Chaplain Budman took the piece of paper from Damien's hand. It was a drawing of himself, quite a good one in fact, wearing his clerical collar and riding on horseback, holding aloft the severed head of a slain Mongol enemy.

The chaplain was mortified. Not only was he being made fun of, but his revered Attila was still being maligned, even as he spoke, and by the most intelligent of his students at that. Or so he thought.

Budman crumpled up the drawing and threw it in the wastebasket by his desk. 'So,' he said, after a dramatic and properly fear-inducing pause, 'we have an artist in the class. What's wrong, Thorn, am I boring you?' He didn't even give Damien a chance to answer, but continued with heavy sarcasm, 'You, of course, know all about Attila's campaigns.'

Taking a deep breath, Damien replied, 'Something about them, sir.' Damien was as surprised as anyone else in the room at his reply.

‘"Something" about them, eh?' the chaplain repeated, with the same heavy sarcasm. 'If Attila had known only "something" about warfare, instead of everything about it, we wouldn't even know his name today.' He paused and narrowed his eyes. 'Do you know anything beyond his name, Thorn? Do you know anything about him and the Romans, for example?'

Damien took another deep breath. 'I think I do, sir.' He knew nothing! What the hell was he doing?

The class murmured among themselves, wondering what Damien was letting himself in for. Direct confrontation was not his style.

‘You "think" you do,' the chaplain said. 'Well, let's find out, shall we? Tell me, Thorn, what was the size of Attila's army when he invaded Gaul?'

'Approximately half a million men, sir,' said Damien, and before he had time to even wonder how he had known the answer, he heard himself saying, 'But he was defeated in the Battle of Châlons by Aetius in 451. He then turned back, invading northern Italy, but did not go on to Rome.'

Budman was taken aback. He hadn't expected this. But he couldn't back down now, not in front of the class. He had started this thing and would have to see it through.

In any case, it sounded to him like a quotation from the encyclopedia. Maybe Thorn was one of those students who knew everything by rote, who could tell you that Columbus discovered America in 1492, but who had no idea why Columbus was in the Indies in the first place, or what he was looking for.

Budman decided to try what, in an exam, would have been called an essay question. 'Why not?' he asked.