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‘No, he’s no Sabine,’ scoffed another. ‘He’s from the east, from the marshes. Look at his fingernails. He’s a fish-eater, morning, noon and night.’

Attila himself said nothing, and no one thought to ask him directly.

Another speculated that he might be from further south still. From Sicily, even.

‘Sicily?’ cried the first. ‘Hark at him, Sicily, indeed! What did he do, swim here?’

And after that, no one seemed to mind much where he came from, as long as he accepted their endless proferrings of meat, and bread, and wine, and more meat, and more wine…

The woman who had brought him in from the cold sat him between herself and a girl she said was her daughter, a well-fed, rosy-cheeked girl of about seventeen or eighteen. Not only was she better-fed than the wretched starvelings in the city but, like all the people here, she was also purer-skinned and brighter-eyed. Her light brown hair was drawn back from her brow with a ribbon of plain white wool, and she wore a simple white woollen tunic belted round the middle. The front of the tunic was deeply slashed, showing her plump young breasts and the shadowy cleavage between. The boy kept his eyes shyly fixed upon the food in front of him.

‘I know, she does show them off doesn’t she?’ cried the girl’s mother, seeing his discomfiture with great amusement.

‘Mother!’ said the girl.

Beyond this girl sat another, rather thin and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes. She said nothing, but Attila felt her gaze upon him, and once or twice he glanced along at her. Eventually he smiled, and she smiled back. Then she looked shy again and turned away.

‘Fresh meat, y’see,’ leered the old man across the table with the spittled mouth and the unshaven chin. ‘All the girls’ll be after you this e’en. Nice bit of fresh meat in the village. Who’d want an old smoke sausage like I, when there’s a nice bit of fresh meat going begging!’

The woman squeezed Attila’s thigh under the table, and said, ‘How old are you, boy?’

‘Fourteen. Fifteen this snowfall.’

‘I know what you’re thinking, you little wanton,’ she scolded, leaning across and slapping her daughter on the back of her hand. ‘Old enough, I warrant.’ She grinned at the boy and squeezed his cheeks. ‘Look at you, all ragged and drawn – thin as a winter gnat you are. You need some good old local hospitality, dearie, you do. A bit of meat inside you, and some good few cups of wine. I know I likes a bit of meat inside me whenever I can get it. And maybe a bit of the other kind of hospitality too and all later on!’ She rocked back and forth on her bench with laughter.

‘You ever been kissed, then?’ asked the girl.

The boy looked down at his plate. ‘Yes,’ he said defensively.

‘Aw, bless,’ said the girl. ‘And you know what the Saturnalia is for, don’t you?’

He didn’t. But he was about to find out.

The great double doors at the end of the longhouse creaked open and, to deafening cheers and hallooes from the assembled villagers, in came a procession of men and women bearing a train of crudely carved but unmistakable images. First came a rather stately matron carrying a statue of Priapus sporting a huge jutting phallus, carved from olivewood and seemingly oiled specially for the occasion. Priapus, the little grinning god of fertility, stood on a bed of winter berries, elderberries and hips and haws, and his proud phallus was lovingly decorated with wreaths of broom and ivy. Several of the women leant forward to kiss it as it passed by. Next came a tall, dark-skinned man bearing a primitive but rather touching statue of the mother goddess, Cybele, seated and in long robes, suckling her infant son, whom she cradled on her knee. Many people reached out to touch the magical statue. There followed more villagers with long poles garlanded, or hooked with lanthorns, singing and cheering as they walked round and round the long tables, while everyone else fell in behind them. Children ran and squealed and scurried in every direction, breathless and laughing with excitement.

One red-faced man leapt up on the table and raised his wooden goblet to the rafters. ‘To fertile fields and fat old pigs for another sunny year!’ he cried, and he tossed back his goblet, draining a full sextarius of warm red wine in a few mighty gulps. All joined in the toast at the tops of their voices.

The boy watched and took everything in, his slanted yellow eyes missing nothing, although with some astonishment. Among his own people, as among all lean, ascetic nomad peoples, matters of fertility were kept much more veiled. But among settled peasants and farmers who work on the land, fertility and the copulative act went easily together, and were regarded as essential to the fecundity of the earth. They saw the animals copulate freely, the only outcome of which was a happy one, the birth of new lambs or calves; and they saw no reason to conduct themselves otherwise. For a woman to give herself to a man, husband or no, was seen as an act of pure generosity – indeed, it was regarded as positively unhealthy among these folk not to engage in intercourse at regular intervals.

No wonder the unworldly and nature-fearing Christians of the city condemned all those who did not follow their god as pagani, which meant simply ‘country-dwellers’. The people who dwelt in the fertile southern valleys of the empire had long been most resistant to that gaunt, grim-visaged, sin-obsessed desert-religion from the east; and long would remain so. Here, where greenery and the ancient gods still throve, fertility and the breeding powers of Nature were still worshipped above all else.

More wine flowed from freshly unstopped barrels, and the village musicians began to puff away on their reed-pipes, or saw away at their coarse-toned three-stringed lutes, and people began to dance and sing. They sang ‘ Bacche, Bacche venies!’ and ‘ In taberno quando sumus ’, and many other folk-songs of love and wine and the earth, which they had sung in these valleys before the grand poets in Rome ever put pen to paper.

Si puer cum puellula

Moraretur in cellula

Felix coniunctio!

Amore sucrescente,

Pariter e medio

Avulso procul tedio,

Fit ludus ineffabilis

Membris, lacertis, labiis!

If a boy and little girl

Tarry in a little room,

Happy is their copulation!

Love arises with elation,

Weariness flees far away

When they hide in bed to play,

And their nameless game begins,

Of sighs and whispers, lips and limbs…

‘O mercy, mercy!’ cried the old man with the spittled mouth and the unshaven chin, jigging around in the dance with the rest. ‘You take me back to my young sapling days, and I’m all of a frustration that my member will not perform as it did once, in the swelling springtime of my lust.’

At which everyone told him to pipe down, and said they didn’t want to hear about his member, or the swelling springtime of his lust. Someone poured a full goblet of red wine over his white locks, pronouncing that he was now anointed and blessed by Priapus himself. Whether the charm worked was unclear, but the wine trickled over his face and down his furrowed cheeks, and the ancient dancer licked it happily enough from his beard.

‘This time next year we’ll have a carving of a crucified man on the table,’ cried another wag.

‘You must be joking!’ many voices objected.

‘A jolly feast it’d be with that in the middle of it,’ called another.

‘No drinking, no fucking, no farting,’ roared another. ‘Thank Lord Jove I’m not a craven Christian.’

Attila felt his hand taken warmly in another and squeezed. It was the rosy-cheeked daughter, pulling him away from the crowd.

‘Come on, then,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a nice little hut just round the corner.’

The thin, pale girl watched them silently as they went. But the mother winked at them. ‘You treat him gently now, dearie,’ she beamed.

The night air was chill and the sky was clear, the stars shining coldly down from where their fires burnt eternally in the heavens. Attila felt his chest tighten with cold and fear, but his hand in the girl’s hand was warm as she led him over to a small straw-thatched hut near a cottage. His heart was thumping so loudly he thought she must be able to hear. She pulled open the rickety, cobwebbed door and drew him inside. He pulled the door closed behind them, but through the open window came enough pale moonlight for them to see each other’s faces: his drawn and nervous, but with jaw set firm at the prospect of this new and frightening journey; and her eyes sparkling with delight at the prospect of a new conquest.