‘Who are you? Come on out and show yourselves!’ He held his sword out before him, the muscles in his arms as tense as the blade itself. ‘Come on!’
The trees around them seemed to pause for a moment, contemplating this small, fierce boy in their midst. Then something happened to the mist between the trees. It drew apart, like a veil, and the gloom and closeness of that haunted valley, which had weighed upon the boys so heavily, lifted a little. There even seemed to be a source of light shining down upon them from above, stronger than any moon could be. They saw a figure standing among the trees a little way off, and were not afraid.
Orestes immediately thought it was Jesus, come to save them from the surrounding daemons of the mist. Attila thought it was perhaps the ghost of his dead mother. But the figure in its long white robe came nearer, and they saw that it was a young girl, her hair braided like that of a priestess.
She came closer still and stopped before them. ‘She plays in a sunlit field,’ she said softly, her pale grey eyes never leaving the eyes of Orestes.
‘Wha – what?’ he stammered.
She reached out and laid her hand on his head, and pushed him down with some force. Orestes knelt at her feet, and the girl said, ‘Rome bore her, Aquileia destroyed her, Aquileia will be destroyed. But now we see her. She plays in a field of buttercups. And now her mother comes to her and finds her, and they run down to a clear stream. She has made a necklace of daisies for her mother. See how her mother is laughing. And there is a cow, we see a brown cow with glossy flanks, and Pelagia pats its damp nose and laughs.’
Attila saw with wonder that tears were coursing down Orestes’ cheeks.
‘She is happy now,’ said the girl. ‘So happy.’
A breath of wind blew around them for a moment, and the mist cleared. A gleam of pale sunshine came through from the skies above, for night had passed – in a matter of minutes, it seemed – and the sunshine fell on the kneeling boy, haloing him in the pale gold of dawnlight.
There was a long silence. At last the girl took her hand away from Orestes’ forehead and slowly he stirred, as if awakening from a long sleep.
The girl turned and walked away into the mist-shrouded trees.
‘Wait!’ cried Attila.
She walked on.
‘Come on,’ he yelled, grabbing Orestes by the arm and hauling him roughly to his feet.
The two of them stumbled after her into the mist. As they ran, barely able to see the trees before them, they heard the soft voice again, but now it sounded like a mysterious chorus of voices chanting in unison.
‘We are the Music Makers,
And we are the Dreamers of Dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.’
At last they emerged from the dense mist of the woods, and ran out into a sunlit glade beneath a black, overhanging cliff that towered above their heads. There was the dark opening of a cave at the base of the cliff, and beside it grew a tree which, in the sudden break of early morning sunshine, looked as if its boughs were golden. Attila ran headfirst into the tree before he could stop, and snapped off one of its delicate lower branches with the force of his onward rush. The girl, who had paused in the mouth of the cave, glanced back over her shoulder. When she saw what he had done, the trace of an enigmatic smile crossed her face.
‘Well,’ she said, as if something had been confirmed for her. Then she looked across at the panting Greek boy. ‘Thus far and no further for you, greatest friend and greatest betrayer.’
Orestes scowled. ‘What do you mean, “betrayer”?’ he said.
‘Greatest friend unto death, and greatest betrayer thereafter.’ She stretched out her arm towards him. ‘O little father of the last and least, sleep now.’
Without fuss or drama, Orestes trotted over to the edge of the glade where the sunlight caught the edge of the trees, lay down, and instantly fell asleep.
The girl looked at Attila, and the smile vanished from her face. ‘This is for you alone,’ she said. She turned and walked into the cave.
At first Attila could just make out the dim white shape of the girl ahead of him, as silent and flowing as a ghost through a graveyard. But very soon it was so dark that he could not even see that much. He simply kept walking, as if into a void, trusting that it was his destiny to do so.
‘Follow on, Attila, follow on,’ chanted the girl mockingly from somewhere ahead, deep in the darkness of the mountains. ‘For surely you will never follow another again! O leader, O conqueror, O great lord and king!’
The boy did not reply, but followed as bidden.
The walls of rock around him echoed to voices, the girl’s voice and manifold voices chanting in the same tone and time. They hailed him, the voices echoing from the dank walls of the mountains, in a tone that he feared, for there was both mockery and supreme knowledge in those chanting voices combined.
‘All hail, Attila, son of Mundzuk, Lord of All and None!’
‘O Lord of the World from the rising to the setting of the sun!’
‘The Eagle and the Serpent fought, and fell in Italy!’
‘O Lord of the World from the desert to the shores of the Western Sea!’
The voices grew louder, echoing bewilderingly from every direction as he stumbled on, gritting his teeth in grim defiance, sometimes stumbling against the walls of the passageway and grazing his arms and legs against the cruel and jagged rocks, speckled with mica. His head spun with the words that tumbled in the dank air around him, but he was determined, as determined as ever, not to surrender to fear or force, or ever to halt or turn back.
‘In the time of the Seven Sleepers, Lord of All!’ cried the voices in deafening unison.
‘In the time of the shaking of the City of Gold, Lord of All!’
‘In the time of the Last Battle, Lord of All!’
Abruptly the clamour of the voices died, and he saw ahead of him a cave, lit with flickering torches and with a low fire burning in the centre, and a single voice whispered in the air around him. The voice was soft and pitying and maternal, and his heart was torn by its sound, for something told him that it was the voice of his mother.
‘O Attila,’ whispered the woman’s voice, ‘O Little Father of Nothing.’
The boy emerged shaken into the torchlit cave and found the young girl standing opposite him with both arms outstretched.
She stepped across the fire to him and closed his eyelids with her thumbs. Then she leant close to him and spat once upon each eyelid. She took up a handful of ash from the edge of the fire, and blew it in his face. When he opened his eyes he was blind. He cried out in fear, but she only told him to sit.
‘Seeing eyes be blind, that blind eyes may see!’ she said harshly.
Trembling with fear, but still determined neither to weep nor to flee, he sat awkwardly down on the hard stone ground. The air was filled with words, and his blinded vision was filled with images. Images of battle, of cities burning, and the thunderous sound of horses’ hooves on the plains. He started in shock when he heard the girl’s voice, for now it sounded as ancient and hoarse as if it came from the ancient Sibyl herself. As ancient as Tithonus, who asked for eternal life but not eternal youth, and was granted it, until he grew so old and tiny and withered that he was no more than a chirruping cricket in the grass.
‘I have more memories than a thousand years,’ croaked the voice.
Even in the depths of the mountain, a soft whisper of wind seemed to sigh back among the rocks.
The ancient voice in the cave said,
‘Four will fight for the end of the world,
One with an empire,
One with a sword,
Two will be saved and one will be heard,
One with a son