their god as pagani, which meant simply ‘country-dwellers’. The people who dwelt in the fertile southern valleys of the empire had long been most resistant to that gaunt, grim-visaged, sin-obsessed desert-religion from the east; and long would remain so. Here, where greenery and the ancient gods still throve, fertility and the breeding powers of Nature were still worshipped above all else.
More wine flowed from freshly unstopped barrels, and the village musicians began to puff away on their reed-pipes, or saw away at their coarse-toned three-stringed lutes, and people began to dance and sing. They sang ‘ Bacche, Bacche venies!’ and ‘ In taberno quando sumus ’, and many other folk-songs of love and wine and the earth, which they had sung in these valleys before the grand poets in Rome ever put pen to paper.
Si puer cum puellula
Moraretur in cellula
Felix coniunctio!
Amore sucrescente,
Pariter e medio
Avulso procul tedio,
Fit ludus ineffabilis
Membris, lacertis, labiis!
If a boy and little girl
Tarry in a little room,
Happy is their copulation!
Love arises with elation,
Weariness flees far away
When they hide in bed to play,
And their nameless game begins,
Of sighs and whispers, lips and limbs…
‘O mercy, mercy!’ cried the old man with the spittled mouth and the unshaven chin, jigging around in the dance with the rest. ‘You take me back to my young sapling days, and I’m all of a frustration that my member will not perform as it did once, in the swelling springtime of my lust.’
At which everyone told him to pipe down, and said they didn’t want to hear about his member, or the swelling springtime of his lust. Someone poured a full goblet of red wine over his white locks, pronouncing that he was now anointed and blessed by Priapus himself. Whether the charm worked was unclear, but the wine trickled over his face and down his furrowed cheeks, and the ancient dancer licked it happily enough from his beard.
‘This time next year we’ll have a carving of a crucified man on the table,’ cried another wag.
‘You must be joking!’ many voices objected.
‘A jolly feast it’d be with that in the middle of it,’ called another.
‘No drinking, no fucking, no farting,’ roared another. ‘Thank Lord Jove I’m not a craven Christian.’
Attila felt his hand taken warmly in another and squeezed. It was the rosy-cheeked daughter, pulling him away from the crowd.
‘Come on, then,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a nice little hut just round the corner.’
The thin, pale girl watched them silently as they went. But the mother winked at them. ‘You treat him gently now, dearie,’ she beamed.
The night air was chill and the sky was clear, the stars shining coldly down from where their fires burnt eternally in the heavens. Attila felt his chest tighten with cold and fear, but his hand in the girl’s hand was warm as she led him over to a small straw-thatched hut near a cottage. His heart was thumping so loudly he thought she must be able to hear. She pulled open the rickety, cobwebbed door and drew him inside. He pulled the door closed behind them, but through the open window came enough pale moonlight for them to see each other’s faces: his drawn and nervous, but with jaw set firm at the prospect of this new and frightening journey; and her eyes sparkling with delight at the prospect of a new conquest.
‘I should know your name,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘No names. And you tell me no names neither.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ she said, and sighed. ‘Because I know you’ll be gone in the morning. So what’s the point?’ She smiled a little sadly. ‘Now then…’
She pushed him down and knelt with him in the hay, and leaning forward she put her mouth to his and they kissed. It was very silent. After a little while she slipped her tongue between his lips. Attila had been kissed before, of course, in greeting – even, revoltingly, by Eumolpus when they were first introduced – and on the lips as well, as was the custom in the Roman court. That was one Roman custom that no barbarian nation, and certainly not the Huns, would ever adopt.
But this was a different kind of kiss, thrillingly close and intimate, and he immediately felt a surge and warming of his blood. He kissed the girl breathlessly in return, their tongues running over each other, entwining, their mouths opening to each other, their hands reaching out to stroke cheeks and hair…
‘My, you are the greedy little one, aren’t you?’ she whispered. He could see her white teeth in the moonlight as she smiled. She lay back in the hay and pulled her shift up to her waist. She opened her thighs to him, and ran her middle finger, the index lascivius as physicians have named it (although perhaps rather lascivious of them to have done so) down between her ripe lips.
‘Come on then, my darling,’ she said softly. ‘And here, too,’ she said, pulling her tunic down off her slim shoulders and exposing her breasts, ‘touch me here too, here, put your mouth to my breast, kiss me there, and with your tongue, oh my darling, oh…’
Her sighs and gasps filled the air of the little hut; the boy was silent and enrapt, the girl whispering all the time as she guided him and stroked his tousled hair. ‘Oh I love that, I do love that, here, kiss them, take them in your mouth, gently, yes lick them like that, suckle them, oh that is so sweet, do they taste sweet to you, oh my darling, that feels so sweet, and there, oh yes, inside me, touch me there, oh sweet gods, oh I love you, my darling, I do love you…’
And as she sighed and gasped, she reached down and pulled up the boy’s tunic, and felt for his hard cock, and said nice things about how he might be small for his age but that wasn’t, that wouldn’t shame a grown man, that wouldn’t. She spread her thighs wide and guided him inside her and closed her thighs tightly round his waist, and together they made excited young love for a short while, before the boy shuddered between her legs and pressed his cheek against hers and hugged her tightly and tensed and gasped and then slowly relaxed in her arms, his face pressed against her breasts. A few moments later he was asleep.
She looked down and stroked his tousled hair. ‘Typical,’ she whispered.
‘And how was that, you little monkey?’ cried the girl’s mother, grabbing him round the waist. ‘You been outside with my daughter, I know you have, rifling through her treasures like a little bandit. I knew you for a little robber the moment I saw you outside. And I know what you’ve been up to, smile like that, like puss with the milk. Like a hedgehog at a young cow’s udders, look at you, almost licking your lips you are.’
‘Mother, don’t embarrass him,’ said the girl.
‘Embarrass him? He knows well enough what he’s been up to,’ she laughed. ‘And I know what he’s been up to, too, eh? Boy that age, I bet you’d be up for another feather-bed jig later on, eh, my sweet-heart? How’s about something a little more grown-up later on tonight, hey? A bit of a lying-down dance with her old ma, eh? A bit of moaning at the ceiling and groaning at the moon?’
‘Mother!’ cried the girl in outrage.
And then the bawdy peasant-woman was away, whirling among the dancers with flushed cheeks and saucy eyes, her clay cup of wine held high in the smoky air.
Attila and the girl sat down at the table again, both hungry after their exertions. Under the table he took the girl’s hand and squeezed it tight. Save me, he thought. The girl squeezed back and leant over and whispered in his ear, her slim hot hand resting on the back of his neck, ‘You sleep in my bed tonight, don’t you worry.’
There was more formal dancing, with lines of men and women advancing towards each other, exchanging kisses in the centre of the hall and retreating again, with giggles and mock-bashfulness, eyes shyly averted even from those who had shared their beds the night before.
Then with still greater dignity, and with all the happy solemnity of the old pagan spirit, the little wreathed olivewood Priapus was taken up, and the whole village processed outside to the edge of the woods, where there
