The Scourge of God

kills me, too.”

But then came a new voice, as deep as thunder, and it boomed above all other sounds. “Stop, all of you!”

It was Edeco. Skilla jumped like a small boy caught stealing figs and straightened, his sword lowered. Light flared as torches came near, revealing the blood on the warrior’s battered face. His uncle came up with a crowd of the curious, and Ilana was suddenly aware of her half nakedness. She dropped the stave and pulled up her dress to cover her breasts.

“Damnation, Skilla. What are you doing back without reporting to me?”

The Hun pointed. “He attacked me,” he said truculently.

“He was attacking Ilana,” Jonas responded.

“Is this true?” Edeco asked.

Emboldened, she let her bodice fall open. “He ripped my clothes.” Some of the Huns gaped, others laughed. Everyone jostled closer—men, women, children, and dogs drawn by the tableau. She could smell their acrid breath.

“You’d kill the Roman when he’s unarmed?” Edeco asked with contempt.

Skilla spat blood. “He broke the law by attacking me, and he fights unfairly, like a monkey. Any other slave would be dead by now. And what is he doing out here in the dark?

Why isn’t he at his duties?”

“What were you doing, trying to rape a woman of your uncle’s household?” Jonas challenged.

“It wasn’t rape! It was . . .”

Edeco strode forward and with a contemptuous kick knocked the lowered sword aside. It rang as it skipped away into the grass. “We will let Attila say what it was.” The warlord sniffed in disgust. “I can smell the kumiss on you, nephew. Couldn’t you wait until you got to the strava?”

“I did wait, I’d just gotten to camp, and she was waiting—”

“That’s a lie,” she hissed.

“Silence! We go to Attila!”

But the Hun was already there like a nightmare, pushing gruffly through the crowd, the bones of Rusticius discarded but his demon horns still mounted on his head. Like a judg-ing god, he pushed to take in the scene in an instant. There was a long silence while he looked from one to the other.

Then Attila spoke. “Two men, one woman. This has never happened before in the history of the world.”

The crowd roared, and Skilla’s face burned with humiliation. He looked at Jonas with hatred. “This woman is by rights mine, from capture at Axiopolis,” he protested. “All know that. But she torments me with her haughtiness, and looks to this Roman for protection—”

“It looks to me as if she needed it, and that he protected her well.”

The crowd roared with laughter again.

Now Skilla was silent, knowing anything he said would make him look even more foolish. His face was swelling.

“This is a quarrel sent by the gods to make our strava more interesting!” the king called to the crowd. “The solu-tion is simple. She needs one man, not two. Tomorrow these two will meet in mortal combat, and the survivor can have the girl.” Attila glanced at Edeco, and his warlord nodded once. Both knew what the outcome would be.

So did Ilana. Jonas was a dead man, and she was doomed.

XIV

I

THE DUEL

Diana shuddered slightly under my unaccustomed weight, and I felt encased and clumsy. You’ll never be the soldier your brother is, my father had told me, and what had it mattered in Constantinople? I had prided myself on being a man of the mind, not arms, suited to higher callings.

But now I wished I had taken cavalry training. Skilla could ride circles around me while I awkwardly charged in my heavy equipment, my big oval shield banging Diana’s flank and my heavy spear already tiring my arm. The nose guard and cheek plates of my peaked helmet blocked my peripheral vision. The heavy chain mail was hot, even though the day was cool, and the sword and dagger on my belt felt clumsy against thigh and hip. The only blessing was that the equipment cut my view of the thousands of half-drunken and hungover Huns who’d assembled in a field near the camp to watch what they expected would be quick butchery.

The betting was on how quickly I would die.

Skilla’s horse Drilca was prancing, excited by the crowd; and the Hun looked as unencumbered as I was swaddled.

His light cuirass of hoof bone scales rippled and clacked like the grotesque skeleton Attila had worn the night before, and his legs and head wore no armor at all. He was armed only with his bow, twenty arrows, and his sword. His face was bruised from my blows, which gave me some small satisfaction, but he was grinning past the evidence of his battering, already anticipating the death of his enemy and his marriage to the proud Roman girl. Killing me would erase all humiliation. Ilana stood in a cluster of other slaves by Suecca, wrapped in a cloak that made her shapeless. Her eyes were red and she avoided my gaze, looking guilty.

So much for confidence, I thought. Too bad I can’t bet against myself.

I also caught sight of Zerco, sitting comically astride a tall woman’s shoulders. His bearer was not unattractive, and looked both strong and kind, the steady companion many men need but seldom wish for or get. That must be his wife, Julia.

“You should not have interfered, Roman!” Skilla called.

“Now you will be dead!”

I ignored the taunt.

“Look at him, armored like a snail,” someone from the crowd observed.

“And as slow.”

“And as hard to get at,” a third cautioned.

There were other shouts: about my ancestry, my manhood, my clumsiness, and my stupidity. Strangely, I began to draw strength from them. I hadn’t slept since fighting for Ilana, knowing the coming dawn could be my last. My mind had become a whirlwind of regrets and misgivings, and I spent these last hours cursing myself for bad luck. Every time I’d tried to think of the actual combat my brain seemed to shy away from any intelligent planning or useful tactics, skittering away into memories of my race with Skilla, my kiss with Ilana, or that embarrassing but intoxicating glimpse of her bare breasts. I hadn’t rested, hadn’t concentrated, and hadn’t prepared. But now I realized that if I were not simply to be a target as simple as those melons I’d watched the Huns practice on, I must use my head or lose it.

I watched dourly as Skilla loped along the line of cheering barbarians, waving his fist in the air and crying in a high yip-yip-yip like an irritating dog. The Hun would shoot me and my horse from a hundred paces, shaft after shaft plunking in until I resembled a field of spiky flowers. It was not so much a fight as an execution.

“Are you ready?” Edeco demanded.

Was I going to sit as target for slaughter? What advantage could I find? Fight your battle, not theirs, Zerco had said.

Yet what was my battle? “Wait,” I said, trying to think. At least, I decided, I could make myself a smaller target. I let the butt of my spear strike the earth and used it as a pole to lever myself off Diana’s saddle, landing heavily.

“Look, he’s backing out!” the Huns called. “The Roman is a coward! Skilla gets the woman!”

Hefting my shield and squaring my shoulders, I addressed Edeco. “I will fight on foot.”

He looked surprised. “A man without a horse is a man without legs.”

“Not in my country.”