The Scourge of God

“I don’t know if Edeco would agree to let you go.”

“Maybe when your embassy negotiates and favors are being exchanged. Talk to your senator.”

“Not yet.” I knew her rescue would not make sense to anybody but me. I grasped her hand, even this slight contact thrilling me. “Soon Bigilas will return and opportunity will arise,” I promised recklessly. “I’m determined to take you with us.”

“Please, my life will be at an end if you don’t.” And then Bigilas came back.

The son of Bigilas was a boy of eleven, dark haired and wide-eyed, who rode into camp with mouth open and spine tingling. How could he not gape at this horde of Huns whom Roman boys had exaggerated to mythic proportions? Young Crixus was proud that his father was playing so pivotal a role. He, Crixus, was the guarantee of honesty between the two sides! That his father had seemed troubled and distant on their journey north did not particularly surprise the boy: Bigilas had always been too self-absorbed to be either a proper father or good companion, but he moved with the greats and promised they would someday be rich. How many sons could say that?

When word of Bigilas’s return reached Attila, the king invited us Romans to attend him that evening. Despite his proclaimed patience, Maximinus was relieved. We’d been confined to Attila’s camp for weeks.

Once again the king of the Huns was on his dais, but this time there were far fewer retainers in his hall. Instead, there were a dozen heavily armed guards and Edeco, Skilla, and Onegesh: the Huns who had accompanied us.

Trying to ignore the Hun soldiers, I told myself that perhaps this smaller group was an encouraging sign. Here was private and serious negotiation, not diplomatic ritual and show. Yet I couldn’t help but feel greater unease than when I’d first come to the Hun camp, for I’d learned too much about Attila. His charisma was matched by his tyranny, and the humbleness of his attire masked the arrogance of ambition.

“I hope he’s in good humor,” I whispered to Rusticius.

“Surely he wishes to conclude things as we do.”

“You’ve had enough Hun hospitality?”

“Edeco has never forgiven me for standing up for us and speaking back during our journey, and I’ve felt his ire in the mood of his followers. They call me the Westerner, as if fundamentally different because I come from Italy. They watch me as if I’m on exhibit.”

“I think they’re just curious about peoples they’ve yet to enslave.”

Torches threw a wavering light over the scarred faces of Attila’s retainers. The king’s deep-set eyes seemed to have burrowed even farther into his head than I remembered, rotating to look at this figure or that like creatures peering from protective burrows. His odd, ugly, and impassive face made him difficult to read and, as usual, there was not a hint of a smile. This seemed unsurprising. I’d attended Hun justice councils where quarreling tribesmen took rival complaints; and Attila always adjudicated without emotion, his judgments harsh, strange, quick, and yet curiously fitting his grim people and his own stoic visage. Each judgment day he sat bareheaded in the bright sunlight of his compound courtyard, the quarreling or petitioning parties let in by turn. They would be peppered with hard questions, cut off if they protested too long, and then sent away with a decision from which there was no appeal.

There was no true law, only Attila. Often a wrong could be righted by konoss, that Hun practice of a transgressor paying the victim or his family with anything from a cow to a daughter. The Huns usually abhorred imprisonment, for which they had few facilities, and disliked mutilation, because it weakened potential warriors or mothers. But sometimes harsher penalties were applied.

For example, I witnessed Attila’s permission for a cuck-olded husband in a particularly humiliating case to take revenge by castrating the seducer of his wife with a rusty knife and then stuffing the severed privates into the organ of the woman who had lain with him, locked to her with a chain for the full cycle of a moon.

To steal a man’s horse on the empty steppes was tanta-mount to murder, and so a horse thief was ordered torn apart by having his limbs tied to the ponies he had stolen, their owner and his sons urging the horses slowly forward until his joints popped. Then he screamed in agony for an hour as the animals jostled in place: screamed, at Attila’s insistence, until all of our ears ached from it, as evidence of his power.

Finally the horses were whipped forward at Attila’s command, and it was with great difficulty that I didn’t retch. I was astonished at how far the blood spurted and how meaty and meaningless the scattered parts seemed once the victim was dismembered.