“At your command, I return these men,” Agintheus announced. “The other twelve you wrote about are nowhere to be found.”
“Their good luck, I suppose,” muttered Maximinus.
“Or wisdom.” Agintheus sighed. “These soldiers deserve better, senator.”
“It is necessary to conform to the treaty.”
“It is an evil treaty.”
“Imposed by the Huns. Someday . . .”
“See that it doesn’t go badly for them, ambassador.”
“Attila needs men, not corpses. They’ll survive.”
As our expanded party rode away toward Hunuguri the five prisoners called back to their general. “Good-bye, Agintheus. God be with you! You have treated us well! Look after our families!” Their new wives ran after them, wailing, but the Hun rode among the deserters and lashed them into silence. At length, their homes were left behind.
“Why are we giving the Huns those men?” I asked Maximinus. “This is wrong.”
“It’s at the insistence of Attila.”
“And they have to leave their families behind?”
“Attila would say they should never have started families.”
“But why give back recruits to a despot we’ve been fighting?”
Maximinus frowned. “Because he is more desperate for men than for gold. Many German allies flee his armies. The Huns are great warriors, but they aren’t numerous.”
“What will happen when we turn them over?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps they will be whipped. It’s possible they will be crucified. But most likely they will just be pressed back into his armies. The lesson here, Alabanda, is that sometimes you have to do bad things to do good: in this case, peace.”
I rode in silence for a while. “There is another lesson as well, senator.”
“What, my youthful friend?”
“That Attila has a weakness, and that is manpower. If the provinces of Rome and their barbarian allies could ever unite and field a truly great army, and make him pay a heavy price on the battlefield, then his power to frighten us would be at an end.”
Maximinus laughed. “The dreams of youth!”
I resented the condescension. It was not a dream. If Attila took the time to care about five fugitives, it was reality.
Although the province of Moesia that we traveled through had been Roman territory for hundreds of years, civilization had been abandoned. Hun and Goth had crisscrossed this land for nearly three-quarters of a century; and each invasion had further crippled the economy, stolen tax collec-tions, and beggared repairs. As a result, mills had long since stopped turning, their waterwheels rotted away. Bridges had collapsed, forcing our embassy to detour upstream to fords.
Fields were being reclaimed by oak and scrub pine. Granaries had been looted, and broken wagons lay rotting in high grass. Mountains that had not seen a bear for generations now were the home of sow and cubs. At Horreum we passed a cracked aqueduct spilling water uselessly into a new erosive channel.
Most haunting of all were the cities, empty save a few priests, wild refugees, and the dogs that went with them.
Frost and rain had cracked the walls, stucco had peeled like tired paper, and roof tiles had cascaded off abandoned houses to heap in piles of red dust.
There were inhabitants still, but they were a peculiarly hard and skittish lot. Shepherds stayed cautiously on slopes high above the road, allowing plenty of time to flee. Surviving farms were tucked into side valleys where they were less visible to roving armies. Groups of armed Roman bandits scavenged like animals. Accordingly, several old Roman villas had been turned into small castles with new walls and towers, their determined owners clinging to ancestral lands.
Where peacocks once strutted, now chickens ran.
The road began to drop in elevation, the pines giving way to forests of oak, beech, elm, and alder; and the mountains were left behind for terrain that was flatter, wetter, and more confusing. Roads in the Danube valley wound around marshes like snarled thread: One morning we woke to see our path leading briefly east, not west! Finally we came to the banks of the broad Danube itself, its powerful current opaque and green. This river, once patrolled by the Roman navy, now was bare of ships. The paths on which slaves or oxen had towed the craft upstream were overgrown.
Here was the historic boundary of the Empire: Rome to the south, barbarians to the north. The river retained its ma-jestic serenity. Birds followed its course in flocks so great that at times they shaded the sun, and eddies and sloughs were dotted with ducks and geese. The Huns amused themselves by plucking some of the fowl out of the sky with their arrows. I would have feared losing my shafts, but they never missed.
“How will we get across?” Maximinus asked Edeco.
“River men will take us. There should be some near.”
Indeed, we spotted a plume of smoke a short distance upriver and found a crude settlement that was a polyglot of races: old Huns, surviving Romans, refugee Germans, even a black Ethiopian cast up at this outpost, all living together in a warren of log cabins, round houses, ragged tents, and riverbank caves. Naked children played amid wandering geese and pigs. Fly-specked game and fish dried in the sun.
On the shore were a dozen log canoes. The crudeness was startling compared to the proud merchant ships and triremes of the Golden Horn. How could such simple people, incapable of building a decent boat, force Nova Roma to come to them in supplication? Yet here we humbled Romans were, bartering for passage with the canoe builders.
We crossed in turns, the villagers paddling while we pas-sengers gripped the canoe sides as if that might somehow help prevent a capsize. Once again, I saw the nervousness of the Huns about water. There was no mishap, however, and our goods stayed dry, the horses and mules swimming at the end of their reins. At length we all gained the wild northern shore and made camp, building driftwood fires.
Rusticius joined me while we sat by the river eating our supper: duck and roots purchased from the village, a pinch of aniseed giving it a little of the flavor of home. “Do you regret your decision to come?” I knew he felt responsible for inviting me, and I had adopted him as my elder brother.
“Of course not.” I swallowed the lie. “What an opportunity you’ve given me, my friend.”
“Or risk.” He looked gloomy. “These Huns are sour and humorless, aren’t they? Edeco is a bully. I hope we don’t have trouble in their camp.”
“It they wanted trouble they would have made it a hundred miles ago,” I reassured him with more confidence than I truly felt. “We have Rome’s protection, don’t we?”
“Which seems an ocean away, now that we’ve crossed that river.” He shook his head. “Don’t let my foreboding affect you, Jonas. You’re young and more likable than any of us. You’ve great things ahead of you. I have less confidence in my own luck.”
“You were brave to stand up to Edeco at the ruined villa.”
“Or foolish. He expects submission. I don’t think he’s done with me yet.”
Messengers found us with word that Attila was at his camp many days away, so on we went. We found the Tisza River, a broad and gray-green river that is a tributary of the Danube, and followed it northward into Hunuguri. Its banks were lined with timber, like its sister river, and again no ships were available to provide easy passage. Instead, we paralleled it on a great open plain the likes of which I had never seen. While before the sky was hemmed with mountains, now it was a vast bowl that bent to distant horizons.
Grass had become an ocean, and animals moved across it in browsing herds. Hawks wheeled high above, while butterflies danced ahead of the legs of our horses.
Sometimes we saw distant curtains of smoke, and Onegesh told us the barbarians kept the flat landscape open by setting fires. Their animals also kept it mowed. Vast collections of horses and cattle roamed seemingly at will, yet the warriors were able to tell at a glance which tribe a herd belonged to: here Gepid, there Goth, now Scuri. Stucco and tile Roman architecture had given way to villages of wattle-and-daub huts or timber cabins. Their smoke holes carried new and foreign smells.
