The Scourge of God (17 page)

“He actually had little use for entertainment, to tell the truth. He was not unkind or conceited, only distracted. He believes in an idea called Rome but lacks the army to restore it. So he fights one day, negotiates the next, buys the third. He’s a remarkable man who almost alone is holding the West together, and of course his superiors despise him for it. There is nothing incompetence hates more than virtue. Valentinian will one day punish him for his heroism, mark my word.”

“He never marched to help the East.”

“March with what? The people tormenting your half of the Empire were the same he was hiring to keep order in his half—the Huns. They’d work for him and take from you. It sounds callous, but it was the only way he could keep the other tribes in harness.”

“What can you tell me of the Huns?”

“I don’t tell, I show. I help you to see. Learn to think for yourself, Jonas Alabanda, and you will be a hated, feared, and successful man. Now, first of all, look at this settlement along the river. It goes on and on, doesn’t it?”

“The Huns are numerous.”

“And yet are there more people here than in Constantinople?”

“Of course not.”

“More than Rome?More than Alexandria?”

“No . . .”

“Yet the man with the wooden bowl and cup, leading a people who don’t know how to sow, forge, or build—a people who prey on others to supply everything they have— believes it’s his destiny to rule the world. Because of numbers? Or because of will?”

“They are great and terrible warriors.”

“Indeed. Look there.” We reached a point on the river opposite a meadow used for grazing and riding. Twenty Hun soldiers were practicing archery. They galloped one by one down the length of their meadow at full speed, plucked arrows from their quivers with deadly rhythm, and fired with frightening rapidity. Their target were melons, erected on poles fifty paces away, and so often did the arrows hit that the warriors roared and jeered only when one missed. Such an error was usually no more than a handsbreadth in either direction. “Imagine a thousand of them, thundering by a clumsy legion,” Zerco said.

“I don’t have to imagine. By all accounts it’s happened far too many times, and again and again we are beaten.” 

“Keep watching.”

After each pass the galloping warrior rejoined the jostling, joking group and then took his turn again, hurtling across the meadow. After three or four sprints each, they sat, spent and happy.

“Watch what?”

“How many arrows do they have left?”

“None, of course.”

“How fast are their ponies now?”

“They’re tired.”

“See? I’ve showed you more than most Roman generals ever learn. That’s what I mean by thought: observation and deduction.”

“Shown what? That they can hit an enemy’s eye at full charge? That they can lope a hundred miles in a day when our armies march twenty on our best roads?”

“That in far less than an hour they are out of arrows on exhausted horses. That a cloud of arrows came from a handful of men. That their entire strategy depends on breaking the will of others quickly and without mercy because their numbers are limited and their endurance is nil. But if they have to fight not for a moment but for a day, against a unity that outnumbers them . . .”

“This was archery. They were
trying
to expend all their arrows.”

“As they might uselessly against determined infantry that stands its ground behind its shields. Horses are like dogs. They will catch a fleeing man, but shy from one who stands his ground. An army that is a porcupine of spears . . .” 

“What you’re talking about is the greatest of all battles. Of fighting, after all, not just thinking.”

“Of course, fighting! But what I’m talking about is the will to fight
your
battle, not theirs. On your ground: low, armored, patient. Of waiting until your moment. And there is one other thing you should be thinking about as you watch their skill.”

“What’s that?”

“To match it, if you want to survive. Did you bring any weapons at all?”

“They’re in my baggage.”

“You’d better get them out and practice as the Huns do. That, too, you should have deduced by watching them. You never know when you will need to fight, as well as think.” The jostling, joking warriors across the river reminded me of the dwarf’s leap into my lap the night before. “You claimed that you were warning me of danger at the banquet. That nothing is as it seems.”

“Attila invites you to talk of peace, but what Attila
says
may not be what he
means.
And don’t be surprised if he knows more about your companions than you do yourself, Jonas of Constantinople. That’s the danger I’m warning you of.”

Skilla let the wild galloping of his horse release his turbulent emotions. Riding without direction across the flat plain of Hunuguri was like shedding a particularly constricting and burdensome piece of armor. It was a draft of wind that left the complications of camp and tribe and women behind, and restored to him the freedom of the steppes. Attila himself spoke of the tonic of the grasslands. When in doubt, ride.

So why did they leave the steppes ever farther behind? Until the Romans came, Skilla had been certain that Ilana would eventually be his. He alone had protected her, and when Attila won the final battle there would be no alternative. But now she had flirted with Jonas and dressed like a Roman whore. It enraged him, because he feared the scribe could win simply by being Roman. Skilla didn’t want a bed slave. He wanted the highborn woman to love him for what he was, not just make love
to
him, and it frustrated him that she remained stubbornly blind to the Huns and their qualities. The People of the Dawn were better than the hordes that squatted in their stone cities, braver, stronger, and more powerful . . . except that Skilla secretly felt uncomfortable and inferior around the foolish but clever Romans, and hated just that feeling.

That’s why seeing Ilana with Jonas had so infuriated him.

It was not just that the Romans could read the thoughts of other men by peering at their books and papers or that they wore fine clothes or built with stone that lasted forever. As near as he could tell, all their wizardry did not make them particularly strong or happy. They could be beaten in battle, worried constantly about money while having more of it than a Hun would ever need, were hapless at surviving away from their cities, and fussed about rank and rules in ways that would never occur to a truly free man. A Roman had a thousand worries when a Hun had none. A Hun did not grub in the dirt, dig for metal, labor in the sun, or go blind squinting in a dark shop. He took what he needed from others, and all men quailed before him. This is how it had been since his people began following the white stag west, conquering all they encountered. And their women shared their haughty pride!

Yet the Romans disdained him. They never said so, of course, lest he chop them down, but he could tell it in their looks and whispers and manners as they had journeyed from the eastern capital. His was the empire that was growing and theirs was the one that was shrinking, and yet they regarded the Huns as their inferiors! Dangerous, yes, in the way a rabid dog is dangerous, but not the Roman equal in anything that mattered, let alone their master. This stubborn confidence tormented him as it tormented his fellow warriors, because no amount of military defeat seemed to convince the Romans that the Huns were their betters. Only killing seemed to settle the issue.

Ilana was the most baffling of all. Yes, she had lost her father and the man she’d planned to marry, and been taken from her city. But Skilla had not raped or beaten her as she might have expected. He in fact had lent her a fine pony for the ride back to the heart of the Hun empire. What other captive had enjoyed such favor? He had fed her well, protected her from the attentions of other warriors, and brought her presents. If she married him she would be the first wife of a rising warlord, and he would plunder whatever luxuries she desired. They would have fine horses, strong children, and live in a society that would let them follow their whims to sleep, eat, ride, hunt, camp, and make love when they wanted. He was already beginning to gather his own
lochus,
or regiment, and his men would protect her from any harm. He was offering her the world, for soon the Huns would be masters of it. Yet she treated him like a pest! Meanwhile, he had seen, at the banquet, how she cast covetous eyes at the young Roman who had nothing and who had done nothing. It was maddening.

Skilla was annoyed that he was so attracted to Ilana. What was wrong with the women of the Huns? Nothing, really. They were nimble, hard workers, and were bred to produce robust children in rugged conditions. They would both couple and bear children in a blizzard or a desert’s heat, it mattered not to them, and they were proud of their ability not to cry out in either instance. They could make a meal out of a stag or field mouse, whichever was available; find hearty roots in the mud by a riverbed; load a house into a wagon in a quarter of a morning; and carry twin skins of water from a yoke on their back. But they were also plainer, squatter, and rounder. They did not have Ilana’s grace, they did not have her worldliness, and they did not have the fierce intelligence that animated the Roman woman’s gaze when she became curious or angry. There was no need for a woman to be smart, and yet he found himself desiring exactly that quality in Ilana for reasons he couldn’t fathom. There was no use for it! She represented that Roman arrogance he hated, and yet he wanted to possess that arrogance to assuage his own confidence.

His was a desire that was bewitching every clan and brotherhood, Attila had said. The Hun invasion of Europe had made his people powerful, but it was also changing them. The race was being diluted by marriage and adoption. In the forests to the north and west, the horse was less useful. Men who once fought for the simple pleasures of fighting now talked incessantly of mercenary pay, booty, tribute, and the goods they could bring back to satisfy their increasingly greedy wives. Tribes that had wandered with the seasons were settled in crowded Hunuguri. Attila warned his warriors to be careful, to not let Europe conquer them as they conquered Europe. It was why he ate off plain wooden dishes and refused to adorn his clothing, reminding them of the harsh origins that made them hardier and fiercer than their enemies.

Every Hun knew what he meant. But they were also seduced, almost against their wills, by the world they were overrunning. While Attila ate from wood, his chieftains ate from gold plate, and dreamed not of the steppes but of the courtesans of Constantinople.

This, Skilla secretly feared, would destroy them. And him.

He must destroy Alabanda, take Ilana, and escape eastward. And the best way to do so was to wait for Bigilas to return with his son and fifty pounds of gold.

XII

A PLOT REVEALED

D
iplomacy, Maximinus explained to me, was the art of patience. As long as talk went on, weapons were sheathed. While weeks crawled by, political situations could change. Agreement that was impossible between strangers became second nature among friends. So it did no harm to wait in the Hun camp while Bigilas backtracked to fetch his son, the senator assured me. “While we wait there is no war, Jonas,” he observed with self-satisfaction. “Just by coming here, we have helped the Empire. Simply by passing time, we are serving Constantinople and Rome.”

We tried to learn what we could of the Huns, but it was difficult. I was instructed to do a census of their numbers, but warriors and their families came and went so frequently that it was like trying to count a flock of birds. A hunt, a raid, a mission to exact tribute or punishment, a rumor of better pastures, a chase of wild horses, a story of a drinking den or brothel newly established on the shores of the Danube—any of these things could draw the easily bored warriors away. The numbers I counted were useless anyway because most of the Hun nation was scattered far from where we stayed, a web of empire linked by hard-riding messengers. How many clans? None of our informants seemed able to make that clear. How many warriors? More than blades of grass. How many subject tribes? More than the nations of Rome. What were their intentions? That was in the hands of Attila.

Their religion was a tangle of nature spirits and superstition, the details jealously hidden by shaman prophets who claimed to foretell the future with the blood of animals and slaves. This primitive animism was combined with the pantheons of peoples overrun, so that Attila could proclaim confidently that his great iron relic was the sword of Mars and his people knew what he was talking about. Gods were like kingdoms to the Huns: to be conquered and used. Destiny was unavoidable, these primitive people believed, and yet fate was also capricious and could be wooed or warded with charms and spells. Demons could catch the unwary, and storms were the thunder of the gods, but luck was promised by a favorable sign. We Christians were considered fools to look for salvation in the afterlife instead of booty in this: Why worry about the next existence when it was only this one in which you had control? This, of course, was a misunderstanding of the entire point of my religion; but to the Huns the logical goal was to either make life with a woman or end it with war, and one had only to look at the savagery of nature to understand that. Everything killed everything. The Huns were no different.