The cavalryman reined in his horse, his bunched fists pulling towards his chest, the muscles in his arms bulging. He slowed and turned his horse to walk beside the carriage, while the mounted guard fell back, and noted sourly that it was that fat palace eunuch inside. He said nothing for a while, his gaze fixed ahead on the road and the far horizon, his expression one of grim foreboding.
‘Soldier? What is your name?’
The soldier glanced sideways at the eunuch and grunted. ‘Centurion. Centurion Marco.’
‘Marcus?’
‘No,’ replied the soldier slowly, as if to a particularly stupid child. ‘ Mar – co.’
Marco indeed, thought Olympian crossly. It wasn’t even Latin. It was barbaric.
‘Well, Marco, what seems to be the matter?’
‘Trouble on the road ahead.’
‘What, bandits?’
Marco snorted. ‘Bandits, my arse. Begging your pardon, sir. But I think we could handle a few bandits, don’t you? No. Bigger trouble than that, a lot bigger.’ He hawked and spat, and they rode on a little while.
‘Come along, man, speak up,’ said Olympian, his voice petulant with impatience and fear.
‘Well, sir, it’s like this. There’s us going north along the Flaminian Way.’ He sliced forwards with one hand. ‘And there’s Alaric coming south along the Flaminian Way. And somehow I don’t think the road is wide enough for the both of us.’
Olympian clutched his little white hanky to his mouth, and Attila could have sworn he gave a muffled shriek.
The boy leant across the quivering eunuch and said, ‘But Alaric was still camped up in Cisalpine Gaul, wasn’t he?’
The centurion stared into the carriage and jerked his head back with some surprise when he saw the boy. ‘You’re very well informed,’ he muttered. ‘You’re the Hun lad, yes? Uldin’s lad?’
Attila nodded. ‘My father’s father.’
The centurion shrugged. ‘So he was. Alaric was only just over the Alps a month ago, but he’s marched south already. Those horsemen are no slouches. They’ll be outside the gates of Rome by dusk tomorrow, it’s reckoned.’ He hitched back his shoulders and set his mouth grimly. ‘Well, what will be will be. Our job is to get to Ravenna first. So we’re going to have to turn east.’
The boy tried not to appear too eager. ‘Into the mountains?’ he asked.
‘Into the mountains,’ nodded Marco.
‘Into the mountains!’ cried Olympian.
The boy craned and looked up at the sky: the heavily bruised and swollen sky that precedes a violent summer downpour. The rain-filled clouds seemed to hang down from the heavens like great grey bellies ready to burst.
The boy slapped more thunderbugs away from his sweat-slicked arms. ‘There’s a storm coming,’ he said.
The centurion looked not up at the sky but ahead, northwards along the road and towards the far horizon. ‘You’re not fucking kidding,’ he growled. Then he shouted ‘ Hah ’, dug his heels into the flanks of his bay mare, wheeled and galloped back to the rearguard of the anxious column.
‘Well well,’ thought Attila, settling back into the luxuriously padded seat, almost unaware of Olympian’s presence any more. ‘A storm. It just gets better and better. Into the mountains we go.’
The boy liked mountains. You can hide in mountains.
They rested the first night at a simple marching camp on the Flaminian Way, and the second night at Falerii Veteres. At midday on the third day they crossed the Bridge of Augustus over the Nera, and then turned east almost immediately, leaving behind them the wide plains of the Tiber and ascending a narrower road into the Sabine Mountains, towards the town of Terni. The road became bumpier, and beyond Terni they turned onto a minor road, barely a track across the hills, and the column could manage no more than a slow walking pace. They would be pushed to cover so much as fifteen miles a day at this rate, even allowing for every hour of summer daylight. Which they couldn’t, as they would have to make safe camp each night they couldn’t make a fortified town. Nevertheless, the boy guessed that this route was reckoned the least risky, because the least likely for an imperial column to take.
‘Where’s Galla?’ he asked.
‘The Princess Galla Placidia, to whom I assume you are referring in that peculiarly familiar style,’ said Olympian acidly, ‘has remained behind in Rome.’
‘What will the Goths do to her?’
Olympian crossed himself piously, rolled his puffy eyes up towards the roof of the carriage, and said, ‘Nothing that is not already ordained of God.’
He leant forwards and plucked back the little velvet curtains to let in the cooler mountain air.
The hillsides were covered in sheep and fattening lambs, and the occasional shepherd. One stopped and stood right in the road, gawping at the approaching column, until a couple of guards rode out and shoved him out of the way.
‘Of course, it is well known,’ began Olympian, hardly noticing whether the boy was listening to him or not. In fact, the only reason he had begun talking at all was to try to calm his own nerves, which by this time were feeling very frayed indeed, what with the soldiers, and the mountains, and the Goths.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it is well known that the shepherds of these hills are absolute beasts of men, who never take a bath from the day they’re baptised to the day they’re buried. If they ever are baptised.’ He gazed hesitantly out of the window upon the sunparched land, his hanky held tight in his fat, white, delicate hand. ‘They probably still worship goats out here, most of them.’
He settled back into his seat again. ‘“All buggers and bandits,” as they say in Rome of the country people of the Sabine Hills. Or, even more vulgarly, “sheep-shaggers”. One knows what they mean. Why, it wasn’t so very long ago that the Sabine peasants were notorious for having the barber shave not only the hair on their heads but their pubic hair as well. In public. In the market-square, before the eyes of their own wives, and other men’s wives as well! They have as much sense of shame as the animals they tend.’
The boy snickered, and Olympian glared at him.
As if to prove the eunuch’s point, however, a little further on the column passed another shepherd, standing and staring at them as if they were the first human beings he had seen in months. Perhaps they were. He stood stark naked but for a sheepskin wrap round his shoulders. His deep brown skin was like leather dried out and cracked by a desert sun, his legs were misshapen by childhood starvation or adult accident, and his eyes were wild and bloodshot. The boy thought of Virgil’s Eclogues, drummed into him by his Greek pedagogue. So much for the romance of shepherd life.
Olympian tutted.
The boy grinned. These Italian barbarians.
He looked back and saw, with some surprise, that the shepherd had jogged back to a clump of brushwood, and led out from behind it a starveling mule. He hauled himself up onto the mule and, turning it towards the valley below, he glanced back only one more time at the imperial column. Then he kicked the mule forward with some ferocity, and disappeared over the brow of the plateau.
Attila sat back and wondered.
They climbed higher and higher into the mountains, up a stony ravine, which in winter must have been a river in spate but was now only a dry riverbed, steeply banked on either side. Thornbrush clung to the crumbling slopes, and cicadas trilled in the hot summer air. Otherwise the silence and loneliness up here were oppressive. Already they felt a long way from Rome.
The boy couldn’t resist it. Gazing up at the high rocky banks either side, he murmured, ‘Good place for an ambush.’
‘Oh!’ said Olympian, quivering. ‘Oh, don’t say that!’
‘Well, you never know,’ said the wretched boy, apparently enjoying himself immensely.
‘Anyway, our man back there, Marcus, said we had nothing to fear from bandits,’ went on the eunuch, talking nervously fast. ‘We are with a column of heavily armed, professional soldiers, after all.’
‘What about a gang of ex-gladiators?’ said the boy. ‘Not slave-gladiators, I mean the professionals. A lot of them have turned bandits, so people say, now that they’re all out of a job in the arena. They’d be pretty tough
