Attila by Ross Laidlaw Read Free Book Online

then it pressed on into a tract of dense-packed bush.
    Suddenly, from a copse directly to Carpilio’s fore, burst an enormous brown bear, the biggest animal the boy had ever seen. With its powerful muscles bunching and sliding beneath the shaggy pelt, its little red eyes blazing with fury, its open jaws revealing its vicious fangs, the creature was terrifying. Carpilio was gripped with paralysing fright and his bowels seemed to turn to water. He felt the horse beneath him start to tremble. On either side of him, he was aware of the young beaters’ mounts beginning to rear and plunge. Knowing that a horse’s instinct is to flee when faced with danger, but aware too that attempted flight, with the bear directly in his path, was probably his worst option, he placed a reassuring hand on the stallion’s neck. Such was the empathy he had already established with the animal that it quietened immediately.
    â€˜Hold still!’ roared a mighty voice in Hunnish – Carpilio had picked up enough of it to understand the words. Attila kneed his horse into the line of panicking beaters. ‘Present your lances; he won’t face the points.’
    But the advice went unheeded. The line wavered, then broke, as first one youth then another dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and bolted. In a few moments, all the beaters in sight of the bear, except Carpilio, were galloping pell-mell for safety. Last to flee was Barsich who, turning in the saddle, presented to his friend a face contorted by terror and anguished guilt. Left to confront the enraged bear were Carpilio, his father, Attila, and an elderly foot-retainer with three hunting-dogs in leash.
    The old man loosed the dogs, huge, wolf-like brutes with spiked collars. They flew at the bear, which reared up on its hind legs, displaying to the full its awesome size and menace. A forepaw armed with sickle-like claws flicked out; the foremost dog cartwheeled in the air, its back broken like a dry stick. Undeterred, the remaining pair leapt at their quarry, sinking their teeth into its flank and haunch. With an ear-shattering roar of pain and rage, the bear struck its tormentors with those terrible claws. One spun to earth, howling, the pink coils of its intestines spilling from a gashed belly; the other dropped lifeless, its skull stove in like a crushed eggshell.
    â€˜Keep still, boy,’ Carpilio heard his father whisper as the bear turned its attention to its human adversaries.
    Attila charged, his lance aimed at the bear’s chest. As the point struck home, in a blur of movement too fast for the eye to follow a paw connected with the horse’s head, hurling rider and mount to the ground. Towering above them, the lance embedded in its body, the dying monster raised its arms to smash the life from the man pinned helplessly beneath the screaming, blinded horse. But before it could deliver the death-blow, Aetius, vaulting from the saddle, ran forward to confront it. Head swinging to face this new opponent, the bear roared, blood gushing from its gaping jaws. Simultaneously, Aetius thrust upwards with his spear. Impelled with all the power of a strong and desperate man, the blade drove through the creature’s palate deep into its brain. For a moment, the stricken animal stood still. Then it swayed, and toppled with a crash that shook the earth.
    Like ripples from a stone dropped in a pool, a hush spread through the assembled tribesmen. All, on horseback as tradition dictated, were from the same clan as the disgraced beaters. Headed by Rua, the venerable leader of the chief division of the HunConfederacy, those who would decide the fate of the offenders filed in cavalcade into the central space cleared for them: Attila and his brother Bleda, Aetius, and five senior elders. The culprits, ten in number, cowered bound and terrified on the ground. Carpilio, as the one beater involved in the incident who had stayed at his post, and was therefore an