They would reach the edge of the plain of ferns by the first light of dawn. So we had only a few hours left to organize our defense. I went at once to the deacon, to announce that I was assuming command of his subjects. Too late. Those months of anxious waiting for the battle, the effort it had cost him to remain standing and participate in the undertaking, perhaps even the new vigor that I had infused into his veins with my stories: all had hastened his end. I was not afraid to remain close to him as he was breathing his last, indeed, I clasped his hand as he bade me farewell and wished me victory.
He told me that, if I were to win, I would perhaps be able to reach the kingdom of his father, and therefore he begged me to do him a last service. As soon as he was dead, his two veiled acolytes would prepare his corpse as if it were that of a priest, anointing his body with those oils that would imprint his image on the linen in which he would be wrapped.
I was to take that portrait to the Priest, and pale as he might seem, he would show himself to his adoptive father less destroyed than he was. He died a little later, and the two acolytes did what had to be done. They said the sheet would require some hours to become impregnated with his features, and they would then roll it up and place it in a case. They shyly suggested I
inform the eunuchs of the death of the deacon; I resolved not to do so.
The deacon had invested me with the command and thanks to that distinction the eunuchs would not dare disobey me. They had somehow to collaborate in the war, preparing the city to receive the wounded. If they were to know immediately of the deacon’s death, at the very least they would have troubled the spirit of the fighters, spreading the fatal news, and distracting them with funeral rites.
At most, treacherous as they were, they might immediately assume supreme power and at the same time upset all the Poet’s defense plans. To war then: I said to myself. Even though I had always been a man of peace, now it was a matter of defending the child that was to be born.”
- Baudolino against the White Huns
They had studied the plan for months, down to the slightest detail. If the Poet, in training his troops, had proved himself a good captain, Baudolino had revealed gifts as a strategist. Immediately, at the edges of the city, rose the tallest of those hills like heaps of whipped cream, which they had observed on arriving. From up there you dominated the entire plain, as far as the mountains to one side, and beyond the expanse of ferns. From there Baudolino and the Poet would direct the movements of their warriors. Beside them, a select troop of skiapods, trained by Gavagai, would allow rapid communication with the various squads.
The ponces would be dispersed in different parts of the plain, ready to perceive, with their highly sensitive ventral member, the adversary’s movements and to send, as had been agreed, smoke signals.
In front of all the others, almost at the far edge of the plain, the skiapods were to wait, under the command of Porcelli, ready to emerge suddenly, confronting the invaders with their fistulas and their poisoned darts. After the enemy columns had been caught off guard by that first impact, behind the skiapods the giants would appear, led by Aleramo Scaccabarozzi known
as Bonehead, destroying the invaders’ horses. But, the Poet urged, until they received the order to go into action, the giants were to advance on all fours.
If a part of the enemy forces were to get past the deployment of giants, then the pygmies would enter action under Boidi from one side of the plain, and, from the other the blemmyae led by Cuttica. Driven in one direction by the hail of the pygmies’ arrows, the Huns would move towards the blemmyae and, before discerning them in the grass, the defenders could slip under the enemies’ horses.
Each, however, was to avoid running great risk. They were to inflict severe losses on the enemy, but confine their own to the minimum. In fact, the real backbone of the strategy was the nubians, who were to wait, in formation, in the center of the plain. The Huns would surely win the first skirmishes, but they would be already reduced in number when they came up against the nubians, and would be covered with wounds, their horses prevented by the high grasses from moving rapidly. At this point the bellicose Circoncellions would be ready, with their mortiferous clubs and their legendary contempt for danger.
“Right. Strike and run,” Boidi said. “The truly insuperable barrier will be the fine Circoncellions.”
“And you,” the Poet urged, “after the Huns have passed, must immediately re-form your ranks and deploy in a semicircle at least half-a-mile long. So if the enemy falls back on that childish trick of theirs, pretending to retreat in order to encircle their pursuers, you will be the ones to squeeze them between your pincers, as they run right into your arms.
Most important: not one of them must remain alive. A defeated enemy, if he survives, sooner or later will plot revenge. Then if some survivor manages to escape, you and the nubians head towards the city. There the panotians are ready to fly against him, and a surprise like that is something no enemy can withstand.”
The strategy had been so designed that nothing was left to chance, and at night the cohorts crowded into the center of the city and proceeded, by the light of the first stars, towards the plain, each preceded by its own priests and chanting in its own language the Pater Noster, with a majestic sonorous effect that had never been heard, not even in Rome in a most solemn procession:
Mael nio, kui vai o les zael, aepseno lezai tio mita. Veze lezai tio tsaeleda.
O fat obas, kel binol in süs, paisalidumöz nemola. Komönöd monargän ola.
Pat isel, ka bi ni sielos. Nom al zi bi santed. Klol alzi komi. O baderus noderus, ki du esso in seluma, fakdade sankadus, hanominanda duus, adfenade ha rennanda duus.
Amy Pornio dan chin Orhnio viey, gnayjorhe sai lory, eyfodere sai bagalin, johre dai domion.
Hai coba ggia rild dad, ha babi io sgymta, ha salta io velca… Last to file by were the blemmyae, as Baudolino and the Poet were questioning each other about their delay. When they did arrive, each was bearing above his shoulders, bound beneath the armpits, an armature of reeds at the top of which a bird’s head was placed. With pride, Ardzrouni said that this was his latest invention. The Huns would see a head, would aim at it, and the blemmyae would be upon them, unharmed, in a matter of seconds. Baudolino said the idea was a good one, but they should hurry, because they had only a few hours to reach their position. The blemmyae did not seem embarrassed at having acquired a head, indeed; they swaggered as if they were wearing a plumed helmet.
Baudolino and the Poet, with Ardzrouni, climbed up the rise from which they were to direct the battle, and they awaited the dawn. They sent Gavagai with the front line, ready to keep them informed about what was happening. The brave skiapod ran to his battle station, with the cry of “Long live the most holy Magi, long live Pndapetzim!”
The mountains to the east were already glowing in the first solar rays when a wisp of smoke, fanned by the alert ponces, warned that the Huns were about to appear on the horizon.
And they did appear, in a long frontal line, so that from the distance it looked as if they were not advancing, but swaying or jerking, for a time that seemed very long to all. They realized the enemy was advancing only because, increasingly, the invaders were unable to see the hoofs of their horses, already concealed by the ferns from those who were watching at a distance, until the Huns were suddenly close to the hidden ranks of the first skiapods, and all expected, in a moment, to see those brave skiapods come out into the open. But time passed, the Huns advanced farther into the plain, and it was clear that something odd was happening down there.
Whereas the Huns by now were quite visible, the skiapods still showed no signs of life. It seemed that the giants, ahead of schedule, were rising, emerging, enormous, from the vegetation, but, instead of confronting the enemy, they threw themselves into the grass, engaged in a struggle with what ought to have been the skiapods. Baudolino and the Poet, from afar, couldn’t really understand what was happening, but it was possible to reconstruct the stages of the battle, step by step, thanks to the courageous Gavagai, who sped like lightning from one end of the plain to the other.
Through some atavistic instinct, when the sun rises, the skiapod is led to lie down and to shield his head with his foot. And so the assault troops had done. The giants, even if they were not exactly quick-witted, had sensed that something was going wrong, and had started goading them; but, following their heretical habit, they called them shit-monsters, Arian Excrement.
“Skiapod good
