The Death of Attila, page 12
“Are we going back to Hungvar tomorrow?” he asked.
Edeco jerked his gaze back to him. “Oh. Not for a few days. These Romans say they won’t go until they’ve had a chance to rest. We came very slowly. I don’t know why they’re tired. Probably it’s treachery. How is the road north?”
“It’s open,” Tacs said. “But you know how the rivers run to flood when the spring comes, if you wait that long.”
“Just a few more days,” Edeco said. He looked off again, absently, frowning, and after a moment turned back to Tacs and stared at him hard. Tacs smiled at him. Edeco grunted and lowered his eyes.
“Who commands the Kagan’s guard, with me gone?”
“Monidiak, I think.”
Edeco nodded and sank into silence again, his eyes on his hands before him on the tabletop. Tacs ate more bread.
“Do you know Vigilas?” Edeco asked.
Tacs shook his head.
“He came to Hungvar once, on an embassy from the old Emperor.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Perhaps you weren’t there. He is this embassy’s interpreter, a Goth. He was there last night.”
“I remember him,” Tacs said. He waited for Edeco to go on, but Edeco only poured more wine and drank and handed the cup across the table. Whatever worried him lay in his eyes like his habitual frown.
“Well,” Tacs said, uncertain; he thought he should go, and he stood up.
“Tacs,” Edeco said suddenly. “Is it better to honor an oath or to keep trust with the Kagan?”
Tacs sat back down again. “What?”
Edeco rose and went around the table. Although he wore a tunic of fine red cloth and even the gold armbands that the Romans favored, he had on Hunnish leggings and boots of silver fox fur. He went toward the door and looked out, to make sure no one was listening, and said, “I have sworn an oath not to tell something, but if I tell none, a certain wickedness will be done, or rather will go unpunished for not being known, and the Kagan will be ill-served.”
“What oath?”
“According to certain spirits of the Romans, but an oath nonetheless.”
“Why did you swear it?”
“At the time I didn’t realize what it was they would tell me. You know how a man can be curious, and when people offer something in secret he’ll chafe to know it, even if he would refuse it.”
Tacs had no idea what Edeco was talking about. He sat still, waiting.
“So I must break the oath and I am afraid that something bad will come of that. What shall I do to guard myself?”
Tacs laughed. “I am no shaman. Ask The Fluteplayer when you get back to Hungvar.”
“I have heard it said often that you have certain kinds of magic.”
“Talk to The Fluteplayer. Which spirits did you swear the oath on?”
“The demon Christ and some of his attendants.”
“Oh.” Tacs frowned. “I could ask Dietric, he is a Christian.”
“No. Don’t mention any of this to a German, they are all half Roman. I’ll talk to The Fluteplayer, but you must promise to do something for me. You must go back to Hungvar now, ahead of the rest of us, and tell the Kagan that when I was in New Rome, the Romans took me aside and had me swear an oath not to reveal this and then asked me to murder the Kagan for gold.”
Tacs started. Edeco was watching him closely; deep lines that had not been there before marked the corners of his mouth.
“I agreed to it and they gave me some gold. I was afraid to turn them down for fear they would kill me on some pretext, but I never meant to do it. I should have turned them down, shouldn’t I?”
“To kill the Kagan?” Tacs swallowed. “Who asked it? This Vigilas?”
“He was there, but it was one of the counselors, a gelding, Chrysaphius. I should have turned them down.”
“How can they call their Emperor a god; who would command such a thing—to steal the magic of a whole people?”
“I doubt the Emperor knew of it. You know I will not do it, frog, leave off. But I must tell the Kagan so that he will punish them.”
Tacs nodded once. He felt as if the shadow of a lance had passed over him.
“Will you go ahead of us to Hungvar and tell him?”
“I will.”
“You must say I never meant to do it and that I only pretended to accept it to lure them here to be punished.”
“I will. Let me tell Dietric. He has a deep respect for the Romans and should know that they are wicked.”
“He would make excuses and stay as he is. Why have you become such friends with a Gepid anyway? He would not defend you to his people as you defend him to me.”
“Don’t say that. You don’t know him. I like him.”
“He is Ardaric’s son. I have known Ardaric and worked with him since my father’s death. It is possible to be wise without being good, and Ardaric is the proof of it.”
“Dietric is not like Ardaric,” Tacs said stubbornly.
“Aaaah.” Edeco clapped his hands together. “Don’t tell him. Sometimes I think you are too simple to bother with.”
Offended, Tacs said, “I never said that I was clever.”
“At least you don’t lie.”
Tacs rocked back and forth on the bench, glaring at Edeco. The other man got up and walked across the room. All the furniture here was carved of dark wood and polished with oil, and the lines of the tables and benches drew the eye to see the room as one thing, balanced between the tiles of the floor and the ceiling and the shapes of the walls and windows. It was airy and full of light even in winter but like everything Roman it seemed at its best without people in it. Suddenly Tacs yearned to leap up and knock over the furniture and splash offal and garbage across the walls and floor. Edeco came back and sat down again opposite him.
“I’m sorry. It is I who am simple, to speak to you like that. But I have been with the Romans so long there is no peace in my mind any more.”
“Why should you be sorry? Everybody else thinks I’m stupid, too.”
“Puh.” Edeco put one hand on Tacs’ chest and shoved him. “Go away. I haven’t got the leisure to cope with your pride. But don’t tell anybody why you are leaving, and go tomorrow back to Hungvar.”
“Can I take Dietric with me?”
“Yes,” Edeco said. “He would suffer, alone with the rest of us.”
Tacs got up and went out of the room.
TEN
THE KAGAN THRUST OUT HIS lower lip. He sat slouched in his high seat, his left shoulder hunched up and his right arm stretched along the arm of the chair. To his right sat his sons Ellac and Dengazich. They had listened without a word to Tacs and not once had they looked at him. The Kagan had not looked away from him. For the first time Tacs felt uneasy about carrying such news.
The silence stretched on and grew heavy and awkward. The Kagan scratched idly at the wispy hairs of his beard, his eyes steadily on Tacs’. Tacs’ legs began to ache, starting at the ankles and spreading up into his knees and thighs, and he shifted his weight to his toes, uncertain whether he should ask to sit down. The Kagan, watching him, smiled and said, “Sit, little frog. You weren’t made to stand.”
Staring at the blank wall opposite, Dengazich made a face and quickly pulled it straight. Tacs sighed and squatted on his heels.
“So,” the Kagan said, in a mild voice. “Edeco confided in you because the oath he had sworn troubled him and you are the friend of a shaman, The Fluteplayer. What did you say to him concerning the oath?”
Tacs had expected questions about the plot. He had no answer ready for other questions, and he had to think to remember. At last he shrugged. “Nothing. I told him to talk to The Fluteplayer. I don’t remember saying anything else.”
“Unh.” The Kagan smiled. His face smoothed out and he glanced at his sons. Dengazich’s quick smile passed over his face but Ellac’s face showed nothing.
“How did Edeco look?” the Kagan asked. “When he spoke of this plot to murder me, did he seem … upset?”
“Naturally.” Tacs lifted his hands, palms up. “Even to think of such a murder—”
“Sssh. I prefer short answers, you know that. Did he seem as upset about the plot as the oath and breaking the oath?”
“Well,” Tacs said, “he had known of the plot longer than I.” He did not understand this questioning; he was impatient for the Kagan to come back to the subject of the plotters and the embassy coming to Hungvar, so that Tacs could tell him his plan for their punishment. The Kagan’s keen interest in Edeco he did not understand.
But the Kagan only sat back, relaxed. “Did you bring King Ardaric’s son back with you?”
“Dietric? Yes.”
“I am pleased. Ardaric has been nagging me about him like an old woman. You should not have taken him. He had asked Ardaric if he could go, and Ardaric had refused. Did you know that?”
“He never told me,” Tacs said.
“But you knew.”
“He is old enough to do as he pleases, and not as his father wants.”
The Kagan shouted with laughter. His head jerked toward the two young men sitting beside his high seat. When he could control his laughter he said, “Don’t talk like that in front of my children. You see Dengazich—he is scarcely the age of Ardaric’s son and you will inspire him. Thank you for telling me all this. You may leave. See that—Dietric goes back to his familial hearth.” For an instant, speaking of Dietric’s home, the Kagan’s voice sharpened with contempt. But a moment later he was smiling and mild again. “You may see that there is a place made ready for the Romans and their people, when they get here.”
Tacs’ eyes popped open. “Attila. Do you mean you will let them come, even now?”
The Kagan rubbed his chest. “I think to make much of this plot would be to make the Romans too important. They are unimportant. Do as I say, frog.”
“Oh, well,” Tacs said. “I don’t understand you.” He got up, stretching his legs carefully, and went out of the room.
“Why do you let a mere warrior talk to you that way?” Ellac said.
The Kagan rose from his chair. He pressed his hand tightly against his side. “He can talk to me as he wishes. You will talk to me with respect. Go away.”
Ellac rose and marched away. Across the room, on the table where the drink stood in ewers, was the amulet the shamans had given him. Attila started toward it. He gestured to Dengazich to go with Ellac. Nausea filled up his belly. He knew if he could pour honeyed milk over the amulet and drink it before the pain started he would not collapse. But the pain like the stab of a knife struck him in the belly, and he lurched another step toward the table and fell to his knees. Darkness covered his eyes. His mind was paralyzed. A moment later he was looking up into the face of Dengazich.
“What is it?” Dengazich cried. “My father, my Kagan—”
Attila became aware that he was on his knees and his son was holding him up. He straightened his body, taking his weight out of Dengazich’s arms, and got heavily onto his feet. He went to the table for his amulet and the honeyed milk. Dengazich followed him, like a hawk on a hare.
“What happened to you? I saw you fall, what happened?”
“I tripped,” Attila said. The amulet was in a small box of opaque Eastern stone. He opened it and dropped the amulet into his cup. “Where is Ellac?”
“Gone. He left before you … fell.”
The Kagan drank. The sweet mare’s milk disguised the taste of the amulet. In his belly the pain stabbed again, much softer, and faded away.
“Has it happened before?” Dengazich asked.
Attila filled his cup again. “I tripped.” When the first pain began, in his panic he had suspected even Dengazich of cursing him. He understood the seizures better now and no longer watched his sons, but he thought it dangerous that the young man should know of his weakness. He went back to his high seat and sat down. Dengazich moved around before him, restless, and at last hunkered down on his heels and looked up at Attila.
“Ellac does not know. What have the shamans said of this?”
“I tripped,” Attila said again. “If you say anything more of it, to me or to anyone else, I shall know and you will suffer.” He sipped the sweet milk. “Do you doubt me?”
Dengazich looked up at him, his Gothic eyes like the eyes of a lynx. Attila made his own eyes round. Suddenly the boy dropped forward onto his hands and knees and knocked his forehead on the floor. “My Kagan.” Leaping up he ran out of the room.
Attila drank milk. Each attack of pain left him weak, and each time it took him longer to recover. Twice he had vomited blood. That frightened him, and it shamed him to be afraid. He sat slack-muscled, willing his body to gather strength.
The shamans all agreed that it was an old spell. Against a Kagan many enchantments must always lie, such men had many enemies, and now Attila’s strength was going, he was aging, and the enchantments weighed on him. So all the shamans had said.
Two of them—one The Fluteplayer whose magic was ancient and strong and who had several demons —had said that there was something else, and to this Attila himself agreed, that certain spells laid against the Hiung when the animals became men were coming to flower, and of course such spells affected him as Kagan especially.
Although he could not remember it himself he had heard thousands of times how the Hiung had followed the white stag through the swamps into Europe, and how then they had covered the plains, hordes of warriors, each clan with its own king, and women, children, young men, old people, as numerous then as the Ostrogoths or the Franks now. Since that time something had happened to them. Gradually the Hiung were dying. Sickness that left Germans healthy as before killed Hiung, and Hiung women bore children and the children lived a year or two years and died. The young men went on raids and into wars and to join the armies of the Romans and were killed, or they married the women of Germans and their children were Germans, not Hiung.
Dengazich was no Hiung, but a German, like Ardaric, and Ellac’s mind was dull. Only Ernach of all his sons had any heart or craft to lead, and Ernach would not receive the cicatrice until the following midwinter. None of Attila’s children knew the incantations to be said over a dead father. He should have taught them, they should have learned it when he said it over his own father, every year in the season of Mundzuk’s death, but Attila had not said it now for ten years, not since the year he killed Bleda, his brother and Mundzuk’s eldest son.
In that same season when he should have prayed over his father’s spirit, each totem and clan of the Hiung had been used to come together and hold kurultais for the working of hunting magic and go out to hunt for meat for the winter, but for many years there had been no such Great Hunt. The Hiung sat idly in their camps and waited for the Germans to bring them their food, and no one remembered the rituals of meeting, and the men who owned the hunting magic were dying off without sons. No one remembered the songs and rituals for protecting their flocks and herds, because few Hiung kept herds any more, the Germans tended them, they were the herds of the Germans now.
His birth-name was not Attila, nor the hidden name he had taken with his cicatrice when he became a man; he had received the name Attila as a willing gift, because he had brought his people together and made them powerful over all others. Now it seemed to him that soon after his own death, the Hiung themselves would be gone. In his belly the pain nestled, soft, in the honeyed milk, and with an effort of will, he turned his brooding mind to other things.
DIETRIC STAYED WITH TACS on the porch of the Kagan’s stockade until after dark. When he had run away with the Huns, he had never considered that he would someday have to face Ardaric over it. He spoke of this to Tacs, but his friend brushed him off. “He’ll be so happy to have you back he’ll just shout a little and send you away to think on your wickedness. You worry too much.”
“You don’t know my father very well.”
“Don’t go back at all. Stay with us.”
Dietric grunted. He sat back down against the wall. Monidiak, Bryak, and Tacs were playing sticks, punching and slapping at each other with each move, their voices raised like those of women arguing. Dietric watched them, wishing that he could stay with them. Their lives seemed so much easier than his.
Tacs had never even hinted to Dietric why they had left Sirmium so abruptly. In the morning, before he went to see Edeco, he spoke of seeking out a cock fight and had described to Dietric at great length how to choose a cock to bet on. At noon he saw Edeco and by midafternoon he and Dietric were riding back to Hungvar.
The trip back had been bitter, grinding work, riding from darkness to darkness. They had eaten only a few handfuls of parched grain and drunk melted snow and The White Brother. Nearly all the while he had been awake he had been drunk. In his mind the whole journey was a white radiance of snow and sky violated occasionally by the black angles of a tree.
Now while he thought of his father the memory of riding home filled him with a warming triumph. Watching Tacs rearrange his sticks, he tried to think of some casual way of mentioning the ride.
“Tacs, why did we come back so suddenly?”
Tacs looked back at him, smiled, and turned to Monidiak. “He is the best rider of the Germans. He never once asked to slow down, even.”
Monidiak and Bryak laughed and leaned out to touch Dietric’s arm. Dietric looked down, pleased, unable to meet their eyes. He wondered if Tacs had told them why he had left Sirmium. He looked out toward the gate. The sun had gone down but there was still light left in the sky. A troop of women was walking in through the gate, single file, carrying baskets of snow to cool the Khatun Kreka’s wine. Hun guardsmen waited beside the wooden winch for the last of the women to come in so that they could close the gate. Against the fading sky the stiff extended branches of the oak tree stretched like a net.
“Well,” Dietric said. “I guess I have to go.”
“Come stay with us,” Tacs said, looking over his shoulder at him. “Why should you go back ever?”
