Attila

2

The boy was awoken roughly in the midst of his dreams by one of the Palatine Guard. The man carried a torch. It was still dark outside.

‘Get yourself up and dressed. We leave at dawn.’

‘Leave? Where for?’

‘Ravenna.’

Only a few minutes later he found himself seated beside Olympian, one of the senior palace eunuchs, riding in a high and over-decorated Liburnian car through the dark and silent streets of Rome.

Olympian was evidently reluctant, even personally insulted, to find himself sitting beside the half-savage Hun boy for the duration of the journey, and had insisted that Attila be submitted to a full body search before he would consent to ride with him. Why, the little barbarian might be carrying a dagger or something. The soldiers had made sly asides to each other, to the effect that a dagger-thrust in Olympian’s mountainous rolls of flesh was hardly likely to prove fatal. The boy had duly been searched, and given the all-clear. Now Olympian sat beside Attila, touching his mouth from time to time with a little white silk cloth impregnated with oil of rosemary so as to ward off the ghastly, disease-bearing fumes that the boy must surely give off, and refusing to speak a word to him. That was fine by Attila. He could think of nothing that he wanted to say to Olympian.

All the same, he wasn’t mad about sharing a carriage with the eunuch. Unlike the lean and hungry Eumolpus, but in common with the great majority of those who had been deprived of their seed-bearing parts in their youth, Olympian was grossly fat. In the absence of other fleshly pleasures, food had become very important to him. The loose swathes of midnight-blue silk that he wore did little to conceal his massive torso. Indeed, they showed a terrace-like effect, like the Emperor Hadrian’s celebrated gardens at Tivoli, each descending terrace being composed of a greater and greater roll of fat. In consequence, the eunuch perspired heavily, and runnels of sweat ran down his puffy cheeks, playing havoc with the white lead powder that he had carefully applied to his face that morning. Never mind whether the barbarian boy was giving off disease-bearing fumes or not. The eunuch himself was soon giving off fumes of quite another sort. The boy held his nose close to the window, and hoped it wasn’t far to Ravenna.

Either side of their carriage rode a mounted guard. The boy’s previous attempts at escape were well known, and no chances were being taken.

The vast and unwieldy column trundled out of the palace gates and northwards through the city along the great Flaminian Way. Carriages were not normally allowed within city precints by day, ever since Julius Caesar himself had passed a law to that effect. But this was a very special occasion.

Immediately behind Attila rode Beric and Genseric in another ornate and impractical carriage. They were both nursing hangovers, and they felt every queasy rocking of the cabin on its broad leather straps. They chewed fennel but it did little good. Near the Flaminian Gate, Beric leant from the carriage window and vomited.

Ahead of the column rode a detachment of the Frontier Guard, some eighty in number. The roads were bad these days, and the forests dangerous, particularly after one had crossed the River Nera on the great Bridge of Augustus and begun the slow ascent into the Montes Martanis. But no troop of bandits, no matter how desperate, would dare to attack a company of trained soldiers.

As they passed out of the Flaminian Gate their numbers were swelled by a further detachment from the Palatine camp: fifty or so black-armoured Guards, who immediately took up the position of honour at the head of the column, relegating the Frontier Guard to the rear. At the head of the column rode Count Heraclian himself. He seemed keen to leave Rome behind, and make for the safety of marsh-bound Ravenna.

Galla Placidia stayed behind in Rome.

Her advisers had pleaded with her. Eumolpus suggested that her regal presence was needed with the column to maintain order.

She laughed dryly, without mirth. ‘I remain here,’ she said. ‘As do you.’

Eumolpus paled visibly. The Goths were not known for their gentleness to captured eunuchs.

Count Heraclian had told her, before his departure with the column, that she must flee to Ravenna: the only safe haven in Italy now.

‘Ravenna is Italy’s Constantinople,’ he said, ‘the only city we can easily defend. Rome has always been vulnerable to attack. Remember Brennus and the Gauls.’

‘Remember Hannibal,’ Galla snapped. ‘Do not presume to lecture me, Count Heraclian. I may be only half your age still, but I am no schoolgirl. What of the rest of the Palatine Guard? They number upward of thirty thousand, do they not? Since when did an army of five Roman legions have anything to fear from a rabble of barbarians, no matter how numerous? With how many legions did Caesar conquer Gaul? Or the Divine Claudius conquer the whole island of Britain?’

‘Your Sacred Majesty-’

‘Tell me.’

Heraclian shook his head. ‘The Palatine Guard did number thirty thousand… but Alaric commands over a hundred thousand. And the Goths have fought and won many battles, from Scythia to Gallia Narbonensis and the very foothills of the Pyrenees. They are a nation of great warriors, Your Majesty. Already many of the Palatine Guard have left for Ravenna, and others for the south.’

She sneered. ‘ Left for Ravenna? You mean fled. ’ She settled her hands in her lap and looked up at him again. ‘You are leaving for Ravenna, too, I assume?’

Heraclian stammered. ‘My, my… I am needed, Your Majesty, to command the column.’

‘I would have thought a junior officer of the Frontier Guard was quite capable of steering it towards Ravenna?’

Heraclian flushed and said nothing.

‘So,’ said Galla, ‘the Palatine are proving just as loyal to the empire as the Praetorian Guard that preceded them. And we know how they ended up behaving, don’t we, Count Heraclian?’

Yes, he knew. They ended up butchering Emperor Pertinax, and then auctioning off the empire itself for fifty million silver pieces. It was bought by a wealthy businessman, one Didius Julianus, who promptly declared himself emperor. He lasted just sixty-six days, until he was killed as well: beheaded as a common criminal in the baths.

‘Let them all flee,’ she said. ‘Galla Placidia does not flee.’

She spoke with all the composure and the grandiose sense of self that you might expect from an empress who had reigned for half a lifetime. Once again, Heraclian had to remind himself that this tall, bony, pale-skinned woman, in her long, stiff dalmatic and her glittering tiara, was only a girl of twenty-one. Yet she had the will and the presence of a dozen Caesars.

‘What will happen when Alaric arrives?’ he asked.

‘You tell me,’ said Galla. Her ice-cold eyes drilled into him. ‘You are now the master-general of the army, are you not, since you presided over the death of your former colleague, the traitor Stilicho? I would have expected a commander to have a rather greater air of determination and resolve about him than you seem to exhibit, Count Heraclian.’

Her voice dripped with contempt. Heraclian closed his eyes momentarily, as if in self-defence. He felt cold fury rising. How he hated this woman! And how he feared her. He tried to hide his feelings, but she saw them anyway. Her eyes were like needles.

She smiled. ‘Hm?’

It was she who had ordered the death of Stilicho, he thought furiously. He had only been carrying out orders. And now he was in command of the Western Army himself, and she was trying to blame him for everything. It wasn’t fair. Everything was slipping away…

‘When Alaric comes,’ said Heraclian, struggling to control the tremor in his voice and failing, ‘you will be taken into captivity. You will be led from Rome in chains.’

‘No,’ said Galla. ‘Rather, the barbarian hordes will see how an Imperial Princess of Rome can die.’

Heraclian stood and bowed. ‘I must leave,’ he said. ‘I must ride out and join the column. My first loyalty is to-’

‘The emperor.’ Galla smiled. ‘Yes, of course. Ubi imperator, ibi Roma. Where the Emperor is, there is Rome.’

Heraclian bowed again. ‘Your Majesty,’ he said, and he turned and left the room.

Galla watched him go without expression. Then she summoned Eumolpus to her side.

‘Your Majesty?’

‘Tell my maids to prepare my bath.’

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

Well, she thought, Galla Placidia should look her best for the occasion.

She also summoned a scribe to write a letter, to be sent after Count Heraclian immediately.

As the grand column departed from the city, there was no cheering from the crowds that gathered along the roadside. Instead the retreating column was watched with sullen contempt, or even outright hostility. Suddenly the great triumph of Honorius over the Goths, which seemed to have taken place only a few days before, although really it had been a year ago – and the declaration on the Triumphal Arch, that the barbarian enemies of Rome had been destroyed for ever – all began to ring a little hollow. One or two spectators shouted insults, or even threw clods of mud at the passing carriages, until a couple of mounted Palatine Guards rounded on them with drawn swords and they fled. There could be no such escape to Ravenna for the majority of Roman citizens. They must simply sit and wait for the Gothic wrath to come.

Beyond the city lay the great cemeteries all along the Via Flaminia, with their huge limestone tombs, ornately carved with a mix of Christian and pagan symbols, fishes and birds and crosses and scallop shells, interspersed with the dark and mourning shapes of cypress trees. Attila gazed at them and brooded. It was Roman custom to bury the dead beyond the city walls. To bury anyone within the city would bring bad luck, they believed. Except for the great Emperor Trajan, conqueror of Dacia, Rome’s only territory beyond the Danube. When he died suddenly on campaign, and contrary to his dying wishes, the soldier-emperor’s ashes were brought back to the city, and buried in a chamber beneath the mighty column that bore his name and whose carved stone bas-reliefs gave such eloquent witness to his Dacian victories. But the interment there of his mortal remains was against all custom, some said. And since that moment, three long centuries ago – since that high noonday of the Antonine emperors, Hadrian, Trajan and the philosopher Marcus Aurelius, when the Roman Empire comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind – some said that it was at that moment that the empire had started to shrink again, and begun its long and slow decline. Now the city was facing an army of a hundred thousand blue-eyed Gothic horsemen, already far into Italy…

The boy longed to see Alaric ride into proud Rome, even though the Goths were the ancient enemies of his people. But he had other plans. When the Flaminian Way rose up into the hills…

The late summer air was stifling, and thunderbugs crowded the air. They flew in the faces of the cavalrymen, who swatted them away angrily, tilting back their helmets to wipe the sweat from their foreheads.

The country opened out into the market gardens that supplied Rome’s endless needs and greeds, and then the vast estates and villas of the upper Tiber valley. Sun-dried pine cones crunched under the turning wheels of the carriages, broom pods exploded softly in the dense August heat, and the songs of the basking cicadas arose from the long grass.

Olympian insisted that the little red curtains be drawn across the windows to keep out the sun, and the interior of the carriage was as dim as a church. The boy dozed. He dreamt fitfully of Stilicho and Serena, and even awoke at one point believing they were still alive. When he remembered, it felt as if the memory was burning into his flesh like sunburn, or as if his eyes were sunblind with sorrow. He squeezed his eyes shut and took refuge in sleep again. He dreamt of Tibir, the god of fire, and of Otutsir, the god of the sun and the Cause of the Years. He dreamt of his homeland.

The carriage rolled to a halt. He started and pulled the curtains and leant out of the window. Olympian tried to tell him not to, but he ignored him. The air was hot and still and ominous. From far off, way up towards the head of the column, he could hear shouting. The sound of a horseman from the Frontier Guard galloping up from the rearguard of the column. Finally he returned, and Olympian hailed him as the column began to roll slowly onwards again.

‘I say, my man!’

The cavalryman reined in his horse, his bunched fists pulling towards his chest, the muscles in his arms bulging. He slowed and turned his horse to walk beside the carriage, while the mounted guard fell back, and noted sourly that it was that fat palace eunuch inside. He said nothing for a while, his gaze fixed ahead on the road and the far horizon, his expression one of grim foreboding.

‘Soldier? What is your name?’

The soldier glanced sideways at the eunuch and grunted. ‘Centurion. Centurion Marco.’

‘Marcus?’

‘No,’ replied the soldier slowly, as if to a particularly stupid child. ‘ Mar – co.’

Marco indeed, thought Olympian crossly. It wasn’t even Latin. It was barbaric.

‘Well, Marco, what seems to be the matter?’

‘Trouble on the road ahead.’

‘What, bandits?’

Marco snorted. ‘Bandits, my arse. Begging your pardon, sir. But I think we could handle a few bandits, don’t you? No. Bigger trouble than that, a lot bigger.’ He hawked and spat, and they rode on a little while.

‘Come along, man, speak up,’ said Olympian, his voice petulant with impatience and fear.

‘Well, sir, it’s like this. There’s us going north along the Flaminian Way.’ He sliced forwards with one hand. ‘And there’s Alaric coming south along the Flaminian Way. And somehow I don’t think the road is wide enough for the both of us.’

Olympian clutched his little white hanky to his mouth, and Attila could have sworn he gave a muffled shriek.

The boy leant across the quivering eunuch and said, ‘But Alaric was still camped up in Cisalpine Gaul, wasn’t he?’

The centurion stared into the carriage and jerked his head back with some surprise when he saw the boy. ‘You’re very well informed,’ he muttered. ‘You’re the Hun lad, yes? Uldin’s lad?’

Attila nodded. ‘My father’s father.’

The centurion shrugged. ‘So he was. Alaric was only just over the Alps a month ago, but he’s marched south already. Those horsemen are no slouches. They’ll be outside the gates of Rome by dusk tomorrow, it’s reckoned.’ He hitched back his shoulders and set his mouth grimly. ‘Well, what will be will be. Our job is to get to Ravenna first. So we’re going to have to turn east.’

The boy tried not to appear too eager. ‘Into the mountains?’ he asked.

‘Into the mountains,’ nodded Marco.

‘Into the mountains!’ cried Olympian.

The boy craned and looked up at the sky: the heavily bruised and swollen sky that precedes a violent summer downpour. The rain-filled clouds seemed to hang down from the heavens like great grey bellies ready to burst.

The boy slapped more thunderbugs away from his sweat-slicked arms. ‘There’s a storm coming,’ he said.

The centurion looked not up at the sky but ahead, northwards along the road and towards the far horizon. ‘You’re not fucking kidding,’ he growled. Then he shouted ‘ Hah ’, dug his heels into the flanks of his bay mare, wheeled and galloped back to the rearguard of the anxious column.

‘Well well,’ thought Attila, settling back into the luxuriously padded seat, almost unaware of Olympian’s presence any more. ‘A storm. It just gets better and better. Into the mountains we go.’

The boy liked mountains. You can hide in mountains.

They rested the first night at a simple marching camp on the Flaminian Way, and the second night at Falerii Veteres. At midday on the third day they crossed the Bridge of Augustus over the Nera, and then turned east almost immediately, leaving behind them the wide plains of the Tiber and ascending a narrower road into the Sabine Mountains, towards the town of Terni. The road became bumpier, and beyond Terni they turned onto a minor road, barely a track across the hills, and the column could manage no more than a slow walking pace. They would be pushed to cover so much as fifteen miles a day at this rate, even allowing for every hour of summer daylight. Which they couldn’t, as they would have to make safe camp each night they couldn’t make a fortified town. Nevertheless, the boy guessed that this route was reckoned the least risky, because the least likely for an imperial column to take.

‘Where’s Galla?’ he asked.

‘The Princess Galla Placidia, to whom I assume you are referring in that peculiarly familiar style,’ said Olympian acidly, ‘has remained behind in Rome.’

‘What will the Goths do to her?’

Olympian crossed himself piously, rolled his puffy eyes up towards the roof of the carriage, and said, ‘Nothing that is not already ordained of God.’

He leant forwards and plucked back the little velvet curtains to let in the cooler mountain air.

The hillsides were covered in sheep and fattening lambs, and the occasional shepherd. One stopped and stood right in the road, gawping at the approaching column, until a couple of guards rode out and shoved him out of the way.

‘Of course, it is well known,’ began Olympian, hardly noticing whether the boy was listening to him or not. In fact, the only reason he had begun talking at all was to try to calm his own nerves, which by this time were feeling very frayed indeed, what with the soldiers, and the mountains, and the Goths.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it is well known that the shepherds of these hills are absolute beasts of men, who never take a bath from the day they’re baptised to the day they’re buried. If they ever are baptised.’ He gazed hesitantly out of the window upon the sunparched land, his hanky held tight in his fat, white, delicate hand. ‘They probably still worship goats out here, most of them.’

He settled back into his seat again. ‘“All buggers and bandits,” as they say in Rome of the country people of the Sabine Hills. Or, even more vulgarly, “sheep-shaggers”. One knows what they mean. Why, it wasn’t so very long ago that the Sabine peasants were notorious for having the barber shave not only the hair on their heads but their pubic hair as well. In public. In the market-square, before the eyes of their own wives, and other men’s wives as well! They have as much sense of shame as the animals they tend.’

The boy snickered, and Olympian glared at him.

As if to prove the eunuch’s point, however, a little further on the column passed another shepherd, standing and staring at them as if they were the first human beings he had seen in months. Perhaps they were. He stood stark naked but for a sheepskin wrap round his shoulders. His deep brown skin was like leather dried out and cracked by a desert sun, his legs were misshapen by childhood starvation or adult accident, and his eyes were wild and bloodshot. The boy thought of Virgil’s Eclogues, drummed into him by his Greek pedagogue. So much for the romance of shepherd life.

Olympian tutted.

The boy grinned. These Italian barbarians.

He looked back and saw, with some surprise, that the shepherd had jogged back to a clump of brushwood, and led out from behind it a starveling mule. He hauled himself up onto the mule and, turning it towards the valley below, he glanced back only one more time at the imperial column. Then he kicked the mule forward with some ferocity, and disappeared over the brow of the plateau.

Attila sat back and wondered.

They climbed higher and higher into the mountains, up a stony ravine, which in winter must have been a river in spate but was now only a dry riverbed, steeply banked on either side. Thornbrush clung to the crumbling slopes, and cicadas trilled in the hot summer air. Otherwise the silence and loneliness up here were oppressive. Already they felt a long way from Rome.

The boy couldn’t resist it. Gazing up at the high rocky banks either side, he murmured, ‘Good place for an ambush.’

‘Oh!’ said Olympian, quivering. ‘Oh, don’t say that!’

‘Well, you never know,’ said the wretched boy, apparently enjoying himself immensely.

‘Anyway, our man back there, Marcus, said we had nothing to fear from bandits,’ went on the eunuch, talking nervously fast. ‘We are with a column of heavily armed, professional soldiers, after all.’

‘What about a gang of ex-gladiators?’ said the boy. ‘Not slave-gladiators, I mean the professionals. A lot of them have turned bandits, so people say, now that they’re all out of a job in the arena. They’d be pretty tough opposition in an ambush, wouldn’t they?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said the eunuch. ‘You must have been listening to too many silly stories from the slaves.’ He held his hanky to his face again and mopped up the drop of sweat that had formed on the end of his bulbous nose. ‘Gladiators, indeed,’ he huffed.

But the boy was right. He always listened to the stories from the slaves, and found them a very good source of information. He liked information. It was a kind of power.

Emperor Honorius had abolished the games back in AD 404, after the self-sacrificing protest of the monk Telemachus; at the same time, he had shut the gladiatorial schools. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to have occurred to either Honorius or his advisers that an unemployed gladiator, like an unemployed soldier, is a rather dangerous individual. Five thousand professional gladiators finding themselves unemployed overnight are very dangerous indeed. After their well-remunerated careers of bloodlust and carnage in the arena, it was somehow unlikely that these men would quietly settle down as good citizens, and get jobs as water carriers, fresco painters, fig merchants or whatever. Some went into the army, but most of them were too old. The army only wanted young men up to the age of twenty-one: fit, malleable and easily trained. After their years of individual heroics, gladiators, for all their toughness and predisposition to extreme violence, were regarded as poor-quality soldier material.

The best-looking ones were snapped up by some of the wealthier ladies of Roman society, to be their ‘personal assistants’, ‘litter bearers’, or even, in one instance which caused great hilarity among the city’s satirists and literary salons, her ornatrix, or ‘hairdresser’. The word was of the feminine gender, but was now peculiarly applied to male hairdressers, who had become fashionable of late. They were mostly eunuchs, of course, or else interested strictly in boys. Upon hearing of the gladiator-hairdresser, the satirists sharpened their goose-quill pens. Soon there were circulating little squibs about how strange it was that an ornatrix should be required to attend upon his mistress in her private chambers only after having stripped naked, oiled himself all over, and performed vigorous weightlifting and strengthening exercises in the gym with his membrum virile.

But the laughter died on their sophisticated faces when they learnt that the great majority of the gladiators had taken to the hills to become bandits.

‘Remember Spartacus,’ said the pessimists.

‘Yes, and look what became of him,’ said the optimists. ‘Crucified along with his men all along the Appian Way.’

‘Yes,’ said the pessimists, ‘but only after they’d wiped out two Roman legions.’

‘Ah,’ said the optimists. ‘Well, yes…’

Which was why Olympian was so disturbed by this wretched barbarian boy’s suggestion that they might be ambushed. As the eunuch well knew, this was a real possibility.

In general, however, the bandit gangs of the Sabine Hills and beyond were not reckoned to be any great threat, but operated as cowards, attacking lonely, isolated farmsteads, or wealthy merchants foolish enough to travel without a decent armed escort. Whoever they were, it was inconceivable that they should have the temerity to attack a fully escorted imperial column, even in these remote hills.