And the peasant turned away among his companions. But the merchant was deep in an especially keen bit of bargaining, so that Baithene had leisure to continue listening to what these Celtic peasants of his own race were saying to each other. And in all their talk two names were perpetually recurring, entirely new to him—“the Huns” and “Attila.” The Huns were spoken of as a fierce horde of savages, to whom all the other barbarians were as men to wild beasts; fierce heathen all of them, although more bent on plunder than on persecution; however, they had occasionally proved their heathenism by burning alive in a mass those who refused to worship their idols. Moreover, they were said to be ugly as monkeys, with small, deep-set, piercing eyes, wide mouths, and flattened snub noses; short of stature and hunch-backed; from infancy accustomed to be on horseback, till they became a kind of monstrous centaurs. In short, they were thought by many not to be men at all, not descended from Adam, or Odin, but from demons and witches. With no houses or homes, they were a nation of vagabonds, a horde of warriors, always travelling on horseback or in wagons, men, women, and children, making and building nothing, only ravaging and destroying. This was the multitude which was rushing like a sand-storm over all the land. And now this wild mob had been organized into a terrible machine of destruction in the hands of a king whose name was uttered in a terrified whisper, as if he could hear everywhere and see every one, as the name of a mighty demon, or dark god of the under-world: Attila, king of the Huns.
He had laid waste the Belgic land and Northern Gaul, ravaged the fertile fields into a desert, taken what food he needed for his hosts, and then destroyed the rest; taken what plunder he could from the cities, and then massacred the people and burned the towns to the ground. From Worms, Cologne, Trèves, Metz, Cambrai, Rheims, came the cry of ruin. The fugitives crowded all the old Roman roads, and hid in the forests. And now it was rumoured that he was sweeping on to their own river, the Loire, and threatening to destroy Orleans.
It became evident to Baithene that he and Ethne were not the only wronged and plundered creatures in the world. The whole world seemed a chaos, no one safe, no one at rest, none trusting or helping another.
When the merchant’s last bargain was accomplished, Baithene returned to Ethne with a heart full of wonder and horror, and yet with a kind of sustaining sense of being rather a soldier on a universal battle-field than a solitary fugitive, hunted homeless through a world of homes.
There was much to tell Ethne when they were once more alone together on their couches of heather and hay, in their own little sleeping-chamber.
“The heather is sweet,” said Ethne, always finding something pleasant to speak of. “It smells like our Ireland, like home.”
“There is no home,” sighed Baithene; “there are no homes in the world. It is all a desert, a ruin, a wreck.”
“Patrick’s people always told us we were only on a journey here on earth,” Ethne replied. “‘Pilgrims’ they called us; but that must mean that we are travelling to a temple, that there is a home somewhere.”
Baithene unfolded to her all his tidings of the miseries of the world; of the exacting Roman tax-gatherers; the oppressed rebel peasants; of Attila and the Huns. “And,” he concluded, “we are to be hunted about through it all as the slaves of an old miser, who would bargain for a crust with a starving beggar in a burning city.”