The Last Wife of Attila the Hun Read online

  “Suppose I could not. Suppose some matter obliged me to stay where I was. If I knew how to write, which I do not, I would write my message on a scroll and seal it. If the seal was unbroken when Attila received it, then he would know no eyes had seen it but his own.”

  Now I was interested. “Name more,” I demanded.

  Edeco raised one brow. “Have you ever known a man whose thoughts were superior to those of other men? One who could influence others with his knowledge?”

  I thought of Sigurd’s uncle, Gripner. “Yes,” I said cautiously.

  “When that man dies, his thoughts, his wisdom, must also die—”

  “Unless they are written. I see.”

  “And more, Ildico. The Romans prepare their speeches first in writing. That way, they are sure to leave nothing out or to be anything less than eloquent when they deliver their appeals to the masses. They even declare their love in writing, or at least the diffident among them do, those whose faces would otherwise redden and blunt their tongues.” Edeco shook his head. “And more, if I could name them. Births, deaths, marriages, all these things the Romans make record of.”

  “How did you come to know all this? You must tell me.”

  Edeco laughed. “It is not as uncommon as you think. There are many people on the Earth who share this skill with the Romans, Thuets among them.”

  “None that I ever knew. Does Attila know how to write?”

  “It is a tedious thing to learn. Attila has neither the time nor the need to do so himself. There are plenty of men living within the walls of the City of Attila to do it for him. For instance, there is the Roman bishop who—”

  “Bishop?”

  “Aye, a man who professes to be acquainted with the gods.”

  “Go on.”

  “This bishop came to Pannonia once to rob the Hun graves of their treasures. Attila caught him at his task and would have killed him on the spot, but then he thought better about it. One’s enemies, Ildico, are often more useful than one’s friends. Attila made a deal with him. He would let the bishop go if the bishop would promise to open the gates to his own city some nights later. Now Attila not only had the excuse he had been looking for to cross Roman lines, but his success there was also assured. He marched on the bishop’s city, took much gold and many men, and brought the bishop back as a token of his gratitude, for of course the bishop’s people would have torn him apart when they learned he had been the one to open the gates. Now he is one of Attila’s most trusted scribes. And there are others, some of whom have come from far away lands begging to be allowed to record for Attila.”

  “Has Attila so much to record?”

  “Of course! A great man like Attila must make a record of all sorts of things. He sends his demands to the Eastern Empire in this way. He sends the names of the men he has captured and lets the Romans decide how much gold each man’s return is worth to them. Even his dreams are recorded, for naturally they have much influence on the decisions he makes.” He waved his hand in the air. “And all things in between.”

  “I see,” I said. And when Edeco had gone that night, I sat trembling against the cold and seeing more and more clearly how such a skill might be useful to me. And during the next several days I had fantasies wherein I learned to write and used my skill to tell the truth about the war sword. In these fantasies I composed Sigurd’s story over and over, choosing only the most agreeable words to convey Sigurd’s valor and Sigurd’s fall. The notion so excited me that it was all I could do to keep from sharing it with Edeco. Nevertheless, in subsequent visits, he could not help but see how interested I had become in writing generally, and one evening he brought me a sample of it, characters drawn on a sheepskin parchment.

  He entered, as he often did, without any greeting. With his expression full of significance, he held the thing out to me. I locked my eyes on his and stood up to receive it. Then I unrolled it quickly, and there, on its smoother surface, were the pretty, rounded characters that Edeco had described, drawn in a purplish ink. I studied them long and carefully, so long, in fact, that I forgot Edeco’s presence. And when I remembered and glanced up at him, I found, to my astonishment, that he was scrutinizing my face with the same intensity with which I had been perusing the parchment. I was horrified by the affection I thought I saw in his eyes.

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “A dream,” he murmured.

  “Attila’s dream? How did you come by it?”

  He straightened then, but his eyes remained heavy. “Attila sorts them out after a time and keeps only the ones he deems important to his political future. The others are burned. I took this one from the burn pile. You may keep it.”

  He was standing very close to me, so close that I could hear him breathing, and had not the parchment been between us, I feared, he would have moved closer yet. “Does Attila know you have taken it?”

  “Why should he care? It was discarded.”

  I bit my lip. I could imagine myself in the middle of the night when no one was likely to come, endlessly copying the letters with a stick onto the earthen floor. My fingers, which had been idle for so long, burned with the desire to have such a purpose. “But if one of the serving women should see it here… It troubles me, Edeco. What can be more personal than a dream? I am so grateful to you for bringing it to me, for giving me the opportunity to see this wondrous thing you have told me so much about. But if someone were to find it in my hut, perhaps when we are gone to the bathhouse, might it not look as if we were…?”

  Edeco’s eyes hardened suddenly. “Conspiring?” he finished for me.

  He ripped the parchment from my hand and quickly rolled it up. He turned, but before he could leave, I reached out and clutched his shoulder. “I was only thinking of you,” I pleaded.

  “Do you think Attila takes my loyalty so lightly that he would believe me capable of such a thing? Of conspiring against him with you, a Thuet?”

  “I did not think that far along. I only saw that it would seem—”

  “No more!” he shouted.

  His exclamation hung in the air between us. I let my hand slide from his shoulder and stared at his back, at the light curls that covered his neck, so similar in color to my own. A moment passed. Now I could hear the guard riding back and forth beyond the curtain. I wondered whether I should ask Edeco to forgive me, to allow me to accept the parchment after all, for indeed I did covet it. Before I could decide, he turned back to me, and in the next instant, I found myself in his arms, and, to my astonishment, my eyes filled with tears. He held me tightly, his lips brushing my neck as some emotion I had long forgotten surged in me.

  All at once I saw their faces—the faces of my loved ones, my family—in my mind’s eye, as clearly as if they were standing before me.

  I was amazed and alarmed to see the range of passion my enemy’s embrace evoked in me. It was as if I had been waiting for this, waiting for some gesture of love that would link me again to all that I had lost. Nor did it matter to me that the gesture might well be feigned for reasons I could not imagine. The faces of my loved ones were bright and smiling, looking at me as if it were only across some river and not some great godless void too terrifying to name.

  Edeco spoke, but in the jumble of my wild musings, I failed to hear him. I bade the vanishing faces of my loved ones farewell and asked Edeco to repeat himself. He held me back from him, saying, “Only this, Ildico. If I could write, there are things that I would say to you which my tongue has no expression for.” He released me before I could respond. On his face I saw the same wide-eyed, half-frightened look I had seen on his son’s when it had shot up over the knoll. He touched my neck with his knuckles, letting his fingers linger a moment under my chin. Then he dropped his hand abruptly, his fingers already clenching as if they had betrayed him, and went out into the night.

  Sapaudia

  4

 
WE HAD BEEN in Sapaudia a full year when the Franks arrived. They were our first visitors there. In Worms, before the siege, we’d had many visitors; many kings were made welcome in my uncle’s great hall. But after the siege, when my uncle’s hall had fallen to ashes and the dead among us so greatly outnumbered the living that we had neither heart nor hands enough to give them proper burials, most of these visitors, these kings and noblemen, took their tales and their laughter and their gifts elsewhere.

  Truly, we did not fault them. To have done otherwise at that time would have been a conscious act of self-destruction. The Romans had used us to teach all the Thuet world a lesson. Our vanquishment, they hoped, would keep other Thuet tribes in a state of submission. Thus, only by avoiding us could our Thuet brothers prove to the Romans that their vile lesson would be heeded. Had it been the Romans themselves who came on horseback to obliterate us, our brothers would have come in droves with their spears and their battle-axes and their war cries. But the cunning Romans knew this all too well. They paid the Huns to do it for them.

  Only the Franks—Sigmund, Sigurd’s father, and Gripner, Sigurd’s uncle, whose disdain of the Romans exceeded their fear of the Huns—continued to visit us at Worms in the years between the siege and our resettlement at Sapaudia. When Sigmund died, Gripner came just as regularly, and always Sigurd was at his side. In this way, Sigurd and I came to be friends when we were very young.

  Two years before the siege, my uncle, Gundahar, seeing that we needed more lands than the greedy Romans would part with, laid claim to a portion of the lands the Romans call Belgica. Aetius, the Roman general, crushed his effort right away, and many of our people died. And so, between our defeat at the hands of the Romans and our massacre at the hands of the Huns, there were very few of us left. One could say that the Burgundians were no more, there being hardly enough of us to constitute a tribe let alone a kingdom. In fact, we might have said this ourselves in the beginning had we voices with which to speak. But the sight of our dead all around us, floating in a sea of blood and Hunnish arrows, left us numb and speechless. For a long time a mere look was even too painful an exchange.

  Mostly, my people slept back then, as people do when they cannot bear to remember. They awoke only long enough each day to do their most urgent chores, and, sometimes, when they had the heart for it, to eat. Even working and eating, their faces were the blank unflappable faces of dreamers. I, however, being a child, did not sleep. I mourned bitterly for my people, especially for my uncle, but then my need to mourn passed from me and I could not understand why the sorrows of my people persisted. People battled, people died. The world was like that. But our world had come to a standstill. Father, who became king after my uncle was slain, was, perhaps, the greatest sleeper of all. Having no chores to do himself, for he was old even then, he awoke only to eat. And sometimes he could not even manage that. Sometimes his eyes would blink and his head would bob in the middle of a meal, and Mother or I, whoever was nearest, would quickly sweep away his bowl so that his face would not drop into it.

  My brothers slept less than the others. Though older than I (Guthorm had not been born yet), they were still young, and likewise bothered by the deep sleep the Burgundian survivors had fallen into. But they were obsessed with their bitterness, and their lengthy conversations, which I was permitted no part in, were always about the vengeance they would take against the Huns. This, as far as I could see, was as much a waste of time as sleeping. In their wild fantasies they marched to Pannonia alone, the two of them, and cut the Huns down one by one until there were no more.

  Mother was not much better, although, having lost her father and four brothers during the siege and then to learn just after it that she was pregnant, her conduct was no more than could be expected. When she awakened in the afternoons, she would put on a false face and try to pretend that nothing was wrong in her household or beyond it. “Look how the sun shines today!” she would call merrily from the barn door. “Listen to the birds. Oh, we are so fortunate to have sunshine and birds and enough good people to milk the cows and goats and tend the fields!” And then she would collapse in a heap on the earthen floor, blubbering until she slept again.

  The good folk she referred to were not so much our people as our servants who, when the Huns first arrived on our lands, fled as fast as mice. But when they heard what destruction had befallen us, they came back again, pleading to be allowed to help us put our lives back together. Most of them had been with us so long that they no longer remembered the tribes of which they had once been a part. In heart, if not in blood and courage, they were Burgundians, too. Their pain was no less than our own. And though they forced themselves to stay awake so as to make up for their desertion by working at the tasks that would keep us alive, they moaned and sobbed and wailed and had no drive to stir our spirits.

  And so it is understandable that something happened in my heart when Sigurd came riding into this world of death and decay and folly and madness. Even before the siege, when my people were still themselves, I had never known any one of them to be as spirited, as hungry for adventure, or as quick to take on a challenge as Sigurd. And afterward, when these were precisely the qualities that my people lacked, Sigurd seemed a god to me, full of the tales of his doings—some of which were clearly exaggerated for my benefit—and full of the quests he planned to pursue in the future. For me, he was the emblem of the future in a world that refused to be seduced by one. How he loved to speak of the elves and the frost-giants! Leaping about beside his much-loved horse Grani, he would show me how the frost-giants moved when they were angry and how the elves curled up between the boulders when they were afraid. He would beg me to run off with him into the forest where I might see one of these creatures for myself, and though I never did see a single one, what a wondrous thing it was to sit with my hand in Sigurd’s, panting from having run so far so fast, looking up at the sky through the tree tops. His visits were never long enough for me. And when he left, I always felt that he took the best part of me away with him.

  One day, when Father was using the palm of his hand to support his head as he finished his dinner, one of our freemen came into the barn where we were living (the halls having all been burnt during the siege) and addressed my father as “king.” That was the day Father finally awakened. “Bah!” he shouted. “What king? Can a man who has only a few hundred subjects be called a king? There are no kings here. This is a barn, not a palace. See, the walls are chinked, and the wind blows in at night.”

  We never learned what the poor fellow had come to say, for some time during Father’s harangue, he ran off. Father went back to his seat, and, still grumbling over the man’s audacity, he finished his meal. But when he was done, he did not go back to sleep. Mother, who was due to deliver her child any day, slept. And eventually my brothers became bored with their latest conspiracy and went to sleep, too. But Father did not sleep. He paced. He went along the walls fingering the chinks as if he had never noticed them before. He came over to the corner where I was sitting wrapped in skins against the cold and patted my head. And the next day, when I awakened, amazed to see him pacing yet, he told me to run out and gather together all of our people to hear the king speak.

  This was no easy task. Even with the help of my brothers, who came out later to assist me, it took most of the day to assemble the surviving Burgundians and their servants. Some awakened readily and promised to come to our barn momentarily, but when we went back to see what detained them, we found them asleep again. Some had to be poked and prodded into wakefulness and then escorted to the barn. Some said, “What king? Gundahar is dead, is he not?” But eventually we managed to gather together every last one of them. And then, amid the shuffling and the yawning, the bent heads and the sprawled legs, the dried tears and the fresh sniffles, my father the king stepped forward and made the most eloquent speech I have ever heard. He declared that we had lived without hope too long, and that the time had come to turn our hopelessness in
side out. He commanded that all men take up their drinking horns again and be merry. He called for children. He said that we were all as good as dead ourselves if we failed to set our minds to replenishing our kingdom. He reminded us of the struggles our ancestors had endured when they came south from the cold countries to establish themselves on lands where things grew without coaxing. He said he expected every married woman among us who was not beyond the child-bearing age to bear a child within the year. And he swore that in his own house the example would be set. There would be mead and music and song and new life.

  We were not to rub out the past, to forget it, he warned. That would be a serious error. We were to sing about it and still be merry; we were to remember the dead and still yearn for life.

  The task was formidable, and at first our people paid little attention to his decree. They slept less perhaps, but they continued to go about their business ploddingly and with their heads hung low. But as Father had promised, he set the example for them. He forbade my brothers to speak of the Huns until the time came when there would be Burgundians enough to make such discourse sensible. He insisted that Gunner take up his harp again and play until his fingers bled. Mother he made to sing, not about the sun and the birds, but about our ancestors, their hardships and accomplishments, while Hagen and I danced around the hearth. And gradually, our people came to follow the king’s example. Our women began to walk over the graves of the dead, as women do when they long for children. Our men offered sacrifices to the gods so that they might assist in the effort to replenish the kingdom. In the evenings, we gathered together, men and women and children alike, beneath Wodan’s sacred trees, and we sang so loud and so long that I sometimes feared we would set the stars to tumbling. And the gods heard our voices and children were born, their cries obliterating the ghostly cries of the dead. Our pretense was a pretense no longer. The life-spirit had come back into us.