‘Tomorrow night, maybe,’ said Attila. ‘There are no lights in this valley for miles. There’s no choice.’
Orestes watched his sister cough and gasp for breath. After a little while, he drew off his own blanket and laid it over her. Then he curled up against her and closed his eyes and began to shiver.
Attila watched a while longer. Then he drew off his own blanket and got up and went over and laid it over her likewise. He lay down on the other side of her, and closed his eyes, and began to shiver.
Some nights they begged successfully for shelter, or the suspicious country people allowed them at least to sleep in their barns, and gave them a bowl of vegetable pottage at dawn. Some days Pelagia seemed better. And some days not. One morning she awoke and coughed so violently that flecks of blood flew from her mouth and spotted her hands and arms, and she wept with fear. Her brother cradled her to his chest and said that she would get better soon. When spring came and when it got warmer, she would feel better. It was just a winter cold. She looked at him with her huge, orphan eyes and said nothing.
Not long afterwards, Attila awoke to the early dawn and saw Orestes sitting beside his sister, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms hugged tightly round them. Attila called to him, but Orestes didn’t stir. He called again, and finally the Greek slaveboy looked up. His face was streaked with tears.
They dug a shallow trench as best they could, and laid Pelagia in it wrapped in a blanket. They found sprigs of rowan and gorse to cover her, and laid rue and the red berries of bryony around her gentle head, and heaped the earth over her. Orestes wept uncontrollably. Attila went into the woods and found a flat piece of bark. He handed it to Orestes with his pocket knife and went away again.
A few minutes later the slaveboy was ready to leave. Attila went over to the small grave of sad dimensions, and read the lettering on the bark: ‘ Pelagia, much beloved, sleeps with her parents now’.
Attila showed Orestes another piece of bark that he had painstakingly carved with the point of his sword. In one corner was a rough outline of a bear, and below it was an old epitaph on a young slavegirl, which his Greek pedagogue had made him learn by heart and which now came back to him in all its simple, heart-wrenching force: ‘ Rest on her lightly, earth and dew, She put so little weight on you.’
Orestes wiped the tears from his eyes and nodded. Attila went over and laid the inscription at the other end of the grave. He bowed his head and said a prayer to his father Astur, the Father of All. Then he went back and stood beside Orestes and waited until he was ready. They walked on together into the mountains.
13
The two boys walked for many days, climbing higher and higher into the towering Julian Alps. The weather so far was mercifully cool and clear, the air sharp and aromatic with the pines. They spoke little.
Late one afternoon, as the sun was going down in the west, they found themselves forced to descend rather than climb, because of the unassailable steepness of the surrounding mountains. They followed a narrow track which led down into a deep, dark valley where the evening mist was already beginning to settle. They muttered prayers and supplications to their gods under their breath, for each boy felt in his bones that this valley breathed the air of other worlds.
They came to the edge of a dark river which sang none of a river’s usual song of mirth and life as it ran, but flowed on in black, inky silence through the heart of the valley, muted and full of foreboding. The river’s edge was lined with the mournful, lamenting shapes of willow and aspen, and the mist gathered thick on the water. The boys stepped uneasily through dense growths of small, stunted oak and hawthorn, thickly hung with mosses and lichens that muffled the very air they breathed. Among the rocks grew maidenhair fern, and the pools were thick with marsh horsetail. Not a breath of wind was felt in that dank valley, and no birds sang. They felt that no human being had ever walked here before them.
At last, without a word being spoken, for fear of what terrible guardians of that unholy place their voices might awaken, they settled under the low branches of a tree for shelter, and wrapped their blankets tightly round them. Neither looked at the other, and both felt a profound desolation in their souls. The chilling mist folded in about them and they could see no more than a few feet in front of their faces. They longed to be away again, far away from this demon-haunted valley, to breathe the free, clear air of the mountaintops, and to see before them the long way to the North. But they knew they must first creep through this dread place, silent and unnoticed if they could, for someone, something, was watching them.
Attila was drifting off into fearful but exhausted sleep when at his side Orestes started up.
‘What was that?’ hissed Orestes, his hare-eyes staring.
Attila awoke fully and closed his fingers round his sword-hilt. ‘What?’
‘Through the trees. Over there.’
But they could see nothing except the eerie shapes of the trees through the wreaths of freezing mist. They looked a little longer, then Attila said, ‘It was nothing. Go to sleep.’
They settled down again and each pretended to be asleep. But both lay wide awake, their limbs trembling, and not only for cold.
The air around them stirred and whispered, ‘We are the Music Makers,
And we are the Dreamers of Dreams.’
The boys shot up and stared wildly around.
Attila, knowing they had been discovered, and feeling that familiar surge of contempt for any injury or death that might come – since come it must, one day – cried out into the all-enveloping mist, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’
Orestes shrank to hear his companion yell out into the night so fearlessly, but Attila was emboldened by the hot surge of his angry and indignant spirit. He leapt to his feet, brandishing his bright, unsheathed sword and slicing it through the invulnerable mist and darkness.
‘Who are you? Come on out and show yourselves!’ He held his sword out before him, the muscles in his arms as tense as the blade itself. ‘Come on!’
The trees around them seemed to pause for a moment, contemplating this small, fierce boy in their midst. Then something happened to the mist between the trees. It drew apart, like a veil, and the gloom and closeness of that haunted valley, which had weighed upon the boys so heavily, lifted a little. There even seemed to be a source of light shining down upon them from above, stronger than any moon could be. They saw a figure standing among the trees a little way off, and were not afraid.
Orestes immediately thought it was Jesus, come to save them from the surrounding daemons of the mist. Attila thought it was perhaps the ghost of his dead mother. But the figure in its long white robe came nearer, and they saw that it was a young girl, her hair braided like that of a priestess.
She came closer still and stopped before them. ‘She plays in a sunlit field,’ she said softly, her pale grey eyes never leaving the eyes of Orestes.
‘Wha – what?’ he stammered.
She reached out and laid her hand on his head, and pushed him down with some force. Orestes knelt at her feet, and the girl said, ‘Rome bore her, Aquileia destroyed her, Aquileia will be destroyed. But now we see her. She plays in a field of buttercups. And now her mother comes to her and finds her, and they run down to a clear stream. She has made a necklace of daisies for her mother. See how her mother is laughing. And there is a cow, we see a brown cow with glossy flanks, and Pelagia pats its damp nose and laughs.’
Attila saw with wonder that tears were coursing down Orestes’ cheeks.
‘She is happy now,’ said the girl. ‘So happy.’
A breath of wind blew around them for a moment, and the mist cleared. A gleam of pale sunshine came through from the skies above, for night had passed – in a matter of minutes, it seemed – and the sunshine fell on the kneeling boy, haloing him in the pale gold of dawnlight.
There was a long silence. At last the girl took her hand away from Orestes’ forehead and slowly he stirred, as if awakening from a long sleep.
The girl turned and walked away into the mist-shrouded trees.
‘Wait!’ cried Attila.
