It was no more than a circle of wooden huts round a well, with a big haybarn to one side and an ancient timber longhouse to another. His ears had heard aright: there was laughter and song, and they came from the longhouse.
He tethered his horse in the shadows at the edge of the wood, and crept over to the longhouse. Pulling himself up on an upended chopping block, he craned to see through the open window.
Inside a feast of abundance met his eyes. His stomach felt more pitifully hollow than ever, and his mouth flooded with forlorn expectation. Within the building sat the entire population of the village, as many as a hundred peasants with rubicund faces, laughing and singing, drinking and gorging themselves in celebration, by the light of a score of rush torches. It was too late for the harvest celebrations, surely; but in the country districts, it was well- known that an excuse was found for a drunken celebration at least once a week, especially as the year sank into the gloomier months of winter.
Clay wine pitchers were being passed around, and flat osier baskets piled high with rolls of coarse but wholesome bread. Two great pigs, fattened up beautifully on the acorns that they had foraged in the oakwoods in the hills for the past few weeks, were turning golden-brown and shiny with fat on the blackened iron spits. The face of the gasping turnspit at their side was almost as golden-brown and greasy as they, but he was grinning from ear to ear at the thought of all that delicious roast pork to come, the flesh juicy and slightly nutty to the taste.
Huge bowls of clay or olivewood bore mounds of steaming winter vegetables, roast parsnips and turnips, roast chestnuts, winter kale, bowls of lentils cooked with soft goat’s cheese, various kinds of cured hams and sausages, roast and boiled partridge and pigeon from the woods, and after that apples, pears, apricots and plums in abundance, their skins shining plumply in the torchlight.
Suddenly the barn door beside him flew open, and the boy froze. There appeared a plump, middle-aged woman, wheezing out in the cold night air, her face glowing with good food and rather too much wine. Oblivous of the boy standing as still as a statue on the chopping block, she leant one hand against the barn wall, squatted down, hitched up her voluminous skirts, and began to pee noisily. When she had finished, she wiped herself with the hem of her skirts, and heaved herself upright. Only when she turned round did she see the boy frozen there, and give a little gasp of fright.
‘Jove bless us and save us, I thought you was a robber or something.’ She peered at him more closely. ‘What you doing out on a raw night like tonight?’ She pushed his shoulder and turned him to face her. ‘Looking hungrily in at our feast like a wolf off the hills, are you? Or maybe eyeing our young daughters – though you hardly look old enough for that kind of caper.’ And she gave a great belly laugh.
Attila had already decided he would neither fight nor flee, but wait and see what happened. And sure enough, after a moment’s thought, the woman said, ‘Well, you best come in and have some of ours, anyhow. Wouldn’t do to have a lonely traveller turned away from our door on a night like this. We’d soon be hearing the drums of You- Know-Who in the hills.’
And with that mysterious deprecation, she laid her plump hands on his shoulders and propelled him inside.
The assembled company looked curiously, some even suspiciously, at this newcomer with his hair tied up in a barbaric top-knot on the crown of his head, his slanted, glittering yellow eyes that gave away nothing, and his scarred and tattooed cheeks the colour of the night-sky. Several of them speculated about his origins, right under his nose.
‘He’s from the hills,’ said one, ‘from the south. Full of belly and empty of head, they say.’
‘No, he’s no Sabine,’ scoffed another. ‘He’s from the east, from the marshes. Look at his fingernails. He’s a fish-eater, morning, noon and night.’
Attila himself said nothing, and no one thought to ask him directly.
Another speculated that he might be from further south still. From Sicily, even.
‘Sicily?’ cried the first. ‘Hark at him, Sicily, indeed! What did he do, swim here?’
And after that, no one seemed to mind much where he came from, as long as he accepted their endless proferrings of meat, and bread, and wine, and more meat, and more wine…
The woman who had brought him in from the cold sat him between herself and a girl she said was her daughter, a well-fed, rosy-cheeked girl of about seventeen or eighteen. Not only was she better-fed than the wretched starvelings in the city but, like all the people here, she was also purer-skinned and brighter-eyed. Her light brown hair was drawn back from her brow with a ribbon of plain white wool, and she wore a simple white woollen tunic belted round the middle. The front of the tunic was deeply slashed, showing her plump young breasts and the shadowy cleavage between. The boy kept his eyes shyly fixed upon the food in front of him.
‘I know, she does show them off doesn’t she?’ cried the girl’s mother, seeing his discomfiture with great amusement.
‘Mother!’ said the girl.
Beyond this girl sat another, rather thin and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes. She said nothing, but Attila felt her gaze upon him, and once or twice he glanced along at her. Eventually he smiled, and she smiled back. Then she looked shy again and turned away.
‘Fresh meat, y’see,’ leered the old man across the table with the spittled mouth and the unshaven chin. ‘All the girls’ll be after you this e’en. Nice bit of fresh meat in the village. Who’d want an old smoke sausage like I, when there’s a nice bit of fresh meat going begging!’
The woman squeezed Attila’s thigh under the table, and said, ‘How old are you, boy?’
‘Fourteen. Fifteen this snowfall.’
‘I know what you’re thinking, you little wanton,’ she scolded, leaning across and slapping her daughter on the back of her hand. ‘Old enough, I warrant.’ She grinned at the boy and squeezed his cheeks. ‘Look at you, all ragged and drawn – thin as a winter gnat you are. You need some good old local hospitality, dearie, you do. A bit of meat inside you, and some good few cups of wine. I know I likes a bit of meat inside me whenever I can get it. And maybe a bit of the other kind of hospitality too and all later on!’ She rocked back and forth on her bench with laughter.
‘You ever been kissed, then?’ asked the girl.
The boy looked down at his plate. ‘Yes,’ he said defensively.
‘Aw, bless,’ said the girl. ‘And you know what the Saturnalia is for, don’t you?’
He didn’t. But he was about to find out.
The great double doors at the end of the longhouse creaked open and, to deafening cheers and hallooes from the assembled villagers, in came a procession of men and women bearing a train of crudely carved but unmistakable images. First came a rather stately matron carrying a statue of Priapus sporting a huge jutting phallus, carved from olivewood and seemingly oiled specially for the occasion. Priapus, the little grinning god of fertility, stood on a bed of winter berries, elderberries and hips and haws, and his proud phallus was lovingly decorated with wreaths of broom and ivy. Several of the women leant forward to kiss it as it passed by. Next came a tall, dark-skinned man bearing a primitive but rather touching statue of the mother goddess, Cybele, seated and in long robes, suckling her infant son, whom she cradled on her knee. Many people reached out to touch the magical statue. There followed more villagers with long poles garlanded, or hooked with lanthorns, singing and cheering as they walked round and round the long tables, while everyone else fell in behind them. Children ran and squealed and scurried in every direction, breathless and laughing with excitement.
One red-faced man leapt up on the table and raised his wooden goblet to the rafters. ‘To fertile fields and fat old pigs for another sunny year!’ he cried, and he tossed back his goblet, draining a full sextarius of warm red wine in a few mighty gulps. All joined in the toast at the tops of their voices.
The boy watched and took everything in, his slanted yellow eyes missing nothing, although with some astonishment. Among his own people, as among all lean, ascetic nomad peoples, matters of fertility were kept much more veiled. But among settled peasants and farmers who work on the land, fertility and the copulative act went easily together, and were regarded as essential to the fecundity of the earth. They saw the animals copulate freely, the only outcome of which was a happy one, the birth of new lambs or calves; and they saw no reason to conduct themselves otherwise. For a woman to give herself to a man, husband or no, was seen as an act of pure generosity – indeed, it was regarded as positively unhealthy among these folk not to engage in intercourse at regular intervals.
No wonder the unworldly and nature-fearing Christians of the city condemned all those who did not follow
