dragged himself onward, his lungs aflame as if he had just run five miles. Every muscle in his body ached. Even his neck ached terribly – he couldn’t understand why – but he went on.
Upriver, there was no sign of the Hun boy but for a stream of bubbles on the surface. No more than a diving otter might make in the black, starlit waters.
At last Orestes got to the boat and hauled it down to deeper water. He pushed off, utterly exhausted, with the single oar and with the stick on each side. Then, almost collapsed in the bow of the boat, which was dangerously low in the water, he began to paddle, a stroke each side of the bow, like a barbarian in a dug-out canoe on the Rhine.
He didn’t know what he was supposed to do next. His head spun, his limbs burnt, his eyes were almost blind with sweat and dizziness. He heard shouts from the bank, and heavy splashes, and knew he had been spotted, and that the cavalrymen were dismounting and diving in, or ordering their own boats upriver, or even plunging in on horseback like true Batavians, as the Hun boy had said.
Then he was aware of another sound, and looking blearily down he saw two hands appear on the gunwale of the boat, then two arms and a soggy top-knot, and then a round head with yellow, glittering eyes. With a great gasp and heave, as if he still had as much energy and strength left in him as ever, Attila was up over the side of the rocking boat and into the back.
‘Give me the oar!’ he shouted, grabbing it from the startled Orestes, and he began to paddle furiously, one side then the other.
Dark shapes bobbed on the river upstream: the heads of men and horses. Downstream, near the fort, showed the black hulls of the legion’s river fleet. But they were too slow. The boys were already in midstream and crossing fast.
Attila knew it. ‘Here’ he said, tossing the oar to Orestes, who took it with weariness but without complaint. To Orestes’ astonishment, Attila got to his feet, and began dancing like a lunatic in the stern of the dangerously unstable little boat. He shook his fists and tossed his angry head at the speechless soldiers staring from the bank and the river.
‘You fucking arseholes! You thick, Roman bastards!’ he screamed. ‘You useless fucking scumsucking motherfucking sad-arsed abortions of men! You haven’t got a hope in hell of catching us, you steaming sacks of mule-shit! Come and get us if you can, you fucking Roman wankers! Astur piss on you all!’ He stopped jigging for a moment and turned, raised his tunic and bared his buttocks at them. Still there came no sound from the soldiers or their open-mouthed officers.
He resumed his taunting. ‘You couldn’t run a bath, you couldn’t invade a fucking Corinthian brothel, you feckless big-nosed cunts! You dog-breathed turds of the devil! You try swimming after us and you’ll sink to the bottom like lead weights, shitbrains! Come on, try and get us! Come on! Arseholes!’
He whirled to face Orestes, grinning with insane delight, his eyes aflame with a burning, furious madness. In the darkness, Orestes couldn’t see the soldiers’ faces, but he saw that their dim shapes had stopped dead in the shallows, still mounted. He could imagine their expressions.
Attila turned back again. ‘Losers! Abortions! Scumsuckers! Pigfuckers! You’re all going to rot in hell! Rome’s going to fall! We’ll be back, and there’ll be nothing left of your rotting fucking empire but a heap of blood and rubble!’ He wiped spittle from his mouth on his ragged sleeve. ‘And fuck your emperor, and his sister, too! Fuck him right up his scrawny chicken arse!’
Almost choking with lunatic laughter, he sank down in the stern of the boat. He leant his head back, raised his fists at the stars and cried one last time, ‘Fucker-r-r-s!’
At dawn, a company of the Palatine Guard arrived at Aquincum.
‘You have the Hun boy held captive,’ rasped their commander, a lieutenant with half his face collapsed and shapeless from injury. ‘Where is he?’
‘Dismount and salute when you address your superior officer!’ roared the colonel, red with rage.
In answer, the Palatine lieutenant simply held out a sheet of parchment with the imperial seal on it. The colonel lost his confidence at that moment.
‘The Hun boy,’ repeated the lieutenant.
‘He… he’s escaped,’ said the colonel.
The Palatine looked at him in disbelief. ‘Escaped? From a frontier fort?’
‘He had an accomplice. What do you want him for, anyway?’
‘No business of yours.’
The colonel looked away over the river, quite calm now, in the face of his impending punishment at the edge of the sword. ‘He has gone away across the Danube, back to his people.’
The Palatine looked over the river likewise and said sourly, ‘So. I suppose we will never hear from him again.’
The colonel replied, ‘Oh, you will hear from him again.’
The Palatine remembered what they said about dying men’s prophecies, and under his gleaming black armour he shivered.
PART III
Into the Wilderness
1
After three bitter days of struggling across the wide Pannonian plain, the fugitives came to a safe place to rest. Attila found a medicine woman who set Orestes’ broken leg, scolded him roundly, and told him not to move a muscle for at least two weeks. After that he must walk only with a stick, and put as little weight as possible upon his injured leg for at least another moon.
It was early spring by the time they journeyed again, and came to that great range of mountains which in the Gothic tongue are called the Harva? a, in the Hun the Kharvadh, and in the Latin the Carpathians. They crossed the high passes of those wild mountains in flower-bright springtime, and came down at last onto the limitless steppes of Scythia in March, when the grasses, as Attila had said, flashed young and green like the kingfisher’s breast on the Dnieper.
They walked for many days across the steppes, silent and intoxicated with their vast emptiness, their beauty and their immemorial loneliness. One morning they came near to one of the slow, winding rivers of that country, and they heard a woman singing by the riverside as she washed clothes and dried them on the rocks. She sang her nomad songs in the tongue of the Huns, and Attila knew that he was nearly home.
‘My beloved, how proudly he rides,
Proudly, like the wind;
Soon he will be gone,
Like the wind, like the wind.
‘My beloved, how proudly she dances,
She dances like the wind;
Soon she will be gone,
Like the wind, like the wind.
‘See, the tribe is moving on,
Flattening the grass like the wind;
Soon we will be gone,
Like the wind, like the wind.’
The woman started in fear when they called to her, but when she saw it was only two grubby, travel-stained boys she relaxed and listened to them. She saw that one boy was of the People, with his tattooed cheeks and his fierce top-knot tossing in the wind. He went naked to the waist, like the warriors of the tribe, and even though he
