Attila

9

Such was the night on which General Stilicho and his entire circle were savagely destroyed.

An official version was put out by the imperial court, saying that he had been secretly plotting with the barbarian tribes, perhaps with the Huns themselves, to overthrow Honorius and all his family, and to install his own son, Eucharius, on the throne instead. But few believed this, for they knew that Stilicho was an honourable man. And for my part, I do not think he had a traitor’s heart. I think that Honorius, encouraged by his sister Galla Placidia and unscrupulous and self-seeking courtiers such as Eumolpus, Olympian and the rest, came to see Stilicho as a rival in the affections of the people.

In his encampment outside Pavia, the great general, so many times the saviour of Rome on distant battlefields, could have taken up arms against the small troop of soldiers, under the command of the pusillanimous Count Heraclian, who came to arrest him that night; for the great majority of the army would certainly have fought and died for him. Their loyalty was to Stilicho, not to the emperor. But Stilicho could not find it in himself to take up arms against his beloved fatherland, even when his fatherland sought to kill him. Instead he rode from Pavia to Ravenna, and sought sanctuary in a church there. Count Heraclian stationed his troops around the church, lured Stilicho out with false promises of safe passage, and then, as soon as he was in his clutches, shamefully had him beheaded on the spot, according to the strict but secret orders of the emperor himself.

Rome always kills its finest servants, its bravest sons; or so it sometimes seems.

Along with them, the emperor also had killed Stilicho’s young son, Eucharius; the Praetorian Prefects of both Italy and Gaul; two masters-general of the army who were devoted to Stilicho; the quaestor Bonaventura; the imperial treasurer; and many others, their names now forgotten to history, though not to the hearts that loved them.

Following the massacre, every fawning courtier who had previously sung Stilicho’s praises suddenly saw the light, admitted that they had always mistrusted him from the start, and fervently agreed that he had indeed been the most heinous and malicious of traitors.

The many friends of Stilicho were horribly tortured, to make them confess to treachery. Without exception they went to their graves in silence, nobly justifying by their deaths Stilicho’s friendship with them in life.

Stilicho’s wife, Serena, was also killed, strangled in a dungeon with a ligature of silk. They say that she went calmly to her end, praying to Christ for the souls of those who killed her. They say that she died with a strange serenity, as befitted her name. As if she could already see her beloved husband waiting for her there, on the shores of that eternally sunlit country, beyond the cold dark river she must cross.

But Stilicho’s troops, at least, refused to believe that their commander had been a traitor. And the only immediate result of the massacre was that thirty thousand of them, in their furious indignation at the behaviour of the imperial court of Rome, promptly went over to join Alaric and the army of the Goths. Whereupon Alaric, sensing that the empire was once more coming apart, turned his eyes again on the prize of Rome.

A mood of festering hatred settled over the courts of the city. A mood of sullen coercion, abject flattery, and naked fear showing through the ghastly smiles.

Attila did not smile. Still a prisoner, his life spared, still the best guarantee that the Huns would not turn against Rome.

Honorius spent more and more time in Ravenna with his chickens.

Galla Placidia spent more and more time in Rome giving orders.

And the Hun boy spent more and more time alone in his dim-lit cell, his fists bunched up and pressed against his ears, or into the red stars of his eyeballs. Torn apart by the promises he had made to Stilicho, by what he knew Stilicho would have wanted of him, and yet also by the knowledge of what had become of Stilicho himself. That most loyal servant. ‘Do what is right, Attila.’

But another year passed, and the Huns did not come.

Although at all times the boy remained under strict guard, his lessons were resumed, his regime was relaxed, and he was even given a slightly larger chamber.

Other hostage children came and went, depending on what diplomacy had achieved with the various Germanic peoples who threatened the empire’s borders. But Attila would mix with none of them. He despised them all.

He especially depised the two Vandal princes, Beric and Genseric, the most willingly and thoroughly Romanised of the hostages. They had been released before back to their people, and now returned to Rome quite eagerly, under some new diplomatic deal.

They were a few years his senior, perhaps sixteen and eighteen respectively, and very much convinced of their own superiority and their urbane and raffish wit. On one occasion, Attila heard them making a cynical joke about the deaths of Stilicho and Serena. He turned to them and, fixing them with those eyes of his, which even at this age were beginning to take on a terrible aspect beneath his lowering brows, said that if he ever heard them saying such things again he would see to it that they were both dead before nightfall. The brothers looked at each other and laughed at this outrageous threat. But their eyes betrayed more than a little anxiety; and they never mentioned the murdered general or his wife in front of the boy again.

Nevertheless, the Vandal princes, perhaps under pressure from more highly placed palace courtiers, continually tried to persuade the boy to relax and enjoy the soft delights that Rome had to offer. For it is well known that the Vandals are the most slothful of people.

‘Do you have hot baths, and fine wines, and robes of silk, and such foods as we eat here, back among the black tents of your people?’ Genseric asked him mockingly.

Beric added, ‘I have never yet seen a Hun in a robe of silk, have you, Genseric?’

‘Indeed not,’ murmured Genseric, stroking his own silken robe as he spoke. ‘In a motley of dusty leather leggings and, I think, rabbit fur, perhaps, but in silk? No.’

And they smiled mockingly at the bristling boy.

Attila rejected their approaches with contempt. Indeed the brothers, like all the other hostage children, seemed to him as blissfully foolish and unaware of the truth about their world as sleek and fattened cattle in rich pasture, feeding and lolling complacently in the warm summer sun, oblivious of the fact that when winter set in their keepers would in a trice become their killers.

He kept himself even more isolated than before, and one rolling glare of his eyes was usually enough to make even the stoutest adversary back off.

The other children plumed themselves on their ability to speak Latin and Greek, seduced by what they saw as the superior culture of their hosts. They would quote Horace or Virgil to each other, or the exquisite couplets of Sappho; and they would half close their eyes, and sigh, for all the world like the most enervated aesthetes of Baiae or Pompeii. Attila continued to learn Latin doggedly, and with grim determination, just as he continued to learn his Roman history, while regarding his Greek pedagogue, poor, put-upon Demetrius of Tarsus, with scorn.

He learnt of the great victories of Scipio Africanus, of Caesar in Gaul, of Fabius Cunctator, Fabius the Delayer, who defeated the Carthaginians by refusing to engage, but by harrying them with constant guerrilla warfare.

‘That is how my people would fight Rome,’ said Attila. ‘With patience and guile.’

Demetrius snapped, ‘You will desist from-’

‘All these great heroes of Rome defeated other peoples and extended Rome’s boundaries so gloriously,’ queried the boy. ‘Does that mean that warfare and conquest are always glorious?’

The pedagogue was wrong-footed, as usual. ‘Only if the victor is also the party of superior laws and culture,’ he said carefully. ‘As is Rome, compared to the uncouth tribes beyond its borders. Indeed, if Rome were not a superior culture, Providence would never have permitted her to win such an empire in the first place.’

The boy considered briefly, then smiled. ‘In philosophy,’ he said, ‘that is what would be termed a circular argument. And logically it is quite worthless.’

Demetrius was rendered momentarily speechless. The boy laughed.

Once, Rome had been great. That much the boy perceived, and grudgingly admired. When he read of Regulus, or Horatius, or Mucius Scaevola, those strong, grim-faced, relentless heroes of ancient Rome, his blood thrilled in his veins. And when he gazed up at the lofty buildings of the city, he admitted greatness when he saw it. But that was long ago and from another world. Now it was all decadence: a rotten fruit, a hollow shell. The Romans had lost their way, and did not even know it.

As for the barbarian peoples whom Rome continued to cultivate and disarm, they forfeited their barbarian virtues without gaining any of the countervailing old Roman strengths: fortitude, stoicism, self-discipline, warrior hardihood; a pride in self and nation and race; and that humility before the gods which is the mark of true wisdom: a proud and even joyful acceptance of whatever fate the gods have decreed for you, no matter how terrible that fate might be.

Instead, the princes of the Vandals or the Sueves or the Burgundians were wretchedly seduced, passing their wasted days in listless self-indulgence, like Beric and Genseric. And when they were released back to their people, they took with them chefs and court dancers and masseurs, tailors and musicians and poets, and established them in their barbarian homes in a clumsy and ludicrous aping of Roman ways. They even took back with them their own personal hairdressers.

The only time a court hairdresser ever tried to get close to Attila’s shaggy mop, he ended up regretting it.

The Goths at least, it was said, were made of sterner stuff. And in the fitful skirmishes between the Huns and those tall Germanic horsemen, with their mighty ashen spears and their tawny plumes nodding in the wind, it seemed that their reputation was deserved. But many too many of the barbarian tribes were being destroyed: not by weapons of war, but by baths, and wine, and silk.

Attila gagged on the perfumed courts of Rome, even as he saw that those courts were tottering. Within, amid the vast colonnaded staterooms of marble and gold, malachite and porphyry, the emperor and empress and their fawning courtiers might dress in brocades heavy with rubies and emeralds, their white arms wreathed in gold bracelets, their hair piled high with pearl diadems, as they glided in sinister silence beneath their vast, self-laudatory mosaics gleaming through clouds of incense. But close up the barbarian boy, the little wolf-cub in their midst, saw with his unblinking yellow eyes the fissures in the great buildings and abandoned temples of the city, and he observed the many draughty and untenanted rooms of the palace. He saw the people beginning to starve, while still the Roman rich wore silk. Attila scorned silk robes as unfit even for women – was it not Heliogabalus, the monstrous boy-emperor Heliogabalus himself, who had been the first in Rome to wear robes of pure silk? After three terrible years, sickened by his insane cruelties, the people had risen up and killed him. But now they aped him – and not only in his dress: in his greed and his depravity, too. So it seemed to the boy. Aesthetes even told tales of Heliogabalus’ exquisite jests, and reminisced with a fond nostalgia about how he had murdered his guests at a banquet by suffocating them in falling clouds of rose-petals. The guests had gasped and expired beneath deep drifts of flowers, crying out for mercy. The emperor had looked on and laughed. The aesthetes, too, now laughed.

The boy longed instead for the banks of the wide brown Danube, and the Kharvad Mountains, and the plains beyond. He longed for simple mare’s milk and meat, loathing the rich novelties, the ridiculous, contrived delicacies that the Romans ate. He longed for the sound of the wolves in the high mountain passes, and the sight of the black felt tents of his people, and the great royal pavilion of his grandfather, Uldin, hung with animal skins and decorated with carved and painted horses’ heads.

He watched and waited. Patience was always the supreme virtue of his people. ‘Patience is a nomad,’ they said.

In time, the Huns would come.

One evening he was making his way to the kitchens for dinner when he was accosted by one of the palace chamberlains.

‘Tonight you will be dining in the private chambers of Prince Beric and Prince Genseric,’ he purred.

The boy scowled. ‘No I will not,’ he said.

‘By orders of Princess Galla Placidia,’ said the chamberlain icily, not even looking at him.

The boy considered for a moment, then his proud shoulders slumped a little, and he turned and allowed himself to be led to the private chambers of the Vandal brothers. The chamberlain knocked, and a languid voice called, ‘Enter.’

The chamberlain opened the door and pushed Attila inside.

So, thought Attila, staring around, this is what you get if you behave yourself. This is how Rome seduces its enemies.

The door slammed shut behind him.

Before him was a large chamber with a colonnade of pillars running round three sides. Although it was still broad daylight outside, the long summer evening not yet run, in here the drapes were already drawn and the only light was artificial. It also felt as if the underfloor heating was on, even at this time of year. He was suffocating already. Especially as the overheated air was perfumed with attar of roses.

The floor was elaborately decorated with mosaics and black marble, and the chamber was dimly lit with multiple candelabra – not smoky clay oil lamps such as he had in his own chamber, but the finest, most expensive, creamy-coloured beeswax candles, set in silver candelabra that towered over his head. At the back of the chamber, in the dim light, further rooms opened off, and there came the sounds of laughter, high-pitched shrieks and giggles.

In the centre of the room were three couches set round a low rectangular table piled high with elaborate dishes of the rarest fish and meat, fine wines and exotic eastern fruits. They were privileged indeed, the two Vandal princes. Such exquisite dishes must have come from the imperial kitchens themselves.

There was no sign of Genseric, but Beric sat, or rather sprawled, on one of the couches, a sozzled-looking blonde with high-piled hair leaning against him. The Vandal prince wore a white silk robe belted with a golden sash, his eyes were rimmed with kohl that had begun to blur and run, and he had gold bangles on both wrists. He rolled over on the couch and smiled blearily up at the boy, raising his goblet and burping softly at him.

‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘drinking partner, wenching fellow, I salute you.’

Through the darkened door of the further chamber came more squeals and giggles. Beric turned in the direction of the noise. Then he turned back again and beamed at the boy. He patted the couch next to him. ‘Come along, then. Tonight is your special night.’

Attila went and sat down. His throat felt parched and dry but he wanted to drink nothing. He imagined cool mountain streams that caught the sunlight in droplets as they fell. And the slow-moving rivers of the steppes, the herons in the reeds, waiting with their endless ancestral patience for their prey…

A plump slave-girl appeared with downcast eyes, carrying a big jug of wine. Beric held his goblet out towards her. She stopped and poured the wine, but her hand was shaking so much that she spilt a little over his hand.

Beric stared up at her. ‘You stupid fucking bitch,’ he slurred very softly.

The blonde beside him giggled at this witticism.

Beric continued, ‘And so ugly too. Christ, you’re never going to get so much as a poke with a face like that, let alone a husband.’

The blonde positively squawked with laughter.

Beric turned and added, to Attila, ‘Even with my standards lowered by wine as they are, there’s no way I could give her one, could you?’ He looked back at the trembling slave-girl, as if in wonder. ‘Not for all the wheat in Africa.’

The girl kept her face lowered. She didn’t look ugly to Attila. She had a round, gentle face and scared eyes.

‘Why are you still standing there?’ said Beric, suddenly raising his voice. ‘ Go away! ’

She started with fear, but Attila interrupted and said, ‘I… Could I have a bit of wine, too?’ He reached out and took a goblet from the table and held it out towards her. She came over to him, her hands shaking badly, and poured the wine as carefully as she could. She had poured only a little when Attila nodded and said, ‘That’s enough. Thank you.’

He looked up to smile at her but she was already scuttling away like a frightened animal.

‘You don’t say thank you to slaves, you twat,’ said Beric. ‘Sound like a peasant. Christ.’ He gave another tremendous belch. ‘Been drinking since noon.’ His mouth turned sourly down. ‘Think I’m gonna puke.’ He hawked, leant forward and spat on the floor in front of him, then settled back and grimaced. ‘Ugh,’ he said. ‘I need a bath.’

‘Have a bath with me, baby,’ said the blonde girl beside him.

Beric grinned at her and, slipping one hand inside her tunic, began to gently palpate her breast. She crooned at him.

Attila looked down in shame.

Beric held his bulbous goblet aloft, and cried, ‘ Usque ad mortem bibendum! Let us drink until death!’ looking very pleased with himself that he knew this Latin tag. Then he took a huge mouthful of red wine. Still holding it in his mouth, he lowered his lips to the girl’s now exposed breast, and dribbled it over her smooth white flesh. The blonde gasped as if in ecstasy.

Attila kept his eyes on the floor and took a sip of wine. He had never liked the taste and he didn’t like it any more now. The food did nothing for him, either, hungry though he was. In the centre of the table was a roast swan, stuffed with a roast peacock, stuffed with a roast pheasant, stuffed with a roast partridge, stuffed with three or four tiny roast larks, laid out in the very heart of the dish as if they were in a little nest. The whole elaborate creation appeared to have been hacked into pieces with knives by the brothers, and then left uneaten.

Why had he been commanded to dine here? He didn’t understand. Was he supposed to be seduced or something? He glanced over the big silver knives that still lay in the remains of the dish of roast swan, considering. Then he looked away.

‘You should eat something as well,’ said Beric. ‘You won’t get pissed so quickly then. And you’ve got something to throw up, too, if you need to – which you will soon enough, the way this party’s going to go. The two buggering Burgundian brothers are supposed to be joining us soon, and you know how they knock it back. Nothing worse than retching up a bellyful of nothing but wine. Christ.’ He ran his hand across his heavily sweating forehead. ‘I feel unusual,’ he said.

‘Well, hello, dear boy,’ drawled another voice from across the room. It was the older brother, Genseric.

He was wearing a dark red robe elaborately embroidered with hunting scenes in finest gold thread, and belted so that it hung far too high on his thighs. He wore a big silver cross on a chain around his neck – the Vandals were very proud of the fact that they were Christians, regarding the religion as a badge of true civilisation and Romanitas. Genseric also had some kind of pearls or even a pearl necklace draped round his head, and he had his slim, languid arm round a girl who was giggling and looking across at Attila from under lowered eyelashes.

‘My,’ she said softly, ‘look at your scars. How barbaric!’ She spoke as if scars excited her.

She was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with wide blue eyes and very long, straight black hair. She wore bright red lipstick like a harlot on the street, and thick dark kohl round her eyes, and a white tunic which was slit right up the side of her thigh, and hung half off her shoulder, just revealing the roundness of her breasts.

Genseric let go of his girl and flopped onto the couch opposite. ‘God’s bollocks,’ he said. ‘I’m finished.’ He leant his head back and gazed at the ceiling, and sighed, and murmured under his breath a couplet from Martial.

‘“ Balnea, vina, Venus corrumpunt corpora nostra, Sed vitam faciunt, balnea, vina, Venus.”

Which is to say,

“Venus and baths and wine, they say, corrupt us, but they make life taste so sweet – wine, baths, and Venus.”’

Then he raised his head and grinned across at Attila. ‘This is Lollia,’ he said. ‘Lollia – Attila. May the evening see you better acquainted.’ And he winked over Attila’s shoulder.

Beric laughed and burped.

Lollia went over to the blonde girl and started to kiss her on the lips. The girl responded drunkenly, and their lips and tongues intertwined. They ran their fingers through each other’s wigs and emitted theatrical little moans. The two Vandals looked on and grinned.

Attila eyed the knives.

Then Lollia detached herself, and he felt her walk round behind him. She stopped, laughing silently, perhaps. Her hands closed round his face and covered his eyes from behind. They were damp with perspiration, but he could smell her perfume, too. He felt her hair on his cheek, tickling him softly, and her lips nibbling his ear, the tip of her tongue flicking back and forth, and he pulled away and looked down, his cheeks burning with shame.

‘Aw, the lickle boy’s shy!’ shouted Genseric.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never…?’ said Beric.

He longed to get up and go. He longed to run. But something held him back.

Lollia was flopping down on the couch beside him, and resting her head on his shoulder. She sighed and stretched out, and her slit skirt left her legs bare up to the tops of her thighs. So bare and brown. Her toenails were painted the same colour as her lips, and her sandals were no more than delicate strips of soft leather, studded with silver, and laced almost up to her knees – which made her legs appear more naked than ever. The boy tried to look away but he couldn’t.

She reached out for a goblet of wine on the table and drank a little, then she turned to him and held the goblet to his mouth and made him drink from it, too. She forced it back between his lips, and laughed when it ran out over his chin. She set the goblet down, turned back to him and licked the wine from his chin.

‘Juno’s tits, I think she likes you, boy,’ drawled Genseric.

Lollia’s hands were stroking and circling his bare knees now, sliding by slow degrees up the inside of his thighs. He pulled away abruptly and leant forward.

‘Aw, lickle boy shy,’ said Genseric again, watching them through red-rimmed, half-closed eyes.

‘Aw,’ said Lollia, even more softly. She caressed his hair and trailed her fingertips down the side of his neck. He felt a scintillating thrill run up his spine and his skin broke out in goosebumps. He imagined cool mountain streams that caught the sunlight in He pushed her away again. Lollia sniffed crossly.

‘Maybe you’d prefer something more like what the Huns are supposed to,’ slurred Beric, grinning stupidly at him.

Attila glared at him furiously.

‘And what’s that?’ asked Lollia.

‘A horse!’ cried Beric.

The three of them, Lollia and the two brothers, found this hysterically funny. The blonde girl had fallen asleep now, pinkish saliva dribbling from the corner of her mouth and onto the fine silk covering of the couch.

Beric prodded her harshly. ‘Oi, wake up you stupid tart, we’re not paying you to sleep.’

But the girl slept on.

‘You know nothing about the Huns!’ hissed Attila. He could feel his blood pumping furiously. But no one was listening to him.

‘And they tie up the horse’s back legs first, so it won’t kick!’ shouted Beric.

‘Oh, that’s how you do it, is it?’ laughed Lollia. ‘I must remember next time. I got awfully bruised in the stables only last week.’

‘Then they roll it on its back,’ said Genseric, ‘and they’re away – these funny little yellow men, pumping away between the huge thighs of their favourite mare, like Cupid giving one to his mummy, Venus.’

‘It’s true – I’ve seen pictures of it,’ declared Beric.

They almost choked with laughter.

When the hilarity finally subsided, Beric collapsed into the couch. Lollia turned back to the angry boy by her side and began to whisper sweet nothings in his ear. His fists were bunched but he managed not to strike her. And after a few moments, even against his iron will, he began to relax again. Her warm fingers began to sidle up his thighs and under the hem of his tunic. And this time, although he hated her, hated them all with a fury – he couldn’t stir, but only close his eyes. The wine was beginning to make his heart beat faster and faster, as if he were running. He felt unable to move. Then he felt where her soft hand had reached to, and he gasped.

‘Ganymede’s arsehole,’ added Beric, ‘I think she really likes you.’

The boy closed his eyes.

‘Talking of Ganymede and his delectable… you know what,’ said Genseric.

Attila opened his eyes and saw the two brothers exchanging leery looks, and Genseric nodding towards the darkened chamber at the far end of the room.

‘Right you are,’ guffawed Beric, staggering to his feet and draining his goblet of wine. ‘Hold on to your ears, boys. I’m a-coming in!’

A few moments later, Lollia took Attila’s hand a little more firmly and pulled him to his feet.

‘Let’s go back there too,’ she murmured.

Bewildered and thrilled and terrified, he allowed himself to be pulled over towards the darkened chamber. ‘But, but… Aren’t… I mean, isn’t Beric already…?’

But the girl just glanced back at him, and smiled wickedly at him from under her long black eyelashes. ‘The more the merrier,’ she said.

They were at the doorway of the chamber. At first he could see nothing in the gloom. He felt Lollia’s arm round his waist, and she turned to him and he felt her warm breath against his ear. ‘Can you see what I can see?’ she purred. ‘Can you see what wicked things are going on in there? I bet you like to watch. I know I do.’

But he was more agitated now. For inside the chamber he could see that there was nothing but one huge bed, and on the bed he could dimly discern shapes moving about. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw that there were two more girls upon the bed, both of them naked, and making soft noises to each other, and taking it in turns to kiss Beric, who had disrobed as well. But although Beric was taking it in turns to kiss each of the naked girls, Attila could see that there was another figure underneath him as well. And then he realised to his horror that the fourth figure was also a boy, his face pressed down into the bed, and wearing nothing but a gold chain round his waist, and pearl bracelets around his ankles. Like a girl. Like a helpless slavegirl, dressed by her leering master. The boy on the bed raised his head and glanced up from under his horrible, cheap wig of flaxen curls, which they had made him wear so that he would look like Ganymede, and Attila saw how young he was…

‘No!’ he cried, pulling violently away from Lollia.

‘Honey,’ she said, losing her sensuous purr, ‘what-’

‘Get off me!’

He started to run back towards the door, but Genseric had lurched to his feet, laughing hysterically, and was standing in front of the door, blocking his exit.

‘Aw, lickle boy don’t like it? Lickle boy too young!’

Attila stopped in front of him, his eyes flashing furiously. ‘Let me out.’

Genseric shook his head sadly. ‘Not allowed. By order of the Princess Galla herself.’

‘Princess Galla didn’t order that,’ spat the boy, gesturing towards the darkened chamber.

The Vandal prince raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Is that a fact?’ And he began to laugh out loud again. ‘Is that a fucking fact?’

Behind him, he could hear the laughter of Lollia as well.

‘I have always thought,’ said Genseric, resuming his languid tone, ‘that the princess’s greatest strength is that she understands human nature so very well. Don’t you think, my darling?’

Lollia had reappeared by Genseric’s side, and he put his arm round her. They began to kiss again, in full view of Attila, each of them watching him out of the corners of their eyes, and smiling through their kisses.

‘You’re disgusting,’ said Attila quietly. ‘You’re just slaves of the Romans. You’re just monkeys in a cage.’

Genseric pulled back from Lollia and grinned. ‘Yeah, whatever – but look what they’ve given us in return. What a cage! What playmates! And this one, in particular – my beloved Livia-’

‘Lollia,’ said Lollia.

‘Lollia, sorry,’ drawled Genseric, pulling her towards him again, his hand sliding up under the back of her tunic and caressing her bare buttocks. ‘This one really is the most delectably filthy-minded little whore you could ever wish to meet. I tell you, she could really teach you some things – things you’d never dream of.’

Slowly and languidly they began to kiss again.

But they stopped abruptly when Attila put his head down and ran full tilt into Genseric’s stomach. The air whooshed audibly from his lungs, and he fell to one side, gasping. Lollia gave a little scream. Then she reached out and tried to grab the boy by his hair, but he was too quick and too sober for her. He ducked under her snatching fist, hauled open the heavy oak doors of the apartment and ran out into the courtyard. The last things he heard as he fled, towards his small, silent, oil-lit chamber, were Lollia swearing foully and Genseric vomiting onto the marble floor.

He stopped by a water-fountain where a slave was rinsing out a jug. The long summer day was now almost dusk. It was about the sixteenth hour since dawn.

‘Cup,’ gasped Attila.

The slave shook his head.

So he grabbed the jug from him and drank deeply. It was no cool mountain stream, but at least it was water, and it calmed him. He thrust the jug back into the slave’s hands and wiped his mouth.

‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ whispered the slave.

In ordinary circumstances, a slave was strictly forbidden to address anyone unless first addressed himself. But circumstances were far from ordinary.

Attila frowned. ‘I’m not frightened,’ he said haughtily. ‘Just disgusted.’

It was the slave’s turn to frown.

Attila waved towards the princes’ chambers. ‘Some of the other hostages I’m supposed to mix with,’ he said. ‘Scum.’

The slave allowed himself a very slight noncommittal smile.

‘Why should I be frightened, though?’

The slave’s eyes widened. ‘You mean you haven’t heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘About Alaric?’

‘What about Alaric?’ He could almost have shaken him. ‘Tell me.’

The slave drew in a deep breath. ‘He’s marching on Rome. At the head of a hundred thousand men.’

At the news, the strange Hun boy looked anything but frightened. Instead, to the slave’s astonishment, a slow smile spread across his face as he digested the news.

‘Like Rhadagastus all over again,’ he murmured.

‘Except that Alaric is no Rhadagastus,’ said the slave quietly. ‘By all accounts he is a great leader, who has the absolute loyalty of his men. And besides, who does Rome have to command her own armies, now that… you-know-who is gone?’

Attila nodded. He reached for the jug, took another long draught, and set it back in the slave’s hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Apparently it’s not done to thank a slave. But thank you anyway.’

Then the strange Hun boy turned to walk back to his chamber, and the slave could have sworn that he actually heard him whistling.

The rest of Rome cowered in fear. In the palace at Ravenna, there was outright panic. People ran around like the emperor’s own chickens at the scent of a fox. For with General Stilicho so recently murdered, and no fewer than thirty thousand of his men consequently gone over to join Alaric and his grim-faced Goths, who was there now to save Rome? Count Heraclian, they said. But Heraclian was a far lesser man than Stilicho; just as Alaric was a far greater man than Rhadagastus.

‘That fool Emperor Honorius,’ they whispered in the shadowy courts of the palace. ‘He has cut off his own right hand with his left.’

Throughout Rome, and Ravenna, and throughout all of Italy, from the plains of the Po and Cisalpine Gaul to the high hill-towns of Calabria and across to the golden hills of Sicily, there was the hum of fear and imminent panic.

Except in one small, silent chamber, lit only by cheap and smoky oil lamps. There a boy of some thirteen or fourteen years, but small for his age, his cheeks deeply riven with strange blue scars, knelt and prayed.

He prayed to the god of the Huns: a bare sword driven into the earth, forming a cross like the cross of the Christians, but of hard steel. He prayed to his father Astur, the Lord of All that Flies, and in the name of the murdered General Stilicho and his wife, Serena. He clenched his teeth and set his jaw and prayed for vengeance upon their murderers, and remembering them he wept again.

And he prayed that the Goths might come and do the work that the Huns had so far shamefully failed to do. Even though they were the immemorial enemies of his people, let the Goths come, and raze Rome flat in the red wind from the steppes.

See the Tiber foaming with Roman blood.

See the buildings fall like broken bones.

Let it all fall. Let it all be destroyed.

And when it was razed flat, let the very dust be trampled beneath the barbaric hooves of a hundred thousand horses. Leave not one stone standing. Nothing but seven bare and desolate hills beside a blood-red river where great Rome once stood. Nothing on those hills but a single tomb beneath the wide bare sky. A tomb for a murdered general and his beloved, murdered wife.

He heard her sigh again, through his ragged tears: ‘ My darling. .. ’

He closed his eyes and prayed to Chakgha, the horse-god of the plains, and to the kotu ruh, the daemon-spirits of the wind, and to the kurta ruh, the wolf-spirits of the holy Altai Mountains, and to the Father Spirit of the Eternal Blue Sky.

‘O Lord, I pray,

Rain down tonight,

Drown every light,

Rain down tonight.’