ancient wooden boat with a single wooden oar lying in it, gently sliding to and fro in the wash from the river. They needn’t have bothered with Aquincum.
Orestes crept down to the creek, and a surprised moorhen erupted from the reeds and beat away across the dark river, setting his heart thumping anew with fright. He stepped painfully into the boat. It was taking in water slowly, an inch or two swilling muddily in the bottom, and it stank of old fish. It would be no easy matter to move and steer the boat with a single oar, and maybe bail, too, with only his cupped hands, across a mile of the great flowing river. But it was a boat, for all that, and a boat meant freedom.
He squatted in the bottom of the boat, the muddy water oozing over his bandaged toes, clutched the end of the flatboard oar, and brooded. That stinging denial of Attila’s, was, he knew, his salvation. That was why he sat here now, on the verge of reaching freedom in the ungoverned lands on the farther shore. While the tattooed boy who called himself a prince was incarcerated in a locked and bolted dungeon reeking of ordure, somewhere back in the city, being ‘questioned’ by his unsmiling captors.
Orestes looked up at the clear winter stars. Did they care what happened to him or the other boy? Did they care what he did next? Did it matter if they cared or not? When he looked down the stars still shimmered at him inescapably from the surface of the black water. They would not leave him alone.
At last he sighed, laid the oar down against the side of the boat, and stepped painfully back out onto the slimy bank of the creek. He crept up through the reeds and the galingale, and limped slowly back towards the city.
Attila was manacled hand and foot, as the burly white-haired officer had ordered, and half dragged, half carried up a narrow, spiralling stone staircase to a small upper room with a single, strongly barred window. There he was set down upon a stool, and two guards stood by him with spears set firmly in front of his darting eyes.
After a few minutes, fresh from his dinner, the white-haired officer came strolling in and ordered the door to be shut behind him. He was still mopping his mouth with a linen napkin, and his demeanour was more relaxed now that he had a bellyful of food and wine.
‘Just wait till my people hear how I have been treated,’ hissed Attila, before the officer could say a word. ‘Just wait till my grandfather Uldin hears. He will not endure such an insult to his blood.’
The officer raised an eyebrow. ‘Who says he will ever hear of it? You are escaping no further now. Your next stop, and your place of residence for a long, long time to come, will be the imperial court at Ravenna.’
‘Never,’ said Attila. ‘I will die first.’
‘Spoken like a man,’ said the officer. Despite himself, he was beginning to admire, or at least enjoy, the lad’s sheer, naked ferocity. As one might enjoy the spectacle of a wolf-fight in the arena.
‘Neverthless,’ he went on, ‘that is where you are bound – and with the agreement of your people, don’t forget. You are a hostage. It is all a perfectly civilised arrangement.’
‘Civilisation,’ spat the boy. ‘I’ve been there before. Give me anywhere else but civilisation.’
The boy and the man eyed each other in silence for a while. Then the boy looked away.
The officer said, ‘I have never been far beyond the river. Just the occasional punitive expedition when the Alamanni or the Marcomanni have got uppity. Tell me about your country beyond.’
My country? thought Attila. How would you understand my country? You Roman, with your mind as straight and unwavering as a road? How to describe to you, you oaf, my beloved country?
He took a deep breath, pulled at his cruel wrist-manacles, and settled his hands in his lap. He said, ‘My country is a land without boundaries or frontiers or armies. Every man there is a warrior. Every woman is the mother of warriors. Cross the grey Danube and you are in my country, and you may ride for weeks and months and never leave it. There is nothing there but the green, green grassland of the steppe, feathergrass and hare’s-tail grass as far as the eye can see. As far as the eagle flies, a hundred days’ riding eastwards into the rising sun, it is still the green grassland of my country.’
‘You have an active imagination, boy.’
Attila ignored him. He could no longer see him, or even the dank walls of the dungeon around him. He could see only what he described.
‘In March,’ he said, ‘the grasslands flash young and green like the kingfisher’s breast on the Dnieper. In April they are purple with saxifrage and vetch, and in May they are yellow, like a brimstone’s wings. There, many days’ riding beyond the steppes, which are a thousand times the size of your empire, with never a fence or a barrier or a plot of land that is owned or fenced in, nothing to stop you galloping all day and all night, as far as you want, as if you and your horse were flying… There, there is a freedom such as no Roman has ever known.’
The officer stood very still. The two guards did not move. They listened.
‘Beyond the steppes, there rise the white mountains, where the souls of the holy men are fed when they go to dream and commune with the ancestors. Beyond the black waters of Lake Baikal, and the Snow Mountains, and the Blue Mountains, are at last the Altai Mountains, the soul and navel of the world, where all men must go who would be wise or powerful. The high Altai are seen for many days’ riding, high over the plains and the eastern deserts. They are the home of all magicians, all shamans and holy men, and all who hold converse with the Eternal Blue Sky since time began. They say that even your god Christ walked there, in the time before his time of sacrifice.’
He fell silent. It was blasphemy that he had spoken. He would say no more, for even to talk of the Altai was treachery to any who did not know.
After a long pause, the officer said quietly, ‘And I always heard that the Huns had no poetry.’
‘The Huns have poetry,’ said Attila indignantly, ‘but they entrust it not to paper but to memory. All that is holiest and most dangerous is entrusted to memory alone.’
The officer was silent again for a while. Then he nodded to the two guards and they opened the door. With a sombre tread he walked from the room, and left the boy to his dreams of his unknown country.
Attila lay on his side on the lumpy straw pallet, comfort impossible with his arms wrenched behind him and his wrists manacled. They had said he would be unmanacled tomorrow. But tomorrow was tomorrow.
He could see the bright winter stars through the bars of iron: green and twinkling Vega low on the horizon, and Arcturus, and brilliant Capella. And then he heard the high, distant cry of a sparrowhawk. It came from far below, near the ground, which was wrong, and in the middle of the night, which was even more wrong. A sparrowhawk’s cry, like that of all birds of prey, was a cry of power and triumph, as it wheeled high in the sky in the bright day, and surveyed all the earth below it as its kingdom. He tensed and strained his ears, and after a while the cry came again. Not a real sparrowhawk: it couldn’t be. It was a boy with a shiny blade of grass trembling between his taut thumbs…
He had no grass to answer with, and anyway his hands were not free. Unable to contain the beating of his heart and the hot surge of his blood, he cried out in a loud voice, the cry echoing round the little cell and bringing the guards running. They shot the bolts and flung open the door and roughly demanded what he was up to. He said he must have been having a nightmare. They eyed him suspiciously and then left again, double-bolting the heavy door behind them.
He waited patiently on his straw pallet for the cry to come again. Patience is a nomad. But he heard nothing. Instead, something fell like a shadow across the stars beyond the window. He thought at first that it was a night- flying bird come to roost on the narrow shelf of stone outside the bars, but it was gone in an instant. Then it came again, and fell with a barely audible thud on the ledge. He got up and hobbled painfully to the tiny window. There on the ledge was the end of a knotted rope. He didn’t stop to consider, but hurled himself at the bars, reaching his head forward to try and grab the rope with his teeth. He could not reach it. He tried again, flinging himself at the bars with bared teeth, but it was hopeless. The knot trembled on the very verge of the ledge, and fell away and was gone. He sank back in despair.
Again and again the rope-end flew through the night air towards the little barred window, and again and again it fell away uselessly. Attila stopped even waiting for it to come. And then at last, thrown in a wider arc than usual, it sailed cleanly, miraculously, through the bars and fell back against the inner wall. Attila was on his feet immediately, grabbing the knot and holding on to it for all he was worth. There was a tug, and he tugged back. Then a much stronger weight, and he gasped with pain as his pinioned arms were wrenched upwards with the force. He sank to the ground and still clutching the rope he laid his whole weight upon it and braced his feet against the wall. He hoped and prayed it would be enough.
Twice the rope began to slip and his arm muscles screamed in pain, but he held on. The rope trembled in his grasp like a fishline. And then a shadow blocked the stars through the window, and a piping, boyish voice whispered
