They were dragged to their feet and struck sharply across the face for good measure.
The commanding officer, evidently senior, with cropped white hair and a brutal, unflinching stare, ripped Attila’s cap from his head and ran his stubby fingers over the welts of the boy’s tattooed cheeks.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Attila. You have come a long way.’
The boy spat in his face. The officer instantly struck him, so hard that his head spun round and he reeled back. But he did not fall. The officer was surprised. Such a blow would have felled most grown men. When Attila’s head had cleared enough for him to see again, he stepped back in front of the officer and stared him in the eye.
Wiping the spittle from his face, the officer nodded at Orestes. ‘And who’s he?’
Attila shrugged. ‘No idea. Just some hanger-on. Pain in the arse.’
Orestes said nothing, but as he was dragged away by two guards his eyes never left the sullen, unsmiling figure of Attila.
‘Give him a good kicking and throw him out of the city gates,’ said the officer. He paid no further attention to Orestes. All his attention was on Attila, and all his thoughts were of imperial gratitude, of speedy promotion, of donatives of silver and gold and finest Samian ware…
‘Manacle him hand and foot,’ he said at last, ‘and bring him to the fort. No more beating – I want some answers from him. This one knows more than he lets on.’
Orestes lay gasping in the mud for some time, he didn’t know how long. When he tried to stir, he ached all over. His arms and shoulders felt bruised to the bone, and one flank hurt deeply every time he took in a lungful of air. His buttocks almost cramped with pain, his legs, his feet… Even the roots of his hair still stung, where he had been wrenched about by the guffawing soldiers.
Worse than all this, his heart ached with loss. Attila had been everything to him. He had never felt so utterly alone in his life.
At last he crawled to his feet and walked slowly away from the city, to the open fields alongside the river. The river was so wide, so dark. He could never swim it. He limped on through the night until he came to a creek. And there among the reeds and the nodding bulrushes, miraculously, tied up to a half-rotting landing-stage, was an ancient wooden boat with a single wooden oar lying in it, gently sliding to and fro in the wash from the river. They needn’t have bothered with Aquincum.
Orestes crept down to the creek, and a surprised moorhen erupted from the reeds and beat away across the dark river, setting his heart thumping anew with fright. He stepped painfully into the boat. It was taking in water slowly, an inch or two swilling muddily in the bottom, and it stank of old fish. It would be no easy matter to move and steer the boat with a single oar, and maybe bail, too, with only his cupped hands, across a mile of the great flowing river. But it was a boat, for all that, and a boat meant freedom.
He squatted in the bottom of the boat, the muddy water oozing over his bandaged toes, clutched the end of the flatboard oar, and brooded. That stinging denial of Attila’s, was, he knew, his salvation. That was why he sat here now, on the verge of reaching freedom in the ungoverned lands on the farther shore. While the tattooed boy who called himself a prince was incarcerated in a locked and bolted dungeon reeking of ordure, somewhere back in the city, being ‘questioned’ by his unsmiling captors.
Orestes looked up at the clear winter stars. Did they care what happened to him or the other boy? Did they care what he did next? Did it matter if they cared or not? When he looked down the stars still shimmered at him inescapably from the surface of the black water. They would not leave him alone.
At last he sighed, laid the oar down against the side of the boat, and stepped painfully back out onto the slimy bank of the creek. He crept up through the reeds and the galingale, and limped slowly back towards the city.
Attila was manacled hand and foot, as the burly white-haired officer had ordered, and half dragged, half carried up a narrow, spiralling stone staircase to a small upper room with a single, strongly barred window. There he was set down upon a stool, and two guards stood by him with spears set firmly in front of his darting eyes.
After a few minutes, fresh from his dinner, the white-haired officer came strolling in and ordered the door to be shut behind him. He was still mopping his mouth with a linen napkin, and his demeanour was more relaxed now that he had a bellyful of food and wine.
‘Just wait till my people hear how I have been treated,’ hissed Attila, before the officer could say a word. ‘Just wait till my grandfather Uldin hears. He will not endure such an insult to his blood.’
The officer raised an eyebrow. ‘Who says he will ever hear of it? You are escaping no further now. Your next stop, and your place of residence for a long, long time to come, will be the imperial court at Ravenna.’
‘Never,’ said Attila. ‘I will die first.’
‘Spoken like a man,’ said the officer. Despite himself, he was beginning to admire, or at least enjoy, the lad’s sheer, naked ferocity. As one might enjoy the spectacle of a wolf-fight in the arena.
‘Neverthless,’ he went on, ‘that is where you are bound – and with the agreement of your people, don’t forget. You are a hostage. It is all a perfectly civilised arrangement.’
‘Civilisation,’ spat the boy. ‘I’ve been there before. Give me anywhere else but civilisation.’
The boy and the man eyed each other in silence for a while. Then the boy looked away.
The officer said, ‘I have never been far beyond the river. Just the occasional punitive expedition when the Alamanni or the Marcomanni have got uppity. Tell me about your country beyond.’
My country? thought Attila. How would you understand my country? You Roman, with your mind as straight and unwavering as a road? How to describe to you, you oaf, my beloved country?
He took a deep breath, pulled at his cruel wrist-manacles, and settled his hands in his lap. He said, ‘My country is a land without boundaries or frontiers or armies. Every man there is a warrior. Every woman is the mother of warriors. Cross the grey Danube and you are in my country, and you may ride for weeks and months and never leave it. There is nothing there but the green, green grassland of the steppe, feathergrass and hare’s-tail grass as far as the eye can see. As far as the eagle flies, a hundred days’ riding eastwards into the rising sun, it is still the green grassland of my country.’
‘You have an active imagination, boy.’
Attila ignored him. He could no longer see him, or even the dank walls of the dungeon around him. He could see only what he described.
‘In March,’ he said, ‘the grasslands flash young and green like the kingfisher’s breast on the Dnieper. In April they are purple with saxifrage and vetch, and in May they are yellow, like a brimstone’s wings. There, many days’ riding beyond the steppes, which are a thousand times the size of your empire, with never a fence or a barrier or a plot of land that is owned or fenced in, nothing to stop you galloping all day and all night, as far as you want, as if you and your horse were flying… There, there is a freedom such as no Roman has ever known.’
The officer stood very still. The two guards did not move. They listened.
‘Beyond the steppes, there rise the white mountains, where the souls of the holy men are fed when they go to dream and commune with the ancestors. Beyond the black waters of Lake Baikal, and the Snow Mountains, and the Blue Mountains, are at last the Altai Mountains, the soul and navel of the world, where all men must go who would be wise or powerful. The high Altai are seen for many days’ riding, high over the plains and the eastern deserts. They are the home of all magicians, all shamans and holy men, and all who hold converse with the Eternal Blue Sky since time began. They say that even your god Christ walked there, in the time before his time of sacrifice.’