The Scourge of God (28 page)

But he didn’t want his own kind—he wanted Ilana. He didn’t believe she was dead at all. After he killed Jonas, retrieved the sword, and won her back, everything would become simple. They would scratch and buck like wildcats, but when they coupled, what sons they would make!

The country became steeper, reminding him of his horse race with Jonas on the journey from Constantinople. Skilla sensed the Roman was near as he sometimes sensed a deer or wild horse was near, and yet he felt blinded in these hilly woods. He was growing discouraged—had the Huns somehow galloped past them in their haste?—when one of his men shouted and they reined up at a wondrous discovery: a bright Greek ring, left like a golden beacon beside a track that led off the main road. Eudoxius!

So the Huns rose long before dawn to ride quietly on the sidetrack, finally spying a pillar of gray smoke. Had the fugitives become so foolish or so overconfident? Then the smoke disappeared, as if someone realized the mistake. The Huns quietly ascended ridges that overlooked where the plume must have come from, dismounting to lead their ponies through the trees. It was the grayness before dawn, the mountains ahead a soft pewter and the trees a dark foundation. At the crest, Skilla spied three horses in a hollow below.

Now he would be revenged! But Skilla didn’t have much practice yet at leadership, his band was young, and before he could order a proper ambush his warriors whooped and charged. A dwarf and a woman? This would be easy.

It was the noise that saved Jonas. He sprang up, shouting, just as the first arrows, fired at too long a range, arced into his campsite to stick in the ground. He seized one horse, mounted it, and dragged some other man—the Greek doctor?— across its neck with him. The woman and dwarf grabbed another as the third animal simply reared and plunged out of reach. It ran toward the attackers until Hun arrows thudded into the mount’s breast to make sure their quarry couldn’t use it, bringing that animal with a shudder to its knees. Now the fugitives were kicking their two surviving mounts furiously as arrows rained around, all of them precariously mounted bareback. The Huns had them! But then the Arabian horses seemed to explode with speed, weaving almost instinctually, and in a flash they were obscured by the branches. The warriors cried in excitement and frustration and whipped the flanks of their own ponies in pursuit, embarrassed they had not encircled their prey. But the fugitive horses were fresh from a night’s rest and the Hun horses, already exhausted from these mountains, had been climbing for two hours and had sprinted in attack. In moments, what should have been easy capture turned into dogged pursuit.

Skilla was furious. Each of his men had abandoned the tactics they’d been taught since childhood in hope of the individual glory of retrieving Attila’s sword. Now they’d all spoiled it for one another. The warriors blamed as they rode, pointing, while their prey’s powerful horses slipped around the shoulder of a ridge, ending any chance of shooting them. By the time the barbarians crested the hill, the fugitives were streaking for the valley below, where an arched Roman bridge led over a foaming stream.

“We’ll still run them down,” he grimly told his men.

“They’re carrying too much,” agreed Tatos.

The Hun horses were whipped downhill in a ragged line, the warrior’s bows still strung, swords bouncing against their thighs. They watched their quarry pause a moment on the bridge, as if to break or block it. Then the fugitives seemingly gave up and rode across, leaving the Roman road to ride through a gap in the trees on the far side of the stream and struggle directly uphill. They were desperate now, Skilla guessed, leaving the track in hopes of losing their pursuers in broken country. It was a foolish and fatal move because his men would not slacken, not when their quarry’s scent was like the spoor of a wounded stag.

His men need cross only one more bridge, and they had them.

The attack of the Huns had come as a complete shock to us three escapees but not at all to our prisoner, the wily Eudox-ius. After crossing the Danube and riding southward toward the Alps, we had foolishly assumed that our circuitous route had been successful, and we had slackened our pace, giving our tired horses some rest. Yet even when the passes to Italy seemed almost in sight, I still didn’t dare light a fire or abandon habitual caution. I’d taken the risk of purchasing some charcoal when we crossed the Danube, and its heat had since kept us alive. I believed it gave no smoke.

Until that morning.

Ever since we’d escaped Attila’s camp, Eudoxius had been doing anything he could to attract attention. It raised too many questions to gag him, so he’d spoken Greek at every opportunity. He had offered medical care to the endless parade of the sick and crippled that any traveler encounters. One by one he had plucked silver and gold rings off his fingers and left them on boulders or logs in the remote hope a pursuing Hun might spot them, and it was only in the foothills of the Alps that Julia furiously noticed that his fingers had become bare. The doctor had listened for pursuit every night when his head touched the ground. He had not so much seen or heard Skilla as felt him, I think— felt as if an arm were reaching for him as he sank under water. The closer we drew to the Alps, the more his hopes perversely rose. Finally, it was my last charcoal fire that was our undoing. We warmed our dinner and I kicked it out, but the dirt locked in the heat and quiet coals remained. Late at night when Julia had nodded from exhaustion, Eudoxius stretched his bonds enough to reach a fallen fir bough damp with dew. At dawn, he slipped the branch onto the embers before the rest of us stirred and smoke began to roll upward. Julia finally jerked awake, shouting, but by the time Zerco kicked the limb aside and kicked our prisoner, it was too late. Shortly afterward, we heard the yip of the Huns.

Now we were desperate. Unable to break the old timbers of the bridge, we’d abandoned the Roman track and were climbing through trees. Eudoxius thought we were trying to hide.

“Better to give yourselves up,” he counseled as I clutched him like a sack of wheat across the front of my mount, wondering for the hundredth time if his potential value to Aetius was worth his trouble as a captive. “Trying to hide is as ineffectual as a child covering his eyes in hopes of not being seen. The Huns will find you. I’ve seen them shoot out the eye of a stag at two hundred paces.”

“If I die, you will too.”

“You won’t know the arrow is coming until it is through your breast.”

I punched him in frustration and he swore.

“Leave me and the sword and maybe the Huns will break off their pursuit,” he tried. “I’ll trade you your life for it.”

“The sword I might abandon,” I said. “You, I’ll keep as shield.”

Given time and a tool more effective than the old iron sword, we might have sabotaged the bridge. It was obvious no repairs had been made in a generation, and the rotting timber deck had been patched only crudely by the rare traveler charitable enough to care about who came after him. Gaps revealed the white water below. Yet even as I pondered the possibility, the Huns began spilling down the slope behind like a brown avalanche. This forced me to look ahead, and what I saw inspired me.

“Where the devil are you taking us,” Zerco gasped as our two horses struggled up the mountainside, gravel skittering.

“We can’t outrun twenty or thirty men forever,” I replied. “We have to stop them.”

“But how?” Julia cried. An arrow, fired from so great a range that it wobbled, rattled into the trees.

“See that slope of rubble and talus above the bridge? If we can jar it loose, we can send down an avalanche.”

“And ourselves with it,” Zerco predicted. But what choice did we have?

We came out of the trees at the base of a cliff that loomed high above the ravine that the bridge spanned, casting the stream in shadow. Following the cliff base, we climbed along a rubble slope until the loose shale became so thick that all vegetation ended. The horses began slipping as if on ice. Far below, we could see the Huns riding down to the crossing.

“Zerco, truss this damned doctor like a sacrificial goat. Julia, come with me!” I grabbed a stout pine pole lying amid the rubble and we slid partway down the talus slope, zigzagging to a point above the span.

The Huns were like ants, bunched at the bottom, pointing up to where they spied us. One was angrily ordering the others further, and his posture and gestures were all too familiar. Skilla! Would I never be rid of my rival?

I saw what I was looking for. A rock larger than the others had slid down the talus and was perched precariously upright at one end, wedged in place by smaller rocks around it. I planted the pole under, using a stone as a fulcrum. “Help me push!”

Julia pressed desperately.

The Huns, leading their ponies, began filing over the bridge.

“I can’t do it!” she shouted.

“Throw your weight against it!”

“I am!”

And then a smaller ball of energy sprang down the slope and hurtled onto the pole. Zerco! The dwarf’s impact, his weight multiplied by speed, was just enough. Even as the lever snapped, the rock sprang high enough to topple forward; and as it did other rocks broke loose and began sliding like a ruptured dam.

Zerco started to slide with it, his wife catching his tunic. For a moment she swayed at the edge, about to tip.

I hauled at them, retreating upward. “We have to get out of the way!”

Now the hillside was roaring, beginning to slide in a sheet. We clambered to the cliff pass, grabbed solid rock, and turned. What a sight!

We’d triggered a major avalanche. Falling stone smashed into falling stone, rupturing the delicate equilibrium of the mountain. Dust was hissing upward in a geysered plume. The rumble grew in volume, at first inaudible to the Huns below and then so loud that it overcame the sound of the rushing water. The barbarians looked up, staring in stupefaction at the lip of the cliff. A spray of talus burst over and arced down.

They turned their horses and ran.

Now hundreds of tons of rock were sluicing over the precipice like a stone waterfall, and when they struck the bridge there was an eruption. Planks kicked skyward as if catapulted. Aging beams exploded into a spray of splinters. The avalanche punched through the bridge as if it were paper, taking two Huns and their horses with it, and then the plume of rubble hit the torrent with a titanic splash. Bridge bits rained down.

We climbed to the top of the talus, where Eudoxius was, and looked back. I was jubilant. It was as if a giant had taken a bite out of the mountain. A haze of dust hung in the air. Below, the middle of the bridge had disappeared.

The surviving Huns had reined in on the far side of the stream and stared upward, quiet at the damage.

“It will take them days to find another way around,” I said with more hope than knowledge. “Or at least hours.” I patted Zerco. “Let’s pray Aetius got your message.”

XIX

THE ROMAN TOWER

T
he guard tower of Ampelum overlooked the junction of two old Roman roads, one going west to the salt mines around Iuvavum and Cucullae, the other south to Ad Pontem and the mountain passes beyond. The tower was square, fifty feet high, crenellated at its crest, and topped by a tripod-hung kettle in which oil could be lit to send signals to distant towers like it. The fire had been lit many more times than help had ever arrived, given the depleted nature of imperial resources; and so this garrison, like so many, had learned to depend on itself. Rome was like the Moon: ever present and far away.

Around the tower’s base was a wider fortification of stone walls eight feet high, enclosing a courtyard with stables, storerooms, and workshops. The dozen occupying Roman soldiers slept and ate in the tower itself, relying on cows stabled on the ground floor to provide some warmth. This animal heat was supplemented by charcoal braziers that gave the air a stale haze and, over the centuries, had stained the beams black.

To call the garrison “Roman” was to stretch the historic meaning of the term. It had been ages since legions consisted primarily of Latins marching out of Italy. Instead, the army had become one of the Empire’s great integrating forces, recruiting men of a hundred conquered nations and training them under the common tongue. Slowly, the universality of language, custom, and armament had slipped away, and so what manned the tower now was a collection of mountain farm boys and recruited vagabonds, all under the command of a gruff decurion named Silas who originated in the marshes of Frisia. One soldier was Greek, one Italian, and one African. Three were Germanic Ostrogoths, one a Gepid, and the other five had never ventured more than twenty miles from the fortress and thus were simply inhabitants of Noricum. While these men owed nominal allegiance to Rome, they principally guarded themselves, plus a few villages in surrounding valleys from which they extracted provisions and a few coins in taxes. Travelers passing the crossroads were required to pay a toll. When reminders from the clerks in Ravenna became insistent enough, a small portion of this levy was shared with the central government. The soldiers did not expect, and did not receive, anything in return. They were responsible for providing their own food, clothing, weapons, and any material needed to repair the guard tower. Their reward was permission to levy taxes on their neighbors.