The Scourge of God

“Not that I minded losing coin I might never see anyway,” the dwarf chimed in. “I’d no hopes of marrying, and then suddenly I was presented with this angel. The Huns thought it hilarious. They offered to lend us a stool.”

“What others treated as a joke we saw as salvation,” Julia said. “Zerco was the first truly kind and gentle man I’d ever met. We had a bond: our fear of a future dominated by Huns.

Attila is a parasite on better people.”

“And he is driven by two great fears,” Zerco added. “The first is that his people are being corrupted by the booty they acquire and will become soft.”

“Not likely by spring,” I said. “And the second?”

“He fears his own failure. Do you realize what it must be like to be a tyrant who rules by terror and cannot trust one?

How does he know a follower’s loyalty is given or extorted?

How does he know that sex is love or coerced? The very might that makes a kagan all powerful can also make him all doubting. He gains support only by winning. If he falters, all might come undone.”

“You think he’ll falter without the sword?”

“That’s my hope.”

“And Attila sent you to Aetius, and Aetius back to spy.”

“Our marriage was an excuse to send Zerco back to where I was trapped with Attila,” Julia went on. “And there my dwarf saw a way to solve all our problems.”

“How?”

“By getting you to steal the sword, of course. It will demoralize Attila and encourage Aetius. If we can get to the Roman army, the captured sword may help the army to rally, and if the Romans win, Zerco and I can live in peace.” She nodded happily, as if the fate of the world were an easy enough thing for me to arrange.

XVIII

THE AVALANCHE

Skilla’s Huns were tired and far from home, riding in a frontier region not firmly held by any nation. The once-inviolable northern boundary of the Roman Empire had long been breeched. Far south of the Danube the Romans still held sway, in order to guard the passes into Italy. Far north of it the Germans dominated in the deep forests that deterred all conquerors. But along the Danube itself, order had de-volved to a rabble of semi-independent governors, warlords, and chiefs who had carved out fiefdoms in the dying Empire’s disorder. A party as large and deadly as the Huns could move through this landscape with relative impunity, but Skilla’s group dare not linger long in case a local duke or renegade centurion decided to treat them as a threat. The Hun’s task was to recover the sword and kill Jonas, not provoke a skirmish with provincial bumpkins. So he and his men skirted the walled villas and new hilltop forts as carefully as the fugitives did, muttering at the gloom of the trees, cursing the frequent grades, and grumbling at the weather.

Their bowstrings were continually damp, detracting greatly from their killing power, and even their swords showed spots of rust. To add to their unease, the Alps loomed to the southwest. Snow was creeping down the autumn flanks.

Zerco was key. At any one time there were hundreds of couriers, peddlers, pilgrims, mystics, mercenaries, and witches wandering the crumbling roads, making it hard to track a single fugitive such as Jonas. But a dark dwarf riding with a full-stature woman and two other men, one of them bound, was a curiosity that even these strange parts did not see every day. As Huns followed the river upstream toward Lauriacum, they began to hear stories of an odd quartet who had emerged from the forests of the north. The newcomers were filthy and exhausted, and yet the halfling had paid in gold for a hired courier to take a message upriver. The rumor was that the document was a missive for the great Aetius himself. Then they crossed to the river’s southern bank and aimed in the direction of the alpine salt mines where Roman garrisons still soldiered. One of the fugitives carried a strange bundle on his back: long, narrow, and as high as a man was tall.

If the fugitives could find a powerful Roman escort, their escape would be completed.

The Huns had to find them first.

They galloped hard for Lentia and the last standing bridge on this part of the Danube, its stone piers cracked and mossy and its wooden span a crude replacement for long-destroyed Roman carpentry. Yet the bridge remained passable. It was manned by ruffians who demanded tolls; but no sooner had these toughs heard the sound of hooves, and swung shut their gate of thorns, than they smelled the rank odor of Huns, like smoke on the wind. The bridge keepers reconsidered. By the time the barbarian party broke free of the trees and galloped onto the bridge like wolves from the steppe, several with bows in hand and their brown faces mottled with scars, the gate was open and its toll takers in hiding. All they saw was a blur of clods, accompanied by the excited yips of barbarians aimed eagerly southward.

On the warriors went like a dark and urgent cloud, collecting scraps of rumor at this place and that. Somewhere on the highway to Iuvavum fled four tired fugitives. One of them gabbled in Greek.