Attila had only been walking a mile or so, in the grey light of dawn, when he heard footsteps behind him. He hid up and waited, and soon there came in sight the boy Orestes, hand in hand with his sister. Their faces were bright in the chilly early air, their cheeks flushed. Pelagia’s were too flushed, red with hectic spots.
Attila waited for them, then stepped out. ‘I told you,’ he said.
‘Have you got any food?’ asked Orestes. ‘We’re really hungry, Pelagia especially.’
Attila looked at the girl, and then back at the boy. Reluctantly he reached into his leather bag and handed them some stale bread. ‘It’s all I’ve got,’ he said.
They broke it in two and began to eat. The girl chewed slowly and painfully, but she ate it all.
‘Thanks,’ said Orestes.
‘It was nothing,’ said Attila sourly. He walked on.
The two children walked on behind him.
After a while, he turned back and said, ‘That noise you made, outside the cave, like a sparrowhawk. That was you, wasn’t it?’
The boy nodded proudly. ‘We use it as a signal. I’ll teach you if you like.’
Attila struggled with his pride a while, and then said grudgingly, ‘It was a pretty good imitation. Go on, then.’
‘All right,’ said the boy. ‘You use a blade of grass. You take it between your thumbs and…’
They made slower progress now there were three of them, but they managed to steal more food and rest up on warm days in the woods or the hills. The Greek slaveboy talked endlessly, until Attila had to ask him to shut up. Pelagia seemed to grow in strength again. She even began to put on a little weight.
‘You’re good at stealing,’ she told him when he returned one night from yet another lonely farm-house with a flask of thin wine, some bread, salt pork, dried beans, and even a purloined wood pigeon, ready roasted.
‘It’s my greatest talent,’ he said.
‘You could be a proper thief when you grow up.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘I’m going to be in a circus,’ said the little girl. ‘And ride on a bear. I saw it once, in a circus. We were only allowed to sit right at the top, so we were a long way from the arena, but I saw a woman riding on a bear. She was very beautiful, and she had long blond hair and her robes were orangey and gold, like a queen’s.’ She tore off a big chunk of pigeon. ‘Then they put some people to death and everybody cheered, but that was boring, and we were too far away to see much, anyway. And when we got home the mistress stuck pins in our arms because we were late.’ She swallowed the chunk of pigeon meat without chewing properly, and nearly choked. Attila banged her on the back. ‘Bless you,’ she said when she had composed herself again, wiping her watery eyes. ‘We will serve you when you get home. Are you rich?’
‘Fabulously,’ said Attila.
‘Fabulously,’ she repeated. ‘Fabulously rich.’ She liked that word.
He said, ‘In fact, I am a prince. My father’s house is built of pure gold, and even my slaves are dressed in robes of silk.’
She nodded. ‘Do you have bears?’
Little girls are weird, thought Attila. ‘Hundreds,’ he said. ‘We ride them everywhere, like other people ride horses.’
Pelagia nodded again. ‘That’s settled, then. We will be your servants when we get to your kingdom.’
12
They came down from the mountains and crossed the plains of the Po in the frosty start of the new year. Attila dreaded leading them up into the towering white peaks of the Julian Alps at such a season, but they must move on. They had made it so far because there were so many refugees on the roads, so many alarms and rumours sweeping the country, so many tales of the Goths, and even the dreadful Vandals, still on the warpath, and the emperor going mad in his marsh-bound palace.
No one had stopped to question three ragged children on the road along with all the others. Yet. But it only needed one soldier to block their path with his spear, to demand of the oldest boy why he kept his face covered, and to rip the rags away and see his bright, tattooed cheeks, and his slanted, leonine eyes. It was well known what punishment was meted out to runaway slaves, no matter what their age might be. First, the letters F U G would be branded with a red-hot iron on their foreheads, for fugitivus. Then the real punishments would begin…
They must press on. They would not be safe until they had crossed the snowy peaks of the Julian Alps and the mountains of Noricum, and come down into the Pannonian plain, and finally crossed the wide brown waters of the swollen winter Danube to freedom.
They passed by Verona, and keeping near to the flat coast passed by east of Patavum. At last they halted by the roadside, weak with hunger and weariness, and a cold wind blew in from the lagoons to the east, and from the mountains of Illyria beyond. The three children shook with hunger and fatigue, and the little girl was racked with coughing, as if her very ribs would break. Orestes had asked again and again if they couldn’t steal some horses, but Attila replied that they would draw too much attention to themselves that way, now that they were out on the more populated plains of the Po. They must walk on, like all the other thousands of nameless fugitives on the roads of Northern Italy. But they could not walk on. They were exhausted.
As they rested, a great gilt carriage, flanked by numerous bodyguards, came down the dusty road, heading for the famous city of Aquileia on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. It drew up alongside the huddled children. Inside sat a handsome, clean-shaven man with gold signet rings flashing on his fingers. He stared at them for a little while, and a smile gradually crept over his face. Pelagia, at least, smiled back, and then had another fit of coughing. The man touched his hand to his mouth, and began to question the children from within his carriage. At first the two boys were wary and suspicious, and only wished that he would leave them alone. But after a little while he won their confidence, and even Attila, usually so acutely sensitive to danger, was taken in; perhaps his senses were dulled by hunger and exhaustion. After a few minutes, the children were persuaded and taken with the wealthy man and his train into Aquileia.
A few wealthy men, a very few, might put themselves out in a charitable way for a trio of travel-sore little guttersnipes, none too sweet-smelling, and coarse in their manners and address. But the great majority of such men, suddenly overcome by an apparent excess of charitable feelings which they have signally failed to display hitherto, will have another, rather less amiable motive behind the benevolent mask of their charity. So it was with this man, the richest citizen in Aquileia, a merchant and dealer in everything from horses to ships, from cinnamon to silk, from pepper to papyrus to perfumed beeswax candles. Surprisingly, perhaps, given what transpired later that day and on into the night, in his private bath-houses at his villa in Aquileia, guarded at every entrance by his expressionless, highly paid bodyguards; surprisingly, given what he called his ‘Tiberian theatricals’, which the three children were forced to enact, sometimes at the point of a dagger, for his purring delectation; surprisingly, this good citizen was also a family man. Indeed, he was the head and paterfamilias of the Neriani, a clan who had dominated the finances and politics of that wealthy trading city on the shores of the Adriatic for generations, and would continue to do so for a generation more – until a whirlwind came out of the east, and visited Aquileia with a punishment as terrible as any city has suffered in history.
No one ever understood the motive for that atrocious punishment, a punishment Carthaginian in its finality. It might have been better understood if those who were baffled by it had seen that rich merchant on the road to Aquileia, taking the two poor vagabond boys and the little girl into his carriage, and flattering them with promises, soothing them with candied sweetmeats and little goblets of honeyed wine.