There was a pause while the boy considered whether it was worth giving his position away just for the pleasure of answering back. But, as Lucius had guessed, he was proud and reckless. ‘And you can’t catch me, either.’
Before he had finished his sentence, Lucius was slipping from his horse and leading it by the reins as he crept forward down the row of vines.
‘I could just have my men set fire to the vineyard,’ he said.
‘Your men have gone back to the column,’ said the boy.
Lucius grinned, despite himself. The lad’s military intelligence was pretty impressive. ‘How are you going to get anywhere on your own?’ he asked. ‘Winter comes early in these mountains. You’ve no money, no weapons…’
‘I’ll survive,’ called the boy cheerfully. It sounded as if he, too, was chomping the irresistibly ripe, juicy grapes. ‘I’ve seen worse.’
‘And the Julian Alps by October, November? You’ll just stroll over those into Pannonia, will you?’
The boy paused. He was surprised that the lieutenant had read his plans so precisely. How did he know that he was heading north and home?
Lucius meanwhile had stationed his horse at the end of the row, so that its head appeared at the head of one and its rump at the next. Its middle was hidden by the vines. The boy turned and saw the horse’s muzzle appearing round the end of the row, assumed the obvious, and ducked to safety into the next one. He lay low in the sopping wet grass, under the late dark green leaves and the heavy clusters of grapes. Lucius crept towards him on foot. The boy did not stir. He bit into another grape, the purple juices exploding in his mouth. He only had to keep an eye on that horse…
Then he felt the edge of cold steel at the back of his neck and he knew that it was over. His head sank down into the grass, and he spat out the last mouthful of pulped grapes in his mouth. He felt sick.
‘On your feet, son,’ said the lieutenant. His voice was surprisingly gentle.
Attila bowed his head. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.
The lieutenant didn’t move. ‘I said, on your feet. I’m not here to kill you. I know well enough who you are: Rome’s most valuable hostage.’
The boy squinted up at him into the sunshine. ‘Up your arse,’ he said.
Something in his voice told the lieutenant he really wasn’t going to move for him, no matter what he threatened. So he reached down, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him up onto his knees, where the boy knelt in sullen silence, staring into the vineleaves before him. A drunken late-summer wasp buzzed angrily round his face, and even settled briefly on his hair, but he did nothing to swat it away.
Then the lieutenant did a very curious and unmilitary thing. He sheathed his sword again, sat down beside the boy, cross-legged in the wet grass, reached out and picked a whole bunch of shining grapes, and began to eat them as if he had not a care in the world. The boy glanced at him, and then something held his gaze.
At last, the boy said, ‘II Legion, the “Augusta”, Isca Dumnoniorum. Your father was a Gaul, though.’
Lucius nearly choked on a grape. ‘Christ’s blood, lad, you’ve got a memory.’
Attila didn’t smile. It was him, definitely. The tall, grey-eyed lieutenant with the ragged scar on his chin, who had arrested him that time in the street after the knife fight. The boy glared, but not at the lieutenant. At an imaginary image.
‘And you’re Attila, right?’
The boy grunted.
‘I’m Lucius.’
‘Sounds like a girl’s name to me.’
‘Yeah, well it isn’t, OK?’
The boy shrugged.
Lucius quelled his rising temper. ‘It’s Lugh in Celtic,’ he said. ‘Or you can call me Ciddwmtarth, if you prefer. That’s my real Celtic name.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘Wolf in the Mist.’
‘Hm,’ said the boy thoughtfully, slitting a grass stem with his thumbnail. ‘Sounds better than Lucius, anyhow. S’more like a Hun name.’
‘What does Attila mean?’
‘Not telling you.’
‘What do you mean, you’re not telling me?’
The boy looked up at Lucius, or Ciddwmtarth, or whatever he was called. ‘Among my people, names are sacred. We don’t give our real names away to any old stranger. And we certainly don’t tell them what they mean.’
‘Christ, you’re an awkward bugger. And my wife says I’m awkward.’
The boy started in surprise. ‘You’re married?’
‘Soldiers can marry now, you know,’ said Lucius, with amusement. ‘Although some say it’s when we started getting married that the rot started to set in – sapped our vital and manly juices and suchlike.’
The boy was shredding the grass stem to pieces.
‘You believe, I take it,’ went on Lucius, ‘that only idiots marry? And you hadn’t thought me stupid enough to shackle myself to a woman for all eternity?’
Attila had sort of thought that, yes.
‘Ah,’ said Lucius softly, looking westwards towards the hills. ‘But then you haven’t seen my wife.’
Now the boy was embarrassed, his cheeks flushing red under his coppery skin.
Lucius laughed aloud. ‘You’ll see. Give it a few more years and you’ll be as enslaved as the rest of us.’
Not bloody likely, thought Attila, staring down at his grubby feet. Girls! He thought back to those giggling, half-clothed girls in the Vandal princes’ chambers, and how they had stirred him despite himself. And he feared that what Lucius foresaw was already coming true.
‘I’ve a son your age as well,’ said Lucius. ‘A son and a younger daughter.’
‘Among my people, if a man like you were asked what children he had, he’d say, “One son and one calamity.”
Lucius grunted.
‘What’s his name? Your son?’
‘Cadoc,’ said Lucius. ‘A British name.’
‘Is he like me?’
Lucius saw his son’s dreamy brown eyes, and pictured him creeping through the sunlit meadows of Dumnonia with his little sister Ailsa in tow. Clutching his toy bow and arrow in his grubby hand, trying to hunt for squirrels and voles, or telling his sister the names of the flowers, and which plants were good to eat.
‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
Lucius laughed. ‘He’s gentler than you.’
The boy made a guttural sound in his throat, and tore up another fistful of grass. This Cadoc sounded like a calamity, too.
‘Well,’ said the lieutenant, getting to his feet and standing tall over the boy. He reached inside his cloak and drew out a shorter, broad-bladed sword, the kind you’d use for up-close, short-term work. Then he took the sword by the blade-end, turned it round and offered the handle to the boy.
Attila looked up, his mouth agape.
‘This was taken off you, along with your freedom,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Time you had it back.’
‘It’s, it’s… ’ the boy stammered. ‘Stilicho gave it to me. Only a few nights before…’
‘I know. I knew Stilicho, too.’
‘Did you…? I mean, what did you…?’
‘Stilicho was a good man,’ said the lieutenant. ‘And I made him certain promises once.’
Their eyes met briefly. Then Attila reached out and took the precious sword. The blade was as keen as ever.
‘You’ve looked after it,’ he said.
The lieutenant said nothing. Instead he reached down and unbuckled his scabbard belt. ‘And I expect you to do the same,’ he said, handing it to the boy. ‘I don’t know why Stilicho made you this gift. He made me a gift, too.’ He smiled distantly. ‘Both lighter and heavier than yours. I don’t understand it, any more than you do, but it meant something to him. Which still means something to me.’
The boy struggled with the belt, until Lucius told him to turn and buckled it on for him. But it was too loose, so the lieutenant showed him how to twist the belt a couple of times to shorten it, and then it buckled good and tight. Attila slipped the sword into the scabbard, looked up and nodded.
‘It’s good,’ he said.
The lieutenant smiled. ‘Now mind how you travel,’ he said.
Attila stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’