She walked on.
‘Come on,’ he yelled, grabbing Orestes by the arm and hauling him roughly to his feet.
The two of them stumbled after her into the mist. As they ran, barely able to see the trees before them, they heard the soft voice again, but now it sounded like a mysterious chorus of voices chanting in unison.
‘We are the Music Makers,
And we are the Dreamers of Dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.’
At last they emerged from the dense mist of the woods, and ran out into a sunlit glade beneath a black, overhanging cliff that towered above their heads. There was the dark opening of a cave at the base of the cliff, and beside it grew a tree which, in the sudden break of early morning sunshine, looked as if its boughs were golden. Attila ran headfirst into the tree before he could stop, and snapped off one of its delicate lower branches with the force of his onward rush. The girl, who had paused in the mouth of the cave, glanced back over her shoulder. When she saw what he had done, the trace of an enigmatic smile crossed her face.
‘Well,’ she said, as if something had been confirmed for her. Then she looked across at the panting Greek boy. ‘Thus far and no further for you, greatest friend and greatest betrayer.’
Orestes scowled. ‘What do you mean, “betrayer”?’ he said.
‘Greatest friend unto death, and greatest betrayer thereafter.’ She stretched out her arm towards him. ‘O little father of the last and least, sleep now.’
Without fuss or drama, Orestes trotted over to the edge of the glade where the sunlight caught the edge of the trees, lay down, and instantly fell asleep.
The girl looked at Attila, and the smile vanished from her face. ‘This is for you alone,’ she said. She turned and walked into the cave.
At first Attila could just make out the dim white shape of the girl ahead of him, as silent and flowing as a ghost through a graveyard. But very soon it was so dark that he could not even see that much. He simply kept walking, as if into a void, trusting that it was his destiny to do so.
‘Follow on, Attila, follow on,’ chanted the girl mockingly from somewhere ahead, deep in the darkness of the mountains. ‘For surely you will never follow another again! O leader, O conqueror, O great lord and king!’
The boy did not reply, but followed as bidden.
The walls of rock around him echoed to voices, the girl’s voice and manifold voices chanting in the same tone and time. They hailed him, the voices echoing from the dank walls of the mountains, in a tone that he feared, for there was both mockery and supreme knowledge in those chanting voices combined.
‘All hail, Attila, son of Mundzuk, Lord of All and None!’
‘O Lord of the World from the rising to the setting of the sun!’
‘The Eagle and the Serpent fought, and fell in Italy!’
‘O Lord of the World from the desert to the shores of the Western Sea!’
The voices grew louder, echoing bewilderingly from every direction as he stumbled on, gritting his teeth in grim defiance, sometimes stumbling against the walls of the passageway and grazing his arms and legs against the cruel and jagged rocks, speckled with mica. His head spun with the words that tumbled in the dank air around him, but he was determined, as determined as ever, not to surrender to fear or force, or ever to halt or turn back.
‘In the time of the Seven Sleepers, Lord of All!’ cried the voices in deafening unison.
‘In the time of the shaking of the City of Gold, Lord of All!’
‘In the time of the Last Battle, Lord of All!’
Abruptly the clamour of the voices died, and he saw ahead of him a cave, lit with flickering torches and with a low fire burning in the centre, and a single voice whispered in the air around him. The voice was soft and pitying and maternal, and his heart was torn by its sound, for something told him that it was the voice of his mother.
‘O Attila,’ whispered the woman’s voice, ‘O Little Father of Nothing.’
The boy emerged shaken into the torchlit cave and found the young girl standing opposite him with both arms outstretched.
She stepped across the fire to him and closed his eyelids with her thumbs. Then she leant close to him and spat once upon each eyelid. She took up a handful of ash from the edge of the fire, and blew it in his face. When he opened his eyes he was blind. He cried out in fear, but she only told him to sit.
‘Seeing eyes be blind, that blind eyes may see!’ she said harshly.
Trembling with fear, but still determined neither to weep nor to flee, he sat awkwardly down on the hard stone ground. The air was filled with words, and his blinded vision was filled with images. Images of battle, of cities burning, and the thunderous sound of horses’ hooves on the plains. He started in shock when he heard the girl’s voice, for now it sounded as ancient and hoarse as if it came from the ancient Sibyl herself. As ancient as Tithonus, who asked for eternal life but not eternal youth, and was granted it, until he grew so old and tiny and withered that he was no more than a chirruping cricket in the grass.
‘I have more memories than a thousand years,’ croaked the voice.
Even in the depths of the mountain, a soft whisper of wind seemed to sigh back among the rocks.
The ancient voice in the cave said,
‘Four will fight for the end of the world,
One with an empire,
One with a sword,
Two will be saved and one will be heard,
One with a son
And one with a word.’
Although dizzy with fear and disorientation, Attila nevertheless felt a thrill of excitement run down his spine. He had a dim sense that he had heard these words before, though he could not remember where, and he found himself thinking of Aeneas’ journey to the underworld, which he had once studied wearily under the stern eye of his Greek pedagogue. Now he had the uncanny and terrifying sensation that Virgil’s great work was not merely poetry but history, and that the story had gone into reverse, falling backwards into chaos and the fiery abyss – and that he was part of it all…
In perfect consonance with his thoughts, the cracked voice in the cave spoke again, saying, ‘They will call you Anti-Christus, the Scourge of God, but they do not understand. You are not Anti-Christ. You are Anti-Aeneas!’ She cackled madly, and told the boy to open his eyes. He did so, feeling the sticky mess of spittle and ash parting over his eyelids. And then his eyes flared wide with horror, as he saw the ancient thing that sat before him in that unhallowed cave.
It was a haggard crone, toothless, blind and unimaginably old. Her ancient, clawed hands trembled in the firelight, and rheum ran from her blind white eyes and stained the furrows of her parchment cheeks like snailtrails. She wore tattered robes as grey as ash. She spat into her withered palms, and her spittle was as thick and black as tar. She looked up at him, and her watery old eyes gleamed sightlessly. ‘To build a new city you must first destroy the old!’ she cried. ‘But keep the stones perhaps for your foundations!’ She paused and when she spoke again her voice was more grave and rasping. ‘But remember this, and this above all.
‘By a King of Kings from Palestine
Two empires were sown,
By a King of Terror from the east
Two empires were o’erthrown…’
She leant forward, and scooped up some ash from the edge of the fireside. Through the dancing flames, her mouth made a toothless, lipless O.
‘Only youth is beautiful,’ she croaked, more softly. ‘But old age is sometimes wise.’
She threw the ash back into the fire, and the cave filled with black smoke. Attila coughed and choked and scrambled to his feet, searching blindly for the exit. But it was useless. When the air cleared again and the torchlight gleamed once more through the dust, he saw only a young girl sitting cross-legged against the wall
