The Scourge of God (18 page)

Their marriages were polygamous, given the surplus of women due to the ravages of war, with harems the reward for battlefield success. There were also concubines who lived in a social twilight between legitimacy and slavery and who sometimes wielded more influence over their vain masters than a legal wife. Battle death, divorce, remarriages, and adultery were so common that the packs of children who ran screaming through the camp seemed to belong to everyone and no one, and seemed as happy in this state as wolf cubs. The Huns indulged their children and taught them horsemanship with the same earnestness that we Romans taught rhetoric or history; but they would also cuff them with the gruffness of she-bears or hurl them into the river to make a point. Privation was expected as a part of life, and practiced for with fasts, withheld water, long swims, the scorch of fire, or the prick of thorns. Wrestling was encouraged, and archery required. For boys there was no higher honor than to endure more pain than your companions, no greater delight than surprising an enemy, and no goal more important than blooding yourself in battle. Girls were taught that they could bear even more agony than men and that every fiber of their being must be dedicated to making more babies who would someday make still more war.

My guide to this martial society was Zerco, the dwarf seeming to enjoy watching the teasing and torture the children inflicted on one another, perhaps because it reminded him of the torment given people his size. “Anagai there has learned to hold his breath longer than anyone because he’s smallest and the others hold him under the Tisza,” the dwarf explained. “Bochas tried to drown him, but Anagai learned to wring the bigger boy’s balls, so now Bochas is more careful. Sandil lost an eye in a rock fight, and Tatos can’t shoot after breaking his arm, so he’s catching arrows with his shield. They boast about their bruises. The meanest they make their leaders.”

I was toughening myself. The journey alone had developed my muscles to an unprecedented degree, and here in Hunuguri there were no books. Composition of my notes took only a fraction of the day. Accordingly, I set about hardening myself like a Hun. I galloped over the treeless plain on my mare, Diana, improving my horsemanship. And, as Zerco had advised, I dug out my heavy Roman weapons and began to practice earnestly. It made a strange sight for the Huns. My spatha, or cavalry sword, was heavier than the curved Hun blades, and my chain armor was heavier and hotter than their leather and bone lamellar armor. Above all, my oval shield was like a house wall compared to the small round wicker shields of the horsemen. Sometimes Huns came to cross blades for practice and, if I could not match their quickness, neither could they break easily past my shield. They banged on me like on a turtle. I fought several to a standstill, and their initial jeers turned to grudging respect. “Getting at you is like getting at a fox in its den!”

The senator didn’t like this. “We’re an embassy, Alabanda,” Maximinus complained. “We’re here to befriend the Hun, not fence with him.”

“This is what Hun friends do,” I told him as I caught my breath.

“It’s undignified for a diplomat to fight like a common soldier.”

“Fighting is all the dignity they believe in.”

Meanwhile, Skilla’s intervention had only increased my interest in Ilana. I learned that he had been orphaned in the wars, taken in by his uncle Edeco, and had been promised Ilana by Attila himself once he had sufficiently proved his mettle in battle. In the meantime, she served Suecca. Had she agreed to this fate? He claimed that he’d saved her life, and she admitted that her acceptance of presents and protection signaled acquiescence. Yet his generosity also embarrassed her, and it was clear she felt trapped.

I wished I had something to match him, but I’d brought no gifts of my own. Certainly she was a striking woman, with an obvious interest in me as a possible rescuer. Yet she was wary of being seen with me, and I wasn’t sure if her interest went beyond my potential utility as a path to freedom. I tabulated her movements, learning to cross paths with her when she emerged from Edeco’s household on errands, and she learned to expect me. She walked in a way that made me think of her body even when she was in the plainest and most shapeless clothes, and she smiled encouragingly at me even while seeming reluctant to linger. She knew we most want what we can’t have.

“Don’t submit to that Hun,” I told her in hurried moments. I liked the way her eyes shone as she looked to me as a savior, even while I wondered if I could ever actually help her—I had no money—or if she was using me.

“I’ve asked Suecca to keep Skilla away,” she said. “She’s disgusted at my ingratitude and Edeco is amused. These Huns view resistance as a challenge. I’m worried, Jonas. Skilla is getting impatient. I need to get away from this camp.”

“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 cuckolded 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 tantamount 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.

A coward in battle was ordered suspended over a pit of planted spears and each member of the unit he’d deserted was told to cut one strand away from the suspending rope. “Fate will decide if you betrayed enough to weaken the rope to the point where you fall into the pit,” Attila decreed. Because some of his former companions were hunting or on military missions, it took six days before all returned to camp and took their careful slice. In the end there were just enough strands that the rope barely held, and the victim was finally lowered, gibbering and feverish. His two wives sliced their own cheeks and breasts in humiliation before bearing him away.

Each of these incidents was reported and even exaggerated as Huns traveled through Attila’s empire. The kagan was just and yet merciless, fatherly and yet cruel, wise and yet given to well-timed rages. What would it do to a tyrant’s mind, I wondered, to order such punishments day after day, year after year? How would it shape a leader that only by doing so could he prevent his savage nation from sliding into anarchy? When did such acts take one out of the realm of normal conduct and into a universe that existed only in one’s own feverish, self-centered mind? He seemed not so much an emperor as a circus master with whip and torch, and not so much a king as a primitive god.

“This is your son?” Attila now asked, interrupting my thoughts.

“Crixus has come all the way from Constantinople, kagan,” Bigilas said, “as proof that my word is my bond.” His manner seemed more unctuous and false than ever, and I wondered if the Huns noticed the shallowness of his sincerity or just passed it off as Roman habit. “He’s hostage for Rome’s honesty. Please, now hear our ambassador.” Bigilas glanced once at Edeco, but the Hun chieftain was as expressionless as stone. “I myself am your servant, of course.” Attila nodded solemnly and looked at Senator Maximinus. “This demonstrates the trust I can put in the word of Rome and Constantinople?”

The senator bowed. “Bigilas has offered his own son as proof of our good will, kagan, reminiscent of how the God of our faith offered his. Peace begins with trust, and surely this reinforces your faith in our intentions, does it not?” Attila was silent for so long that all of us became uneasy. Silence hung in the room like motes of dust.

“Indeed it does,” he finally said. “It tells me exactly what your intentions are.” Attila looked down at Crixus. “You are a brave and dutiful boy to come all this way at the command of your father. You demonstrate how sons should behave. Do you trust the sire of your flesh, young Roman?”

The boy blinked, stunned at having been addressed. “I— I do, king.” He searched for words. “I am proud of him.” He beamed.

Attila nodded, then stood. “Your heart is good, little one. Your soul is innocent, I think.” He blinked once. “Unlike your elders.” Then he let his dark eyes pass over each of us in turn, as if seeing inside our hearts and selecting different fates for each of us. Instantly we knew that something was desperately awry. “It is too bad, then,” the despot rumbled, “that your father has utterly betrayed you and that you must be tortured for his sins.”

It was as if the air had gone out of the room. Maximinus gaped like a fool. Bigilas went white. I felt confused. What treachery was this? Poor Crixus looked like he had not understood.

“We will uncoil your entrails like yarn and let my pigs feed on them,” Attila described without emotion. “We will boil your toes and your fingers, immersing them one by one so that you will know the pain of the last before we start on the next. We will cut away your nose, flay your cheeks, and break out your teeth in turn—one per hour—and cinch a thorny bramble around your privates and pull until they turn purple.”

Crixus was beginning to shake.

“What madness is this?” the senator croaked. “Why do you threaten a child?”

“We will do these things—and my wives will giggle at your screams, young Crixus—unless your father shows the honor that
you
have shown.” Now Attila’s dark gaze swung to settle on Bigilas.

“S-show honor?” stammered Bigilas. The guards, I saw, had quietly formed around us. “Kagan, what can you—” 

“We will
do
it”—here Attila’s voice was rising to low thunder—“unless the translator here tells me why he has brought fifty pounds of gold from Constantinople.”

We other Romans turned to Bigilas in consternation. What was Attila talking about? The translator looked stricken, as if told by a physician he was doomed. His legs began quivering, and I feared he might collapse.

Attila turned to his chiefs. “He did bring fifty pounds, did he not, Edeco?”

The warlord nodded. “As we agreed in the house of Chrysaphius, kagan. We searched the translator’s saddlebags just moments ago and brought it here for you to see as proof.” He clapped his hands once, a sharp report. Two warriors came in bearing sacks, leaning slightly from the weight. They strode to Attila’s dais and slashed open the sacks with iron daggers, releasing a shower of yellow metal. Coins rolled at Attila’s feet.