stood a simple stone shrine. Within, lit by two precious beeswax candles, stood a naked statue of the Great Mother, smiling distantly, with benevolence and power, upon her simple devotees. Both men and women took it in turns to kiss the phallus of Priapus, before the little god was laid reverently between the Great Mother’s thighs. A white woollen veil was drawn over the pair, and they were left in discreet privacy for the night, to couple and so to ensure that the Earth herself should be born again in the spring.
No sooner had the villagers stepped back from the shrine, and bowed their heads one last time to their beloved deities, than there came a hoarse cry through the night air, from the hills above. The frenzied words cascaded down upon them, in a voice as cracked and dry as the wind in dead leaves.
The girl leant close to Attila, so that her soft hair tickled his cheek deliciously, and whispered, ‘It’s a local madman called Holy John.’
The boy nodded. ‘We’ve met,’ he said.
‘Idolators! Fornicators!’ cried Holy John. ‘May Christ have mercy upon all your Christless and unshriven souls! For ye dwell in the very mouth of hell, and are mired in the very mire of the devil’s own bowels in all your lusts and filthy fornications.’
The people looked at each other and guffawed merrily. Some even began to dance, as if his words were a kind of irresistible music.
‘Holy John,’ they cried, raising their foaming mugs of wine as if in salutation. ‘Holy John, come down from the mountain. Welcome to our Feast of the Great Mother, Holy John.’
There was a scuffling in the woods above, and the old man appeared, standing on a jutting rock, looking more wild-eyed than ever, Attila thought. He wore a long, begrimed habit of coarse brown-stuff, his grey beard was matted, and his thin lips worked in a fury. Even from this distance, the boy thought he could smell the old man’s rank odour: many hermits took literally the injunction of St Jerome: that those who have washed in the blood of Christ have no need to wash again.
‘Woe unto you, O Israel, for your filthiness is in your skirts. And, as the prophet Ezekiel saith, you have committed harlotries, and have lusted after your paramours, whose members are like the members of donkeys, and whose emissions are like the emissions of stallions.’
‘Where? Where?’ cried one of the women in the crowd. ‘I could do with some of that!’
‘Wherefore I say unto you-’
But already Holy John upon his rock was being besieged, first by loud obscene cries, so that his cracked and ancient voice was drowned, and then in person, by the girl’s mother, who to the approving roar of the onlookers hauled her considerable bulk up onto the rock below Holy John, and tried to lift his skirts.
‘Away from me, thou Scarlet Woman!’ cried Holy John, trying frantically to hold down his habit which she had hauled up over his scrawny, scabbed old knees, and he continued to preach with what dignity he could muster. ‘Avaunt thee, O thou Jezebel, without sense or shame!’
The crowd was in uproar, until eventually the two of them, hermit and peasant woman, came shuffling in a close-knit but inelegant dance to the edge of the rock and fell in a heap into the crowd below. Some of the sturdier younger men tried to catch them as best they could. No harm was done, and soon Holy John was staggering to his feet again. He retrieved his staff in a fury, and was about to stride off to a safe distance at the edge of the forest when his blazing eyes fell on the face of Attila who stood nearby, watching with great interest.
Holy John seemed horror-struck. His bony forefinger pointed, trembling, at the startled boy. ‘Behold, behold, for the End of Years is upon you!’ he cried.
The crowd fell silent, curious and a little taken aback by the sudden note of fear in the hermit’s voice.
‘For is it not written, in the Book of Daniel, that the king’s daughter of the south shall come to the king of the north, to make an agreement? Aye, and has this not happened in our time, with the daughter of the late Emperor Theodosius, whom they call the Princess Galla Placidia, wedded now to the King of the Goths?’
The crowd stirred and looked uncertain. Such news meant little to them, but a prophecy fulfilled meant much. Attila looked struck by the news: he took a gasp of air, scowling in a fury at some private vision before him.
‘Aye, and is it not written, in the same Prophecy of Daniel, that at the End of Years, a Prince of Terror shall come from the North, and shall utterly destroy you? For he shall come like a whirlwind, with chariots and with many horsemen, and shall overthrow the kingdoms of all the world. And he shall do according to his will, and shall magnify himself above all gods, and shall speak marvellous things even against the God of gods; for he shall magnify himself above all.’ Holy John’s voice rose to a demented shriek, and his finger trembled even more violently in the boy’s face. ‘And upon his face are the marks of his violence. See, see: he comes. He comes!’
At which the boy, to the stunned surprise of the assembled villagers, lashed out and struck the holy man a terrific blow across his face. Holy John staggered backwards, but he did not fall. He leant, gasping, on his staff a little while, blood trickling from his mouth and over his beard. Then he turned and stumbled away until he reached the shadowy edge of the forest. In the gloom they could hardly see him, and wished to see him no more. But still they heard his ancient, dried-out voice, taunting them.
‘Oh, ye are the children of very daemons. Ye are all in the devil’s own mouth, and shall be damned perpetually. And your gods and goddesses are the devils out of hell, one with Moloch and Ishtar and Ashtaroth, whom I shall not name before the Most High God, but Great Whores all, whose only worship is itself a whoring and a fornicating and a revelling in the filthiness of women and of…’
But at this the mood turned ugly. The people of the village were merrily impervious to the insults that Holy John or his fellow Christians hurled at them personally, but could not bear such attacks upon their most treasured mysteries, least of all on the night of the Feast of the Great Mother, and within the hearing of the goddess herself. No matter how festive their mood, they would not countenance Holy John coming down from the mountain and calling their beloved Great Mother, who gave them life and fed them all, a whore. Some of the younger men ran towards Holy John with a mind to give him a beating and a lesson. The old man evidently decided that, on this occasion at least, the one true and vengeful Lord God of Israel could not be relied upon to pluck him out and miraculously save him from this sinful crowd of idolators and fornicators, as He had once saved the Prophet Daniel in the lions’ den. He swirled round and, with a surprising turn of speed for a man of his years, dashed away into the woods and was lost to sight.
The girl and Attila walked slowly back towards the village, side by side.
‘Why did he say that to you?’ she asked. ‘About the End of Years and everything?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
She glanced sideways at him. ‘Where are you from, anyway?’
There was a pause, and then he said, ‘From the north.’ He grinned wolfishly at her in the darkness. ‘A Prince of Terror from the North.’
She eyed him sceptically, and took his hand again. ‘Come on then, my Prince of Terror. Time for another conquest.’
What he hadn’t realised was that, in these poorer parts, although the girl had her own pallet to sleep on, her entire family slept in a single room, up above the animals. Fortunately, perhaps, her entire family consisted of only her mother and her younger sister, the thin, pale, watchful girl with the dark-shadowed eyes. The father had died some years back of a wasting fever.
So that when he and his new love were just reaching the heights of transport, he looked over to see both her sister and her mother lying close by, watching with smiles on their faces, and even whispering to each other about what was going on.
‘Mother!’ cried the girl, covering them both with a sheet.
‘We can still hear you, even so!’ cried her mother.
Despite the proximity of the other two females, however, the boy and girl had only an hour or two of fitful sleep that night, and both looked flushed and tired in the morning.
Before the boy took his leave, the girl and her mother gave him a cloth-wrapped bundle of fresh bread, smoked sausage, dried apricots and figs. There was no sign of the younger sister.
‘There’s a horse tethered at the edge of the wood, round to the west,’ said the boy. ‘About half a mile away.’
‘Whose horse?’ said the mother suspiciously.
‘Mine, of course,’ he said. ‘Only I don’t want it any more. You have it.’
‘How far away did you st-did you get it from?’
‘A long way away,’ said the boy. ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. It’s a good horse.’
