The Sword of Attila by Gibbins David

Author:Gibbins, David [Gibbins, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 2014-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

13

Flavius sat in the bows of the boat staring ahead into the mist, his cassock now used as bedding and the tribune’s insignia on his shoulders gleaming in the dull light. It had been an arduous three-day voyage since departing from the island, a place they had been all too happy to leave, through gorges and rapids and whirlpools, always against the current of the great river. But for the last day the rocky shoreline had steadily dropped in height until the banks now were no higher than the boat’s mast, and they had begun to feel that they were through the worst of it. They had been lucky with the wind, always strong enough to fill the sail and push them at a slow walking pace against the current, but every so often that morning there had been a chill brush from the north-east, a hint of the harsh winds that they knew swept across the steppe-lands of their destination. Priscus had told them that they would feel it as they approached the rock that marked their turning point in the river, the entrance to a tributary that would lead them to a landing stage where their river journey would end and the final leg of their trip through the flat open grasslands would begin.

Flavius thought about what Priscus had told them of the sword of Attila. It had been forged long ago in the days of the ancestors of Mundiuk, before the time of Trajan and Decebalus and the Dacian Wars, before the Romans had even tried to penetrate the northern lands of the barbarians. It was said that the smiths had come down the silk route from a mysterious island in the sea beyond Thina, a place where swords were made so sharp that to touch a blade was to lose a finger. The men with narrow eyes had set up their forge in a dark dell in the steppes, in one of the places at the bottom of an eroded stream bank where the Huns lived protected from the sweeping winds above, venturing out only to hunt and trade and go to war. There, for months on end, they had tempered and annealed the steel, making a blade that was immensely strong and yet ductile, adding to the iron a rare electrum that made the blade shine with a radiant lustre even in the dull light of the North. The chieftain who had ordered the sword made, a distant ancestor of Mundiuk, had given the smiths a stone that his own ancestors had seen fall from the sky on the ice sheets of their northern hunting grounds, a stone that attracted iron to it; they had made it the pommel of the sword. The smiths were still there now, burned and buried in the dell with their forge, killed by the chieftain with the very sword they had made him in order to prevent them from selling their skills to others who might stand against the power that now shone from his hands.

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