‘Oh, most assuredly,’ wailed Holy John. ‘Her very flesh, and those very breasts that gave you suck, her soft and perfumed womanly hair, her lissom limbs and her shapely womanly buttocks are kissed by the hellish flames, and all, all consumed daily in the irremediable torments of the damned.’
The boy had already retrieved his scabbard and drawn his sword. ‘Leave me now,’ he said quietly.
‘That I shall not!’ cried Holy John. ‘The Lord God of Hosts Himself hath led me here this day, to make a glorious conquest of thy soul! And conquer it for Christ I shall, ere the sun hath-’
Attila put the point of his sword to the wrinkled and sagging wattles of the old man’s throat. ‘I said, leave.’
‘I fear thee not, thou daemoniac sinner,’ cried Holy John, trembling nevertheless with something that resembled fear. ‘I fear not them that can destroy the body, but only them that can destroy the soul!’
‘Then you are a fool,’ said the boy. ‘Even the smallest child among my people could tell you that the body and soul are not two separate things, nor can the soul be taken out of the body like a plumstone out of a plum. Rather the soul and the body are one, like, like’ – he searched for an image – ‘like the sun and the sunset it makes.’
Holy John stared at the boy and began to moan, a deep wail of lamentation rising from his belly.
The boy pricked the point of his sword a little further into the sagging throat. ‘Now go,’ he said. And with a faint smile he added, ‘And may Our Father, Astur, have mercy on your soul.’
Mention of the daemonic name worked where the sword had not. With a howl Holy John turned and fled from the glade, his hands to his ears and his long and filthy skirts flapping round his skinny, mottled legs.
It began to rain. The boy broke camp, mounted up and rode from the glade.
Even then, Holy John had not altogether finished with him. From the shelter of the trees, from where he had been spying on the boy, he called after him, ‘You ride under the wings of daemons, boy!’
Attila did not turn round. Instead he bowed his head, muttered, ‘Then let it be,’ and rode on into the rain.
He rode up into the mountains, among the tall pines, their resinous scent fresh on the wind and the damp air. High on an exposed ridge he rode into his first flurry of snow. The flakes settled and then quickly melted on his forearms and on his horse’s mane.
At night he built a rough shelter of pine branches and huddled in his single blanket, sick with longing. He ached with cold and loneliness. But even when he fell asleep his teeth remained clenched. For he scorned even his own sorrow.
He set horsehair snares for rabbits, watching out for their twilight runs at evening. He boiled up bird-lime from grass-grains and holly leaves, and he smeared the lime on the higher branches of trees to trap birds. Each one when roasted over the fire was little more than a mouthful; he ate them bones and all. He had better success with a wickerwork fish-trap he made from hazel twigs, and he gorged on baked river-fish till he could eat no more.
As the year deepened in its colours into autumn, he found enough wild fruit, seeds and nuts to sustain him. He knew how to bite away the nourishing skin of rosehips without digging deeper into the irritant hairs in the centre. He knew how to bake a pine cone just long enough for it to crack open and give up the tasty kernels within. And he certainly knew how to skin and gut a rabbit, and roast it on a spit of alderwood. He grew lean and far-eyed, but he knew he would survive.
But there came an evening when he could find nothing to eat. He had fished in a lake all day with pegged-out lines and baited hooks of hawthorn, without success, and his belly felt light with sadness and emptiness. He sat his horse on a rocky outcrop and looked down into a neat little valley below, and saw the torches and rushlights of a village burning. He even thought he could hear the sound of laughter and coarse-voiced song. He slipped from his horse and led it down into the valley.
10
It was no more than a circle of wooden huts round a well, with a big haybarn to one side and an ancient timber longhouse to another. His ears had heard aright: there was laughter and song, and they came from the longhouse.
He tethered his horse in the shadows at the edge of the wood, and crept over to the longhouse. Pulling himself up on an upended chopping block, he craned to see through the open window.
Inside a feast of abundance met his eyes. His stomach felt more pitifully hollow than ever, and his mouth flooded with forlorn expectation. Within the building sat the entire population of the village, as many as a hundred peasants with rubicund faces, laughing and singing, drinking and gorging themselves in celebration, by the light of a score of rush torches. It was too late for the harvest celebrations, surely; but in the country districts, it was well-known that an excuse was found for a drunken celebration at least once a week, especially as the year sank into the gloomier months of winter.
Clay wine pitchers were being passed around, and flat osier baskets piled high with rolls of coarse but wholesome bread. Two great pigs, fattened up beautifully on the acorns that they had foraged in the oakwoods in the hills for the past few weeks, were turning golden-brown and shiny with fat on the blackened iron spits. The face of the gasping turnspit at their side was almost as golden-brown and greasy as they, but he was grinning from ear to ear at the thought of all that delicious roast pork to come, the flesh juicy and slightly nutty to the taste.
Huge bowls of clay or olivewood bore mounds of steaming winter vegetables, roast parsnips and turnips, roast chestnuts, winter kale, bowls of lentils cooked with soft goat’s cheese, various kinds of cured hams and sausages, roast and boiled partridge and pigeon from the woods, and after that apples, pears, apricots and plums in abundance, their skins shining plumply in the torchlight.
Suddenly the barn door beside him flew open, and the boy froze. There appeared a plump, middle-aged woman, wheezing out in the cold night air, her face glowing with good food and rather too much wine. Oblivous of the boy standing as still as a statue on the chopping block, she leant one hand against the barn wall, squatted down, hitched up her voluminous skirts, and began to pee noisily. When she had finished, she wiped herself with the hem of her skirts, and heaved herself upright. Only when she turned round did she see the boy frozen there, and give a little gasp of fright.
‘Jove bless us and save us, I thought you was a robber or something.’ She peered at him more closely. ‘What you doing out on a raw night like tonight?’ She pushed his shoulder and turned him to face her. ‘Looking hungrily in at our feast like a wolf off the hills, are you? Or maybe eyeing our young daughters – though you hardly look old enough for that kind of caper.’ And she gave a great belly laugh.
Attila had already decided he would neither fight nor flee, but wait and see what happened. And sure enough, after a moment’s thought, the woman said, ‘Well, you best come in and have some of ours, anyhow. Wouldn’t do to have a lonely traveller turned away from our door on a night like this. We’d soon be hearing the drums of You-Know-Who in the hills.’
And with that mysterious deprecation, she laid her plump hands on his shoulders and propelled him inside.
The assembled company looked curiously, some even suspiciously, at this newcomer with his hair tied up in a barbaric top-knot on the crown of his head, his slanted, glittering yellow eyes that gave away nothing, and his scarred and tattooed cheeks the colour of the night-sky. Several of them speculated about his origins, right under his nose.
‘He’s from the hills,’ said one, ‘from the south. Full of belly and empty of head, they say.’