Chapter 679: Northern Offensive (Part 1)

The night was deep but not monotonous, with stars twinkling in the cloudless sky. However, Attila's palace was brightly lit, with soldiers and nobles running back and forth on the earthen roads.

Among them, a figure wearing a toga was particularly conspicuous. He was running under the escort of four guards, all the way to the wooden palace in the center of the fortress. There, soldiers holding torches had been guarding the huge wooden door of the palace for a long time.

The man's arrival was like a signal. There was no need for urging or proof. The guards at the gate immediately opened the door to let him pass.

He stepped on the Scythian weaving and groped forward in the dim light of the fire, still murmuring and calling out in a low voice, "My king, my king!"

The guard at the last door opened the last wooden door for him. The man didn't dare to hesitate any more and he rushed in.

This was an extremely spacious room, with a huge bed in the middle, with blankets and pillows all in disarray. Braziers for lighting were placed around it, and Scythian women, wrapped only in a layer of cloth or even naked, were busy lighting the firewood in the braziers, making the whole room look as bright as day.

Attila was sitting at the outermost edge of the bed, a worthy king. Even when he was sitting at the end of the bed after the rain clouds had just passed, he still had the aura of being on the throne.

"My king!" the man called out to Attila hurriedly, "What do you want to see me for?"

It was not until he heard the man's call that Attila slightly opened his eyes and looked at the Roman in front of him who was panting because of running all the way. His face turned pale due to physical exhaustion, but fortunately the dim light emitted by the fire successfully concealed his unbearable appearance.

"Your skin color now looks the same as mine, Oedites, my old friend." Attila spoke, his voice a little hoarse, and his tone was full of loss. He looked like he was bored late at night and came here to disturb others' sleep. Fortunately, he was the king, and no matter how willful he was, he would be forgiven.

"Yes, yes, my king!" Oedites didn't know what medicine Attila had taken wrong, so he could only respond repeatedly.

"You must be blaming me in your heart for waking you up when you were sleeping and making you come all the way here to find that everything is normal." Attila said with a cold smile. His smile was gloomy, more like a sigh.

"I didn't, my king!" Oedites defended himself: "I am your servant, my king, the noble Hun king Attila, I am your loyal servant. Since you need me, I should be ready to serve you at any time!"

"Haha, your words always make me feel very useful!" Attila said with a smile: "Have you Romans learned how to please people for hundreds of years? But I have to say that you really did it, Oedites. I am very grateful for your loyalty."

"It is my honor to serve you!" Oedites said hastily.

"Okay, okay!" Attila smiled and waved to Oedites, saying, "Come and sit next to me. It's just right. I want to talk to you."

Oedites did not dare to hesitate. He took small steps to Attila's side and slowly sat down. Attila reached out and stroked his back. After hesitating for a moment, he said thoughtfully, "You know, my friend, I had a dream, a very, very bad dream. In this dream, I felt so helpless. Yes, I couldn't trust anyone. I was so lonely and so hateful."

"Is it because of the Goths?" Oedites asked, following up on Attila's words. "The Visigoth named Trismon?"

"No, not just him." Attila shook his head, his eyes fixed on the various floral patterns on the Scythian carpet illuminated by the fire below. "And Flavius ​​Luca. I dreamed that at Thermopylae he whipped his soldiers with a long whip as long as the Rhine and ordered them to fight me."

"Then what?"

"My soldiers are retreating step by step. They are helpless in the terrain of Thermopylae." Attila raised his head and looked at Oedites. "I heard that hundreds of years ago there was a Persian king named Xerxes. He was defeated here and saved the Greeks from being conquered."

"I always want to conquer them and let them have a taste of being conquered, but how can they be so stubborn? They can even break our bowstrings and bend our lances."

"Perhaps now is not the time, my king."

"Perhaps you are right, Oedites, my friend." Attila sighed softly, "Every time I set out to enter Roman territory, I was determined to win, but I always returned in defeat. They are not as fragile as we seem, at least not as fragile as those dignitaries sitting in the council hall and the palace."

"After returning from the Marne, I always had the same dream. I dreamed that the wide river was flowing with bright red blood from the source, and there were dense corpses floating in front of it. Some people were struggling in it, but the blood kept pouring out of their mouths until it was like a rope around their necks, suffocating them and finally sinking into the water. I also saw Golding, a guy I trusted quite a lot. He was pierced through the chest by a golden spear. The spear seemed to come straight down from the sky and nailed poor Golding to the ground. But this poor guy just refused to die. He wailed, raised his head and cried loudly to me, his ten fingers clasped together and kept scratching on the ground until two deep gaps were dug. He cried and shouted at me, trying to beg me to save his life, but I was terrified and stood there like a tree, watching them trapped in despair and indifferent."

"It's not your fault, my king. It was our accompanying tribes who were unwilling to fight with all their strength and only wanted to survive that caused your failure!"

"But I still failed! Didn't I?"

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Oedites was silent.

Attila went on to say: "Because if we fail, our enemies will only laugh at me, because I am the leader, the instigator of the war, and of course the final loser!"

The more Attila spoke, the more unwilling he became. He clenched his fists and hit his thigh hard, making a dull "pop" sound.

"I don't want to continue to blame myself in this dream. I must cheer up and return to the battlefield to avenge them and Golding!"

Attila's impulsiveness made Oedites, who was sitting next to him, dare not say a word. He could only listen to Attila expressing his dissatisfaction, and felt vaguely in his heart that after a whole year of forbearance, Attila would definitely not be able to bear such humiliation and would retaliate, giving the Romans an even more crazy revenge!

(End of this chapter)