bore heavy platters of roasted meat, hauled the insensible to one side so that they would not be trampled, and threw dirt on the worst of the vomit and piss. Despite the cool night air we were sweating from the heat of the fires and the press of bodies. Attached as we were to the houses of Hereka and Edeco, we were at the center of the strava’ s galaxy, all other fires and merriment wheeling around those of the great kagan and his chief lieutenants.

“Attila has promised to speak,” I whispered. “When that happens, all eyes will be on him. Leave, alone, so there is no suspicion. I’ll follow.”

With no stump or stone on the flat plain, Attila chose a novel means to get attention. A trio of horses was walked into the gathering as the merriment and mayhem built to its first-night climax. Two of the horses had riders, but the third was bare. It was onto this horse that Attila sprang, boosting himself up until he balanced on its back, the flanking riders encircling his calves with their arms to brace him. “Warriors!” he cried.

They whooped in response. A thousand men and women crowded to hear his words, bellowing and singing at the sight of their king. And what a sight he was! Again, Attila wore no decoration, yet what he did wear atop his ordinary Hun clothes was ghastly. The bones of a man had been tied joint to joint and arranged on his front. The bones matched Attila’s own frame, jiggling and rattling as the king drunkenly swayed to keep himself standing upright on the back of the nervous horse. The skull was missing, but Attila’s own head was far more terrifying. His visage was dark, his hair wild, and two curved horns had been attached to jut from his temples like a demon god’s. Lightning bolts of white paint zigzagged down his scarred cheeks, and black paint circled his eyes to turn them into pits. “People of Hunuguri! People of the Dawn!”

They roared their fealty. Attila was giving them the world. Ilana pushed out through the crowd to slip away.

Finally it quieted. “As you know, I am the meekest of men,” he began.

There was appreciative laughter. Indeed, who was less ostentatious than Attila? Who wore less gold, demanded less praise, and ate more modestly than the king of the Huns?

“I let deeds replace speeches. I let loyalty speak my praise. I let mercy show my heart. And I let dead enemies testify to my power. Like this one here!” He shook the skeleton hanging on his body, and the Huns howled. “This is the Roman I crucified after his friends tried to have me assassinated. Listen to this Roman of the West, because I have no words to match what his rattle says about my contempt for his people!”

I was sickened. Rusticius’s head, I knew, must now be mounted on one of the poles around Attila’s house, its fine brown hair blowing in the wind, his once-friendly grin now a skull’s grimace.

“You have been patient this year, my wolves,” Attila went on. “You have slaked your thirst for blood with water and let tribute substitute for plunder. You have slept, because I commanded it.”

The crowd waited, expectant.

“But now the world is changing. New tidings have come to Attila. New insults, new promises, and new opportunities.

The Romans must think we are a nation of women, to send a few pounds of gold to kill me! The Romans think we have forgotten how to fight! But Attila forgets nothing. He misses nothing. He forgives nothing. Drink well and deeply, my warriors, because for some of you it will be your last. Sleep deeply and rut deeply, to sow new Huns, and then sharpen your weapons this long cold winter, because the world must never stop fearing its Hun master. All this year we have rested, but in the coming spring, we ride. Are the Cadiseni of the Huns ready to ride with Attila?”

“Ten thousand bows will the Cadiseni bring to the king of the Huns!” shouted Agus, the chieftain of that clan. “Ten thousand bows and ten thousand horses, and we will ride from Rome itself to the bowels of Hades!” The crowd cheered, half crazed with drink and bloodlust. All they really knew was conquest and restless journey.

“Are the Sciri ready to ride with Attila?” the king cried.

“Twelve thousand swords will the Sciri bring when the snows melt in the spring!” promised Massaget, king of that nation. “Twelve thousand who will be first to break the shield wall and let the Huns follow us!” Cheers, hoots, and challenges followed this boast, and there was a friendly and rough jostling as the warlords pushed and jockeyed for position before their king.

“Are the Barselti ready to ride with Attila?”

Another roar. Now I began to push my way out of the crowd, saying I was under orders to fetch more food. Attila would give us the time we needed.

Ilana had initially stumbled in the dark after leaving the area of the great fires, but soon her eyes adjusted. The glow from the clouds cast a lurid red light. As she neared the Tisza the camp seemed empty at its margins, only an occasional Hun hurrying to fetch another skin of mead or chase the rump of a lover. No one paid her any heed. So now she was about to trust her life and future to this young Roman and his strange dwarf friend! It was necessary. Although Jonas and his party had failed to ransom her as she originally hoped, he at least represented the male strength she needed to help escape to the Empire. He’d even said he was falling in love with her.

Did men fall in love so easily? Did she at all love him? Not in the way she’d loved her betrothed, the dear Tasio, who’d been shot by that arrow during the siege of Axiopolis. She’d dreamed girlish dreams of marrying him, having a vague but happy future of home and children and sweet surrender to his lovemaking. Now that seemed a thousand years removed, and she could scarcely remember what Tasio looked like, much to her secret embarrassment. She was more practical now, more desperate, more cynical. This man from Constantinople was really just a convenient ally. And yet when he kissed her, and looked at her with longing eyes, her heart had stumbled in a tumult she dared not confess. What foolishness to be thinking of such a thing before they were even away! And yet if Jonas and she escaped together, would he try to press himself upon her? And what should be her reaction if he did . . . ?

It was while lost in such girlish thought that a wall loomed in the darkness and she stopped abruptly, afraid she was about to crash into a house. But, no, it sidestepped, snorting. She’d been so witless that she’d almost walked into a horse and rider! The Hun who loomed above her leaned drunkenly down, swaying slightly and grinning. “And who is this sweet woman, come to meet me before I’m fully home!” he said in slurred recognition. “Have you been waiting for me, Ilana?”

Her heart sank. What monstrous fortune was this? Skilla!

“What are you doing here?” she breathed. She’d thought him still away at Constantinople, escorting the humiliated Roman embassy.

Leaning precariously, a skin of kumiss dangling from one shoulder, Skilla slid off his horse in a half topple. “Finding you, it seems,” he said. “What a homecoming! First I find the whole plain alight with celebratory bonfires. Then a sentry patrol passes me some tart kumiss so that they don’t drink so much that they pass out themselves, earning a crucifixion. And then, following the river path because it’s the only one simple enough for my tired horse to negotiate, I find you running out to meet me!”

“It’s a strava for the Greek envoy Eudoxius, not you,” she said. She was thinking furiously. “I’ve been sent to fetch more kamon for the party.”

“I think you’ve come to look for me.” He swayed, leer-ing. “I’ve been thinking of you for a thousand miles, you know. It’s all I think about.”

“Skilla, it’s not our fate to be together.”

“Then why did the gods send you to me just now?” He grinned.

Please, please, she prayed, not this, not now. “I have to go.” She tried to dart around him but he was quicker than his drunken state made her expect, snaring her arm.

“What beer is out here in the dark?” he objected. “I think it is fate that sent you to meet me. And why do you recoil?

All I’ve ever wanted to do is honor you, to make you my wife, and bring you rich presents. Why are you so haughty?”

She groaned. “Please, I don’t mean to be.”

“I saved you.”

“Skilla, you were with the Huns who killed my father.

You carried me into captivity—”

“That’s war.” He frowned. “I’m your future now. Not that Roman slave.”

She craned her neck, looking for help. She knew she should try to charm her way out of his grip but she was flustered. She had to get away! Jonas might come at any moment and a confrontation between the two men could ruin everything. She shoved and they rocked backward in a crude dance. “Skilla, you need to sober. We have to part.”

It amused him, this smug little flirt, this woman who preened. He yanked and pulled her in close, his breath on hers, the rank smell of travel sweat and dust pungent and disagreeable. He sniffed her sweetness greedily. “In a strava? This is when men and women come together.”

“I have duties. I serve the wife of Edeco.”

This challenged him. “I am the nephew of Lord Edeco and a future lord myself,” he growled, twisting her arm so that she remembered who was master. “I am one of those who is going to rule the world and everything in it.”

“Only if you prove yourself! Not like this—”

“You could be a queen. Can’t you see that?”

She slapped him with her free arm, as hard as she could, and the sound was as loud as the crack of a whip. Her hand stung like fire, the blow jolting her shoulder, and yet he seemed oblivious to the pain of it. He grinned more fiercely.

“I don’t want to be your queen. Find another. There are thousands who would want to be your queen!”

“But I want you. I’ve wanted you since I saw you by the burning church in Axiopolis. I wanted you all the way to Constantinople these last weeks, prodding that foolish senator seated backward on his ass and hating him for taking me away from you. I wanted you all the way back. You hang on me like that bag of lead hung on the neck of Bigilas, bowing his shoulders, humping his back, until at the end he could barely stagger, weeping, his son leading him by the hand.

I’m tired of this foolish waiting.”

What to do? His grip was like a manacle. She had to find an excuse. “I’m sorry I slapped you. I’m just surprised. Yes, yes, I know we must marry.”

He looked triumphant and greedily kissed her.

She broke with a gasp and twisted her head away. “But Edeco said you must wait for Attila to give me! We must wait, Skilla. You know we must!”

“To hell with Attila.” He sought her lips.

She gave him only her cheek. “I’ll tell you said that! I’ll tell you’ve interrupted my duties, I’ll tell you drank on the way into camp, I’ll tell—”

Maddened by impatience he snarled and pushed, as violently as if in battle. She fell, the wind knocked out of her, and bounced her head off the hard-packed turf of the track.

She was dazed, her eyes blinded by tiny lights as she looked up at him. He fell to his knees, straddling her, and grasped her dress at its neck.

“No, Skilla! Think!”

He pulled and the garment tore, its strings parting like scythed wheat, and her breasts came free to the cold kiss of the night air. She spat in frustration and defiance, and he cuffed her, dazing her even more, and began hauling her dress up her thighs. He’d gone crazy. The more she squirmed and struggled, the more it seemed to excite him.

She clawed at him, and he laughed.

“I told them you’d scratch me.”

She screamed, hopelessly, because she knew the scream would be lost in the shouts of this wild night. Skilla was insane, drunkenly wrestling with her clothing and his own. Yet if he raped her, what would it matter? She was a captive and a slave, and he was of the Hun aristocracy.

Then something hurtled in a rush of wind and crashed into both of them, knocking Skilla aside and rolling with him across the grass and dirt. There were grunts and soft curses, and then the newcomer got atop Skilla and struck him.

“Ilana, run for the river!”

It was Jonas.

The Hun snarled, bucked, and finally somersaulted backward. Jonas went over with him, taken by surprise, and lay stunned. The Hun twisted like a wolverine and reached for the Roman’s throat. “Haven’t they killed you yet?” Now he was on top, pressing down; but suddenly a fist shot upward and Skilla’s head snapped back, his grip coming free. Jonas heaved, and the two were separated once again.

“Go to the river!” he gasped to her again.

If she ran for the river she still had a chance to escape.

The dwarf could help them find the way, and Jonas could keep Skilla pinned. And yet as the two men struggled, she couldn’t run as desperation dictated. Did she feel more for the Roman than she’d admitted? “I won’t leave you!” She looked around for a rock or stick.

The Hun, spitting blood from a cut lip, put out his arms to encircle like a bear and charged. Jonas crouched, his arms cocked, and now he struck again—a left, a right, and then a hard jab left—as Skilla was brought up short, standing there stupidly as Jonas hammered at him. Finally the Hun staggered back out of range, confused. Then he stubbornly stumbled forward again. Jonas swung, there was a heavy thud, and Skilla went down.

The Roman stepped back, wary. Ilana had to remember to breathe. She realized that the Hun had no knowledge of boxing, the art that all Roman boys were taught.

Skilla rolled, got to his knees with his back to them, and staggered up, the fermented mare’s milk and the drumbeat of punches making him unsteady. From his battered mouth he managed a feeble whistle. “Drilca!” The Hun pony loomed into sight again, nervously dancing.

Skilla fell against the saddle, seemingly spent, and then he whirled, drawing the sword sheathed there. He looked murderous. “I’m sick of your tricks, Roman.”

Ilana found a pole from a meat-drying rack and wrenched it free, running back. Jonas had bent and was circling, fists cocked, eyeing the blade to elude it. “Ilana, don’t make me waste this. Run, and get away.”

“No,” she whispered, crouching with the stave, afraid of the sword and yet determined. “If he kills you, he kills me, too.”

But then came a new voice, as deep as thunder, and it boomed above all other sounds. “Stop, all of you!”

It was Edeco. Skilla jumped like a small boy caught stealing figs and straightened, his sword lowered. Light flared as torches came near, revealing the blood on the warrior’s battered face. His uncle came up with a crowd of the curious, and Ilana was suddenly aware of her half nakedness. She dropped the stave and pulled up her dress to cover her breasts.

“Damnation, Skilla. What are you doing back without reporting to me?”

The Hun pointed. “He attacked me,” he said truculently.

“He was attacking Ilana,” Jonas responded.

“Is this true?” Edeco asked.

Emboldened, she let her bodice fall open. “He ripped my clothes.” Some of the Huns gaped, others laughed. Everyone jostled closer—men, women, children, and dogs drawn by the tableau. She could smell their acrid breath.

“You’d kill the Roman when he’s unarmed?” Edeco asked with contempt.

Skilla spat blood. “He broke the law by attacking me, and he fights unfairly, like a monkey. Any other slave would be dead by now. And what is he doing out here in the dark?

Why isn’t he at his duties?”

“What were you doing, trying to rape a woman of your uncle’s household?” Jonas challenged.

“It wasn’t rape! It was . . .”

Edeco strode forward and with a contemptuous kick knocked the lowered sword aside. It rang as it skipped away into the grass. “We will let Attila say what it was.” The warlord sniffed in disgust. “I can smell the kumiss on you, nephew. Couldn’t you wait until you got to the strava?”

“I did wait, I’d just gotten to camp, and she was waiting—”

“That’s a lie,” she hissed.

“Silence! We go to Attila!”

But the Hun was already there like a nightmare, pushing gruffly through the crowd, the bones of Rusticius discarded but his demon horns still mounted on his head. Like a judg-ing god, he pushed to take in the scene in an instant. There was a long silence while he looked from one to the other.

Then Attila spoke. “Two men, one woman. This has never happened before in the history of the world.”

The crowd roared, and Skilla’s face burned with humiliation. He looked at Jonas with hatred. “This woman is by rights mine, from capture at Axiopolis,” he protested. “All know that. But she torments me with her haughtiness, and looks to this Roman for protection—”

“It looks to me as if she needed it, and that he protected her well.”

The crowd roared with laughter again.

Now Skilla was silent, knowing anything he said would make him look even more foolish. His face was swelling.

“This is a quarrel sent by the gods to make our strava more interesting!” the king called to the crowd. “The solu-tion is simple. She needs one man, not two. Tomorrow these two will meet in mortal combat, and the survivor can have the girl.” Attila glanced at Edeco, and his warlord nodded once. Both knew what the outcome would be.

So did Ilana. Jonas was a dead man, and she was doomed.

XIV

I

THE DUEL

Diana shuddered slightly under my unaccustomed weight, and I felt encased and clumsy. You’ll never be the soldier your brother is, my father had told me, and what had it mattered in Constantinople? I had prided myself on being a man of the mind, not arms, suited to higher callings.

But now I wished I had taken cavalry training. Skilla could ride circles around me while I awkwardly charged in my heavy equipment, my big oval shield banging Diana’s flank and my heavy spear already tiring my arm. The nose guard and cheek plates of my peaked helmet blocked my peripheral vision. The heavy chain mail was hot, even though the day was cool, and the sword and dagger on my belt felt clumsy against thigh and hip. The only blessing was that the equipment cut my view of the thousands of half-drunken and hungover Huns who’d assembled in a field near the camp to watch what they expected would be quick butchery.

The betting was on how quickly I would die.

Skilla’s horse Drilca was prancing, excited by the crowd; and the Hun looked as unencumbered as I was swaddled.

His light cuirass of hoof bone scales rippled and clacked like the grotesque skeleton Attila had worn the night before, and his legs and head wore no armor at all. He was armed only with his bow, twenty arrows, and his sword. His face was bruised from my blows, which gave me some small satisfaction, but he was grinning past the evidence of his battering, already anticipating the death of his enemy and his marriage to the proud Roman girl. Killing me would erase all humiliation. Ilana stood in a cluster of other slaves by Suecca, wrapped in a cloak that made her shapeless. Her eyes were red and she avoided my gaze, looking guilty.

So much for confidence, I thought. Too bad I can’t bet against myself.

I also caught sight of Zerco, sitting comically astride a tall woman’s shoulders. His bearer was not unattractive, and looked both strong and kind, the steady companion many men need but seldom wish for or get. That must be his wife, Julia.

“You should not have interfered, Roman!” Skilla called.

“Now you will be dead!”

I ignored the taunt.

“Look at him, armored like a snail,” someone from the crowd observed.

“And as slow.”

“And as hard to get at,” a third cautioned.

There were other shouts: about my ancestry, my manhood, my clumsiness, and my stupidity. Strangely, I began to draw strength from them. I hadn’t slept since fighting for Ilana, knowing the coming dawn could be my last. My mind had become a whirlwind of regrets and misgivings, and I spent these last hours cursing myself for bad luck. Every time I’d tried to think of the actual combat my brain seemed to shy away from any intelligent planning or useful tactics, skittering away into memories of my race with Skilla, my kiss with Ilana, or that embarrassing but intoxicating glimpse of her bare breasts. I hadn’t rested, hadn’t concentrated, and hadn’t prepared. But now I realized that if I were not simply to be a target as simple as those melons I’d watched the Huns practice on, I must use my head or lose it.

I watched dourly as Skilla loped along the line of cheering barbarians, waving his fist in the air and crying in a high yip-yip-yip like an irritating dog. The Hun would shoot me and my horse from a hundred paces, shaft after shaft plunking in until I resembled a field of spiky flowers. It was not so much a fight as an execution.

“Are you ready?” Edeco demanded.

Was I going to sit as target for slaughter? What advantage could I find? Fight your battle, not theirs, Zerco had said.

Yet what was my battle? “Wait,” I said, trying to think. At least, I decided, I could make myself a smaller target. I let the butt of my spear strike the earth and used it as a pole to lever myself off Diana’s saddle, landing heavily.

“Look, he’s backing out!” the Huns called. “The Roman is a coward! Skilla gets the woman!”

Hefting my shield and squaring my shoulders, I addressed Edeco. “I will fight on foot.”

He looked surprised. “A man without a horse is a man without legs.”

“Not in my country.”

“But you’re in ours.”

I ignored that. Striding fast to hide my tremors, I made for the center of the makeshift arena, a circle two hundred paces across formed by the wall of thousands of barbarian bodies. There could be no escape.

“Yes, he’s a coward!” the Huns called to one another.

“Look at him stand still for execution!”

Skilla had pulled up short and was looking at me in bewilderment. Did I hope simply to spare my fat mare from arrows? Diana was in no danger. Skilla’s intent, he had promised, was to slay me as quickly as possible and claim the mare for his own.

I stopped at what appeared to be the exact center of the field. Skilla, you will have to come to me. I looked back. Attila was seated on a hastily constructed platform, Ilana and the other women pressed against its base. The great iron sword of Mars, pitted and black, was across the tyrant’s knees. A man in Greek dress was at his shoulder, whispering commentary. This, I assumed, was the Eudoxius whose return had initiated the strava. Why was he so important? The kagan pointed his arm straight up at the sky and then brought it down. Begin! A roar went up from the assembled crowd, where skins of drink were being passed freely.

I watched as Skilla on Drilca made another long loping circuit of the ring, cheers rising as he passed. He seemed to hesitate to attack, as if wondering what I intended to do. I simply followed him by turning in a slow circle, my mail shirt hanging to my knees, my oval shield covering all but my feet and head, my eyes hidden by the shadow of my helmet. My sword was sheathed and my spear remained planted on the ground. I stood like a sentry, not crouched like a warrior, but still well covered. Finally the Hun decided it was time to finish things. He reached and, in a practiced motion almost too quick and smooth to be followed, plucked an arrow from his quiver, drew, and shot. He could not miss.

Unlike a battle, however, where a sky full of bolts and arrows make evasion impossible, I had the advantage of being able to follow a single shaft. I jerked to my left and the arrow passed harmlessly over my right shoulder, flying on toward the crowd. The spectators there surged backward with a yell, some toppling each other, and the missile landed harmlessly at their fringe, plowing into the dirt. The rest of the audience laughed at them.

“One,” I breathed.

Skilla, annoyed at my evasion, shot again from the ring’s periphery, and again I had time to dodge and duck, the arrow making a sucking sound in the wind as it buzzed by my ear.

I cursed myself for the imagination that allowed me to picture it striking home.

“Two.” My own voice was firmer now to my ears. I spat and swallowed.

Now a new chorus of yells and catcalls came up from the crowd, which was beginning to back up in order to make a larger arena in respect for the wayward arrows. “The target is the Roman, not us!” Others wondered aloud if my punches had blinded him.

Angry at this mockery, Skilla kicked Drilca into a gallop, still making a broad orbit around me. This time his action was almost a blur. With a speed that seemed almost super-human but which was practiced until it was second nature to the Huns, Skilla launched a succession of arrows too quickly for me to evade them singly, while riding the circuit at full tilt. They came at me in a fan. Now I crouched beneath my shield and then at the last moment fell into a ball. Three arrows flew over me entirely and three struck my shield at an oblique angle, plowing into it but not penetrating. No sooner had the volley stopped than I bounced up, reached around, and snapped in half the shafts that had stuck in my shield.

“Eight.”

Skilla had settled his horse into a lope again, seemingly as baffled by this evasion as he had been by my boxing. He made for where one of his arrows was jutting from the ground and leaned to scoop it up, but a Hun ran forward, yanked it out, and broke it in two. “You only get one quiver!” he shouted.

Sensing the sport, the crowd pulled up and shattered the other spent arrows as well. “A quiver only! Strike home or be damned, Skilla!” Some of the sentiment was beginning to swing to me, I realized. “You couldn’t hit your mother’s ass!”

Zerco the dwarf had bounded down from his wife and was capering in front of the crowd, crowing excitedly. “The Roman is invisible!” he cackled. “The Hun is blind!”

Scowling, Skilla galloped by and almost ran the dwarf down. At the last moment Zerco scampered back into the safety of the crowd, hooting and turning a somersault as he tumbled to safety.

So the Hun fired again, singly this time, and then again in almost absentminded fashion, giving me time to dodge the arrows.

“Ten.”

Yet even as I evaded the tenth shaft, Skilla abruptly changed tactics and kicked his pony straight at me. This time he drew and held, leaning toward me as Drilca neared, the hoofbeats kicking up a blur of clods, clearly intending to shoot from a distance of a pace or two and pinion me once and for all. There would be no time to dodge. Yet as he drew near I stopped pivoting around my planted spear and hefted it, and just before I judged he’d shoot I threw as hard as I could. The spear sailed. Now Skilla was forced to jerk the reins, his horse cutting away; and while the spear missed, so did his arrow, which this time went so high that it soared over the heads of the Huns. A great shout went up, both of excitement and derision, at this near miss by both opponents. Skilla wheeled his horse around, and I ran to retrieve my weapon.

The exchange was repeated, with no different result. Neither of us had yet drawn blood.

“Twelve,” I counted, panting now. Sweat stung my eyes.

Edeco stepped out from the mass and grabbed Drilca’s bridle as it trotted by. “Are you trying to cool him with the wind from your arrows?” he demanded. “This is not a game, it’s your reputation. Use your head, boy.”

Skilla yanked away. “I will give you his, uncle.”

Now he sped by again, but this time at a distance that was too far for me to heave my spear. Again he loosed three arrows in quick succession so that no matter which way I dodged, I could not escape. This time two arrows thudded home on my shield with enough force to pierce it. One broke through but was spent enough that it merely punched against my mail shirt, not penetrating it. The armor saved my heart.

The other arrow struck, however, where my left arm held the shield straps, and pierced my forearm. I was pegged to my protection. The shock was enough to make me stop for what was almost a fatal moment, and another arrow flew singing toward my eye. I ducked just in time so that its head clanged and skipped across my helmet, jarring me with a blow to the head. I staggered.

“Sixteen.” I winced, my ears ringing. A rivulet of blood dripped from my shield.

The crowd noise fell briefly to a disconcerted murmur.

Skilla had clearly struck his target, but my Roman shield and armor was stronger than they had expected. What witchery was this? As derisive as they were of defeated opponents, any prowess or good equipment earned their respect.

Still the pony cantered around, the crowd screaming encouragement and abuse at both of us now. Skilla reached around and then hesitated.

He had only four arrows left. How to end this frustration?

With a howl he directed Drilca straight at me again in a thunderous charge, and as I raised my spear he suddenly veered sharply to the left. My throw sailed wide, and Skilla cut back to come at my undefended side before I could turn, his bow drawn. This time I simply fell in panic, and the arrow sizzled by my ear just before the Hun pony ran over me. Hooves slammed down on my shield, cracking it, and one hoof struck my side and kicked me along the ground in a spinning skid. It was as if the world had been robbed of air.

I felt disoriented and in agonizing pain, a rib cracked. The horse danced, and then it was beyond me, neighing in confusion while Skilla hauled to turn its head around. The sound of the crowd was like a roaring ocean, buffeting both of us with rising emotion.

I had to fight back, but how?

Skilla rode toward me even as I crawled to get my spear.

I grabbed it and then twisted around, using my shield like a rock to hide beneath in a desperate attempt to defend myself, as Skilla shot downward again from murderous range. The powerful bow sent the arrow through the shield like paper.

Yet the pony was skittering away from my wavering spearhead, and so this shaft missed my chest and plowed through my shoulder instead, driving down with such force that it went completely through and stuck me to the ground. I was more helpless than ever. Skilla drew again, Drilca sidestepping closer. He couldn’t miss. This would finish it. I glanced sideways along the ground. Ilana had emerged from the crowd at Attila’s dais and had run a few steps into the field, her hand at her mouth.

I would not let him have her.

With an awkward heave I desperately lurched my spear upward and it stuck in the pony’s belly. The horse screamed and bucked and Skilla’s next to last arrow went at an awkward angle that merely stuck in my shield. Drilca trotted fearfully away, the lance dragging from his underside, blood and piss draining as it weaved. The pony’s head shook.

The Huns were going wild, but who they were cheering for and who they were despising could no longer be discerned in the tumult. This had been a far better fight than they had hoped.

I felt as if a horse had fallen on me, so heavy did my shield suddenly feel, and my vision was blurring. It was the shock of wounds. I had to get up! Skilla was getting his horse back under control, and my spear had dropped away from Drilca’s belly, kicked and broken in half by the anxious pony. I could hear the spatter of its blood.

I still was pinioned to the ground by that arrow, afraid to move because of the pain. But I had to! Summoning all my courage, I heaved and sat up with a shout that pulled the feathered shaft clear through my shoulder, leaving me dizzy with agony. Then I used my good right arm to lever the shield from my left, wincing as the other shaft through my forearm broke in two as the straps fell away. I kicked, and the shield skidded free, an empty, bloody platter. My mail had a sheen of bright blood now, my shoulder bubbling like a spring, and my head ached from where the one arrow had struck my helmet. Yet somehow I got to my knees and then my feet, staggering, and I marveled at what I could make my body do. “Nineteen.” It was a wheezing gasp.

I watched as Skilla drew his final arrow.

Skilla kicked, but Drilca came on at barely a trot, wary now of this man who had wounded him so grievously. The pony’s eyes were clouding. The Hun looked triumphant.

Noise enclosed both of us like a box, a delirious buffeting; and yet I could see nothing but my opponent, weaving closer. I drew my sword. Skilla’s grin grew contemptuous.

He would never come close enough to give me a chance to use my weapon.

“Finish him!” Edeco’s roar came floating through the cacophony.

I could see Drilca’s breast, his high, lathered neck, and Skilla peering just beyond it down the shaft of his arrow. He was only ten paces away.

So I threw, hurling my sword with my right arm and grunting through the pain.

It whirled end over end, a steel pinwheel, and struck Drilca full in the chest, the horse buckling to its knees and tumbling forward. Skilla lurched and lost control of his arrow, which went low. Then Drilca was sprawling, his rider flying out of the saddle and over the horse’s head, my sword embedded and lost under the kicking, screaming horse.

Skilla skidded on the grass and dirt, cursing.

I ran past him, a stumbling run, and picked up the half of my broken spear that bore the head.

Skilla still had his sword, but his instinct was for archery.

His quiver was empty, but his last arrow jutted tantalizingly from the ground. He crawled for it, even as I staggered in pursuit, my spear poised to strike if I could reach him before he could retrieve the broken arrow and shoot. I was bleeding freely now, and my opponent was largely unhurt. All he had to do was wait for my collapse! Yet that wouldn’t fit his pride. Skilla’s hand closed over the arrow shaft and plucked it like a flower. He would have one last, clear shot at my chest. Lying on his back, he fitted arrow to bowstring. I braced myself to die.

But when he tried to pull the string, it flapped uselessly.

Skilla gaped. The fall had broken his bow.

I charged. Before he could reach for his sword my Roman boot was on his chest and my spear point was at his throat. The Hun started to twist and the tip began to cut. He stopped, frozen, finally knowing fear. He looked up.

I suppose I looked like a great, metal monster, chest heaving, blood droplets from my two arrow wounds spraying us both, my face still mostly lost behind my helmet but my eyes bright and lusting for revenge. Impossibly, I had bested him. The Hun closed his eyes against the end. So be it. Better to die than bear humiliation.

Now the crowd had surged forward, dramatically shrinking the battlefield to a tiny ring, its sound and excitement clamoring, the smell of the pressed bodies rankling. “Kill him, kill him!” they screamed. “Now, Roman, he deserves to die!”

I looked at Edeco. Skilla’s uncle had turned away in disgust. I looked at Attila. The Hun king grimly put his thumb down, in mocking copy of the Roman gesture he had heard of.

It would not be a combat kill anymore; it would be an execution. I didn’t care. These Huns had crucified Rusticius, enslaved Ilana, slain her father, and trapped me. Skilla had taunted me from the day we’d met. I knew this was not what the priests of Constantinople expected. The final thrust would be a relic from the old world, not this new, saved, Christian one, supposedly so close to Apocalypse. But none of this mattered in my hatred. I squeezed the shaft of my broken spear in preparation.

And then something slight and frantic hit me, butting me aside before I could thrust. I staggered, outraged, and howled with pain. Who was this interloper?

She loomed in my vision. Ilana!

“No.” She was weeping. “Don’t kill him! Not for me!”

I saw Skilla’s eyes blink open, amazed at this reprieve.

His hand closed on the hilt of his sword, still undrawn. He rolled to one side to clear it.

And then all went black. I had fainted.

P A R T T W O

I

RALLYING THE WEST

XV

I

THE WINE JAR

Iwas in a dark, hot place, and some kind of gnome or in-cubus was leaning over me, perhaps to feast on my aching flesh or carry me to some place even deeper. The roar of the Hun crowd had subsided to a hushed ringing, and Ilana had betrayed me and then disappeared in a fog. I knew I had made some great, irretrievable mistake but couldn’t remember what it was. Then the demon leaned closer . . .

“For the sake of your Savior, are you going to sleep forever? There are more important things afoot than you.”

The voice was high, caustic, and familiar. Zerco.

I blinked, white light flooding in. So did pain, fresher and more acute than I had felt in my fever dream. The hum of the crowd was merely the noise my ear made while pressed in a cup of wool blanket, and the mistake I regretted was leaving Constantinople and becoming entangled with a woman. I struggled to sit up.

“Not yet.” The dwarf pushed me down. “Wake, but lie still.” Someone placed something hot on my shoulder.

“Ahhhggg!” It stung like a viper. And I had longed for adventure!

“It will help you heal,” a female voice murmured. It was a voice I painfully recognized. “Why did you save Skilla!”

“To save us. And no man is going to die for me. That’s silly.”

“It wasn’t for you—”

“Hush! Rest.”

“What kind of a future do you think you’d have if you’d slain Edeco’s nephew?” Zerco added. “Let the girl heal you so you can save Rome.”

I waited for a wave of nausea and dizziness to pass and then tried to focus. The unbearable light faded as my eyes adjusted to fire and candle. It was actually quite dim in the room, I realized. I was in a cabin with the jester, the leather webbing of the bed creaking as I shifted on my straw mat-tress. From the smoke hole at the cabin’s peak, I glimpsed a circle of gray sky. A cloudy day, perhaps dusk. Or dawn.

“What time is it?”

“The first hour, three days after you humiliated that young rooster,” the dwarf said.

“Three days! I feel drained.”

“As you are, of blood, piss, and spit. Julia, is it ready?”

There was a third person in the room, the woman I had seen holding the dwarf on her shoulders. “Here, drink this.”

The cup was bitter.

“Don’t turn your head away—drink it! My God, what an unruly patient you are! Finish that, and then you can have some wine and water. That will taste sweeter, but this will make you well.”

Obediently, but grimacing, I drank. Three days! I remembered nothing except my own collapse. “So I am alive.”

“As is Skilla, thanks to Ilana here. He hates you more than ever, of course, especially since this beauty has been given leave to nurse you. He’s hoping she can heal you only so he can try killing you again. No man has ever prayed harder for the recovery of another! I warned him that you’ll simply outthink him again. Now he is puzzling how you did it the first time.”

Even smiling hurt. I turned to Ilana. “But you feel something for him.” It was an accusation. I’d fought for her, and she hadn’t let me finish it.

She was embarrassed. “I led him on about marriage, Jonas. I led both of you on, because women are so helpless here. I’m not proud of it. The duel made me sick. Now I’m out of Suecca’s house and soon will be out of this one, and leave you all alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s the other reason Skilla hates you,” Zerco said cheerfully. “When it was apparent neither of you two bucks was going to die, Attila considered like Solomon—and awarded the girl to himself.”

“Himself!”

“As slave, not concubine. He actually said you’d both fought bravely. He declared that Skilla was the true Hun but pointed out that he was now in the debt of a Roman. So both of you will now be given a chance to fight for Attila, and whoever distinguishes himself the most will eventually get the woman.” The dwarf grinned. “You have to admire his ability to motivate.”

“Fight? I want to fight against Attila. He crucified my friend Rusticius for no reason. He humiliated my mentor, Maximinus. He—”

“Ah, I see Skilla has shot some sense into you. That’s why you need to recover. While you fuss about this pretty morsel, great things are astir in the world, Jonas of Constantinople. Attila has not been asleep, and the world is in peril. Are you planning to nap through all of history or help your Empire?”

“What are you talking about?” My vision was getting blurry again. Whatever Julia had given me was obviously a sleeping potion. Why had they awoken me only to put me back under?

“We’re saying that you must sleep to recover, not listen to this little fool called my husband,” Julia soothed. “That drink had the medicine of the meadow. Sleep, while your body struggles to heal. You have years ahead to save the world.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Zerco said.

But by that time I was asleep again.

I do not recommend being holed by two arrows. Great heroes bear wounds bravely and without complaint, childhood stories tell. But my arm and shoulder complained loudly and long of having been punched through by two shafts of wood, and every twinge reminded me of my own mortality. My courage would never be so naïve again. Yet I was of that age when confinement in bed seems a torment and recovery comes quickly. By nightfall I was sitting up, even if the hours dragged from pain, and by the following morning I was walking unsteadily around the hut. Within a week I was restless and well on my way to healing, aching but not inca-pacitated. “By the first snow you’ll be chopping my firewood,” the dwarf promised.

Ilana and I had spoken at length only once. It was dark, the other two asleep, and fever had brought me awake. She mopped my brow and shoulder, sighing. “I wish the arrows had gone into me.”

“Don’t blame yourself for a duel ordered by Attila.”

“I felt like a murderess and utterly helpless. I thought the death of my betrothed and my father had hardened me, but I couldn’t stand to see you two pitted against each other with me as the prize. I don’t want to marry Skilla, but do you think I feel nothing toward him after the attention he’s given me? I wanted to use you to rescue me, but do you think I don’t notice how you looked at me, touched me? I hate fighting. And now . . .”

“It’s still a contest.”

She shook her head. “I’ll not have either of you killing Attila’s enemies for him in return for my bed. I won’t marry Skilla, but I won’t burden you. Pretend you’ll fight, and then slip away. Don’t worry about me or the Empire. We’ve damaged you enough.”

“Do you really think me such a fool that I was just led around by you? I wouldn’t have tried escape if you hadn’t encouraged me, Ilana. It’s you who was trying to save me.”

She smiled sadly. “How naïve your goodness is! You need to heal your mind as well as your body. And that’s best done alone.” She kissed my forehead.

“But I need . . .” I drifted off again. When I awoke, she was gone.

“Where’s Ilana?” I asked Zerco.

He shrugged. “Maybe she’s tired of you. Maybe she loves you. Maybe she told Attila you’ll live and he decided she’d done enough. And maybe, just maybe, I had more important things for her to do.” He winked conspiratorially.

“Tell me what’s going on, Zerco.”

“The end of the world, the seers believe. The Apocalypse, Christians fear. Messengers are riding out. Spears are being sharpened. Do you know of the Greek Eudoxius?”

“I saw him at my match with Skilla.”

“He came with tidings for Attila. Then another party, quieter and even stranger, arrived in camp. I’ve asked Ilana to keep her ears open. When I entertain in Attila’s great hall, she feeds me what information she can, with a whisper here or a written scrap of message there. Thank God we are literate and most Huns are not!”

“What has she learned?”

“Ah, curiosity. Isn’t that a sign he is healing, Julia?”

“Curiosity about politics or about the woman?” his wife replied slyly.

“Curiosity about everything!” I shouted. “My God, I’ve been prisoner long enough of your pots and potions! I need to know what’s going on!”

They laughed, and Zerco peeked out the hut’s wicker door to make sure no one was listening. “It appears a eunuch has again entered our lives.”

“Chrysaphius?” I dreaded hearing that minister’s name again.

“No, this one from the West, and considerably gentler by all description. His name is Hyacinth, like the flower.”

“From the West?”

“Have you heard of the princess Honoria?”

“From gossip, on the journey. The sister of Valentinian, shamed when she was caught in bed with her steward. Her brother was expected to marry her off.”

“What you may not have heard is that she’s chosen confinement over marriage, which indicates she’s perhaps more sensible than her reputation.” He grinned, and Julia poked him. “Actually, this Hyacinth is her slave and messenger, and it seems she may be ever more foolish than reported.

Nothing is secret in a royal household, and Ilana has heard he came in the dead of night with a secret message to Attila from the princess. Hyacinth bore her signet ring, and what the eunuch had to say has changed the Hun’s entire thinking.

Up to now Attila has focused on the riches of the East. Now he is considering marching on the West.”

This did not strike me as entirely bad news. Attila had been preying on my half of the Empire for a decade. It would be a relief to have his attention turned elsewhere.

“That, at least, is not my concern. My position is from the Eastern court.”

“Really? Do you think either half of the Empire will stand if its brother collapses?”

“Collapses? The Huns are raiders—”

“This Hun is a conqueror. As long as the West stands fast, Attila dares not risk all his strength against Constantinople.

As long as the East gives craven tribute, he satisfies his people by making threats and distributing gold. But now everything is changing, young ambassador. What little standing you might have retained as a member of a failed imperial embassy disappeared two weeks ago when news came that the Eastern emperor, Theodosius, died in a riding accident.

General Marcian has succeeded to the throne.”

“Marcian! He’s a fierce one.”

“And you are even more forgotten than you were.

Chrysaphius, the minister who sent you and secretly plotted to kill Attila, has finally been ejected from his post at the urging of Theodosius’s sister Pulcheria. Rumor says he’ll shortly face execution and that Bigilas may find himself rowing a galley. You’re simply a diplomatic embarrassment, best forgotten by all sides. Moreover, Marcian has sent word that the days of paying tribute to the Huns are over, that not a single solidus will ever be sent north again. A treaty had been completed with Persia and troops are being shifted from the eastern marches to Constantinople. Attila’s demands have gone too far.”

“So there’s to be war?” I brightened at this chance for rescue, then paled as I realized that Attila had threatened to execute me for far less imperial determination.

“Yes, but with who?” Zerco asked rhetorically, ignoring my expression. “Word of Marcian’s defiance had reportedly sent Attila into a rage. His little pig eyes began to bug out as if he were being strangled. His hands balled into fists. He cursed Marcian in seven languages and howled like a crazy man; and he became so frenzied that he flopped on the ground like a landed fish until blood spurted from his nose.

It came out in a froth, wetting his beard and flecked his lips and teeth with red. Ilana saw it! None of his henchmen dared go near him during this fit of rage. He vowed to teach the East a lesson, of course, but how? By subduing and uniting the nations of the West, he shouted, and bringing them all, Hun and slave armies, against the walls of Constantinople!

Attila said his people had endless enemies and would know no peace until they had conquered the entire world.”

“He would do so because of the accession of Marcian?”

“No, because this twit of a Roman princess has asked him to. If this eunuch and her signet ring can be believed, the woman Honoria, sister to the Western emperor Valentinian, has asked Attila to be her protector. He has chosen to interpret this as a proposal of marriage, which he believes would entitle him to half of the West as dowry. Failure to accede to this demand, he is claiming, means war.”

“Surely he doesn’t expect Valentinian to agree to such an absurdity. People say Honoria is a silly trollop.”

“Silly or scheming? Sometimes the two are the same thing. And, yes, Valentinian will not agree, unless another threat is so pressing that perhaps he would be forced to come to accommodation with Attila. And now this Eudoxius has brought just that threat, it seems. This wily traitor has become pivotal.”

“A fugitive Greek doctor?”

“A self-important troublemaker. He has visited the Vandal king Gaiseric in North Africa and extracted his promise to attack the Western Empire from the south if Attila will attack it from the north. If the Huns and Vandals act in concert, it is the end of Rome.”

“Surely Attila is not foolish enough to march west with Marcian showing new defiance in the east . . .”

“Wait, there’s more. Have you seen the Frankish prince Cloda?”

“From afar, as one more barbarian envoy. I’ve been a slave to Hereka, remember?”

“Not just an envoy. The Franks had a disputed succession, and Cloda’s brother Anthus seized the throne. Cloda is asking Attila to help him get it back.”

I sat, my mind whirling from all these simultaneous happenings. Maximinus had counseled that simply waiting sometimes solved problems between nations, but this time waiting seemed to have compounded them. “The prophecy,”

I murmured.

“The what?”

“Maximinus told me that twelve vultures Romulus saw in his dream meant Rome would fall after twelve centuries.

That would put the end at less than three years away. Not to mention that the priests think that the Huns are a manifesta-tion of biblical prophecy. Gog and Magog and the armies of Satan, or some such thing.”

“You understand more than I give you credit for, young man!” the dwarf exclaimed with delight. “Indeed, all signs point to such an end! But now it is the West that must fear, not the East. Edeco himself told me once he was impressed by the triple walls of Constantinople and wondered if the Huns could ever get inside them. Attila might wonder if the Western kingdoms are not easier targets of his wrath. Will the German tribes that have settled there ever unite under the Romans to resist him? It hasn’t happened yet. And now Attila has the sword of Mars, which he’s claiming is proof that he means to conquer.”

“He’s never been beaten. There seems little hope.”

“Unless Aetius can be warned and Attila’s momentum can be slowed, my young Roman friend—until the West can rally together against him.”

“But who can do that?”

Zerco gave me the smile of a Syrian rug merchant. “You can. Ilana has a plan.”

I could now count two truly foolish things I had done in my short life. The first was naïvely agreeing to serve as scribe and translator to the court of Attila. The second was agreeing to Ilana and Zerco’s desperate plan to not just escape by creating a diversion but to take history into our own hands.

Only the prospect of reunion with Ilana convinced me to try. Our dilemma was plain. I had no intention of trying to out-soldier Skilla in Attila’s army to win her back or give Skilla a chance to duel with me again. But the diversion of the strava had passed, and no similar opportunity for escape seemed likely . . . unless we made our own. Yet whatever Ilana’s guilt or confusion, I was determined not to leave her in Attila’s compound. So Ilana had come up with a magnificently reckless scheme so lunatic that of course Zerco immediately hailed it a work of genius. All it needed to succeed, he said, was me. I had little confidence it would work, but my virtual enslavement and wounds had made me anxious to strike back before Attila remembered his promise to torture me to death. I ached to escape from the limbo of my captivity and longed for Ilana with a desire that was almost overwhelming. Not her body, though that passed through my mind, too, but her Romanness, her connection to normality and home. What is love? Insanity, I suppose, the willingness to risk everything for what threatens to be a colossal mental illusion. Why had she affected me so? I don’t know. Our moments were stolen, our confidences brief, our knowledge of each other meager. Yet she haunted me in a way that made my feelings for distant Olivia seem childish and made me prefer to risk all. It made me, finally, ready to kill.

It was Ilana who suggested I be smuggled into Attila’s kitchen, but Julia who came up with how. I was to be carried in the kind of clay amphora that held looted wine. “It’s no different from Cleopatra’s being carried to Caesar while rolled in a carpet,” she reasoned.

“Except that the Egyptian monarch stayed drier and was no doubt lighter to carry,” her dwarf husband joked.

I admitted the idea had a certain simple charm; and while I didn’t know Julia well, I’d become impressed by her calm practicality. She was that blessed person who made the best of what was, rather than dreaming about what should be, and thus was happier with her odd companion than a hundred kings with a thousand wives.

Marriage to the dwarf had been a way out of slavery, though being a fool’s bride wasn’t exactly the path to re-spectability. From the pair’s mutual desperation had come an odd and touching form of love, similar to my own situation with Ilana. Zerco would have adored the allegiance of even the plainest woman, but Julia was not just attractive, she was engagingly good-humored, smart, able, and loyal, demonstrating faith in her diminutive husband that most men would envy. She had turned Bleda’s mocking joke of a marriage into partnership. Julia appreciated not just the dwarf’s intelligence and determination to survive but that he had voluntarily returned to humiliating bondage with the Huns in order to be with her. Clearly the halfling loved her, and that had been the first step toward her love for him.

What kind of sexual arrangement they had, I couldn’t guess, but I’d seen them kiss, and Zerco curled in her arms in the evening like a contented pet.

It’s odd who we envy.

So Julia had gone to the rubbish pit that smoldered at the foot of the crucifixion hill and found a clay amphora that had been discarded after breaking in two. This wine jar, which swelled from its narrow base like the hips of a woman and then narrowed at the top to a graceful neck, had two handles at its lip and was two thirds the height of a man.

Zerco’s wife carried it in two trips, past barking dogs on a moonless night, and brought it into our cabin. The clay stank of grape. Now I curled myself to be sealed inside like a chick in an egg. “Your wounds will hurt,” she said, “but the pain will keep you awake.”

“How am I supposed to get back out?”

“We will give you a Roman short sword and you can chop your way.”

“But what if they open the jar before I’ve had a chance to escape?”

“I’m going to seal the throat of the jar with layers of wax and straw with a little wine between,” she said. “We’ll drill a small hole in the bottom so you can breathe, and wedge you in with straw.”

Zerco was scampering around the cabin in delight. “Isn’t she clever?”

I looked at the two pieces. “But the jar is broken, Julia.”

“And it will be mended with pitch and the join concealed with clay dust. They carry in provisions at night so as not to disturb the daytime crowd that assembles to hear Attila’s judgments. It will be dark. We’ll roll you to the wine house, you’ll be lifted onto a wagon, and before you know it you’ll be stacked in the kagan’s kitchens.”

Zerco was cackling. “Julia, my muse, who knows every ruse!”

So I let myself be swaddled in the amphora’s foul em-brace, the jar glued with pitch and coated with yard dust. At Julia’s instruction, I reinforced the joint on the inside with a rope sticky with pitch. It was like being buried or sent back to the womb. I was drawn up like a fetus, my gladius clutched like an umbilical cord, and the sensation of being rolled was so disorienting that it was all I could do to keep from vomiting. Soon I was too hot and struggling for breath.

Then we came to rest for some time, and from the shortage of air I actually faded, not jolted awake again until the amphora was lifted into a Hun wagon. There was the dull report of a whip and the vehicle shifted into motion.

In little more than half an hour, I was unloaded inside Attila’s compound. There were guttural voices for a while, and then silence. It must be the very darkest time of the night, when most are asleep. Following Julia’s suggestion, I used the tip of the sword to pry at the stoppers. A shower of wine came down on my head, making me stink even more, but it was followed by blessed air that gave me strength. I saw no light coming through and heard no voices. The kitchen must be empty. So now I sawed at the sticky rope, cutting it to weaken the jar. Finally, summoning my courage, I struck the join and pushed pieces of the amphora aside like shards of egg, letting myself hatch. Then I crawled over the other con-tainers like a sodden chick. How my wounds and muscles ached!

I dropped to the dirt floor of the storeroom and listened.

Nothing. Attila’s guards manned his stockade, not his pantry.

It was time to find Ilana and try her insane plan to save Rome and let us escape.

Slave barracks lined two sides of the courtyard of Attila’s compound. The female barracks, Zerco had reminded me, were on the eastern side so that its windows and porch faced west, giving as many late-day hours as possible for the captives to weave, make baskets, card wool, embroider, sew, and polish at which the Hun females seemed to excel. Those picked for the kagan tended to be young and beautiful, of course, on display and in turn observing, and gossiping about, visitors to Attila’s court. Their king kept them for work and decoration, not sex; he slept only with those he married to avoid the political complications of bastard heirs.

His multiple marriages—of which that to Hereka ranked first—were usually about alliance, not love. The captives were also an investment. A year or two in Attila’s service inflated their value and he would sell them to Hun nobles while their beauty was still at its peak. He used the money to help pay for his armies.

Ilana had told Zerco of a passageway between kitchen and barracks, entered through a hidden pantry door. It en-abled the slave women of his household to be served and reach the privy without traversing the more public areas: a scrap of privacy that prevented them from encountering men who could provoke trouble. This would be my own entry. I slipped past the pantry’s ranks of hanging game and clay jars of preserves and found the low door in back. It seemed Zerco sized, but once through it the windowless passage became high enough that I could shuffle ahead in the dark without bumping my head. At a second door I cut the bolt’s leather thong, lifted the latch, and slid into the room.

The slave chamber was dappled with moonlight, faintly illuminating the forms of two dozen females asleep on floor mats. Their bodies reminded me of the undulating green hills of Galatia, sinuous and rounded; and the place smelled of the sweet musk of assembled women, their let-down hair fanning across woolen pillows and glinting like alluvial plains under a glimmer of starlight. Here a breast peeked from a cocked arm, there a hip made a perfect Byzantine arch.

“Heaven on Earth,” I breathed.

I began moving down the double row of sleeping forms, marveling. It was like the assembly of damsels in the village by the lake: here a Hibernian blond, there a Caucasian redhead, and across from them a Nubian black. All exquisite, all captive. It seemed easiest to slip past them all for a quick inspection—the time it took couldn’t hurt—and then, my curiosity more fully satisfied, I’d turn back to look more carefully for Ilana.

A toe kicked my ankle.

I bent. Her head came up, hair tousled and her eyes still sleepy: She had nodded off while waiting. The moon painted innocence on her that I hadn’t observed before and I realized how much the Ilana I knew was a woman anxious and driven, desperate for alliance. Here for a moment was a younger, softer woman who’d emerged from a dream. I found myself kneeling and caressing her cheek and shoulder before I fully knew what I was doing, aroused by all this female beauty.

“Not here,” she whispered, trembling as my fingers slipped down. Light fingers gripped mine. “Jonas, stop.”

She was right. I pulled, and we both stood. None of the other girls had moved. My eye wandered over their forms, wondering their eventual fate. Would they suffer for what was about to happen? No, I told myself, the Huns had their own sense of harsh fairness and would know the slave girls were blameless. But, then. Rusticius had been blameless as well . . . Ilana nudged me. Her look had become impatient.

We padded quickly toward the door and then froze as a tawny-headed Scythian groaned and turned, her limbs twitching for a moment like a sleeping dog’s. She stilled.

I could hear the release of Ilana’s breath.

Then we were through the door and I took a last, wistful glimpse.

As we hurried for the kitchen I wondered: Had a head come up?

XVI

I

ESCAPE

What took you so long?” Ilana demanded when we paused at the door of the kitchen. “I feared they had found you. I worried all night!”

“Until you fell asleep.”

“It’s almost dawn!”

“I was delivered on their schedule, not mine, and waited for the kitchen to quiet.” I studied her. “We don’t have to risk this.”

She shook her head. “Yes, we do. Not just for us but for Rome.”

Her determination made me braver. “Then find some jars of cooking oil and let’s do what you and the dwarf have planned. By first light, we’ll either be gone or dead.”

The battle with Skilla had hardened me, she could see, just as the sack of Axiopolis had hardened her. Pain had cut some lines onto our young lives, and the hopelessness of rescue had provided desperation. I saw the gleam in my own eyes reflected in hers, and realized we had become wolves.

We had, in a way, become Huns. “Yes,” she said. “It ends tonight, one way or another.”

“Hold still. I’m going to cut your dress.”

She caught my wrist. “I don’t need help for the distraction you’ve planned.”

“But I would enjoy helping.”

She snorted, turned from me, used my short sword herself, then gave it back.

It had to be as simple as it was brutal. I crept along the stockade wall until I neared the rear of Attila’s great hall, keeping a wary eye out for sentries on the walls. The silhouettes on the stockade towers, all facing outward, looked somnolent. At the rear door to the hall there was only a single guard, slumped and bored. I signaled my companion by briefly revealing the gleam of the short sword.

Ilana ran wordlessly across the dark courtyard, jars of oil cradled. The guard straightened, puzzled by this approaching female form. She stumbled when she reached the sentry, a sealed jar rolling like an errant ball and drawing his eye.

She grasped his knees. “Please!”

He looked down in confusion. “Who are you? Get up.”

She leaned back to reveal the provocative tear she had made. “He’s trying to have his way with me but I’m pledged to Attila. . . .”

The man stared just a moment too long. I came up behind and thrust. The point of my sword emerged from his stomach as my other hand drew a dagger across his throat. Blood geysered, wetting us all. The man, his cry cut off by the knife, collapsed in the dirt.

“It went through so easily,” I said, a little shaken.

“It will go just as easily into Attila. Take his helmet and cloak.”

The hall was high, dark, and empty. The table and benches had been pushed to one side and the dais where Attila’s curtained bed rested was shadowy, lit only by a single oil lamp. There the chieftain slept with whichever wife he’d picked for the evening, and we could hear the faint drone of his drunken snoring. On the wall, mounted as it had been when I’d first seen it, was the great black iron sword of Mars. It looked huge and ungainly, its haft long rotted away so that only a spike of iron remained. The wavering lamplight played over it. Would stealing it really deter the superstitious Huns?

“Spread the oil and I’ll take the sword,” I whispered.

She shook her head. “I step lighter.”

Dancing across the boards, she hopped up on the dais and made for the weapon. I began pouring oil on the planks of the great hall, the sheen catching the feeble light. Oil splashed on my hands, making the clay slippery; and despite the coolness, I was sweating. How long before another sentry found the dead guard? I finished with one jar, took up the other. If we failed, I did not want to imagine the long death we would endure. . . .

Suddenly there was a thud and I jerked. The unexpected heaviness of the iron sword had twisted it out of Ilana’s grasp and its tip had struck the floor. My own grip slipped and the second jar fell and broke, sending oil streaming across the planks.

We froze, waiting. The snoring had stopped a moment, becoming a grumble instead. Yet the curtain of Attila’s bed didn’t part.

All I could hear was the roar of blood in my ears. Then the snoring resumed.

I remembered to breathe.

Ilana caught the dull blade in her other palm, lifted it, and, bearing the sword, began to carefully make her way to me. Then she would fetch the lamp to ignite the fire. . . .

“The Romans are killing Attila!”

The shout made us jump. It was a woman’s voice, coming from the courtyard outside. “Help! The Romans have murdered a Hun!”

Now the bed curtains swung open.

“It’s Guernna,” Ilana spat.

I leaped our moat of oil to take the sword. “Get the lamp!” I hefted the weapon. No wonder she had dropped it!

The relic seemed two or three times the weight of an ordinary blade, as if a god had indeed wielded it. Where had the Huns found it? Who had made it? Then my feet strayed into the pool of oil and I slipped, sprawling, and cursing myself as I did so. At the same moment, the dark form of Attila burst from his bed and he seized Ilana by her hair just as she was lifting the oil lamp.

How could it all go so wrong?

She looked at me desperately as I scrambled to get up, hoping to use the old sword to skewer the barbarian king before I, in turn, was skewered. Then, as Attila bent Ilana’s head painfully back and reached for her lamp, she threw.

It struck the oil and a wall of flame roared up, separating me from her.

“Ilana!”

“For the sake of the Empire, run!”

The struggling pair were obscured. I tried to find a way through or around the fire, but my oily leggings ignited. I dropped to press my leg against the floor to smother the flames, wincing at the burn. The fire was growing bigger, and I was coughing from the smoke. “Ilana!”

There was no answer, just fire. The rear door was cut off, but I could see the figure of Guernna, staring at me in the rippling heat. Damn her! Snarling, I charged and leaped, flying through the flames, my clothes smoking.

The German girl yelped and disappeared.

I turned to the dais and Attila’s bed, ready to cleave him in two. It was empty. I whirled. I couldn’t see the kagan and Ilana anywhere. I began to cough.

Now the wood of the walls was igniting. The heat was a roiling wave, pulsing at me.

“Ilana!”

No answer. Attila’s bed ignited, and from its light I saw a hole in the floor leading down into a passageway. Even as I spied it, its entrance burst into flame.

With a whoosh, the rafters overhead ignited. I had to retreat.

I plunged through the flames again to get to the main entrance, ignited, dropped, and rolled. Flames sputtered out even as more pain seared me. Then I staggered toward the front door of the hall, dizzy and coughing. There were shouts and the sound of horns outside the barred main entry.

I was still dragging the heavy sword and still wore the Hun helmet. What should I do? The whole point of my escape had vanished in the smoke. I’d lost what I’d really come for: not a sword but a woman. Yet Ilana had sacrificed herself to give me time. Save the Empire, she had told me. So had Zerco.

Heartsick at what I must do, I unbarred the door. “The Romans are attacking Attila!” I shouted in Hunnish. Soldiers pushed past me. “Get water to save the kagan!” In the smoke and confusion, no one looked past my helmet and cloak. “He told me to protect the sword!”

With smoke pouring into the darkness and a hundred voices shouting at once, they let me stagger past. Out in the courtyard, all was chaos. Huns were galloping in through the gate to lend help even as the slave women were streaming from the barracks to seek refuge outside the stockade walls. I joined their current, clutching the weapon to my chest. It bumped as I ran. Then I grabbed the reins of a horse that a rider had momentarily abandoned and swung on, looping his lariat around the guard of the sword to hang it from my back. I looked around. Attila’s palace was in flames. Ilana was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the kagan.

There was no going back.

So I galloped hard for the Tisza, my heart a stone, my throat burning from smoke, my mind in shock. How I had failed! First I’d lost Rusticius and now Ilana. The fire was mercy if it killed her quickly, I told myself. What Attila would do to her if they had survived by disappearing down that hole, I didn’t want to guess.

The entire Hun camp was in chaos. Many, seeing the fire, assumed they were under attack. Half-naked warriors burst from their dwellings with drawn swords or half-strung bows, looking for enemies. Mothers shooed children like tides of mice. Horsemen galloped wildly, passing each other in the confusion. I, looking simply like one more crazed and furious Hun, was able to sprint for the river without being challenged. My mount and I crashed into the Tisza, the spray like milk under the moonlight, and we let the current carry us downstream away from the lurid light of the fire.

My horse gained its footing, we splashed onto land, and then galloped across dew-wet grass to the rim of dark trees where the dwarf was supposed to be waiting.

I was nearly in the cover when my stolen pony reared away from some figure lunging with a spear. Before I could react the weapon rammed home in the horse’s breast and my mount went over, crashing to earth and pinning one of my legs.

Caught! The great iron sword dragged me down. My attacker loomed over the dying horse and another, a scuttling child, was coming with a long knife. Perhaps, given our failure, it was just as well. I tensed for a thrust and then realized who was attacking.

“Zerco! It’s me!” I cried in Latin. “Julia!”

The dwarf stopped and his wife paused. She had yanked the bloody spear out of my dying horse and had lifted it to plunge it into my torso, but now she looked down in surprise. “Dressed like a Hun? And where’s Ilana? This was not the plan.”

I let my head slump back, my voice thick. “I couldn’t save her. Attila grabbed her after we started the fire.” Tears came, welling on my face.

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Zerco was fumbling at me. “But you’ve got the sword.”

I shoved the dwarf away. “To hell with the damned sword!”

The dwarf came back, cutting the lariat from around my neck and dragging the weapon free. “This is what is important, Jonas Alabanda. This, and what I’ve stolen as well. I am sorry about your woman, but this will save many women. Many, many women.”

“What have you stolen?”

“You aren’t the only man who has been busy tonight. I paid a visit to the Greek doctor who would betray the Empire.” He grinned fiercely. “He decided to accompany us, trussed like a pig.”

“We’re taking Eudoxius when we failed to kill Attila?”

This was madness atop madness. “Our diversion failed!”

“If Gaiseric is allying with Attila, my master Aetius needs to know about it. He’ll be best convinced by the traitor himself. Besides, the doctor’s absence might confuse the Huns even more. Perhaps they’ll think him a double traitor, secretly in league with Rome. It might slow their plans, if your fire hasn’t already done that.”

I shook my head in frustration. Nothing was happening as I expected. Stripped of the encumbering weapon, I managed to kick myself free of the horse and dragged myself away. I felt raw: shot, burned, bruised by the fall, exhausted from being awake most of the night in that stifling jar, and devastated by the loss of Ilana. Half a mile away, I could see people running, backlit by the flames of the kagan’s palace.

“And is what we’ve stolen worth Ilana’s life?”

“A million women’s lives, I hope.” The dwarf rested the sword on his shoulder like a pole. It was nearly twice as long as Zerco was high. “This sword will be seen as a sign from God. It will help rally the West. I understand your sorrow, but we still have a chance. The Huns are in disarray, and Ilana didn’t know which way we’d flee. And if she somehow still lives, this sword may be her only hope.”

Suddenly I saw it. “We can trade it for her!”

Zerco shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. Don’t torture yourself with temptation. This sword goes to Aetius.”

“To hell with Aetius! This piece of iron is all Attila cares about! The Huns will give anything to get it back!”

“How long do you think any of us, including Ilana, will live once you stop to parley with the barbarians? Have you learned nothing in all your months here?”

He was right, but I was stubborn. “They have their own honor.”

“Which must now be avenged for the murder, or attempted murder, of Attila. And you want to walk back into their camp with his stolen sword?”

I opened my mouth to argue and then closed it. The dwarf was right. Escape was insult enough, but we’d risked everything by violating the chamber of Attila. This would not be forgiven. Ilana had courageously gambled and lost. Just as I’d lost her.

“If she lives your only hope is to defeat Attila,” the dwarf went on, “and the best way to do that is to take this sword to Aetius. Come, the horses are waiting.” He began dragging the sword toward the trees.

I felt I couldn’t move. “I failed her, Zerco,” I said miserably.

My tone made the dwarf stop. Finally he came back and pressed the old weapon into my hands. “Then make up your failure, Jonas. The last thing Ilana would want is for you to be found at dawn standing foolishly in a meadow, her sacrifice in vain.”

The sky was beginning to blush. So we mounted the horses and rode hard, desperate to be well out of sight by full daylight.

Eudoxius, bound to a saddle, was gagged, his eyes glar-ing furiously. I’d expected that Zerco might have stolen my own mare, Diana, but the dwarf said that would have aroused too much suspicion: both when he took the horse and when she was found missing. Diana’s presence, in contrast, might confuse the Huns enough to think that I died in the fire. So the dwarf had instead stolen Arabians. Julia and Zerco shared the same mount, Eudoxius was on the next, and I on a third. The fourth we let go again, for Ilana was not there to ride it.

XVII

I

PURSUIT

It was startling how the witch Ansila has been right, Skilla thought. Fortune had given him a second chance after all.

After his combat with Jonas, the Hun had been so humiliated that he wanted to drown himself in the Tisza. It was terrible enough that the Roman had bested him. But he’d been saved by a woman! The reprieve had meant other warriors treated him like a ghost already dead but somehow still annoyingly among the living, a reminder of rare defeat. Skilla burned for revenge and the recapture of his honor, but Attila wouldn’t allow a combat rematch. And mere murder would not erase his shame. A stab in the back was the mark of a coward. So until war came, there was no opportunity to prove himself, and war was an agonizing six months or more away. Every waking moment became a torment, and every dream a nightmare, as Jonas recovered with Ilana as his nurse. So finally Skilla went to the Hun witch Ansila and begged her to tell him what he should do.

How could he regain his old life and eliminate the cursed Roman?

Ansila was an ageless crone who lived like a burrowing animal in a clay cave, paved with straw and beamed with tree roots in the riverbank. She remembered much of the past and saw far into the future, and every warrior both feared her and bribed her, for visions. A gold-studded bridle and bit, looted by Skilla during the raid on Axiopolis, was the fee he paid for her prophecy. He went to her at midnight, squatted morosely as she built up her fire to heat sacred water, and then watched impatiently as she scattered herbs on its surface and looked into the steam.

For a long time nothing seemed to happen, the prophet-ess standing motionless over her iron pot, her lined face and gray hair wreathed in the vapors. Then her pupils dilated and her hands began to tremble. She recited her message in a singsong rhyme, not looking at him but at things impossibly far away:

You will not have to wait long, For your frustration to be gone, Young warrior.

The one you hate is tempting fate.

He will light a fire that will bring desire, And steal what will ultimately heal.

On a darkling field you will have met, When the greatest fire is not yet set.

She staggered back from the steam, breathing deeply, her eyes shut. Skilla waited for explanation, but there was none.

The closeness of the cave made him giddy.

“Steal what, Grandmother? What fire? I don’t understand.”

Finally she peered at him, as if remembering he was there, and gave a crone’s grin of missing teeth. “If you understood life, little fool, you could not bear to live it. No man could. Be thankful you’re as ignorant as a goat in its field, for you’re happier because of it. Go now, be patient, and prepare for everything to change.” She turned from him in dismissal, grasped the bridle, and tottered across the cave to se-crete it in a chest. Later, she would trade it for food and clothing.

For a week Skilla had stewed in frustration, confused by the prophecy and waiting for some obvious sign. Had Ansila been wrong? Had he wasted the bridle? Then Jonas set fire to the kagan’s house, trying to kill Attila, and Ilana had been caught. In a single night of flame and confusion, everything had changed.

No bodies had been found in the ruins of the great house.

Attila himself had escaped with Ilana and his third wife, Berel, who had been sharing his bed that night. The king had pushed the two women beneath his bed through a hole that led to a tunnel specifically constructed to keep him from being cornered. It had been too dark and smoky for the king to be certain just who had attacked, but Guernna said it had been the young Roman.

Ilana, battered from Attila’s beating of her in his early rage, claimed Jonas was kidnapping her. “I was trying to save the sacred sword when you awoke,” she said in the gray ash of morning, her high chin failing to control the quaver in her voice. “He was trying to steal it and me.”

None believed this, and yet it provided a plausible excuse for what was to come next. Attila’s chiefs had assembled by the smoking ruins, several murmuring that the Roman girl should be crucified or worse. Their king had a different idea.

The loss of the sword deeply disturbed his superstitious spirit. This was a message, but what? To reveal misgiving would be to invite a usurper, but to fail to keep alive every opportunity for the sword’s recovery would be to tempt fate.

Better to use the loss to spur on his warriors, and use the woman until he got the sword back.

“It seems the god of war is testing us,” he told his followers. “First he allows us to discover the sword in a common field, meaning for us to find it. Then he steals it away just as easily. Do we deserve his favor? Or have we become soft as the Romans?” His warlords looked down in embarrassment and resentment. All had heard Attila’s warnings of decay many times. Was this finally a sign of divine disfavor?

“Now we will become hard again,” Edeco vowed, “hard like Mars.”

“What do we know?” Attila asked. “Is the Roman here?”

“His horse is here.”

“Which means nothing.” He thought. “The war god is revealing our proper direction. He wants us to march to wherever the sword is and wrest it back.”

“But the Romans will have it!” Onegesh exclaimed.

“They will use it against us!”

“How can they use what they do not understand? This is my talisman, not theirs.”

Edeco looked glum. “I would rather they not have it.”

“So let’s get the woman to tell us where he went,”

Onegesh said.

They eyed her. Ilana said nothing.

“No,” Attila finally said. “I am not going to damage this woman for what she probably doesn’t know. She’s better used as bait. All know how much the Roman who must have the sword desires her. Guernna said he leaped the flames to try to follow.” He pointed to Skilla. “I also know the longing of our own young hothead. So nothing has changed except this test. This fire is a sign that the Hun must return to the open sky. My survival is a sign that Mars still finds me worthy. Any sword that has been through the fire is stronger for it. So now we plan in earnest. This girl goes in a cage. This hothead finds where the sword has been taken and gets it back—or, when we find the Roman, we trade the woman for the sword.” He looked pointedly at Skilla.

“There will be no trade because the Roman will be dead and I will bring the sword back to you!” Skilla cried. And, elated that Ansila’s promises seemed to be coming true, Skilla took thirty men and rode out in pursuit.

He followed the Tisza southward to the Danube, reaching it in two and a half days of hard riding, but there was no trace of Jonas. The ferrymen in their canoes swore they hadn’t seen any fugitive. Villagers didn’t report any strange travelers. The best hunters in the group could find no trail or sign.

Skilla was anxious. Was he about to be humiliated again?

“Maybe he is so slow we’ve gotten ahead of him,” a warrior named Tatos, one of Skilla’s closest friends, suggested.

“Maybe.” Skilla pondered. “Or maybe so fast that he slipped across on a log or a stolen boat, or even swam the river with his horse. It’s not impossible. Nor is it impossible he drowned.” That would be a bitter theft, he thought. “All right, two will search downriver, one on either bank. Two more upriver. Five of you will cross here and ride toward the Pass of Succi, questioning every person you meet and offering a reward for the Roman. But I don’t think he came this way. He has another purpose in mind.”

“What?”

“My guess is he’s gone another direction.”

“East?” asked Tatos.

“That takes him farther from everywhere he knows.”

“West?”

“Eventually, perhaps. But not at first, because he’d risk running into our patrols. I say north first, but not forever.

The Germans would never hide him from us—they know better than that. My guess is north and then west . . . west to Aetius.” He tried to remember the maps of that area he’d seen. The Huns didn’t have the knowledge to draw maps, but they had learned to read them. How strange that an enemy would tell you the way to his homeland! “If we follow the Danube to the old Roman provinces of Noricum and Raetia, far up the Danube valley, we may intercept him. Tatos, return to Attila with word of what we’re doing and see if anything more has been learned in the camp. The rest of us will ride northwestward, toward the great bend of the Danube.

I’ve ridden with Romans before and know well how slow they are. We still have time.”

So they set out, and when Tatos rejoined them five days later he had intriguing news. “The dwarf and his wife are gone, too.”

“The dwarf?”

“The fool, Zerco. He’s disappeared.”

Of course! The jester had not just help nurse the Roman in his hut, the pair had become conspirators. Not until they lived together had Jonas shown the boldness to set fire to Attila’s palace. How much of what happened had been the fool’s idea?

“And something even stranger, Skilla. The Greek Eudoxius has disappeared, too.”

“Eudoxius! He’s no friend of Zerco.”

“Or of the Roman. Unless he’s been playing a double game.”

Skilla thought. “Or they have taken him prisoner.”

“Perhaps as a hostage,” Tatos said, “or for the Romans to torture.”

“It’s clear, then. They’re riding for Zerco’s old master, the Roman general Aetius. So we ride toward news of Aetius, too. Anyone who sees them will remember a dwarf, a woman, a Roman, and a Greek doctor. They might as well be a traveling circus.”

Our quartet of fugitives rode ever deeper into the barbarian world. Zerco’s plan was to travel a great arc into Germania, going first northwest and then southwest, striking the Danube again somewhere between Vindobona in the east and Boioduram to the west. He said we would cross the river into the relative safety of Noricum, that province north of the Alps still partly under Roman control. From there we could learn the whereabouts of Aetius or go on to Italy.

The chance of discovery by roving patrols of Huns or Germans forced us from the main tracks and required us to move slowly. We rested during the middle of the increasingly short days as autumn advanced, but rode into the night and rose again before dawn, as stealthy as hunted deer. Fortunately, we were away from major rivers or trading routes and settlement was sparse. Log huts crouched in clearings amid forest as old as time, the smoke of cooking fires curling away into thick ground mists. Trunks were as fat as towers, their limbs the outstretched hands of giants. Leaves rained down, and the days were growing cloudy and cold.

The world was growing darker.

This was country different than I had ever seen before, different even than the mountains we’d crossed to get to Attila. It was dim in the forest and hard to tell direction. Shapes moved in the night, and occasionally we saw the moonlit gleam of animal eyes, of which kind I cannot say. The air was always chill and damp, and our reluctance to light a fire, because of its revealing smoke, made our meals cold and cheerless. My only consolation was that I believed the Huns would like this pathway even less, given their love of open sky and rolling grassland.

I could have ridden faster by myself, I suppose, but it would have been with a sorrowful recklessness likely to get me caught. The elation I’d expected from fleeing Attila’s camp had instead become sadness at the loss of Ilana. In this somber mood, the company of the dwarf and his wife was a comfort, relieving me of having to make the decisions of where to go. They were gentle at my remote and troubled manner—only much later would I think to thank them—and Julia, who had come from such country, instructed us in the ways of camping. Zerco tried to explain the intricacies of imperial politics to me. So many kings, so many alliances, so many treacheries! Animosities reaching back two and three hundred years! The sword, perhaps, would help temporarily unite them.

The kidnapped Eudoxius, in contrast, was a misery as company. The Greek, once his gag was removed, was tireless in complaining not just about his capture but also about the weather, the food, the route, the hard ground at night, and the companionship. “I consort with kings, not jesters,”

he ranted. “I am on a mission to free a captive world. I am Pericles! I am Spartacus! I am Gideon! I can hear the pursuing hoofbeats now! Listen, you’ve sealed your own doom by capturing me!”

“Listen?” Zerco replied. “How can we not? You’re louder than a mule and twice the trouble, and your braying makes just as much sense.”

“Let me go and I’ll trouble you no more.”

“Slit your throat and you’ll trouble us no more! You are gabbling your way toward a bright red necklace, believe me!”

“Let’s do it now,” I suggested irritably.

“He’s met Gaiseric,” the dwarf replied wearily. “That’s what Aetius will be interested in. Trust me, he’s worth all his noise.”

Zerco knew more than I suspected. His fool’s antics had allowed him to be ignored like a dog during some of the Hun councils, and he’d learned much about the location of barbarian tribes, favored routes to the west, and where provisions might be bought or stolen. Riding like a stocky child in front of his wife, his head cushioned pleasingly against her breasts, he led us by the map he’d formed in his mind.

At an unmarked crossroads or at the hovel of a sutler where we might buy food, he’d clamber down and leave us waiting while he played the mysterious and misshapen pilgrim.

Eventually he’d waddle back with information and bread.

“This way,” he’d announce confidently. Then we’d be on our way again. Never seen was the great sword that was swaddled in rags and slung across my back.

The traveling was more rugged than my journey to Attila.

The autumn rains were chill and this part of Germania seemed a maze of low hills, cloaked by dark forest that extended as far as the eye could see. Our sleep was restless, and there were no slaves to pitch a tent or prepare a meal.

We huddled like animals.

It was on the fourth night that Eudoxius tried to escape.

I’d tied the captive’s hands behind his back, hobbled his feet, and strung another rope from the Greek’s ankle to my own to alert me of any mischief, but in the deepness of the night I shifted slightly, my leg stretching, and realized the tether had gone slack. I came sharply awake. Someone was moving because I could hear his anxious breath.

The quarter moon came out from behind a shred of crowd, and I saw a dark form crouched over my saddle where I had placed the great iron sword.

I reacted without thinking, hurling a faggot of wood that took Eudoxius by surprise. It bounced off him, drawing a grunt, and then the Greek was running hard for the darkness of the trees, abandoning the sword he’d tried to steal.

I snatched up the Hun bow I’d been practicing with and had taken, but Zerco, also awake, stayed my hand. “Aetius needs him.” So I ran, too, and here my youth stood me in good stead. I steadily gained on the lumbering doctor, hearing his panicked wheezing.

It was when I was about to tackle him that he whirled and almost killed me, lashing out with a bright knife I didn’t know he had. So that is how he’d cut himself free! It barely grazed my side before I was inside his reach and plowing into him like a bull. We both flew; the knife was knocked free and crashed. Then the same boxing skills I had used on Skilla were employed again. I wasn’t sure what I was more furious about—my own laxness at searching him, his greed for the sword, or his attempt to kill me—but I pummeled him thoroughly for all three. In moments he gave up resisting and curled into a ball.

“Please, mercy! I only wanted to go back to Attila!”

I stopped, panting. “Where did the knife come from?”

He peeked and smirked. “From the small of my back to my inner thigh to the stitching on my saddle—wherever I could hide it.”

Zerco came and spied the knife in the moonlight. He picked it up. “This could have ended all three of us, if he’d been brave enough to go for our throats while we slept.” He turned its jeweled hilt. “A pretty blade. Look at the work-manship!” The dwarf squatted. “Where did you get it, doctor?”

“What care is that of yours?”

Zerco pricked the doctor’s throat. “So I’ll know who to send it for cleaning!”

“It was a gift from Gaiseric,” Eudoxious squeaked. “He took it from a Roman general. He sent it as a token of his word to Attila, and Attila gave it to me as a reward.”

The dwarf handed it to me. “And now you’ve bestowed it on Jonas, while you’ll be trussed each night like a pig.” He gave a kick to the prostrate doctor. “That’s for disturbing my sleep.” He kicked again. “And that’s for having to listen to you for the last four days.”

“I’ll speak my truth!”

“And I’ll kick you again.”

We traveled on. With no Roman mileposts and few promontories to judge our progress, this new world seemed as endless as the sea. Crude forest tracks wound underneath patriarch trees that had sprouted before Romulus and Remus were born. This was a world Rome had never conquered and never wanted to, a place of shadowy stillness; gray marshes; and dark, tunneled brooks. The sun of the Bosporus seemed impossibly distant, and when we encountered settlement, the primitive state to which people were falling after the rampages of the Huns was depressing. At the ruins of Carnuntum we passed by a small party of Gepids living like animals in its corners. How I longed for a Roman bath! And yet the baths were a ruin, the pools empty and the boilers unlit. The only water left running was through the abandoned community’s sewage drains, and it was here that the hapless barbarians washed themselves and their clothes.

We bought food, and passed on as quickly as we could.

I learned more about the peculiar marriage of Zerco and Julia.

“The union was meant to mock me,” Julia explained. “I was captured from the Scuri tribe when a child and sold by the Huns to a Gepid master as brutal as he was stupid. He thought he could force affection by the whip, and meant to take me to wife when I reached thirteen. I was comely enough to excite his lust, and he was ugly enough to extinguish mine. He proclaimed one night I was ripe enough to give up my virginity, but I put foul meat in his stew and gave him a night at the privy instead. His neighbors laughed at him. He threatened to kill me, but the Huns warned him not to, so he went to Bleda demanding his money back. Bleda, who didn’t want to offend the Gepids at that moment, paid for me himself from money he owed his own jester. Then he awarded me to Zerco instead, as an insult to me and in punishment for my mischief.”

“Not that I minded losing coin I might never see anyway,” the dwarf chimed in. “I’d no hopes of marrying, and then suddenly I was presented with this angel. The Huns thought it hilarious. They offered to lend us a stool.”

“What others treated as a joke we saw as salvation,” Julia said. “Zerco was the first truly kind and gentle man I’d ever met. We had a bond: our fear of a future dominated by Huns.

Attila is a parasite on better people.”

“And he is driven by two great fears,” Zerco added. “The first is that his people are being corrupted by the booty they acquire and will become soft.”

“Not likely by spring,” I said. “And the second?”

“He fears his own failure. Do you realize what it must be like to be a tyrant who rules by terror and cannot trust one?

How does he know a follower’s loyalty is given or extorted?

How does he know that sex is love or coerced? The very might that makes a kagan all powerful can also make him all doubting. He gains support only by winning. If he falters, all might come undone.”

“You think he’ll falter without the sword?”

“That’s my hope.”

“And Attila sent you to Aetius, and Aetius back to spy.”

“Our marriage was an excuse to send Zerco back to where I was trapped with Attila,” Julia went on. “And there my dwarf saw a way to solve all our problems.”

“How?”

“By getting you to steal the sword, of course. It will demoralize Attila and encourage Aetius. If we can get to the Roman army, the captured sword may help the army to rally, and if the Romans win, Zerco and I can live in peace.” She nodded happily, as if the fate of the world were an easy enough thing for me to arrange.

XVIII

I

THE AVALANCHE

Skilla’s Huns were tired and far from home, riding in a frontier region not firmly held by any nation. The once-inviolable northern boundary of the Roman Empire had long been breeched. Far south of the Danube the Romans still held sway, in order to guard the passes into Italy. Far north of it the Germans dominated in the deep forests that deterred all conquerors. But along the Danube itself, order had de-volved to a rabble of semi-independent governors, warlords, and chiefs who had carved out fiefdoms in the dying Empire’s disorder. A party as large and deadly as the Huns could move through this landscape with relative impunity, but Skilla’s group dare not linger long in case a local duke or renegade centurion decided to treat them as a threat. The Hun’s task was to recover the sword and kill Jonas, not provoke a skirmish with provincial bumpkins. So he and his men skirted the walled villas and new hilltop forts as carefully as the fugitives did, muttering at the gloom of the trees, cursing the frequent grades, and grumbling at the weather.

Their bowstrings were continually damp, detracting greatly from their killing power, and even their swords showed spots of rust. To add to their unease, the Alps loomed to the southwest. Snow was creeping down the autumn flanks.

Zerco was key. At any one time there were hundreds of couriers, peddlers, pilgrims, mystics, mercenaries, and witches wandering the crumbling roads, making it hard to track a single fugitive such as Jonas. But a dark dwarf riding with a full-stature woman and two other men, one of them bound, was a curiosity that even these strange parts did not see every day. As Huns followed the river upstream toward Lauriacum, they began to hear stories of an odd quartet who had emerged from the forests of the north. The newcomers were filthy and exhausted, and yet the halfling had paid in gold for a hired courier to take a message upriver. The rumor was that the document was a missive for the great Aetius himself. Then they crossed to the river’s southern bank and aimed in the direction of the alpine salt mines where Roman garrisons still soldiered. One of the fugitives carried a strange bundle on his back: long, narrow, and as high as a man was tall.

If the fugitives could find a powerful Roman escort, their escape would be completed.

The Huns had to find them first.

They galloped hard for Lentia and the last standing bridge on this part of the Danube, its stone piers cracked and mossy and its wooden span a crude replacement for long-destroyed Roman carpentry. Yet the bridge remained passable. It was manned by ruffians who demanded tolls; but no sooner had these toughs heard the sound of hooves, and swung shut their gate of thorns, than they smelled the rank odor of Huns, like smoke on the wind. The bridge keepers reconsidered. By the time the barbarian party broke free of the trees and galloped onto the bridge like wolves from the steppe, several with bows in hand and their brown faces mottled with scars, the gate was open and its toll takers in hiding. All they saw was a blur of clods, accompanied by the excited yips of barbarians aimed eagerly southward.

On the warriors went like a dark and urgent cloud, collecting scraps of rumor at this place and that. Somewhere on the highway to Iuvavum fled four tired fugitives. One of them gabbled in Greek.

Skilla found himself thinking of Ilana more than he wanted to, despite the humiliation of her both rejecting him and then saving him from Jonas. He knew she lived, and the thought of winning her back still haunted him. Why had she pushed aside Jonas’s spear from that final thrust? If she hated killing, why had she later tried to burn Attila, instead of simply fleeing with Jonas? She baffled him, and it was her mystery that kept her in his mind. He had visited her in captivity before setting out, bringing her food as an excuse and hoping she might give some clue about the fugitives, torn between pity, obligation, and exasperation.

“None of this would have happened if you had come to me,” he had tried.

“None of this would have happened if you and your kind had stayed where you belong, out on the oceans of grass,”

she’d replied. “None of this would have happened if I’d let Jonas win the duel.”

“Yes. So why didn’t you, Ilana?”

“I wasn’t thinking. The noise, the blood . . .”

“No. It’s because you’re in love with me, too. You’re in love with both of us.”

She had closed her eyes. “I’m Roman, Skilla.”

“That’s the past. Think of our future.”

“Why do you torment me!”

“I love you. Accept this, because I’m going to free you from this cage.”

She had spoken with the weariness of the terminally ill.

“Just leave me, Skilla. My life is over. It ended in Axiopolis, and it’s some kind of monstrous mistake of misguided destiny that I’ve been left to witness this other. I’m a dead woman, and have been for some time, and you need to find a wife of your own kind.”

But he didn’t want his own kind—he wanted Ilana. He didn’t believe she was dead at all. After he killed Jonas, retrieved the sword, and won her back, everything would become simple. They would scratch and buck like wildcats, but when they coupled, what sons they would make!

The country became steeper, reminding him of his horse race with Jonas on the journey from Constantinople. Skilla sensed the Roman was near as he sometimes sensed a deer or wild horse was near, and yet he felt blinded in these hilly woods. He was growing discouraged—had the Huns somehow galloped past them in their haste?—when one of his men shouted and they reined up at a wondrous discovery: a bright Greek ring, left like a golden beacon beside a track that led off the main road. Eudoxius!

So the Huns rose long before dawn to ride quietly on the sidetrack, finally spying a pillar of gray smoke. Had the fugitives become so foolish or so overconfident? Then the smoke disappeared, as if someone realized the mistake. The Huns quietly ascended ridges that overlooked where the plume must have come from, dismounting to lead their ponies through the trees. It was the grayness before dawn, the mountains ahead a soft pewter and the trees a dark foundation. At the crest, Skilla spied three horses in a hollow below.

Now he would be revenged! But Skilla didn’t have much practice yet at leadership, his band was young, and before he could order a proper ambush his warriors whooped and charged. A dwarf and a woman? This would be easy.

It was the noise that saved Jonas. He sprang up, shouting, just as the first arrows, fired at too long a range, arced into his campsite to stick in the ground. He seized one horse, mounted it, and dragged some other man—the Greek doctor?—

across its neck with him. The woman and dwarf grabbed another as the third animal simply reared and plunged out of reach. It ran toward the attackers until Hun arrows thudded into the mount’s breast to make sure their quarry couldn’t use it, bringing that animal with a shudder to its knees. Now the fugitives were kicking their two surviving mounts furiously as arrows rained around, all of them precariously mounted bareback. The Huns had them! But then the Arabian horses seemed to explode with speed, weaving almost instinctually, and in a flash they were obscured by the branches. The warriors cried in excitement and frustration and whipped the flanks of their own ponies in pursuit, embarrassed they had not encircled their prey. But the fugitive horses were fresh from a night’s rest and the Hun horses, already exhausted from these mountains, had been climbing for two hours and had sprinted in attack. In moments, what should have been easy capture turned into dogged pursuit.

Skilla was furious. Each of his men had abandoned the tactics they’d been taught since childhood in hope of the individual glory of retrieving Attila’s sword. Now they’d all spoiled it for one another. The warriors blamed as they rode, pointing, while their prey’s powerful horses slipped around the shoulder of a ridge, ending any chance of shooting them.

By the time the barbarians crested the hill, the fugitives were streaking for the valley below, where an arched Roman bridge led over a foaming stream.

“We’ll still run them down,” he grimly told his men.

“They’re carrying too much,” agreed Tatos.

The Hun horses were whipped downhill in a ragged line, the warrior’s bows still strung, swords bouncing against their thighs. They watched their quarry pause a moment on the bridge, as if to break or block it. Then the fugitives seemingly gave up and rode across, leaving the Roman road to ride through a gap in the trees on the far side of the stream and struggle directly uphill. They were desperate now, Skilla guessed, leaving the track in hopes of losing their pursuers in broken country. It was a foolish and fatal move because his men would not slacken, not when their quarry’s scent was like the spoor of a wounded stag.

His men need cross only one more bridge, and they had them.

The attack of the Huns had come as a complete shock to us three escapees but not at all to our prisoner, the wily Eudoxius. After crossing the Danube and riding southward toward the Alps, we had foolishly assumed that our circuitous route had been successful, and we had slackened our pace, giving our tired horses some rest. Yet even when the passes to Italy seemed almost in sight, I still didn’t dare light a fire or abandon habitual caution. I’d taken the risk of purchasing some charcoal when we crossed the Danube, and its heat had since kept us alive. I believed it gave no smoke.

Until that morning.

Ever since we’d escaped Attila’s camp, Eudoxius had been doing anything he could to attract attention. It raised too many questions to gag him, so he’d spoken Greek at every opportunity. He had offered medical care to the endless parade of the sick and crippled that any traveler encounters. One by one he had plucked silver and gold rings off his fingers and left them on boulders or logs in the remote hope a pursuing Hun might spot them, and it was only in the foothills of the Alps that Julia furiously noticed that his fingers had become bare. The doctor had listened for pursuit every night when his head touched the ground. He had not so much seen or heard Skilla as felt him, I think—

felt as if an arm were reaching for him as he sank under water. The closer we drew to the Alps, the more his hopes perversely rose. Finally, it was my last charcoal fire that was our undoing. We warmed our dinner and I kicked it out, but the dirt locked in the heat and quiet coals remained. Late at night when Julia had nodded from exhaustion, Eudoxius stretched his bonds enough to reach a fallen fir bough damp with dew. At dawn, he slipped the branch onto the embers before the rest of us stirred and smoke began to roll upward.

Julia finally jerked awake, shouting, but by the time Zerco kicked the limb aside and kicked our prisoner, it was too late. Shortly afterward, we heard the yip of the Huns.

Now we were desperate. Unable to break the old timbers of the bridge, we’d abandoned the Roman track and were climbing through trees. Eudoxius thought we were trying to hide.

“Better to give yourselves up,” he counseled as I clutched him like a sack of wheat across the front of my mount, wondering for the hundredth time if his potential value to Aetius was worth his trouble as a captive. “Trying to hide is as in-effectual as a child covering his eyes in hopes of not being seen. The Huns will find you. I’ve seen them shoot out the eye of a stag at two hundred paces.”

“If I die, you will too.”

“You won’t know the arrow is coming until it is through your breast.”

I punched him in frustration and he swore.

“Leave me and the sword and maybe the Huns will break off their pursuit,” he tried. “I’ll trade you your life for it.”

“The sword I might abandon,” I said. “You, I’ll keep as shield.”

Given time and a tool more effective than the old iron sword, we might have sabotaged the bridge. It was obvious no repairs had been made in a generation, and the rotting timber deck had been patched only crudely by the rare traveler charitable enough to care about who came after him.

Gaps revealed the white water below. Yet even as I pondered the possibility, the Huns began spilling down the slope behind like a brown avalanche. This forced me to look ahead, and what I saw inspired me.

“Where the devil are you taking us,” Zerco gasped as our two horses struggled up the mountainside, gravel skittering.

“We can’t outrun twenty or thirty men forever,” I replied.

“We have to stop them.”

“But how?” Julia cried. An arrow, fired from so great a range that it wobbled, rattled into the trees.

“See that slope of rubble and talus above the bridge? If we can jar it loose, we can send down an avalanche.”

“And ourselves with it,” Zerco predicted. But what choice did we have?

We came out of the trees at the base of a cliff that loomed high above the ravine that the bridge spanned, casting the stream in shadow. Following the cliff base, we climbed along a rubble slope until the loose shale became so thick that all vegetation ended. The horses began slipping as if on ice. Far below, we could see the Huns riding down to the crossing.

“Zerco, truss this damned doctor like a sacrificial goat.

Julia, come with me!” I grabbed a stout pine pole lying amid the rubble and we slid partway down the talus slope, zigzagging to a point above the span.

The Huns were like ants, bunched at the bottom, pointing up to where they spied us. One was angrily ordering the others further, and his posture and gestures were all too familiar. Skilla! Would I never be rid of my rival?

I saw what I was looking for. A rock larger than the others had slid down the talus and was perched precariously upright at one end, wedged in place by smaller rocks around it.

I planted the pole under, using a stone as a fulcrum. “Help me push!”

Julia pressed desperately.

The Huns, leading their ponies, began filing over the bridge.

“I can’t do it!” she shouted.

“Throw your weight against it!”

“I am!”

And then a smaller ball of energy sprang down the slope and hurtled onto the pole. Zerco! The dwarf’s impact, his weight multiplied by speed, was just enough. Even as the lever snapped, the rock sprang high enough to topple forward; and as it did other rocks broke loose and began sliding like a ruptured dam.

Zerco started to slide with it, his wife catching his tunic.

For a moment she swayed at the edge, about to tip.

I hauled at them, retreating upward. “We have to get out of the way!”

Now the hillside was roaring, beginning to slide in a sheet. We clambered to the cliff pass, grabbed solid rock, and turned. What a sight!

We’d triggered a major avalanche. Falling stone smashed into falling stone, rupturing the delicate equilibrium of the mountain. Dust was hissing upward in a geysered plume.

The rumble grew in volume, at first inaudible to the Huns below and then so loud that it overcame the sound of the rushing water. The barbarians looked up, staring in stupe-faction at the lip of the cliff. A spray of talus burst over and arced down.