The King suddenly stood and swept his arm wide. ‘Be still and hear me, O People!’
Little Bird sat looking up at him, cross-legged and wide-eyed, a child in his seventh decade.
There was a long silence, Attila standing with his head hung low on his breast. Then he said, so softly that Little Bird strained to hear, ‘He is very wroth with us, he has utterly cast us off, we are rejected and despised. It is in the book of the Christians – I knew it as a boy. Long Roman winter afternoons with the pedagogue, a hostage, the cold sun sinking low beyond the bars. We are the people of Gog and Magog. I despised the bones and rags and worshipped fragments of the saints in their charnel-house churches, and the prophecies of their holy books, but now they come back to haunt me in my age. Now I go to the house of death myself with faltering steps, and I leave my people abandoned by their God.’
‘Oh, my mad master, do not say so.’
‘We will be blown away as the old song says, “like the wind, like the wind”. And of the great Hun people in after-years there will be neither sight nor sign in all the wide world, as if we had never been. And is it I…? A King of Kings from Palestine, a King of Terror from the East. Oh, my dreams are relentless now, they come to me nightly without cease, those seers and tellers beside the haunted stream beneath the trees in that misty morning in my boyhood long ago, when I had none but my beloved Orestes to comfort me. We laid his sister in the earth…’
Little Bird went to him.
Attila did not see. His eyes roved. ‘Comfort is not, consolation is not, in the midnight my heart murmurs that even the gods are not! You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me, you have taken my hate from me and my love from me; sad is my song now, my head is heavy, my heart hums a song of ash. And you who have taken all from me are nothing but a formless Void without voice or sense or feeling, the Beginning and the End of all things, for ever and ever.
‘Their prophecies hum about my ears like angry flies. Two empires were o’erthrown… One empire’s birth was Italy, the other was his own. And is it I…? It is a thought that I can hardly bear, oh, help me bear it, little shaman, as you would help an old man staggering under a burden. Fortune’s fool, history’s halfwit.’ He leaned forward and put his hands on Little Bird’s skinny shoulders.
Little Bird winced as if the touch was as cold as Scythian frost. ‘You might as well ask a mouse to bear a boulder on his back, my master.’
Attila’s arms fell by his sides again, and he sat back again.
‘In my hoar old age I thought I had had reverence, piety, glory, empery, and now it is gone from me, everything is taken from me, my empire stutters and fails like a pauper’s tallow candle. A seer once said my beloved son Ellak would inherit my empire. I know now what empire he spoke of: the great, the infinite empire of nothing.’
‘Do not say so, master.’
‘My sons quarrel with one another and soon enough they will war with each other, once their father is gone and nothing remains of him but fading footprints and bones. My Checa is gone the way of all flesh, motes of dust in the sun, the ribs of long-dead cattle bleached white, no birdsong, no sweet waters, an empty desert place, a tattered village beside a dying lake.
‘I am as broken as the earth riven by ice. There is none to help me bear it; a king must die alone. My heart sings with grief, a lonely, mountain-top grief which only a dying king can know. The Madness of King Goll. I heard the Celtic slaveboy singing, long ago, who knew the ancient prophecies of the Sibyl. The grey wolf knows me
… The hare runs by me, growing bold… “They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.” King Goll, old friend, I know you, and I see your face in the water. Is it I who has brought them to this pass and this predestinate end?’ He stirred and trembled, his eyes wild, his hands gripping the finials of the alien throne. ‘Oh, I shall go mad! Oh, let me not be mad!’
‘O Father,’ said Little Bird, laying his head in his lord’s lap, ‘my heart will keep company with yours as both break.’
12
At last word came that Attila was marching on Rome.
Aetius rode down the Flaminian Way from Ravenna to cut him off, with a force of little more than one thousand men. A ludicrous number. He had hoped that the citizens of Ravenna, Fiorentia, Rome itself, might have joined him in this last, wretched battle in Roman history, little more than a skirmish. But the people had already fled.
As Aetius and his column neared the half-abandoned city on the seven hills, however, they met an extraordinary sight: a cortege headed by the Bishop of Rome, Leo, proceeding north, unarmed, to meet Attila. Priests in their chasubles carried crosses, banners, censers, and chanted hymns; the gold of the monstrances and dalmatics gleamed in the Italian sunlight; Bishop Leo himself, stocky and round-faced and cheerful like the Campanian countryman he was, riding a plump white horse slightly too small for him, was flanked by long lines of choirboys and deacons.
‘What the hell is this?’
The bishop reined in. ‘Master-General Aetius? Join us. Ride with us. And allow us to talk with Attila first, before-’
‘Talk with Attila! Your Holiness, with all due respect, talking with him, pleading with him, paying him off – at this late stage – is like a hind pleading with a lion, when the lion has already got its teeth in her arse!’
The bishop smiled indulgently. Such vigorous similes reminded him of his country boyhood. ‘ Talk with Attila,’ he resumed composedly, ‘before you and your brave soldiers line up to face him for battle.’
Aetius stared. Then he gave the order to fall in behind.
It was near the Mincius river that Attila and the Bishop of Rome had their talk. The gentle farmland of Virgil and Catullus, now trampled by barbarian cavalry.
In Leo’s small party of priests and chaplains was also a burly old fellow with a white beard, and a younger man with brown eyes. Some said they were all the way from Britain, but others doubted that as a tall tale. Many tall tales grew up about that meeting. That Attila and the Britons and the papal party exchanged ancient Sibylline verses, and that after he had heard them in full the dread King of the Huns, the Scourge of God, hung his head, and began to pull his men back and turn them round. Some even claimed that Rome was saved by Attila’s superstitious dread of the Christian Church, and a few old, garbled rhymes. Others commented that Attila’s force was spent anyway; he had been defeated on the Catalaunian Fields.
The meeting did confirm one thing. The legions of Rome truly belonged to the past. Attila did not fear armies, but he feared the god of the Christians: the god who had thundered at him from the dark depths of Rhemi cathedral. The old military power of Rome was extinguished, but the new power of the Catholic Church had replaced it.
‘It was not the priest of the Christians who made me depart,’ said Attila, ‘but that other, in the white robe, standing behind him.’
Orestes frowned. ‘There was none such.’
‘He bore a flaming sword.’
Orestes fell silent and then stepped out of the king’s tent. He heard a sing-song voice away in the darkness.
‘The Great Spirit wills it.
Dry your eyes.
The white man comes.
A People dies.’
13
In the west of Britain, an old man and his son at last came home to their simple long-house. The old man eased himself off his horse and a woman only a few years younger came out and wept and embraced him. They clung to each other, then went inside. The younger man went to stable the horses.