a more terrible sting. The soldier howled with agony, clutching his hands to his face, which spurted gore between his splayed fingers, and tumbled backwards. A few moments later, a muffled thump told the boy that he had rolled off the ledge to the ground below. Attila heard distant shouts and roars of anger, and he bared his teeth like a wolf in the darkness. Then he turned and crawled back down the slope to his unseen cave.
After some time, the sounds of the soldiers died away. But Attila was no fool. He would not emerge from that cave for at least a day.
He found by touch a place on the wall where water trickled down from the rock above, and he put his tongue to it and drank what he could. The water tasted green and slimy, but it would do. It would keep him alive a little longer. He would survive. He would always survive.
He crouched all day in the cave, his arms wrapped tightly round his knees. When night came, even the sliver of daylight through the crevice vanished, and he was in utter darkness. His fear of enclosed spaces came back to him with full force, and he imagined the most terrible of things. He imagined a deep, distant rumbling of rock, and then the overhang shifting, just a few inches, and his escape route being sealed for ever. He would sit in absolute darkness, unable to see or move, and scream until he died.
But he gritted his teeth and willed himself to sit out the night. If he returned to the crevice and the upper air, the soldiers would be waiting, and they would drag him out like a rat from a hole, and crowd around to drive their swords into him with all their anger and frustration. He screwed his eyes shut so that at least he had the light of the red and green stars that played upon his eyeballs, and he waited.
He awoke from troubled dreams when he heard a scuttling in the darkness. A bat, he told himself. But it was bigger than a bat. It was more of a shuffling. He prayed that it was not a cave-bear. He prayed to Astur his father in the eternal blue sky that there was not another entrance to the cave, and that a monstrous cave-bear had not returned home, its dark fur glistening with blood.
He drew his sword and stared into the darkness, but it was like trying to see through tar. He couldn’t make out so much as his hand in front of his face. He had the horrible feeling that someone – some thing – was at this very moment squatting malevolently, immediately in front of him, its face only inches from his own, its black eyes boring into his, its long fangs dripping. He even dared to sniff the air a little, hoping against hope… He smelt no foul carnivorous breath, nothing but damp cave air. Yet still he could hear the snuffling noise, and it was coming closer.
He thought of his people’s stories about foul creatures which lived in darkness and crept out at night to crawl through the trees, or fly through the night air with their outstretched bats’ wings. They alighted under the eaves of lonely cottages to sniff the air, crawling inside to fix their sharp fangs into the soft flesh and to drink the blood of babies, leaving them only a black and withered dried-out husk in their cot, to be found by their screaming mothers in the morning. Perhaps the sound was one of those ghastly vampires, flesh moonwhite and translucent, eyes like jelly, scuttling home to sleep with a bellyful of babies’ blood. He pressed himself against the wall and held his sword more tightly. You could not kill a vampire, they said. Metal would pass through it as it would pass through mist. And when they had sucked your blood, you became one of them.
He heard a weird, high-pitched cry that was almost a scream, and he could have sworn, though it was impossible in the night, that it was the high, lonely cry of a sparrowhawk. Or maybe a vampire…
But it was no vampire who spoke from the darkness beyond. It was the voice of, he guessed, a young boy.
‘Pelagia!’ the voice whispered. ‘Are you all right?’
Attila kept silent. There was no other noise.
‘Pelagia!’
There was another pause, and then beyond the entrance of the cave there came a soft scraping. Suddenly against the blackness there flared a small yellow flame, and by its dim light, Attila saw a slim, grimy hand reach in, followed by the body of a young boy, two or three years his junior, gripping a spear in his other hand. He set the flickering lamp on a stone ledge and looked around. The instant he saw Attila he crouched lower and aimed his spear straight at his belly.
‘If you have touched her,’ he hissed. ‘If you have harmed her in any way…’
‘Who?’ whispered Attila, bewildered, but keeping his sword up in readiness all the same.
The boy glanced across the cave, and there, by the dim light of the little lamp, Attila saw for the first time that there was a roll of blankets against the wall opposite.
The boy said no more but scuttled over to the blankets and drew back the edge very gently. Attila realised to his astonishment that he had shared the cave all night with a young girl, and had never known a thing. The poor waif must have been terrified, yet he had never heard her breathe, let alone scream. She was only about six or seven, and her face was pale and drawn. The boy leant down, kissed her forehead and whispered a prayer of thanks. The girl turned her head where she lay and looked across at Attila, her eyes huge in her thin face, her lips pale and bloodless.
‘He killed a man,’ she whispered. ‘A soldier. Over there.’
‘That was the blood on the ledge?’ said the boy jumpily. ‘That was your doing?’
Attila nodded. ‘I didn’t know anyone else was in here. I was hiding.’
‘Well, so are we. You an escaped slave as well?’
Attila suppressed the lofty contempt that he felt at this slur on his ancestry. ‘No,’ he said with as much evenness as he could muster. ‘I’m a… from the north. I was taken as a prisoner of war. I’m going back to my people.’
‘Beyond the Great River? You mean, beyond the empire?’
Attila nodded.
The boy stared at him. Like his sister, he had wide, staring, hare-like eyes, although he looked healthy enough. Skinny and undernourished, maybe, nervy and excitable, but well enough for a runaway slave.
He said, ‘Pelagia and me – I’m Orestes, by the way – we ran away.’
‘They were horrid,’ whispered Pelagia. ‘And fat. And the mistress of the house used to stick pins in us if we didn’t work hard enough, or if we spilt anything.’
Orestes nodded rapidly. ‘Actual pins. In our arms, or in the backs of our hands. So we ran away.’
Attila smiled. ‘Well, that’s three of us.’
Orestes stared at Attila a while longer, then he said, ‘Can we come with you?’
‘Not really. I go much faster than you. Anyway,’ he added, a little brutally, ‘your sister’s not well.’
‘How do you know she’s my sister?’
‘You look the same.’
The boy nodded again. ‘Yeah, well, she is my sister. She’ll be all right.’ He leant over her: she seemed to be asleep again, her breathing fast and shallow. ‘You’ll see.’
‘You didn’t come across any soldiers out there?’
Orestes shook his head.
Attila grunted. ‘Well, soon as it’s dawn I’m off. I wish you luck.’
‘There’s another way out of the cave if you need it. Just be safe. Down there.’ He pointed.
‘Well why didn’t you tell me before?’ he said with some anger.
The boy stared wide-eyed at him for a little while longer, then lay down to sleep beside his sister.
Attila had only been walking a mile or so, in the grey light of dawn, when he heard footsteps behind him. He hid up and waited, and soon there came in sight the boy Orestes, hand in hand with his sister. Their faces were bright in the chilly early air, their cheeks flushed. Pelagia’s were too flushed, red with hectic spots.
Attila waited for them, then stepped out. ‘I told you,’ he said.
‘Have you got any food?’ asked Orestes. ‘We’re really hungry, Pelagia especially.’
Attila looked at the girl, and then back at the boy. Reluctantly he reached into his leather bag and handed them some stale bread. ‘It’s all I’ve got,’ he said.
They broke it in two and began to eat. The girl chewed slowly and painfully, but she ate it all.
‘Thanks,’ said Orestes.
‘It was nothing,’ said Attila sourly. He walked on.
The two children walked on behind him.
After a while, he turned back and said, ‘That noise you made, outside the cave, like a sparrowhawk. That was you, wasn’t it?’
