sunlit water, descending down and down, dragged by the current still along the gravel bottom of the riverbed through tapered waterweeds slimy and emerald green until finally it settled there, insensible, lifeless.
And then there was a sudden backwash and a watery commotion and the spluttering idiot child was miraculously bobbing close to the bank, making a kind of paddling motion and pulling itself up onto the mud like a primitive amphibian.
After a moment of astonishment, Enkhtuya shook her head. The rivergod had rejected the sacrifice as unworthy. Then she went over to the child and pulled it to its feet. The child was blubbering and weeping, and she laughed and wiped the water from its naked body with the edge of her hand, and wiped the snot from its nose with the hem of her robe, as gently as a mother would have done. Then she took its malformed hand in hers and led it back to the camp.
Orestes looked back over the implacable and indifferent river that had played thus with the child and then cast it aside. Today the river had decided not to kill. Enkhtuya did not oppose the dictates of the river or the earth. But Orestes felt something coming off the surface of the river, as cold as an evening mist. The day was warm and promising fair. But there among the tall reeds and rushes, Orestes the inscrutable, imperturbable Greek, shivered uncontrollably, as if he had just been vouchsafed some vision he had rather not.
Later that morning, if any had been watching, they would have seen Orestes walk determinedly into Attila’s tent. After a few minutes they would have heard the king’s voice raised in wrath, and then seen Orestes emerge from the tent and stride away, white-lipped with fury.
Later, they might have seen Orestes and Little Bird talking privately together, over by the horses. Then after a little the two men falling silent, hanging their heads as if in sorrow.
Attila decreed that another fine wooden palace should be built for him and the royal family, and his people worked for many days and with great labour to that end.
Little Bird became more and more insolent. At the campfire one evening, with the king himself close by, he began to sing one of the tales of Tarkan, the ancestral hero of all the wide-wandering Hun people. Tarkan, he sang, was a man both foolish and wise, like many kings and rulers. At first he would live only in a tent. But then he became so mighty, and his fame so celebrated, that Astur his father made him a house to dwell in, built of fine wood, with lintels of purest gold, and walls panelled with ivory, and set with jasper and chalcedony and every kind of rare gem. A magnificent house, a palace, the equal of any that the settler peoples boast of. But Tarkan the Tent-Dweller lit his fire inside, in the middle of the house, and fell asleep beside it after too much koumiss, and woke up in the midst of an inferno! He ran out weeping and bellowing, falling into the rain and the mud and kicking his legs and complaining bitterly to Astur that he had given him such a death-trap for a dwelling. And Astur spoke to him out of heaven and said, ‘Foolish hero, I gave you the finest house that god ever gave man. But like all the wide-wandering Hun peoples for ever after, you will have no house to dwell in, but be always a tent-dweller and a keeper of flocks and a nomad upon the earth, despising the farmers and the towns, and despised likewise by those who dwell therein.’
At which another voice cut in, and it was the voice of Attila. ‘And they shall be your enemy, and you shall be their enemy. And there shall be warfare perpetual between nomad and settler across every part of the world and for all time until the war at the end of the world.’
As if he had won a round in a battle of the bards, the king vaulted to his feet, clapped the dust from his clothes and retired to his proud new wooden palace, unperturbed. The chieftains and the chosen men left around the fire laughed.
But Little Bird did not laugh. He said, ‘And they shall take up snakes.’ Then he added, so softly that only Orestes heard, ‘And they shall make sacrifices of innocent blood.’
3
It was spring before the full impact of the news reached the courts of Rome and Constantinople. There had been a reshuffling of the distant, restless barbarian tribes beyond the Danube frontier, and now those wild Scythians, the Huns, were once again encamped on the Trans-Pannonian plain. The people they had displaced had fled westwards into Germania, or else over the river to seek refuge in the border towns of Aquincum and Carnuntum. But few of the refugees had any great tales of horror to tell. It seemed the inscrutable nomads of the steppes had simply decided to overwinter in the lush pastures beside the River Tisza this year. It was no great cause for concern. Those people were as drifting and aimless as leaves in an autumn wind. There was no reason to suspect any great plan, for those barbarous people had no capacity for making plans. They lived without reason and law, and knew only their own primitive customs and dreadful blood-red rites.
But one listener took it differently: Galla Placidia, in the court at Ravenna. She said there could be a plan. She said there could be a very great plan afoot. She wanted to know if the King of the Huns was the still the one they called Attila. The messenger did not know. She slapped him twice, but still he did not know. Galla angrily hissed something about the poverty of intelligence on the frontiers these days and swept from the room.
Later that day, Valentinian was in his private chambers, eating white truffles fresh from the woodlands of Umbria.
His mother entered unannounced, followed by a court clerk bearing a large scroll on a long wooden pole. The birthplace of this court clerk was Panium, a humble and unremarked little town in Thrace. The clerk himself, through his diligence and trustworthiness over many years, had risen high in the echelons of the Byzantine administration, so high, indeed, that he was not infrequently seconded to the court of Ravenna in the west, as now. There were those who said that these frequent and seemingly quite unnecessary secondments and to-ings and fro-ings between courts were the means by which the Western and Eastern Empires kept an eye on each other; that such a civil servant, in other words, with a foot in each court, must needs be a spy. But the clerk always met such extravagant speculations with a polite little bow of his head, and recourse to that most trusty of friends, silence.
He had served for some time as chief clerk in the office of the Count of the Sacred Largesse, and also as a clerk-in-consistory, recording rank, until he had been appointed deputy chief clerk-in-consistory, a post, it may justly be said, of no little reach and responsibility.
But let me not be boastful. It is just that oh, how I wished my aged parents could have lived to see the day when I attended upon the Empress Galla Placidia herself! How proud they would have been, how they would have beamed and nodded their white heads, to hear their son tell of court doings and dealings, on my rare visits home on leave to that little town of Panium, there on the sunwarmed olive-green hillside. But it was not to be. Both my parents lay sleeping beneath that green hillside, and my family, if I had any, were the clerks and secretaries and chamberlains of the imperial court.
Thanks to my well-known trustworthiness and reserve, I was at this time as close to Galla Placidia as any commoner. This was doubtless a great privilege, though not always a great comfort. I was often obliged to sleep at night lying on my right-hand side, my less favoured side, since my left cheek was stinging so much from her slaps and was too hot to put to the pallet. However, all agreed that the empress slapped her staff less often than she used to.
She was now an old woman, approaching her sixtieth year, and although she tried to maintain her regal bearing and hold herself rigidly erect she could not disguise a worsening stoop, as if she carried a great weight on her thin shoulders. Her skin was still very pale and pure, untouched by sunlight in six decades, but she had many fine lines round her cold green eyes, and her thin, hard lips were thinner than ever. It was long since a husband had shared her bed, and she had found motherhood a disappointment. What mother’s breast could swell with pride contemplating such a daughter as the ludicrously named Honoria, or such a son as Emperor Valentinian III? A son who had on more than one occasion, it was said, tried to poison his mother, leaving her retching and groaning in her chamber for days afterwards. They never spoke to each other but to quarrel.
Valentinian born in the month of July, 419, was on the eve of his twenty-eighth birthday, though still without either wife or child. He was very thin, with almost no muscle on his arms and legs but with a distended little potbelly like that of an old man. His face was unlined and boyish, chubby and wide-eyed. When excited he dribbled a
