He staggered towards the boy, but it was hopeless. The boy skipped out of his way with ease. Borus turned and reached a bloody hand towards him, more as if he were pleading than threatening.
Attila stopped again and stared back at him. Then he turned and said to the crowd, softly, his voice never raised, his eyes scanning each of their horror-stricken faces, ‘If you do not let me go now, I will kill every one of you.’
This time, they heard his words.
The crowd – as many as fifty or a hundred people – seemed to be in collective shock. Absurd though the boy’s threat was, something about the way his alien, slanted eyes glittered in that barbaric, blue-scarred face, allied to the steadiness of his arm, which extended the short blade of the fruit-knife towards each of them turn, slowly revolving, silenced them all. There was something about him, as they said later…
As the quiet, implacable force of his threat sank in, the crowd actually began to part before him, like the sea parting before the God-driven command of Moses. And there is no doubt that, incredible as it would seem, the boy would indeed have walked away from them at that moment, leaving his huge opponent kneeling in the dust, looking like a man who has just wrestled with an angel; like Jacob at the brook Jabbok, wrestling with his unknown antagonist blindly in the night, never knowing that his opponent was of God.
But the uproar had by now come to the notice of the city guard, and as the sullen, bewildered crowd began to make way for the boy, a voice of a different stamp altogether rang out in the midnight air.
‘Clear the way there, clear the way! Come on, you drunken scum, get out of my way.’
Sensing a different danger, the boy turned on his heel and held his dagger out again.
The crowd parted, and there stood no drunken street-bully. There stood a tall, grey-eyed lieutenant in the chainmail uniform of one of the Frontier legions, with a ragged scar across his chin and a scornful smile playing on his lips. Behind him stood a dozen of his men.
The lieutenant was surprised to find that the cause of all this ruckus was this one small, dusty, bloodstained boy.
For a moment, the boy extended his knife-hand towards the soldiers themselves – all twelve of them.
The lieutenant glanced at the crop-headed, tough-looking man by his side. ‘What do you reckon, Centurion?’
The centurion grinned. ‘The lad’s got spirit, you’ve got to admit, sir.’
The lieutenant looked back at the boy, his right hand resting easily on the pommel of his sword. He didn’t trouble to draw it, and when he smiled his eyes were as cold as ice.
‘Drop it, son,’ he said quietly.
Attila returned his gaze for a moment. Then he sighed, straightened and dropped the knife at his feet.
The lieutenant turned to his men. ‘You, Ops, Crates, tie him up, arms behind his back.’
Still kneeling in the dust, Borus saw the boy being tied, and he relaxed, and felt his legs trembling, and then he stretched out his arms and fell, and lay in the dirt. His head was throbbing. He rolled half over. His mouth felt bitter, metallic, and his back felt strangely cold. He was bewildered. His eyelids kept drooping, he didn’t know why, and his limbs ached and tingled. He prayed. He could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs – or fluttering, rather, like a bird trapped and panicking in a bone cage. He gazed into the stars above and prayed to every god he could name. His eyesight blurred, and it seemed to him as if every star was growing into a radiant circle of light. He prayed to Mithras and to Jupiter and to Isis and to Christ and to the very stars themselves.
The stars looked silently down.
‘And you,’ the lieutenant called to Borus, ‘get home to your wife. That wound needs seeing to.’
Borus didn’t stir.
One of the soldiers went over and knelt beside the fallen man and touched his fingertips to his neck. Then he stood up again. ‘He’s dead, sir.’
‘Why, you little-’ roared a man in the crowd, ‘I’ll-’
Two soldiers blocked his way with crossed spears, and one knocked him sharply back with a kick to his midriff.
But the crowd’s mood had turned ugly and belligerent.
‘You murdering swine!’ screamed an old woman.
‘Slit his dirty neck!’
‘String him up! Look at him, the little demon, look at that look in his eye! He’ll kill us all, give him half a chance!’
Several women in the crowd crossed themselves. A man clutched the bluestone he wore round his neck to ward off the evil eye.
The lieutenant regarded his captive. ‘You’re popular,’ he murmured.
The boy glared up at him with such unabated ferocity that even the lieutenant was momentarily nonplussed. Then he demanded his name.
The boy ignored him.
‘I asked you,’ repeated the lieutenant, leaning down, ‘ what is your name? ’
Still the boy ignored him.
From the angry crowd, a voice cried, ‘He said his name was Attalus or some such.’
‘Attalus, son of Turda, son of Arse-Lick,’ cried another.
For the first time, the lieutenant noticed the blue scars on the boy’s cheeks, eerily visible in the sidelong torchlight.
‘Not…?’ he wondered softly. He turned to his men. ‘Lads,’ he said, ‘I think we could be in for a little donative.’ He turned back to the boy. ‘Strip.’
The boy didn’t stir.
The lieutenant nodded, and one of his men stepped forward, gripped what remained of the boy’s tattered tunic at the neck, and ripped it down to the waist.
The crowd gasped. They had never seen anything like it.
The boy’s back was decorated with the most fantastic swirls and curlicues, weals and welts, some made by needles and blue ink, some more cruelly cut in with a knife and then sewn up with a horsehair in the wound to ensure that the scar remained bold and prominent. It was the way of the Huns.
Not Attalus. Attila. The fugitive.
Princess Galla Placidia would be grimly pleased at his recapture. She seemed to have a strange obsession with the boy.
‘Well done, lads,’ said the lieutenant. ‘And the rest of you,’ he said, raising his voice again, ‘disperse. Or we’ll make you – which will hurt.’
The crowd sullenly and reluctantly began to move away. One of them walked over to Borus and covered his face with a cloth.
The lieutenant asked him if he knew the dead man. He nodded.
‘Then you’ll see to his corpse,’ he said.
He turned back to his troop. ‘Right,’ he barked, ‘back to the Palatine. On the double.’
‘Word of advice,’ said the lieutenant affably as they marched back up the hill, the boy’s arms trussed tightly behind him like spatchcock chicken. ‘Next time you’re on the run, try not to attract so much attention to yourself by killing someone.’
The boy said nothing.
‘Lucky for you we came along when we did, anyhow. They’d have torn you limb from limb.’
At last the boy spoke. ‘They wouldn’t have got close.’
The lieutenant grinned. After a while he said, ‘And the man you put down?’
‘Self-defence.’
The lieutenant nodded. It was clear enough.
‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ the boy blurted out.
The lieutenant saw in some surprise that the boy’s eyes were bright with tears – not such a tough nut as he made out.
The lieutenant nodded again. ‘It’s OK, son. It happens. You did well to defend yourself.’
The boy tried to rub his nose with his bound arm, but couldn’t reach. If he sniffed the lieutenant would hear him, and he didn’t want that.
