‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ he said, softly this time, his voice filled with menace.
Attila looked on, unimpressed. ‘You’d have done it anyway,’ he said, ‘you great oaf.’
‘Right, that’s it!’ roared the man, advancing on the boy with great lumbering strides. ‘You’re going to get a-’
‘Don’t you dare touch me. Do you know who I am?’
The man was so astonished and the crowd so amused by this haughty reprimand, coming from this slight, scowling ragamuffin with the mud-caked face, that they paused as one body and waited for the explanation.
The man folded his arms and rocked back on his heels. ‘Oh, I am so sorry. May the Lord have mercy’pon my sinful soul. And who might you be, pray?’
The boy knew he should keep silent, that he should say nothing, be nothing; that he should slip away into the shadows, no more than a street urchin like the thousands of nameless others who lived in this city’s alleyways like rats. But his pride overwhelmed him.
‘I am Attila, son of Mundzuk,’ he said, ‘the son of Uldin, the son of Torda, the son of Beren-’
The crowd started laughing, and their laughter drowned his small, proud, steady voice. He continued to list his genealogy, but he could not be heard. The crowd whooped and hollered with inebriated glee, and clapped their hands, and more were joining them all the time. Meanwhile Attila’s antagonist only encouraged them all the more, walking slowly round the still boy, as if viewing this strange, stunted specimen from all possible angles. He folded his brawny arms across his chest, furrowed his brow in puzzlement, and then grinned around at his audience with complicit mockery.
‘-the son of Astur, the King of all that Flies,’ finished the boy, his voice never faltering, but trembling now with rage.
The crowd gradually fell silent.
‘And who might they be, Attila, son of Mud-Suck?’ asked Borus, sweeping his arm across his chest and bowing very low. The crowd began to laugh again. ‘They sound to me like names it’d be unkind to give a horse.’
The crowd erupted with fresh laughter.
‘You aren’t descended from a horse, are you?’ he enquired. ‘You don’t look like – although as a matter of fact, now I consider, you do smell a little ripe and horse-like.’
The boy’s trembling hand was clenched firmly round the handle of his knife. His feet did not stir, though an urgent voice in his head was telling him, Flee now! Drive your way through this mocking crowd and run like the wind, and never, ever look back. Or they will find you. They will come after you and they will find you.
But his feet did not move, and his pride and anger boiled like lava within him.
The crowd fell silent again, in expectation of further entertainment.
‘I am of royal blood,’ said Attila softly. ‘And I am bound for my homeland beyond the mountains. Now let me pass.’
‘The lad’s drunk!’ shouted an onlooker.
‘Mad, more like,’ said an old woman. ‘Mad as a sunstruck badger. Set the dogs on him, I say.’
‘Put him in the Circus,’ slurred another, before turning aside to vomit on someone else’s feet. A scuffle broke out, but most people’s attention remained on the strange, mad boy who thought he was a king.
It was only because a fistful of mud hit Attila in the face that his ox-like antagonist got near him. One of the crowd had thrown it, and Attila turned his head in a fury to see who it was, wiping the mud from his face and his still-tender eye where Galla had slapped him only last night. Immediately, and with surprising swiftness, the torchlit shadow of his huge opponent fell across him. Before he could move, Borus had picked him up in a single sweeping bear-hug, and raised him high above his head. The crowd bayed in delight as the man shook the boy violently.
‘Your Majesty!’ he cried. ‘Oh, your Sacred Majesty, oh, Attila, son of Mud-Suck, son of Udder, son of Turda, son of Arse-Lick – let me raise you high up above the level of the common herd, so that you may loftily survey your mighty kingdom! And then let me – but alas, alas, I have dropped Your Majesty in a horrible great puddle of blood! Oh woe is me, oh forgive me!’
Attila lay stunned for a moment in the small quagmire of dust and goat’s blood while the crowd, growing in size all the time, jeered and laughed with the contagion of raucous herdlike delight. More onlookers spilt from the taverns round about, and the air was thick with dust and wine-fumes and scornful, jeering laughter.
The boy looked up and around at their creased and wine-flushed faces with a black, scowling hatred. In his heart he cursed all Rome.
Borus paraded around the natural ring of spectators like a Cypriot wrestler, flexing his biceps and smiling broadly. He didn’t notice the boy getting to his feet again, his hair matted with blood, his face streaked and his once-white tunic half torn from his back and thickly dyed a darkening red. He didn’t notice the boy reaching into his bloodstained tunic and producing a sharp knife with a rope-bound handle. He didn’t notice the boy stepping up behind him.
But he did notice a sharp and agonising pain in the small of his back, and reeled round to see the boy standing facing him, knife held out in his right hand, his left hand splayed for balance and deflection.
The laughter and smile froze on every watching face. Everything had suddenly changed. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
The man stared at the boy, in pain and astonishment more than anger. The very night was silent and watchful with fear.
‘Why, you… ’ he said shakily. He pressed his hand against the wound. It was in his kidneys. He reeled again. ‘You… ’
He staggered towards the boy, but it was hopeless. The boy skipped out of his way with ease. Borus turned and reached a bloody hand towards him, more as if he were pleading than threatening.
Attila stopped again and stared back at him. Then he turned and said to the crowd, softly, his voice never raised, his eyes scanning each of their horror-stricken faces, ‘If you do not let me go now, I will kill every one of you.’
This time, they heard his words.
The crowd – as many as fifty or a hundred people – seemed to be in collective shock. Absurd though the boy’s threat was, something about the way his alien, slanted eyes glittered in that barbaric, blue-scarred face, allied to the steadiness of his arm, which extended the short blade of the fruit-knife towards each of them turn, slowly revolving, silenced them all. There was something about him, as they said later…
As the quiet, implacable force of his threat sank in, the crowd actually began to part before him, like the sea parting before the God-driven command of Moses. And there is no doubt that, incredible as it would seem, the boy would indeed have walked away from them at that moment, leaving his huge opponent kneeling in the dust, looking like a man who has just wrestled with an angel; like Jacob at the brook Jabbok, wrestling with his unknown antagonist blindly in the night, never knowing that his opponent was of God.
But the uproar had by now come to the notice of the city guard, and as the sullen, bewildered crowd began to make way for the boy, a voice of a different stamp altogether rang out in the midnight air.
‘Clear the way there, clear the way! Come on, you drunken scum, get out of my way.’
Sensing a different danger, the boy turned on his heel and held his dagger out again.
The crowd parted, and there stood no drunken street-bully. There stood a tall, grey-eyed lieutenant in the chainmail uniform of one of the Frontier legions, with a ragged scar across his chin and a scornful smile playing on his lips. Behind him stood a dozen of his men.
The lieutenant was surprised to find that the cause of all this ruckus was this one small, dusty, bloodstained boy.
For a moment, the boy extended his knife-hand towards the soldiers themselves – all twelve of them.
The lieutenant glanced at the crop-headed, tough-looking man by his side. ‘What do you reckon, Centurion?’