General Heraclian’s soldiers did not return the next day. Nor the day after that. Their promise to do so had been only an idle threat, intended to terrorise recalcitrant villagers and remind them of their lowly status in the heaven-appointed scheme of things. The troop had already moved on after the barbarian boy, taking up fresh trails where they could. The villagers set about rebuilding their barn, draining and cleaning their well, gathering and drying what further winter fodder they could from the surrounding land that kept them. They would not see the soldiers again until the spring and the next levy of taxes. Meanwhile they could live in poverty and peace.
11
Attila remained happily unaware that the soldiers of Rome followed so closely on his trail. He even managed to push to the back of his mind the bewildering news that Galla Placidia had married the King of the Goths; and that the Eternal City would not be destroyed after all, but would triumph yet again, to subdue, civilise and finally Romanise her Gothic conquerors themselves. But at least now the Huns would know who their enemies were: everyone.
Despite the complications and treacheries of the wider world, as the boy saw them in the fierce simplicity of his adolescent heart, still that heart sang within him with youthful lust and longing, and sometimes he sang aloud as he walked the dusty goat-paths of Italy towards home.
One bright morning he was walking along a stony path with cliffs rising high to his right, and steep pine-clad slopes falling away to his left, through which he had just climbed, along a winding, zigzag path. He had stopped for breath and was staring up into the eternal blue sky. He thought he could hear something – the sound of horses’ hooves approaching. He wondered if he ought to get off the path to be safe, but he lingered, peering a little longer, to see if he could glimpse who it was, coming through the sparse pines below.
His blood froze with horror. On the bend in the path immediately beneath him, a full cavalry troop of Roman horsemen, Palatine Guards in their ominous black armour, was walking steadily up the hill towards him. The leader kept his eyes steadily, almost lazily on the ground beside his horse, taking in every slightest sign that the boy’s light feet had made. Immediately behind the tracker rode the officer of the troop in his black plumed helmet, his terrifying visage deeply scarred and half-collapsed from where an enemy blade had severed his cranial nerves.
Attila whirled round in uncharacteristic panic. He knew now, deep in his heart, that they meant to kill him. This time they would not bind him with ropes and drag him back to the emperor or his sister for imprisonment again. This time they would stretch him over the nearest rock and hack his head from his body.
He thought as he ran. The horsemen would be round the corner in moments, and the instant they saw him they would gallop forward and bring him down with their spears, and he would be done for. Dashing down into the woods would take him nearer them. The only alternative was the cliff to his right, but that was a crumbling golden limestone wall of forty feet or more – unscalable, surely?
There was no more time to hesitate. Silent as a deer stepping through woodland, he crept into the pines and moved along, only a few paces above the horsemen. He heard one of them say how close they were to him now, how fresh the trail marks were. He stopped breathing for a moment. Then he moved deeper into the forest alongside the path, hoping to find refuge in the green gloom of the pines. He was so intent on watching the cavalry that he almost forgot to look ahead. When he did he saw only woodland ahead of him, but he felt in his blood that something wicked was coming steadily towards him. He could hardly bear to look, wanting to tear his eyes away. And when he did, he nearly cried out in terror. Before him on the narrow woodland path, walking silently towards him with eyes fixed, were more of the soldiers in black armour, on foot, their swords drawn, their faces terrifyingly expressionless. They might have been the ghosts of soldiers rather than men of flesh and blood.
Gasping with fright, his blood hammering, the boy flung himself off the path and into the trees, scrambling uphill to the stony track above. As he burst out onto it the cavalry troop rounded the corner and saw him. It must have been the officer’s voice, harsh and authoritative, that called out to him. But he was already scrabbling at the cliff-face. A shard of dust-dry limestone came away in his frantically grasping hands, and he could hear the sound of the horsemen trotting easily towards him. They were almost upon him. One of them was already slicing his thick swordblade through the air.
With a cry Attila ducked lithely under the horse’s neck, swerved and ran on a little further. To his right he saw a crevice in the cliff, a tiny valley carved by millennia of water running from the hills above, a single scrawny juniper bush guarding the entrance. He scrambled into the crevice, dragged himself behind the juniper bush, and gazed up: the damp, steep crevice ran all the way up the cliff. But it was impossible to ascend. The limestone was slick as oiled skin where the water cascaded down, and crumbling dry where it did not. Behind him he could hear the men dismounting and the officer telling them to get on in there and bring him out. He whipped round in desperation. His hand fell on the pommel of his sword. If he must die here, trapped like a hunted animal in a crevice in the rocks, he would at least try to take one of them with him.
Something touched his cheek. He whipped round again, and found to his astonishment that it was a thin rope, knotted at regular intervals for grip. The soldiers were just the other side of the sentinel juniper bush, hacking at its branches to get through. Without questioning this miracle, the boy clutched the rope as a drowning man would clutch a spar of wood, and crawled up it in a trice. He came to a narrow ledge about fifteen feet above the ground, and rolled free onto it. Looking down, he saw the soldiers at the foot of the rope, gazing up in amazement. One began to climb up after him, but now he had a chance – just the one chance, just one slender advantage. He tore his sword free from his scabbard and slashed at the rope at the edge of the ledge. In two swift strokes it was severed, and the soldier tumbled back down to the ground, angry but uninjured. Immediately there were yells for their comrades to bring more rope and some spearhafts. They would not be long in pursuing.
Lying flat on his belly for fear of sly arrows, Attila looked around the narrow ledge, still too dazed with terror to think rationally about the presence of the rope. The back of the ledge was damp and dark, overshadowed by the huge overhang of the cliff above. He wriggled towards it. It was as black as pitch. He hated confined spaces. It was his secret terror. For a second, he felt he would rather die than have to squeeze himself into so confined a space. But he gritted his teeth, and even grunted at himself in fury, and pushed himself in under the overhang. The narrow horizontal gap in the rock was just enough for him to wriggle through, and then he was inside the cliff itself, rolling downwards several feet to a halt. He had no idea where he was, for the narrow slit in the rock admitted no light. His terrified gasps told him, however, that he was in a cave or a chamber of some size, for they echoed back at him from all sides.
Against the dim light of the slit in the rock he saw the silhouettes of soldiers who had shinned up to the ledge and were working out where he had gone. He felt sure none of them would be able to crawl through after him, so with a mix of fear, courage and pulsing hatred he crawled back up the slope to the crack in the rock like a lizard, hands and feet moving alternately, his sword-blade gripped between his teeth. As he reached the crevice, and drew the sword-blade from his teeth, a soldier’s face appeared just outside and peered in unseeing. Attila drew back his sword and thrust it forward through the crevice, straight into the soldier’s face. No scorpion under a rock ever gave a more terrible sting. The soldier howled with agony, clutching his hands to his face, which spurted gore between his splayed fingers, and tumbled backwards. A few moments later, a muffled thump told the boy that he had rolled off the ledge to the ground below. Attila heard distant shouts and roars of anger, and he bared his teeth like a wolf in the darkness. Then he turned and crawled back down the slope to his unseen cave.