The Death of Attila, page 19
“Does he speak Hiung?”
Ummake turned away, her hands full of grain, and poured it into a stone jar.
Tacs got up and went across the aul to the monk’s side, shook him until the man’s eyes opened, and sat back. Like a child waking up the monk lifted his head and looked around, full of trust. His eyes fixed on Tacs’ face and he smiled.
“Go,” Tacs said, in Latin. “Go away. You will only get into trouble here.”
The monk pulled himself up onto his haunches, shaking out the sleeves of his rough black gown. He smoothed both palms across his head. In the light from the smokehole and the fire, his thin face looked all hollows and ridges. His eyes were pale as water, shining.
“Did you hear me?” Tacs said, impatiently.
“You are hasty. I was told Huns had no sense of time,” the monk said. He sat down cross-legged. “You speak excellent Latin, where did you learn it?”
Tacs banged his hands on his knees, angry. “You must go. Wickedness will come to you if you stay here.”
“No. Wickedness will come to me only if I let it. Christ Jesus is my armor against sin.”
“Tacs,” Ummake called sharply. “I told you, he has been very kind to me. Leave him alone.”
“Yaya wouldn’t want him here.” Tacs glared at the monk as if he could lift him up on the end of his stare and hoist him out of the aul.
Ummake threw a cup at him. “Yaya is dead.” Her face was slimy with tears and mucus; she scrubbed it roughly with her sleeve. Her eyes moved to the monk and her face altered into gentleness. “Come here, friend.” She held out one hand.
The monk smiled. “Friend,” he said, in Hiung; so he knew some of the language after all. He went toward her, bent over, across the aul.
“Ummake,” Tacs said. “Why do you… .” He watched her, helpless; she broke off a chunk of bread and handed it to the monk, patted his hand and smiled at him, as if he were a favorite dog.
With the bread in his hand, the monk turned to look back at Tacs. “Please. Come translate for me.” When Tacs hesitated: “Please.”
Tacs went over to them. “Ummake. What are you doing?”
“You all went off to your own doings,” Ummake said. “You left me alone with Yaya. Everybody else is either drunk or asleep or working at something. This one helped me carry Yaya around the dead-aul. He helped me wash him and dress him. He comforted me.”
“He is a Roman,” Tacs said.
The monk was pulling at his sleeve. Finally Tacs looked around at him. “What do you want?”
“I want to thank her. And to tell her of the comfort and love of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
For a moment Tacs was wordless. Finally he burst out: “Her husband is dead, and you want to tell her about Roman things—German things—”
“It is now that she needs it,” the monk said.
Ummake was sealing jars of food with mud. She had rolled up the wide sleeves of her shirt nearly to the armpits. Tacs watched her a moment, her strong arms and her hands, her eyes lowered to her work. Her hair hung down over her shoulders, matted and tangled. Tears splashed on her hands.
“He wants to tell you of the demon Christ,” Tacs said. “He says it will comfort you.”
Ummake shook her head. “I shall have all my comfort very soon. Tell him so.” Her hands went on packing mud into the necks of the jars. Her eyes watched her work. “Ask him to stay with me.”
Tacs turned back to the monk. “She says she will not listen. Stay if you want.” He backed off. If the monk made her feel easier, maybe there was good in it. He remembered what The Fluteplayer had said and went across the aul to find his bows and extra clothes.
Monidiak came after him. “We shall have to take Yaya out to the plain today. I am leaving. Without me there will not be enough.”
“Good. Find Bryak.” Tacs threw back the torn cloak he had been sleeping under and looked over his equipment. He needed arrows. Suddenly he heard what Monidiak had said and glanced behind him. “Where are you going?”
“With Ellac. He wants to go up by the Lakes and gather the people there. The shamans are calling for all the Hiung to meet on the Nedao River at the auroch crossing to elect a new chief. We will gather at the beginning of the Stag-Fighting Moon.”
“Why didn’t you talk to me first?”
“Oh.” Monidiak struck him lightly on the arm. “We will all come together at the Nedao, anyway. We shall see what happens there. I knew you would not follow Ellac. Are you going with Dengazich? He is too young.”
“Are they fighting?”
“Not yet. But Dengazich is talking about Bleda, and the elder son set aside in favor of the younger.”
Tacs thought, Everybody is leaving. Within a few days, Hungvar would be deserted. “The Gepids are going away.”
“Of no importance. Whoever we make Kagan will ride them down.”
“We will make no new Kagan.”
“It doesn’t matter. The Germans would never dare stand against us, anyway.”
Tacs picked up one of his arrow cases. “Last night I saw Yaya and he told me that he had been killing Germans. That was who killed him, the Germans. For killing them. Be careful. Do you have any extra arrows?”
“Take Yaya’s.”
Tacs’ heart jumped. The thought of taking a dead man’s arrows revolted him. But when he looked into his arrow cases, he saw how few were left.
“Ummake,” he called.
She was folding up a sleeping mat; the monk sat beside her, looking off into nothing. When Tacs called, she raised her head.
“I need arrows,” Tacs said, ashamed of asking.
“Take them.”
Tacs went across to the wooden chest against the wall and got down Yaya’s bows and his cases of arrows. Ummake had often made arrows for him, although most people said it weakened arrows if a woman made them. There were three full cases. Tacs took two of them and left the third for Ummake to leave with Yaya.
In the midafternoon, when they had all packed up everything in the aul, Bryak came, and they took Yaya’s body from the dead-aul and rode out onto the plain. Tacs and Monidiak carried the body between them on a horse and Bryak rode in front carrying
Yaya’s bows and his spear. Ummake with the monk beside her followed the body. Tacs led his three extra horses; Ummake had Yaya’s mare on a leadline.
They went away from Hungvar to the north. The long summer drought had parched the steppe grey-brown. The sky burned so blue that it hurt to look at it. Not long before sundown they came to a spring where a tall tree promised plenty of wood. Ummake sat down in the shade, with the monk beside her, while Tacs and Monidiak gathered wood and Bryak drove four sticks into the ground at each corner of the mat Yaya lay on. The three of them lashed sticks together for a platform, raised it up on the sticks, and laid Yaya on it with his bows and spear. After they had piled the goods and food under the platform, Ummake took the bridles and saddles from her horses and drove them away. The mare was already grazing near the spring and the three saddle horses jogged away to join her.
Ummake sat down again under the tree. From her pack, she took the crown of wood and ribbons that she had worn to her wedding and put it carefully on her head. She got out pots of paint and painted her face for mourning. Putting everything away again, she sat still with her hands open in her lap.
Monidiak walked around the platform, pretending to see that it was secure. Bryak stood looking fixedly at the northern horizon. At last they went to their horses. Monidiak looked back toward Ummake; Bryak mounted and rode over to Tacs, who was standing beside the platform.
“You will come to the Nedao, won’t you?” Bryak said.
“I don’t know,” Tacs said. There was a lump in his throat. He reached out blindly and clasped Bryak’s hand. Monidiak led his horse over and each of them hugged Tacs by turn.
“You will come,” Monidiak said.
“Maybe … I could go to New Rome.”
Monidiak laughed. “Or you could turn into a sparrow and fly away. We will look for you.” He threw his reins over the head of his dun mare and vaulted up onto her back. “Keep safe.” He and Bryak kicked their horses away, waving to him.
Tacs turned slowly from them, back to Ummake. The monk was sitting there looking into the air; he did that often, his hands clasped and his lips moving slightly. Tacs went to Ummake and squatted down beside her.
“Good-by.” He leaned forward and pressed himself into her arms. She embraced him; her cheek brushed against his, warm and soft.
When he stood up, she said, “Wait.”
Tacs set himself. He looked furiously at the monk, knowing she would speak of him. Ummake said, “You must take him with you.”
“Ummake. You are mad. He can walk. He has legs.”
“He is a city man, a Roman. He would die.”
Tacs glared at the monk. “You. Come with me.”
The monk lifted his head. “Oh. Now?” He got to his feet and started toward Tacs’ horses. Tacs followed him, and when the monk stopped and looked back, took him by the arm and pushed him ahead. “But what about her?” the monk asked, and immediately frowned. Tacs pushed him to the sorrel mare.
“Get on.”
At first he thought that the monk would refuse, but the Roman hesitated only a moment. He took hold of the sorrel’s mane and hauled himself awkwardly up her side and onto her back. Tacs shook his head so that the monk would know he disapproved and leapt up onto the back of the black pony.
They started off toward Hungvar. The monk kept twisting his head to look behind them. Tacs only turned once. He saw Ummake sitting under the tree, staring off into the distance the same way the priest had, and on the platform Yaya’s clothes fluttering in the wind.
The monk said, “I wish I could have told her about Jesus.” He avoided Tacs’ eyes and looked straight ahead, toward Hungvar.
SEVENTEEN
TACS GALLOPED BACK TO the Hiung camp, dragging his led horses behind him as fast as he could, half hoping that when he came to the edge of the camp and looked back, the monk would be gone. But he was not, although his hair flopped in his eyes and his coarse black gown was twisted around his body. Tacs rode up the embankment that ran along the southeastern edge of the camp and reined in.
“Now you must give me back my horse. There is the camp.”
The monk glanced into the packed bustling camp and said, “Please don’t leave me alone here. I speak no Hunnish—only a few words.”
Tacs waved to the north. “The Gepids have a camp here, on the hill beyond the river. You can walk over there.”
“Please,” the monk said. He took a breath to steady his voice. “I am afraid. Please don’t leave me alone.”
Tacs studied his face, intrigued; something in the monk’s voice made him believe that the man was struggling less with fear than with his pride. Tacs said, “Why do you want to go with me?”
“All my life I have wanted to bring the Word of God to the Hun people. Now I am among Huns, and I find myself afraid, but if I shrink now I shall never succeed.”
Tacs could make no sense of that. He looked around at the Hiung camp before them, sprawled along the slope below the stockade. People were taking down their auls all along this side of the camp. Skeletons of the auls stood here and there, peeled branches curved like ribs up to meet the lodgepole in the center. Children and dogs and goats were gathered in clumps near the skeletons, waiting to be loaded up.
“You mean,” Tacs said, “you want to live with Hiung people.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The Germans already know Christ.”
Tacs laughed. “Yes. Well, you can come, I suppose. But I don’t know where we are going—I am going with The Fluteplayer, who is a very wise and great shaman.”
He started off along the edge of the camp. The monk followed after, keeping his horse clear of the two led horses. Behind him the sorrel mare’s suckling colt and the black mare’s filly played while they ran.
Already the air from the Hiung camp smelled stale, as if the camp were long deserted. Tacs rode into it near The Fluteplayer’s aul and wound his way through people rushing around packing up their gear. A train of six wagons rolled slowly away from them; on two of the wagons, auls had been built, and an old man sat inside one of them, looking out the door.
The Fluteplayer’s wives were taking the hides down from the frame of his aul and rolling them up. All their furniture and all The Fluteplayer’s glass jars and sacks and other equipment were gone. In the middle of the half-naked aul, The Fluteplayer sat on his heels and played his flute.
Tacs dismounted and hitched the led horses to the aul frame. The black pony he left to wander at will. The monk stood uncertainly with his reins in his hand, and Tacs pointed to the aul frame.
“Tie her. She’s very quiet, see her baby?” He patted the sorrel colt, which came trotting up and poked his nose up under the mare’s flank. When the monk had tied the mare fast, Tacs pushed him down and forward through the gap between two ribs of the aul.
The Fluteplayer looked up. “Who is that? Sit down. You came before I said you should. Just as well.”
He was sitting on the last of his fine carpets, and he moved backward to give them room on it. Tacs pulled the monk down beside him. The monk sat with his legs crossed, like a beggar in a city.
“He wants to know who you are,” Tacs said to the monk, indicating The Fluteplayer.
The monk nodded. His head and face were shaped like a wooden mask, all flat spare planes. “Please tell him that I am Aurelius, a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, a citizen of the City of Rome and lately an inhabitant of New Rome, where my father was a civil servant and my mother the daughter of a Senator.”
When Tacs had translated this, The Fluteplayer smiled and said, “He has a straightforward way to him. Tell him that I have been waiting for some sign of what course I should follow and I believe that he is a message to me. I will go to New Rome.”
Tacs jerked his head up. “But—”
“You will take me and you can do whatever you choose, when I am there. Tell him.”
“But he wants to be with the Hiung.”
The Fluteplayer shrugged. “What he wishes makes no difference to me.”
Tacs translated to the monk everything that The Fluteplayer had said. The monk lifted up his eyes to him, smiling. “My dear friend, you know my desire to live among your people. I don’t want to go back to my own. Tell him I may be a message to him but now that he has received his sign I must find some way to stay with your people. He does not need me with him now.”
When The Fluteplayer had heard that, he said, “Tell him he may come back to the Hiung later, but now is impossible. The clans are scattering until the hunting season. Most of the people will be in groups of two or three families. They won’t come together until late in the autumn, to elect new chiefs and hold a great hunt. Who would take him with them—a man who can’t help them hunt or herd or keep a camp but who would eat as much as any of them? Tell him, he will understand, his face is intelligent.”
The Fluteplayer picked up his flute where it hung against his breastbone and warbled notes from it. Tacs grimaced. In Hiung what he had said was all easy to say but in Latin it took many more words and lots of explanation. At the end of it the monk looked over at The Fluteplayer, his face heavy with resignation.
“I see. God’s will be done.”
“He understands,” Tacs said.
“I expected that he would,” said The Fluteplayer.
WHEN AURELIUS HAD FIRST mentioned his desire to preach the Gospel to the Huns, his superiors had denounced him for the sin of pride. The penance he received only fixed deeper in his soul the sense of his mission. For years he struggled to reach Hungvar. Finally a diplomatic envoy agreed to take him. When at last he came to Hungvar, he was pitched out unceremoniously into the wet, in a humiliating and degrading spectacle witnessed by dozens of the barbarians, and it took him the better part of the summer to detach himself from the pious Alans who rescued him: having no priest of their own, they were determined to keep him, even though they were Arians and he believed the Truth of Jesus Christ. At last he found his way back to Hungvar, arriving in the midst of the funeral. The screaming, the fires, the people rushing frantically in all directions should have terrified him, but instead they filled him with a passionate and fearless exhilaration. He plunged into the first occupied hut he came to and began to preach.
Of course the Huns hardly knew what was happening before them, but understanding would come when they had accepted him, and the Word of God poured from him. He preached less to his audience than to himself. Part of his vocation in becoming a monk was that thinking about Christ always made him happy.
The next morning when the last of the Huns had fallen asleep or left the hut, he went out into the open to breathe and orient himself. He enjoyed the look of the camp; it reminded him of a nursery full of untidy children. While he stood at the hut door admiring what he saw, some of the Huns came back, carrying a dead man. They ignored him; he might have been invisible. Among them was one who sobbed and struck aside the hands of those who tried to give comfort. Aurelius realized that this was a woman and the wife of the dead man.
He followed them a little way into the camp, fascinated by the woman’s choked, inconsolable grief. The men left the corpse in a large empty hut, and the woman began to straighten the body, still crying. Aurelius went to help her.
At first she acted as if he were not there, but gradually her restraint dissolved, until at last she was talking in a stream to him, even though she knew he spoke no Hunnish. Together they washed her man’s wounds and put fresh clothes on his body, and all the while, she talked.
The man had been hacked to death with knives. Aurelius at first was unable to look at what he was doing. The woman—her name, she made clear, was Ammarka—handled the body as if it were only meat. But suddenly, washing the caked blood from the body, she laid her cheek against its chest and moaned, and Aurelius saw that she handled it so deftly because she knew it so well. The sliced and filthy body took on another aspect for him.
