“Which is?”
“That you take me with you.”
“You! And you talk of Ilana slowing me down?”
“I’m light, a good companion, and I’ve been where we need to go.”
This sounded like madness. “Can you even ride a horse?”
“Julia can. I ride with her.”
“Another woman!”
“You started it. Do you want my help or not?”
Ilana and I waited in an agony of impatience. The days were growing shorter, the land yellow and sleepy. Already there was a chill to the night and the first leaves petaled the Tisza.
When the weather turned, the barbarian tracks became soup, and travel became difficult. Yet one week and then another slipped by, and no opportunity to leave presented itself.
Hereka and Suecca kept sharp watch on us.
Twice we managed to meet for quick reassurance. The first time was at the river, dipping water and murmuring quickly before breaking apart, each of us trusting a person we scarcely knew. The second time was in a ravine through which a seasonal creek fed the river, its bottom dense with brush. Some Huns coupled there, I knew, away from the eyes of their parents or spouses. Now I drew her near to whisper.
These meetings had made her more precious, not less. I found myself remembering moments I didn’t realize I’d recorded: the way the light had fallen on her cheek by the river, the wetness of her eyes when she stared up at me on the wood cart, or the swell of breast and hip when she filled her jars at the river. Her neck was a Euclidian curve, her clavicle a fold of snow, her fingers quick and nervous with the grace and beat of a butterfly wing. Now I looked at her ear that gleamed like shell amid the fall of her dark hair, the parted lips as she gasped for breath, the rise and fall of her bosom, and wanted her without entirely knowing why. The idea of rescue and escape magnified her charms. To her, I was a comrade in a dangerous enterprise. To me, she was . . .
“Has the dwarf assembled our things?” she asked anxiously.
“Almost.”
“What payment does he want?”
“To go with us.”
“Do you trust him?”
“He could have betrayed us already.”
She nodded, her eyes glistening like dark pearls. “I think I have good news.”
“What?”
“There’s a Greek doctor named Eudoxius who Attila sent as an envoy. He’s returning and is only a day’s ride away, according to gossip. Some think the Greek is bringing important news, and it has been a while since the community feasted. Men have been sent to hunt, and Suecca has started us cooking. I think there’s going to be a celebration.”
“A Greek doctor?”
“Another traitor, fled to the Huns. It’s the end of the summer, and there’s an abundance of kamon and kumiss. The camp is full because the warriors have been returning for winter. They will hold a strava to celebrate the return of this Greek and drink, Jonas, drink themselves insensible. I have seen it.” She grasped my arm, straining toward me, her excitement making her quiver. “I think this is our chance.”
I kissed her.
It surprised her more than I thought it would, and she pulled away, not certain whether she welcomed my advance, her emotions playing across her face like the rippling of a curtain.
I tried to kiss her again.
“No.” She held me away. “Not until things are settled.”
“I’m falling in love with you, Ilana.”
This complication frightened her. “You don’t know me.”
She shook her head, keeping her purpose in mind. “Not until we’ve escaped—together.”
*
*
*
The news that Eudoxius brought back was secret, but his return excuse enough for a strava, a grand national party, or a celebration for as much of the fragmentary nation as happened to be camped around Attila at the time. It would welcome back the Greek doctor, mark the harvest that Hun vassals were humbly bringing to their masters, celebrate the humiliation of the treacherous Roman ambassadors, and commemorate a year in which the Huns had exacted a good deal of taxes, booty, and tribute with very little fighting. The relative peace, everyone knew, would not last forever.
The strava would take place when the leaves turned golden and the morning plain was white with frost and would last three days. It would be a bacchanalia without Bacchus—a festival of dance, song, games, jesters, lovemaking, feasting, and above all drinking that at its end would leave the participants sprawling. It was this excess that Ilana was counting on to aid our escape. By the end of the first night no one would notice we were missing. By the end of the third, no one would care.
Zerco promised to assemble the saddles, clothing, and food once the strava was well under way. There were Roman horses picketed in a meadow across the Tisza. I hoped to find Diana, but if not I would steal the strongest horse I could find. We would swim the river, saddle the animals, and ride north. Once well away we would cut west, following the northern bank of the Danube, and then cross into Pannonia and gallop for the Alps, eventually reaching Italy. From there we could take ship for Constantinople.
I could smell the streets of home.
Because tens of thousands of Huns, Goths, and Gepids were celebrating, the strava was held outside. A thousand flags and horsehair banners were erected, fluttering in the wind like a rising flock of birds. A hundred bonfires were built in huge pyramidal pyres. Lit at dusk, they were so bright that they turned the cloudy sky orange, and plumes of sparks funneled upward as if Attila was giving birth to new colonies of stars. Each tribe and clan had its own music. The camp’s celebrants migrated from one center of entertainment to the next, each host determined to outdo his neighbor in the volume of song and the quantity of drink pressed into wandering hands. Voices rose and dancing started. Then flirtations. Then fights. A few Huns were stabbed or garroted like fighting wolves, their bodies casually cast behind yurts to be attended to when the strava was over. Couples broke away for lovemaking, legs splayed, buttocks pumping, in anxious release before they became too drunk. The warlords and shamans drank mushroom and forest herb drafts and were so exhilarated by their visions that they pirouetted around the fires, roaring nonsense prophecies and staggering after screaming damsels who stayed maddeningly out of reach. Children wrestled, ran, stole. Babies cried, half ignored, until their own noise finally put them to sleep.
Both Ilana and I were required to serve. We dragged forth casks and amphorae of wine, bore heavy platters of roasted meat, hauled the insensible to one side so that they would not be trampled, and threw dirt on the worst of the vomit and piss. Despite the cool night air we were sweating from the heat of the fires and the press of bodies. Attached as we were to the houses of Hereka and Edeco, we were at the center of the strava’ s galaxy, all other fires and merriment wheeling around those of the great kagan and his chief lieutenants.
“Attila has promised to speak,” I whispered. “When that happens, all eyes will be on him. Leave, alone, so there is no suspicion. I’ll follow.”
With no stump or stone on the flat plain, Attila chose a novel means to get attention. A trio of horses was walked into the gathering as the merriment and mayhem built to its first-night climax. Two of the horses had riders, but the third was bare. It was onto this horse that Attila sprang, boosting himself up until he balanced on its back, the flanking riders encircling his calves with their arms to brace him. “Warriors!” he cried.
They whooped in response. A thousand men and women crowded to hear his words, bellowing and singing at the sight of their king. And what a sight he was! Again, Attila wore no decoration, yet what he did wear atop his ordinary Hun clothes was ghastly. The bones of a man had been tied joint to joint and arranged on his front. The bones matched Attila’s own frame, jiggling and rattling as the king drunkenly swayed to keep himself standing upright on the back of the nervous horse. The skull was missing, but Attila’s own head was far more terrifying. His visage was dark, his hair wild, and two curved horns had been attached to jut from his temples like a demon god’s. Lightning bolts of white paint zigzagged down his scarred cheeks, and black paint circled his eyes to turn them into pits. “People of Hunuguri! People of the Dawn!”