Afterwards, as she walked down the path to the village, she looked back over her shoulder. He took a step after her, quite unconsciously. In that moment, even his deep, deep longing for home was overcome by his longing for this thin, pale girl with her large, sad eyes. It was as much as he could do to stop himself running after her and, and.. . With the other girl he had felt a hot, mind-numbing surge of his blood, but with this girl he felt it in his heart – and how it ached, so painful and so sweet. She smiled and waved to him, and he waved back. She turned away and walked on down to the village.
He looked after her for a long time, even when she had vanished from sight. He wanted to run after her and protect her from other men, and monsters, and daemons, witches and storms, and whatever else might ever come to threaten her gentle flesh. He wanted wolves and bears to appear from the forest, so that he could run after her and protect her, draw his sword and kill them all in front of her, even if he should die himself in doing so. It would be such a sweet death.
Eventually he turned back and began to ascend the long path to the north.
When he at last emerged from the woods on to the free, grassy, wind-blown hills, his heart leapt furiously within him, and his heated blood surged again. He flung his arms wide to catch the burly, buffeting wind, and he bellowed over the pale, wintry valley below that he wanted to conquer the whole world, and have every woman in it. Then he ran madly on until the air grew chill and seared his lungs, and drove his blood more and more madly through his veins, laughing and roaring as he ran higher and higher into the mountains.
Early one morning, not long after Attila had left the village, a troop of soldiers rode in from the Palatine fort near Ravenna. They were led by an officer with a face so scarred and lopsided that he made the children cry and run from him. Even the ragged dogs of the village yelped and hid under carts or in the shelter of cottage doorways.
He called his troop to a halt in the centre of the village, beside the thatch-roofed well. The people emerged from their humble dwellings spontaneously at this new arrival, murmuring among themselves. He said not a word but only held his hand up. His fingers were heavy with signet rings. The people fell silent. His horse stepped sideways and its breath trumpeted into the frosty air. The officer looked around and then spoke.
‘We are here on the orders of General Heraclian. You have entertained a fugitive from Roman law in this village. A boy of some fourteen summers, with barbarian tattoos on his cheeks and his back. Where is he?’
The people tried not to look at each other, but some failed. The officer saw everything. He turned to his burly decurion and nodded. The decurion vaulted from his horse, strode over to the nearest hut, and emerged a few moments later with a flaming brand taken from an open fire.
‘I will not ask a second time,’ said the officer. ‘Answer me.’
The plump-faced miller said, ‘We know of no such boy, Your Honour. We are only simple-’
The officer nodded to two more of his men. ‘Bind him.’
They dismounted and seized the miller’s arms, wrenched them behind him, and tied them tightly with coarse rope. The miller, strong man though he was, could not suppress a muted howl at the agony he felt.
The other villagers eyed each other in open fear, but none of them could bear to betray one who had so recently been their guest. Every custom and law of hospitality rebelled against it. Inwardly, even now, they braced themselves for the inevitable punishment they would suffer for their insolent silence. They had had dealings with the enforcers of Roman law before, when they came round each season to collect the village’s meagre but hard-felt contribution to the imperial exchequer. Every taxation left them a little poorer, a little more bitter. Nothing they paid in tax ever came back to them, in kind, in protection, in security. They saw nothing for their money. Only their quiet, unknown valley kept them safe from the depredations of the wider world. Except when the representatives of the Roman state came to visit.
The officer read the situation with cruel exactness. He kicked his horse and rode over to one of the barns, lifting a spear from the grasp of one of his troopers as he passed. In the doorway of a barn crouched a furry, tatty-eared little dog, his brown eyes never leaving the lieutenant for a moment. But even so he was not quick enough. As the officer rode by, with an icy nonchalance that appalled even the most tough-minded of the villagers, he jabbed the point of his spear downwards and impaled the dog on the end, then wheeled and rode back towards the centre of the village square, the poor creature howling with its last breath as he came.
The officer rested the spear with its horrible load on the edge of the well, blood dripping slowly from the dog’s body and darkly staining the stone lip of the well.
‘No!’ cried one or two of the villagers, stepping forwards, unable to believe that anyone could be so savage.
The officer said, ‘The boy?’
They stopped in their tracks, and hung their heads in anger and shame, and said nothing.
The officer looked back at the dark mouth of the well. And then he drew back his arm, and scraped the blood-soaked corpse of the dog from the end of his spear. The clotted mass of fur and blood rested for a moment on the lip of the well, and then rolled and tumbled over. A moment later they heard a heavy splash, and the whole village gave a low, collective moan.
The officer turned to his decurion, who still carried the flaming brand. ‘Fire the haybarn,’ he said evenly.
At this the girl’s mother waddled forward in a fury, unable to contain herself. She screamed at the officer that he was a disgusting pig of a man, and a disgrace to humankind, and that surely the gods and the goddesses who looked down, would-She was cut short by a swingeing backhanded blow, the officer’s heavily ringed fist sending her spinning to the ground.
‘Mother!’ cried the girl, running forwards.
‘I’m all right, m’dear,’ she mumbled, struggling up from the dust, her mouth bleeding profusely. ‘Unlike this disgusting pig of a man will be soon enough, God willing.’
‘Sssh, mother, please,’ pleaded the girl.
The officer ignored her.
The woman was helped away by her daughter. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that tooth he’s knocked out was giving me grief anyhow. Hurt like crazy in me poor old skull, it did.’
No one else had the courage, or the foolhardiness, to protest openly, much as they might admire their neighbour for her sharp-tongued bravery. But in their hearts – those hearts as sturdy and enduring as the hearts of peasants everywhere – the more they saw their liberty abused and their property destroyed, the more silently, woodenly rebellious they became. At the outset, one or two of them might have considered telling soldiers which path the barbarian boy had taken into the mountains, in exchange for a quiet life. But now not one of them would dream of it. Their water might be polluted, their precious winter fodder for their cattle might be burning before their eyes, and the great haybarn, which had taken the whole village two weeks of hard labour to build, might be reduced to ash. But not one of them now would co-operate with these wretched, bullying minions of the state.
The soldiers did not stay to watch the barn burn to the ground. Once the flames had taken inextinguishable hold, they regarded their work as well done.
The officer looked over the cowed but undefeated villagers. ‘We will be back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And then you will tell us what we want to know.’
The villagers huddled together more closely than ever that night, but not a voice was raised in dissent. They would take whatever was meted out to them, and they would say nothing. Nothing would break them.
Some say that the peasants and country people have no sense of honour, and care only for brute survival. They say that a peasant will do anything, say anything, swear any oath or betray any friendship, to save himself and his family and his few precious animals. And it is true, perhaps, that honour is a virtue that only the rich can afford. A poor country girl in the city is quickly obliged to choose between her honour and her life. But in place of honour, the peasant nurtures a passion less overt, but every bit as fierce and intractable: a loathing for being told what to do.