The Scourge of God

“And it will be mended with pitch and the join concealed with clay dust. They carry in provisions at night so as not to disturb the daytime crowd that assembles to hear Attila’s judgments. It will be dark. We’ll roll you to the wine house, you’ll be lifted onto a wagon, and before you know it you’ll be stacked in the kagan’s kitchens.” Zerco was cackling. “Julia, my muse, who knows every ruse!”

So I let myself be swaddled in the amphora’s foul em-brace, the jar glued with pitch and coated with yard dust. At Julia’s instruction, I reinforced the joint on the inside with a rope sticky with pitch. It was like being buried or sent back to the womb. I was drawn up like a fetus, my gladius clutched like an umbilical cord, and the sensation of being rolled was so disorienting that it was all I could do to keep from vomiting. Soon I was too hot and struggling for breath.

Then we came to rest for some time, and from the shortage of air I actually faded, not jolted awake again until the amphora was lifted into a Hun wagon. There was the dull report of a whip and the vehicle shifted into motion.

In little more than half an hour, I was unloaded inside Attila’s compound. There were guttural voices for a while, and then silence. It must be the very darkest time of the night, when most are asleep. Following Julia’s suggestion, I used the tip of the sword to pry at the stoppers. A shower of wine came down on my head, making me stink even more, but it was followed by blessed air that gave me strength. I saw no light coming through and heard no voices. The kitchen must be empty. So now I sawed at the sticky rope, cutting it to weaken the jar. Finally, summoning my courage, I struck the join and pushed pieces of the amphora aside like shards of egg, letting myself hatch. Then I crawled over the other con-tainers like a sodden chick. How my wounds and muscles ached!

I dropped to the dirt floor of the storeroom and listened.

Nothing. Attila’s guards manned his stockade, not his pantry.

It was time to find Ilana and try her insane plan to save Rome and let us escape.

Slave barracks lined two sides of the courtyard of Attila’s compound. The female barracks, Zerco had reminded me, were on the eastern side so that its windows and porch faced west, giving as many late-day hours as possible for the captives to weave, make baskets, card wool, embroider, sew, and polish at which the Hun females seemed to excel. Those picked for the kagan tended to be young and beautiful, of course, on display and in turn observing, and gossiping about, visitors to Attila’s court. Their king kept them for work and decoration, not sex; he slept only with those he married to avoid the political complications of bastard heirs.

His multiple marriages-of which that to Hereka ranked first-were usually about alliance, not love. The captives were also an investment. A year or two in Attila’s service inflated their value and he would sell them to Hun nobles while their beauty was still at its peak. He used the money to help pay for his armies.

Ilana had told Zerco of a passageway between kitchen and barracks, entered through a hidden pantry door. It en-abled the slave women of his household to be served and reach the privy without traversing the more public areas: a scrap of privacy that prevented them from encountering men who could provoke trouble. This would be my own entry. I slipped past the pantry’s ranks of hanging game and clay jars of preserves and found the low door in back. It seemed Zerco sized, but once through it the windowless passage became high enough that I could shuffle ahead in the dark without bumping my head. At a second door I cut the bolt’s leather thong, lifted the latch, and slid into the room.

The slave chamber was dappled with moonlight, faintly illuminating the forms of two dozen females asleep on floor mats. Their bodies reminded me of the undulating green hills of Galatia, sinuous and rounded; and the place smelled of the sweet musk of assembled women, their let-down hair fanning across woolen pillows and glinting like alluvial plains under a glimmer of starlight. Here a breast peeked from a cocked arm, there a hip made a perfect Byzantine arch.

“Heaven on Earth,” I breathed.

I began moving down the double row of sleeping forms, marveling. It was like the assembly of damsels in the village by the lake: here a Hibernian blond, there a Caucasian redhead, and across from them a Nubian black. All exquisite, all captive. It seemed easiest to slip past them all for a quick inspection-the time it took couldn’t hurt-and then, my curiosity more fully satisfied, I’d turn back to look more carefully for Ilana.

A toe kicked my ankle.