The Scourge of God

What was wrong with the women of the Huns? Nothing, really. They were nimble, hard workers, and were bred to produce robust children in rugged conditions. They would both couple and bear children in a blizzard or a desert’s heat, it mattered not to them, and they were proud of their ability not to cry out in either instance. They could make a meal out of a stag or field mouse, whichever was available; find hearty roots in the mud by a riverbed; load a house into a wagon in a quarter of a morning; and carry twin skins of water from a yoke on their back. But they were also plainer, squatter, and rounder. They did not have Ilana’s grace, they did not have her worldliness, and they did not have the fierce intelligence that animated the Roman woman’s gaze when she became curious or angry. There was no need for a woman to be smart, and yet he found himself desiring exactly that quality in Ilana for reasons he couldn’t fathom.

There was no use for it! She represented that Roman arrogance he hated, and yet he wanted to possess that arrogance to assuage his own confidence.

His was a desire that was bewitching every clan and brotherhood, Attila had said. The Hun invasion of Europe had made his people powerful, but it was also changing them. The race was being diluted by marriage and adoption.

In the forests to the north and west, the horse was less useful. Men who once fought for the simple pleasures of fighting now talked incessantly of mercenary pay, booty, tribute, and the goods they could bring back to satisfy their increasingly greedy wives. Tribes that had wandered with the seasons were settled in crowded Hunuguri. Attila warned his warriors to be careful, to not let Europe conquer them as they conquered Europe. It was why he ate off plain wooden dishes and refused to adorn his clothing, reminding them of the harsh origins that made them hardier and fiercer than their enemies.

Every Hun knew what he meant. But they were also seduced, almost against their wills, by the world they were overrunning. While Attila ate from wood, his chieftains ate from gold plate, and dreamed not of the steppes but of the courtesans of Constantinople.

This, Skilla secretly feared, would destroy them. And him.

He must destroy Alabanda, take Ilana, and escape eastward. And the best way to do so was to wait for Bigilas to return with his son and fifty pounds of gold.

XII

A PLOT REVEALED

Diplomacy, Maximinus explained to me, was the art of patience. As long as talk went on, weapons were sheathed.

While weeks crawled by, political situations could change.

Agreement that was impossible between strangers became second nature among friends. So it did no harm to wait in the Hun camp while Bigilas backtracked to fetch his son, the senator assured me. “While we wait there is no war, Jonas,” he observed with self-satisfaction. “Just by coming here, we have helped the Empire. Simply by passing time, we are serving Constantinople and Rome.”

We tried to learn what we could of the Huns, but it was difficult. I was instructed to do a census of their numbers, but warriors and their families came and went so frequently that it was like trying to count a flock of birds. A hunt, a raid, a mission to exact tribute or punishment, a rumor of better pastures, a chase of wild horses, a story of a drinking den or brothel newly established on the shores of the Danube-any of these things could draw the easily bored warriors away.

The numbers I counted were useless anyway because most of the Hun nation was scattered far from where we stayed, a web of empire linked by hard-riding messengers. How many clans? None of our informants seemed able to make that clear. How many warriors? More than blades of grass. How many subject tribes? More than the nations of Rome. What were their intentions? That was in the hands of Attila.

Their religion was a tangle of nature spirits and superstition, the details jealously hidden by shaman prophets who claimed to foretell the future with the blood of animals and slaves. This primitive animism was combined with the pantheons of peoples overrun, so that Attila could proclaim confidently that his great iron relic was the sword of Mars and his people knew what he was talking about. Gods were like kingdoms to the Huns: to be conquered and used. Destiny was unavoidable, these primitive people believed, and yet fate was also capricious and could be wooed or warded with charms and spells. Demons could catch the unwary, and storms were the thunder of the gods, but luck was promised by a favorable sign. We Christians were considered fools to look for salvation in the afterlife instead of booty in this: Why worry about the next existence when it was only this one in which you had control? This, of course, was a misunderstanding of the entire point of my religion; but to the Huns the logical goal was to either make life with a woman or end it with war, and one had only to look at the savagery of nature to understand that. Everything killed everything.