Читать книгу The Darkness and the Dawn - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 18

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During the final stages of his talk with Micca the Mede, Attila had been fully conscious of the rapid advance of the hours. The first stars of evening were in the sky when the bent back of the tall merchant vanished through the door. He glanced up then at the small window above him.

“It is over,” he said to himself. “The names have been drawn and two of them have lost their heads.”

There was no suggestion of suspense about him. He was sure that his supreme luck had continued, that the gods to whom he deferred in his mind had looked upon his inner wishes; and so he had no doubts as to the outcome of the drawing. In any case, had not the odds been five to one? When had he needed better than that?

“Because I have spared her father, my little Swanhilde will be very grateful,” he said to himself. “How her lovely eyes will shine! Tonight I shall have her sit beside me at the board so that my bold fighters will be able to feast their eyes on her.”

It was with a satisfied spirit that he addressed himself to the Adoration of the Moon, which was his practice each evening. Turning to the window, he looked up at the orb which was showing its broad face above the line of the log wall.

“O Moon,” he said, in a solemn voice, “this is Attila, the son of Mundzuk, who was the son of Turda, the son of——” He proceeded to enumerate the whole of his lineage, carrying the line back for a score of generations. “O Moon, who guided my people when they lived on the cold plains and who has been watching us march to the conquest of the world, continue to give us of your support now that the great test is at hand. O Moon, cold and clear and so very old and wise, give me of your counsel, direct my feet into the right path. See to it that I do not fail in the great task ahead of me. See that I do not become weak. Today I was guilty of a weakness. Let it not happen again. I must be hard as well as strong.

“Do this for me, O Moon, and I pledge that I shall burn none of the cities of mine enemies until the hours of the day are spent. So that thou, O Moon, will ride up into the sky in time to see the high flames greet you like sacrificial fires and as proof that thy servant has been working in thy behalf.”

His voice went on, sometimes rising to an almost ecstatic pitch, sometimes falling into a mumble as a mood of incoherence settled upon him. Finally he lowered his arms and turned to take up again the mundane affairs of life. He realized that he was hungry.

Onegesius was waiting for him outside the door. The night was closing in so rapidly that a servant stood behind the latter with a flaming torch to light the way up the narrow steps leading to the dais. Attila could hear the stamping of impatient feet on the floor above his head. His officers, back from the pleasure and excitement of the executions, were hungry also.

“It is over,” he said, with a nod to Onegesius.

“Yes, O King of Kings,” was the answer. “I followed your orders. The crowd was large and there was much excitement. The people seemed pleased that the rest are to be spared.”

“Who were the unlucky ones?”

If the light cast by the torch had not been so unsteady Attila would have been aware that his assistant was pale and very nervous. Onegesius swallowed uneasily before answering.

“The first one was Galata of Eastern Sarmatia.” There was a pause. “He whimpered when his name was called. The guards had to take him by the arms and lead him to the block.”

“He was always a troublesome fellow. I’m glad he was one of them. Who was the other?”

“The second one—was Athalaric of Thuringia.”

The eyes of Attila blazed with the wild surge of emotions which filled him on receiving this intelligence but before he could speak Onegesius hurried into an explanation. “There was some trickery about it, O Great Master,” he said. “I had disobeyed your orders because I—I knew you did not want Athalaric to die. I did not put his name in the box. I held it out. See.” He fumbled at his belt and produced a slip of parchment on which appeared the name of the ruler of Thuringia. “But when the two slips were drawn, one of them carried the name of Athalaric. What could I do then? I could not protest that there had been a mistake, that it was not your desire that he should die. I could not say that someone had maliciously juggled the slips. All I could do was to stand there and watch Athalaric die.”

Attila asked in a voice of suppressed fury: “How could it have happened? Who could have done it?” He examined the slip. “It is clear that someone was determined that Athalaric should die. Could it have been them? Is this the proof that it was not intended for me to have this girl as my new wife? Have the gods turned their faces from me? It is possible that your trickery angered them.”

“No, no!” cried Onegesius. “I know it was someone who had a part in the drawing. There were several who had the chance to substitute the slip. I had arranged things so that it would not be known that one name was not in the box. As soon as two had been drawn, the rest were emptied out and burned at once. Then the two names were read. There were four who took part in the ceremony of the drawing. O Great Tanjou, there can be no doubt that it was the work of human hands. It will not be hard to get at the truth.”

There was a moment of tense silence. Attila kept his eyes on the ground and so his assistant could only guess at the nature of the conflict going on in his mind. Would he believe what he had been told? Or would he decide that he, Onegesius, must be punished because he had angered the gods?

“Who would play me such a trick?” asked Attila, finally.

Onegesius breathed more freely. He was not to be made the scapegoat after all. “Are there not many,” he said, “who would prefer you not to have another wife, one so beautiful she would have all your favor and who would give you sons you would prefer to those you have now?”

Attila looked up at this. “It is possible.” He tensed his fingers as though they clasped the soft neck of the guilty one. But he dropped no hint of what he proposed to do. After a long silence, he asked in an almost normal tone, “Did he die well?”

“He died bravely, Great Tanjou. It was a contrast to the sorry ending of Galata.”

“Do not tell me yet the names of those who helped in the drawing. I must think.” Then he asked abruptly: “What of the girl? Where is she?”

“She has given way to her grief. Aja says that she cried out repeatedly that life holds nothing for her now, that she wants to die.”

Attila grunted. “I want no wife beside me who snivels and cries,” he said. “Perhaps tomorrow she will come to her senses. We shall wait and see.”

Attila stumbled once as he climbed the dark stairs. He struck at the wall with an impatient hand. “Can it be that the gods are turning their faces from me?” he asked himself. “Is it a warning? Perhaps I have not striven hard enough; for the wise man knows that he must keep on pleasing the gods with accomplishments. He cannot sit down and expect them to favor him.”

The clamor from the hall stopped suddenly. There was complete silence when Attila reached the last step leading up from the lower depths where decisions of world-shaking importance were made. He paused, wondering what had happened to close all the mouths of his raucous warriors. Then he heard a single voice raised and recognized it as that of Micca.

“Many hundred years ago,” the itinerant merchant was saying in the full and rounded tones of the professional storyteller, “when Sargon was king of Babylon and the world was at his feet, there was a poor tailor who plied his trade in a small booth inside the gates of the city. This unfortunate man had a family of three sons who were thin and ill nourished because their father was too poor to buy them the food they needed. When it came his time to die, this poor man, who had worked so hard with such meager rewards, realized that he owned only three articles which he could leave to his three sons, a needle, a length of thread and a piece of wax. He summoned his oldest son to his bedside and gave him his choice——”

“A stop must be put to this,” said Attila to himself. “It is womanish pap for my warriors to hear.”