The Scourge of God Read online

  She spied the Roman to one side of their cluster of tents, brushing a gray mare. He seemed handsome enough, curious, and, she hoped, necessarily innocent of female motive. She walked by his field of vision while staring straight ahead and for a moment feared he might ignore her, so intent he seemed on combing his damned horse. She’d have to try again when returning from the river! But, no, suddenly he straightened abruptly and just as he did so she deliberately stumbled and caught the jar as it toppled from her head. “Oh!”

  “Let me help you!” he called in Latin.

  “It’s nothing,” she replied in the same tongue, trying to feign surprise. “I didn’t see you standing there.” She clutched the clay jar to her breasts like a lover.

  He walked over. “I thought you might be Roman from your look and manner.”

  He seemed almost too kind, not yet hardened by life’s cruelties, and for a moment she doubted her plan. She needed someone strong. But at least he would take pity!

  “I saw you serving at the banquet,” he went on. “What’s your name?”

  “Ilana.”

  “That’s pretty. I am Jonas Alabanda, of Constantinople. Where are you from?”

  She cast her eyes down, purposely demure. “Axiopolis, near the Black Sea. The city the Greeks called Heracleia.”

  “I’ve heard of it. You were captured?”

  “Edeco conquered it.”

  “Edeco! He’s the one we rode here with from Constantinople.”

  “The warrior Skilla caught me and brought me here on his horse.”

  “I know Skilla as well!”

  “Then we have even more in common than our empire.” She smiled sadly.

  He held out his arms. “Here, let me help carry that.”

  “It’s woman’s work. Besides, it’s not heavy until full.”

  “Then let me escort you to the river.” He grinned. “You look like more enjoyable company than Edeco or Skilla.”

  This was going better than she’d hoped. They walked together, the quick companionship giving a sheen to the pleasant day, the grass suddenly greener and the sky bluer. “You’re young to be on such an important mission,” she said. “You must be wise beyond your years.”

  “I merely speak Hunnish and enjoy letters. I hope to write a history.”

  “You must come from a good family.” She hoped he was rich enough to buy her.

  “We’ve had some misfortune. I’m hoping this journey turns it around.”

  That was disappointing. They reached the grassy river-bank, the Tisza lolling lazily, dried mud showing how much it had fallen since spring. She stooped to dip water, making her movements deliberately slow. “The journey has let us meet each other, at least,” she said.

  “What house do you belong to here?”

  “Suecca, wife of Edeco.”

  He watched her stand and balance. “I will ask him about you, I think.”

  Her heart soared. “If you could ransom me, I would serve the embassy on your way home,” she said, her words coming more quickly than she’d planned. “I can cook, and sew. . . .” She saw the amused concern on his face and stopped. “I just mean I wouldn’t be any trouble.” The jar balanced on her head, she carefully began walking back, knowing that Suecca would miss her soon and probably be suspicious of why she’d uncharacteristically fetched the water. “I could tell you much about the Huns, and I have relatives in Constantinople who could contribute . . .”

  She was desperate to bind him to her side. Yet even as she babbled, pathetically promising everything she could think of—how she hated to be a supplicant, and helpless!—there was a sudden rattle of hooves and a Hun pony burst between them, butting Jonas aside and spilling some of the water. “Woman! What are you doing with the Romans!”

  It was Skilla, astride his horse Drilca.

  “I am only fetching water—”

  Jonas grabbed the rein. “It was I who talked to her” Skilla pointed with his whip. “Let go of my horse. This woman is my uncle’s slave, taken in battle. She has no business talking to any free man without permission, and certainly not to you. If she doesn’t know that, then Suecca will make it clear!”

  “You’ll not punish a Roman for talking to a Roman.” There was low warning in Jonas’s voice, and Ilana realized there was some history between these two. She was both thrilled and apprehensive. How could she use it? How could she be so calculating?

  “She’s no longer a Roman! And a slave has no business mingling with diplomats! She knows that! If she wants to be free, then let her agree to marriage!”

  The Roman pulled on the reins, turning the horse’s head and making it sidestep. “Leave her alone, Skilla.”

  The Hun lashed the hand that held his rein, put his boot on the Roman’s chest, and shoved. Jonas, taken by surprise, vaulted backward, landing in humiliation on his rear. Skilla wheeled and scooped Ilana off the ground, her jar falling and shattering. “This one is mine! I told you that!” She struggled, trying to scratch, but he held her like a child, his arm iron. “Keep to your own, Roman!” Jonas charged, but before he could reach Skilla the Hun yipped and galloped his horse away across the encampment, people whooping and laughing as Ilana hung helplessly, her feet a foot or two off the ground, bouncing like a rag doll until he dropped her rudely in Suecca’s doorway. She staggered, breathless, while his exited horse turned in a circle.

  “Stay away from the Roman,” he warned her, twisting his body to keep her in view as he struggled with his horse. “I am your future now.”

  Her eyes were afire. “I’m Roman, too! Can’t you see that I don’t want you?”

  “And I am in love with you, princess, and worth a dozen men like him.” He grinned. “You’ll see it, in the end.”

  Ilana looked away in frustration. There was nothing more unendurable than to be loved by someone you didn’t want. “Please leave me alone.”

  “Tell Suecca I will bring her a new jar!”

  Then he galloped away.

  Never had I felt so humiliated or angry. The Hun had caught me by surprise and then disappeared, like a coward, into the sea of his people. I was certain Skilla had no real relationship to the young woman, whatever he might dream, and I was tempted to dig my weapons from the baggage and call the warrior out. But as a diplomat I knew I couldn’t start a duel. Nor, I admitted to myself, was I very certain I could beat him. In any event I’d risked Maximinus’s anger simply by talking to a girl. But she was Roman, pretty, and—if this was the one Skilla had boasted would marry him after she’d scratched him—in peril. For a person of my age and situation, it was a recipe for infatuation.

  I brushed myself off, annoyed at the nearby Huns grinning at my embarrassment, and tried to think what to do.

  “You can never win solely by fighting,” an oddly pitched voice said in Latin, as if reading my mind. “It requires thought as well.”

  I turned. It was the dwarf who had performed the evening before. Zerco, they called him. What a little monster he was, waddling up from the trees where he must have been lurking.

  “Did I ask your advice?”

  “What need to ask, when you so clearly need it?” Daylight made his visage even more pitiable: his skin too dark, his nose flat and lips wide, his ears too big for his head, his head too big for his torso, and his torso too big for his legs. His back was partly humped, his hair a shaggy mat, and his cheeks beardless but pocked. All that saved him from repulsion were his eyes, which were as large and brown as an animal’s but blinked with sharp intelligence. Perhaps Zerco was not the fool he seemed when performing.

  “You were spying.”

  “A clown has to observe the betters he wishes to mock.”

  Despite myself, I smiled wryly. “You plan to mock me, fool?”

  “I already did, last night. And between that maid leading you by the sword and that barbarian seating you on your rump, you’re doing a good enough job yourself. But I’ll pick on your Hun friend next, perhaps.”

  “That Hun is not m
y friend.”

  “Never be too sure who your friends and enemies are. Fortune has a way of changing which is which.”

  The dwarf’s quickness made me curious. “You speak the tongue of the Empire.”

  “I come from Africa. Discarded by my mother as the devil’s joke, kidnapped and sold as a jester, and passed from court to court until I found favor with Bleda, whose idea of humor was simpler than his dour and more ambitious brother’s. Other men must work their way to Hades, but I’ve found it in this life.” He put his arm to his brow in a pantomime of self-pity.

  “Someone said Attila gave you to Aetius, the general of the West, but you came back for your wife.”

  “Ah Julia, my angel! Now you have found me out. I complain of hell but with her I’ve found heaven. Do you know that she missed me even more than I missed her? What do you think of that?”

  I was baffled. Bigilas had said the woman was not ugly like Zerco, but I could not imagine what their relationship was like. “That she has peculiar taste.”

  The dwarf laughed.

  “Or that she looks inside the skin as well as outside.” Zerco bowed. “You have a diplomat’s flair for flattery, Jonas Alabanda. That is your name, is it not?”

  “So you are a spy.”

  “I am a listener, which few men are. I hear many things and see even more. If you tell me something of Constantinople, I will tell you something about these Huns.”

  “What could I tell you of Constantinople?”

  “Its palaces, games, and food. I dream of it like a thirsty man dreams of water.”

  “Well, it’s certainly grander than what we have here: the greatest city in the world now. As for the Huns, I’ve already learned that they’re arrogant, rude, ignorant, and that you can smell one before you see one. Beyond that, I’m not sure there’s much to learn.”

  “Oh, but there is! If you fancy Ilana and despise Skilla, you should come with me.” He began walking north along the riverbank, in a rocking gait that was comic and pitiable at the same time, and I hesitated. The crippled and diseased made me uncomfortable. Zerco would have none of it. “Come, come. My stature is not contagious.”

  I slowed my own habitual pace to match his. Children ran after us, calling insults, but didn’t dare draw too close to the odd little monster and the tall, mysterious Roman.

  “How did you come to be a jester?” I asked when he didn’t say anything more.

  “What else could I be? I’m too small to be a soldier or laborer and too ill-formed to be a poet or a singer. Making fun of the great is the only way I’ve saved myself.”

  “Including the noble Flavius Aetius?”

  “It’s the most competent who are usually most willing to laugh at themselves.”

  “Is that what you think of the famous general?”

  “He actually had little use for entertainment, to tell the truth. He was not unkind or conceited, only distracted. He believes in an idea called Rome but lacks the army to restore it. So he fights one day, negotiates the next, buys the third. He’s a remarkable man who almost alone is holding the West together, and of course his superiors despise him for it. There is nothing incompetence hates more than virtue. Valentinian will one day punish him for his heroism, mark my word.”

  “He never marched to help the East.”

  “March with what? The people tormenting your half of the Empire were the same he was hiring to keep order in his half—the Huns. They’d work for him and take from you. It sounds callous, but it was the only way he could keep the other tribes in harness.”

  “What can you tell me of the Huns?”

  “I don’t tell, I show. I help you to see. Learn to think for yourself, Jonas Alabanda, and you will be a hated, feared, and successful man. Now, first of all, look at this settlement along the river. It goes on and on, doesn’t it?”

  “The Huns are numerous.”

  “And yet are there more people here than in Constantinople?”

  “Of course not.”

  “More than Rome?More than Alexandria?”

  “No . . .”

  “Yet the man with the wooden bowl and cup, leading a people who don’t know how to sow, forge, or build—a people who prey on others to supply everything they have— believes it’s his destiny to rule the world. Because of numbers? Or because of will?”

  “They are great and terrible warriors.”

  “Indeed. Look there.” We reached a point on the river opposite a meadow used for grazing and riding. Twenty Hun soldiers were practicing archery. They galloped one by one down the length of their meadow at full speed, plucked arrows from their quivers with deadly rhythm, and fired with frightening rapidity. Their target were melons, erected on poles fifty paces away, and so often did the arrows hit that the warriors roared and jeered only when one missed. Such an error was usually no more than a handsbreadth in either direction. “Imagine a thousand of them, thundering by a clumsy legion,” Zerco said.

  “I don’t have to imagine. By all accounts it’s happened far too many times, and again and again we are beaten.”

  “Keep watching.”

  After each pass the galloping warrior rejoined the jostling, joking group and then took his turn again, hurtling across the meadow. After three or four sprints each, they sat, spent and happy.

  “Watch what?”

  “How many arrows do they have left?”

  “None, of course.”

  “How fast are their ponies now?”

  “They’re tired.”

  “See? I’ve showed you more than most Roman generals ever learn. That’s what I mean by thought: observation and deduction.”

  “Shown what? That they can hit an enemy’s eye at full charge? That they can lope a hundred miles in a day when our armies march twenty on our best roads?”

  “That in far less than an hour they are out of arrows on exhausted horses. That a cloud of arrows came from a handful of men. That their entire strategy depends on breaking the will of others quickly and without mercy because their numbers are limited and their endurance is nil. But if they have to fight not for a moment but for a day, against a unity that outnumbers them . . .”

  “This was archery. They were trying to expend all their arrows.”

  “As they might uselessly against determined infantry that stands its ground behind its shields. Horses are like dogs. They will catch a fleeing man, but shy from one who stands his ground. An army that is a porcupine of spears . . .”

  “What you’re talking about is the greatest of all battles. Of fighting, after all, not just thinking.”

  “Of course, fighting! But what I’m talking about is the will to fight your battle, not theirs. On your ground: low, armored, patient. Of waiting until your moment. And there is one other thing you should be thinking about as you watch their skill.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To match it, if you want to survive. Did you bring any weapons at all?”

  “They’re in my baggage.”

  “You’d better get them out and practice as the Huns do. That, too, you should have deduced by watching them. You never know when you will need to fight, as well as think.” The jostling, joking warriors across the river reminded me of the dwarf’s leap into my lap the night before. “You claimed that you were warning me of danger at the banquet. That nothing is as it seems.”

  “Attila invites you to talk of peace, but what Attila says may not be what he means. And don’t be surprised if he knows more about your companions than you do yourself, Jonas of Constantinople. That’s the danger I’m warning you of.”

  Skilla let the wild galloping of his horse release his turbulent emotions. Riding without direction across the flat plain of Hunuguri was like shedding a particularly constricting and burdensome piece of armor. It was a draft of wind that left the complications of camp and tribe and women behind, and restored to him the freedom of the steppes. Attila himself spoke of the tonic of the grasslands. When in doubt, ride.

  So why did
they leave the steppes ever farther behind? Until the Romans came, Skilla had been certain that Ilana would eventually be his. He alone had protected her, and when Attila won the final battle there would be no alternative. But now she had flirted with Jonas and dressed like a Roman whore. It enraged him, because he feared the scribe could win simply by being Roman. Skilla didn’t want a bed slave. He wanted the highborn woman to love him for what he was, not just make love to him, and it frustrated him that she remained stubbornly blind to the Huns and their qualities. The People of the Dawn were better than the hordes that squatted in their stone cities, braver, stronger, and more powerful . . . except that Skilla secretly felt uncomfortable and inferior around the foolish but clever Romans, and hated just that feeling.

  That’s why seeing Ilana with Jonas had so infuriated him.

  It was not just that the Romans could read the thoughts of other men by peering at their books and papers or that they wore fine clothes or built with stone that lasted forever. As near as he could tell, all their wizardry did not make them particularly strong or happy. They could be beaten in battle, worried constantly about money while having more of it than a Hun would ever need, were hapless at surviving away from their cities, and fussed about rank and rules in ways that would never occur to a truly free man. A Roman had a thousand worries when a Hun had none. A Hun did not grub in the dirt, dig for metal, labor in the sun, or go blind squinting in a dark shop. He took what he needed from others, and all men quailed before him. This is how it had been since his people began following the white stag west, conquering all they encountered. And their women shared their haughty pride!

  Yet the Romans disdained him. They never said so, of course, lest he chop them down, but he could tell it in their looks and whispers and manners as they had journeyed from the eastern capital. His was the empire that was growing and theirs was the one that was shrinking, and yet they regarded the Huns as their inferiors! Dangerous, yes, in the way a rabid dog is dangerous, but not the Roman equal in anything that mattered, let alone their master. This stubborn confidence tormented him as it tormented his fellow warriors, because no amount of military defeat seemed to convince the Romans that the Huns were their betters. Only killing seemed to settle the issue.