She turned away so that he would not see her tears. ‘Now go,’ she said.
He took a step towards her, his hands held out as if in supplication. ‘But… But I… ’
She did not look back. ‘I said go!’ she cried.
He flinched and took a step backwards, and then turned and ran, his eyes blurred with tears.
He returned to his room by flickering torchlight, to find that a couple of guards had overturned his bed, ransacked his linen chest, and were searching through his every possession. When he came running in, they barely spared him a glance.
‘Outside,’ they growled.
Attila stepped back outside, and slipped down the corridor towards the statue of Augustus – its mysteriously missing eye now replaced. He felt behind the statue and it was still there: his sword, the gift of Stilicho, in the last place the guards would think of looking.
He heard footsteps behind him.
It was Eumolpus. He raised one finely plucked eyebrow. ‘And what fresh destruction are you wreaking now, rat-boy?’
Without a word, his blood beating, Attila pulled the bundle out from behind the statue, drew the sword from its oiled cloth and turned it round and about in front of the eunuch’s eyes.
‘Isn’t it fine?’ he said.
‘Give that here.’
The boy smiled and shook his head.
The eunuch suddenly looked dangerous. ‘I said, give it here.’
Attila looked up, and then raised the blade to the level of his shoulder, arm crooked ready to strike, the long and lethal point aiming straight at his tormentor’s chest.
‘If you want it so much,’ he said, ‘take it.’
Eumolpus stared at him long and hard. Then he moved suddenly, stepping sideways and grabbing at the boy’s side. But the boy was faster, ducking under the eunuch’s outstretched arm and turning on the ball of his foot and holding out the sword towards him again.
‘Well, well,’ said Eumolpus in a low voice. ‘And what sort of person – what traitor – would give a little urchin such as yourself a gift as fine as that?’
Contrary to all expectations, Attila suddenly lunged forwards, and the startled Eumolpus stepped backwards, stumbled against the pediment of the statue of Augustus, and fell. Scrambling to his feet again, all composure lost, he cursed the boy furiously. He paused to brush his resplendent golden dalmatic clean of the barbarian touch, hissed some unintelligible Greek at the boy like a peevish viper, and departed.
‘Nasty cut you’ve got there, by the way,’ the boy called after him. ‘Round your throat.’
He rewrapped the sword in its oiled cloth and hid it in the folds of his tunic.
When Eumolpus fell, he had dropped a scrap of paper. Once he had vanished round the corner, the boy retrieved it. It was in code. He took it back to his room. The guards let him in, and then locked and bolted the door behind him. He settled down on the low bed to crack the code. He liked codes, but this one was hard. Soon his tired eyes began to close, and he fell asleep.
In his dreams, he continued to work on the code. He knew that it mattered somehow. He saw himself as if from a distance, in the dusk, straining his eyes by the guttering oil lamp. From one of the distant courtyards came a strange, high-pitched cry, like a bird in lamentation.
He dreamt that he leapt from his bed and ran to the Chamber of the Imperial Audience, to find Princess Galla Placidia seated on a painted wooden throne and surrounded by children, which was strange since she had none. And who, as they said in the backrooms of the palace, would want to marry her anyway? ‘Galla and husband,’ they quipped. ‘Virgin and martyr.’
Her brother, Honorius, sat at her feet, playing with a child’s spinning top. The princess stroked the goatkid in her lap and smiled. The kid smiled, too.
Stilicho was standing beside her. He wore an expression of puzzlement. He reached behind his back, and gave a low groan. Attila saw to his horror that the general had a big knife sticking out of his back, with gold scrollwork on the handle.
‘I must go home to my wife,’ said Stilicho.
The princess stroked the kid and looked at Attila and smiled.
He woke up numb with sorrow, and to the sound of screaming.
He lay wide awake and in a cold sweat, straining to hear again. Perhaps it hadn’t been a scream. Perhaps it had been the friendly guard knocking on the door, or even the monk Eustachius himself.
But then another scream came ringing through the night to his chamber, like the cry of one of the exotic birds in the imperial aviary, and he knew that things had begun to go terribly wrong. He knew in his heart that now there would be no friendly guard, and no kindly monk called Eustachius. He was alone.
He heard violent shouting in the corridor outside, and then a sound like scuffling, and a man bellowing as if in raw pain. There were running footsteps, and doors slamming, and then the sound of wood being smashed and splintering. He gripped the edges of his bed with fear, as a man adrift on the ocean in the black night might grip a plank of wood. He was unable to move. Any moment, a couple of armed guards would burst in through his door with drawn swords, and drive those thick steel blades straight through him and into the straw pallet below.
But no one came. He forced himself to loosen his grip on the bed. He shook his head as if to clear it of the fog of nightmare.
He got up and wrapped his light woollen cloak round him for protection, though the night was warm. Then he took his sword and went over to the door. He gripped the hilt in both hands, raised the sword high above his head, and drove it deep into the heavy oak. He was determined to dig a hole through it, no matter how long it took. But at the first blow the door swung eerily open. The guards outside were gone.
He wrenched the blade back and it came free of the wood with a squeak. In a daze he smelt, even tasted, the unmistakable coppery tang of blood in the air. And he sensed with the very hairs on his head that all the palace was under a cloud of fear. The night was in silent, horror-struck uproar.
He started to run. He passed a man slumped in the darkness of a doorway, and then he stopped and ran back. The front of the man’s coarse tunic was dark and wet. It was Bucco, the fat Sicilian baker, his friend. He knelt and laid his hand against Bucco’s cheek. It was as cold as wet clay. He moved Bucco’s head slightly, and it fell awkwardly to one side, revealing a ragged gaping slash across his throat. Nearly gagging, the boy reeled to his feet and ran on. Why Bucco? Why a simple slave?
Now things came to him, through the haze of fear. There was nobody around. Even at this late hour, there should have been palace guards patrolling the courtyards, night-slaves working, aquarii replenishing the water- butts, priests and deacons in the service of the imperial family on their way to chant the early-morning offices of Lauds and Terce in the cold and incense-filled chapel. But there was no one. It was as if the palace were suddenly deserted – and yet sounds carried from afar on the hot night air.
From deep within the palace he heard that cry of the bird again, only now he knew it was no bird but a woman’s screams. Then rounding a corner into a small courtyard he almost ran into another woman standing beside a small fountain. He had never seen her before. She was dressed all in white, like a priestess, but she held out to him at arm’s length a dead kitten, her mouth hanging open in a silent scream, her eyes staring unseeing at him. None of it made any sense. He stumbled away from her. Madly he wanted to laugh. It was all as meaningless as a nightmare, but it was real, it was all too real. He was wide awake.
He heard running footsteps coming closer and then fading, he heard doors slamming, the clanking of chains being dragged over marble tiles. He came to a bundle of rags slung in a corner, and as he passed by the bundle stirred and a bloody human hand reached out. He ran on.
He could hear the distant clangour of church bells in the city now, and again it made no sense. They seemed to signal some dire and bloody event, sounding to his ears as if they came from deep underground, from the realms of chaos and ancient night. He didn’t slink like a wolf through the palace now. He ran with one hand clenched to his chest with the steel weight of his sword beneath. He would need it tonight.
No one seemed to notice him, a mere child.
Two soldiers shoved past him, with a man grasped by the elbows between them. They virtually had to drag him, for his legs were broken. He wore a high-ranking officer’s uniform. His face was so bloodily pulped that the boy could not recognise him. Only his teeth showed white from his darkened face, his lips drawn back in some terrible
