‘You, boy,’ said Attila to Aetius’ slave, ‘bring more firewood up to last the night.’
The boy trotted off to do his bidding.
Attila nodded. ‘He’s good.’
‘He’s very good,’ said Aetius.
‘What people?’
‘He’s a Celt – British.’
‘Ah. Good fighters once.’
‘Good fighters still.’
‘And he understands Hunnish.’
‘He speaks and understands Hunnish, Latin, Celtic, Saxon, Gaulish, and some Gothic.’
‘Educated, for a slave.’
‘He wasn’t always a slave.’
The boys stared into the fire for a while, wondering how else they could compete. Then Attila said, ‘Here, have some of this.’ He passed over a leather flask.
‘What is it?’ asked Aetius suspiciously.
‘Kind of fermented sheep’s milk.’
‘Not koumiss again?’
Attila shook his head. ‘No, it doesn’t get you drunk. It’s just sheep’s milk that’s gone sour, sort of. It keeps well in hot weather.’
Aetius put the neck of the flagon cautiously to his lips and tasted. An instant later he held the flagon aside and spat his mouthful of the stuff straight into the sizzling fire.
Attila roared with laughter and took the flagon back.
Aetius wiped his lips, an expression of revulsion on his face. ‘What in Hades was that?’
Attila grinned broadly. ‘We call it yogkhurt.’
‘ Yogkhurt?’ repeated Aetius, even more gutturally.
Attila nodded.
Aetius shook his head. ‘Sounds as bad as it tastes.’
The next day they went looking for boar. They picked up a spoor very soon – telltale footprints of two main toes, with two barely visible either side – but lost the track in the dense undergrowth where their horses couldn’t go. Later they found what looked like a wallow beside a fallen treetrunk. Attila dismounted and gave a low whistle, crouching beside the treetrunk, running his fingertips over the bark.
‘What is it?’
‘These grooves. They’re deep.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a big one.’
They rode on.
‘It’ll be lying up somewhere,’ Attila called back. ‘We’ll have to flush it out.’
‘I can smell something,’ said Cadoc.
Attila turned and stared at the slaveboy. ‘You have boar in your country, as well as perpetual rain?’
The boy nodded. ‘Many boar. In the autumn, up in the beechwoods, we-’
The boar came screaming out of nowhere. It flashed across Attila’s mind, even as he glimpsed the great, bristling curve of its back as it charged snorting towards them, that it must be a mother and they had stumbled on her close to her litter. No ferocity in nature like the ferocity of a mother protecting her young. But then he registered the boar’s size, the length of its tusks – eight inches? nine? – and his ears registered the thunderous galloping of its small hooves across the clearing, carrying its massive weight of four hundred pounds or more His ears were filled with a more dreadful sound, of a horse screaming. He was lying face down on the forest floor, his mouth full of a mulch of last year’s leaves. His horse was writhing in agony across his legs, as the huge boar worked furiously away on the other side, opening up the horse’s belly with lightning-quick slashes of its terrible tusks.
The three other boys dismounted in an instant, and Aetius scrabbled desperately to drag his spear from its sling. At any moment the boar might tire of tearing the horse’s guts from its stomach and turn its beady little eyes and monstrous tusks on them. Or on the other boy, trapped and helpless beneath his dying horse. If the boar trotted round and began to work on him, he would be dead in seconds.
The boar stopped, and there was silence in the glade but for the thrashing of the dying horse. The boar raised its massive head. Aetius thought it might weigh four hundred and fifty, even five hundred pounds. It was the biggest boar he had ever seen; bigger than any in the arena, in the forests of Silestria, anywhere. The stench of it filled the forest glade with a thick, dark musk, and its cruel off-white tusks, gleaming through the dripping blood and the tendrils of torn intestine from the disembowelled horse – nine inches long was perhaps an underestimate.
The boar stared at them for a little while longer, its flanks heaving furiously as it got its breath back, unhurried and unafraid. Then it sensed movement beside it, and suddenly was afraid again, and hot with rage. It turned to gore the horse. But it wasn’t the horse, it was something else.
Snuffing the air, the boar galloped round to where Attila lay trapped and twisted, lying there helpless in last year’s leaves, and moved furiously towards the fallen boy with lowered tusks.
The Celtic slaveboy moved as fast as a forest animal. He slithered in the horse’s spilt guts, scrambled over the mound of its open belly and thrust his sword into the boar’s flank, just as the first swipe of its tusks opened up a deep cut across Attila’s back. The blade went in less than an inch, but it was enough. The boar turned on him, screaming with fury, and drove straight at him. But Cadoc slipped back over the dead horse and the enraged boar drove its tusks uselessly into dead flesh again. Then it felt a far deeper, more terrible wound along its back, penetrating deeply into its tough old bristling hide. It whipped round on its neat little hooves and saw Aetius. The Roman boy pulled the spear free again and braced his back against an ancient beechtree. The butt of his boar-spear was braced deep among the roots, for a boar that size would knock a man and spear aside like gossamer if they were not rooted in the ground like the roots of an oak.
Out of the corner of his eye, Aetius saw the Celtic slaveboy about to scramble over the horse again and try to attack the boar from behind.
‘No, Cadoc!’ he cried. ‘Let him come to me.’
The boar eyed Aetius a moment longer, its ears deaf to their human cries, filled only with the furious bang of blood in its brain. Then it charged.
The thick ashen spear snapped in two like a twig with the force of that five-hundred-pound weight, and Aetius threw himself aside only just in time. But in its mad unheeding charge, the great boar had also driven its own chest deeply onto the spearhead, which was buried up to the crossbar in its lungs and killing it. The boar reeled back, squealing, and fell to one side, slashing at its invisible tormentors, bright pneumonic blood frothing and spraying furiously from its champing jaws. It struggled to its feet again, but then its hind legs collapsed, its forefeet still planted unyielding in the soft forest floor.
Aetius crawled to his feet, dazed and shaking, and saw two boys – the two slaveboys, both acquainted with the lash and chain of their masters – creep towards the dying boar from either side, small blades in their hands. Aetius shouted ‘No!’ to them, for the boar was dying anyway, and yet, even in its last moments, it might turn that massive, bristling head and slash a man open from navel to throat. But the two slaveboys for once ignored the command of the master, and moved in closer, carefully avoiding that slowly swinging, bloody head. As one, they pounced forward and drove their blades into the creature’s body, Cadoc’s blade going deep into its tough, muscled neck, and Orestes’ slipping between its ribs. Still the boar swung its head, butting Cadoc and tossing him back into the leaf litter as if with mild irritation, but making no contact with its terrible tusks. Its mad ferocity was draining away now with its blood. It lay down in the leaves, and gave another heave of its blood-soaked flanks, and then after a long while another. And then it died.
Aetius steeled himself and tried to shut his nose against the stomach-turning reek of the disembowelled horse. He grasped it by its hind legs, ready to drag it off the fallen boy, and shouted orders to the slaves to take hold likewise. But from the other side he heard a cry, and there was Attila. He had hauled himself free, and although he clutched the back of one thigh, where he felt he had twisted a tendon, and he could sense the back of his shirt soaked where the boar’s tusk had razed through the skin of his back, nevertheless he was only slightly hurt, and too full of the furious thrill of the danger to feel real pain yet.