After crossing the plains at an exhausting canter, our horses flecked with white foam and drooling at the bit, we rode up into the cooler foothills of the Haemus Mountains and then higher, where there was still edelweiss growing among the rocks. We found water for our mounts, a runnel clear as crystal from a rock spring, and they whickered and drank deep and raised their heads again, refreshed. We had the finest white Cappadocian horses from the imperial stables – magnificent, though I say so myself – and the master-general and Theodoric and Torismond rode at our head. It was no great force to turn and face a numberless horde of the enemy on our heels, but we could at least move very fast.
Behind us were over a million of the devil’s own horsemen, so they said. Well, rumour always multiplies enemy numbers by ten. Aetius had estimated Attila’s fighting force to be a hundred thousand, which was still the greatest number that Rome had faced in seven centuries, since the days of Hannibal. And how had the strength of Rome herself fared in those seven centuries? Not well.
As for our chivalrous mission to rescue an empress, Aetius kept his head bowed and did not speak of it. She whom he had not seen for. .. fifteen years, was it? Many battles and campaigns ago. That was how he measured out his life, in battles, not years. Too many battles ago he had kissed her, on a balcony overlooking the Golden City of Jerusalem. But that was many battles ago, and in another world.
We rode into deep pinewoods and the light grew dim and green. The horses harrumphed nervously, their hooves crunching over dry needles. The men patted their necks for comfort, none too comfortable themselves. Both horses and riders were creatures of the open plains. Woods meant darkness, witchcraft and ambush.
Towards evening, having ridden as fast and far as we could into the falling darkness, we were looking for a clearing to camp in when Torismond said he had seen a leopard, high in the trees.
‘There are no leopards in these mountains,’ Aetius assured him.
‘Alexander the Great hunted lions in the mountains of Greece,’ said the youth stubbornly.
‘That was many centuries ago, brother,’ said Theodoric.
‘Don’t fret,’ said Aetius. ‘You will meet with dangers enough without leopards.’
As we lay that night beside the fire, one of the wolf-lords stepped forwards, driving before him at the end of his spear something he had captured, creeping around the outskirts of the camp. No leopard, but a crazed bird- catcher. We regarded him with curiosity.
He had only one blackened stump of a tooth, and bright beady eyes darting to left and to right and missing nothing. His bare feet were glued with feathers as if he were turning into a bird himself, and he wore a straw hat garlanded with faded summer flowers.
‘And you are?’ growled Aetius.
The bird-catcher began to babble at once, speaking extraordinarily fast, like one who has not spoken with another living soul for months and years.
‘I was a missionary of Christ, one of the missionaries of St John Chrysostom sent out upon the eastern steppes to minister to the heathen there in their feathers and skins and preach them the gospel.’ He grinned, showing his blackened stump, shiny with saliva in the firelight. ‘But my friends would say, if I had any, they would say that I was driven mad out there by the indifference of the trackless, Christless wilderness. For you know that there is no law of heavenly love out there.’
‘What tribes did you preach to?’
‘Ostrogoths, Monoglots, Monopeds, Huns, Hasmodaeans, Amazons with only one tittie-’
Aetius rolled over to go to sleep. ‘The man’s insane.’
‘And now I trap my feathered brethren for meat and for feathering my own feet,’ continued the bird-catcher. The princes and their wolf-lords continued to regard him, this antic figure in the firelight, fascinated, half- amused.
‘And you see, of all the birds that I tear gently from their gluey lime-white perches there on the tree and drop into my capacious basket, wrynecked and for ever after songless and silent, I sometimes take one that appeals to me and my curious whims and I let him go with his song intact and his neck unbroken. It is a fancy of mine. So may it be with you, my noble warriors, in the hands of the Great Catcher, as you ride out into the Christless wilderness against that terrible enemy whose hearts would turn you to stone if you could but see them. For though even the freed bird shall end in a basket all the same in time, yet do not despair, for not all are killed outright, not all lose themselves in the nighttime of my capacious osier basket. Some fly free and sing still. May you do the same, little brothers, for the Truth is nothing but all the little deeds of kindness that man to man or trapped bird ever did.’
‘You were a strange missionary,’ murmured Theodoric.
‘A shadow missionary, preaching the Fallen Christ.’
The bird-man glanced at him quickly and then went on, ‘Our stories are not completed in this world. There remains something far beyond, never to be known or named by the stumbling tongues of men. He who thinks he has it by the tail, and owns its name, is drowned in ignorance. Yet it abides. And even when in the latter days, which may be coming soon, the scroll of the world is rolled up and cast into fire, and the light of the sun is snuffed out like a candle, and all the universe comes to its natural and inborn doom, that Being will still abide, brooding on in all its eternal majestic solitude, as before the world was made.’
‘Peace now, go,’ muttered Aetius beneath his blanket, pretending to be asleep but in truth hearing the fool’s words, for they had a kind of compelling power. But the bird-catcher had more to say before we slept.
‘In each man’s heart lies his own truth, and there is no shaping it with eloquent words and reasons to fit your own more neatly. There was a bird’s nest, a lark’s nest, a little thing unregarded, and I trod on it unawares, and hearing the sound I looked down and saw a little mess of nest and blood and feathers and tiny sodden shapes of baby birds unborn. A little thing. It was then Christ died in me, never to rise again.’
Some of the wolf-lords looked hard at him. This was blasphemy. But the fool was oblivious.
‘Those broken eggshells. The wind in the trees. The pitiless sky. Nothing changed. Nothing mattered. No solace came to me or bird. I scraped the remains of the eggs and tiny birds from my boots – for I wore boots in those days like a man – and heaped them up and scattered earth on them and blessed them, and then I walked on, and Christ no longer walked by my side. Never again. From that day to this I am no Christ-worshipper nor missionary of St John Chrysostom, sent out into the wilderness to baptise the Scythian heathen, but only a bare lone man, a birdman, a madman.
‘And one day before very long now, I too will perch on a branch and be caught and trapped by one far greater than me, the oldest and the greatest god of all, his capacious osier basket unfillable and forever hungry for all eternity, no matter what goes in. Death is a portal, to be sure, but a portal to what?’ He smiled and winked conspiratorially. ‘Some doors go nowhere.’
Then they tired of the madman and, believing that his ominous words would bring them bad luck in this dark and forbidding place, on this uncertain mission already compromised and humiliating, they drove him away at spearpoint into the woods and commanded him not to return. He went whistling into the darkness like a bird at dawn.
12
The bird-catcher’s words cast a pall over the next day. As we rode up higher into the mountains for the pass that would take us down to Azimuntium, safely away from the open plains where our enemy in countless thousands once more hunted and laid waste, several of the wolf-lords already wore bronze cuirasses under their long red cloaks, and tall, gleaming Spangenhelms nodding with flaxen plumes. The air was heavy and ominous, and we almost prayed for a rainstorm to relieve it.
We rode higher and higher, the country becoming lifeless and bare, only a few last twisted and stunted trees sheltering straggling sheep, then only thorns and faded brown heath. In the deep rocky chasms, the trickle of dark streams and ferns and mosses hiding from the light. We rode along one of these narrow, sunless defiles, its high, gloomy walls hung with sphagnum moss and hart’s-tongue fern, thinking of ambush. But Aetius did not fear ambush, not in the mountains. This was not the Huns’ terrain. They would be fools to ride here, steppe warriors raised on the limitless plains.
