Attila

8

It was night. He leant against a wall and tried to still the thumping of the blood in his head by force of will. He gave a low moan and rubbed his forehead against the flaking, ancient wall. The air around him stank, and a huddle of rags nearby emitted a low gurgle, but he did not even look round.

Hopes may deceive, but none deceives like despair. Despair is the lowest cowardice of all.

He straightened up against the wall, feeling the tug of the fine flaxen stitches in his skin. He took a lungful of fetid air, pushed himself away from the wall and began to walk.

In a nearby alley, he stooped, holding his arm across his nose, and pulled at a pile of rags. An emaciated corpse rolled out, eyes staring, the nearly bald skull clunking horribly on the ground as if hollow with hunger. He shook the black rags violently again, and a rat ran free with a squeal. The corpse’s belly had been eaten open.

He pulled the black, stinking winding-sheet round his shoulders, half covering his face, he tied another strip of rag around his head like a Barbary pirate. Then he walked unsteadily round the eastern gate of the Palatine.

The guard saw him coming.

‘The answer’s no,’ he shouted. ‘Now shove off.’

Luicus went nearer.

‘You come one step closer and I’ll put a blade in your guts!’

‘Spare a crust for a poor, starving citizen,’ croaked Lucius. Even in his own ears his voice sounded cracked and terrible.

‘You heard. Now shove off.’

‘A little bread or some horse-flesh?’

The guard ignored him.

The beggar stood a little taller and the guard eyed him warily but curiously.

‘How much are you paid, soldier?’

The soldier looked defensive. ‘You know the answer. We haven’t been paid for six months. But at least we still-’

‘And you have a wife and children?’

‘One of each. And maybe even that’s an extravagance these days.’

‘Are they not hungry, too?’

‘Now look, I’ve told you before, I’m not standing here arguing with-’

‘How much would you get for a plump grey mare in your stables, sold for horse-flesh? A plump grey mare with her belly fat on rich summer grasses, her satin flanks gleaming in the sunshine?’ The beggar now stood up fully. ‘Answer me, soldier.’

The guard frowned. ‘You know what I’d get. Anything I bloody well wanted, and more. But how-’

‘And how much did you get for my horse?’ The beggar let the filthy sheet fall from his shoulders and tore the rag from his head, and the guard recognised him at last. ‘How much did you get for Tugha Ban?’

Lucius was unarmed, but he stepped forward menacingly, and the guard stepped back in reply. He slipped inside the gateway and drew the barred gate across.

‘You bastard,’ said Lucius softly. ‘You treacherous bastard. May all the gold you gained bring you nothing but grief.’

He turned and made his way down the grand street of the Via Palatina, moonlit, deserted, starved, already haunted by the ghosts of its former greatness.

He had not gone more than a hundred yards when he heard a cry from the gatehouse. He hesitated, wondering whether to turn round. When he did, he saw a figure standing at the top of the street, a grey mare beside him, saddled and bridled, her reins in his hand. The mare tossed her head and whinnied softly. Lucius felt a profound shudder of emotion – several emotions – run through him. Then he walked back up the street and she settled her muzzle in his cupped hand. Her ears flicked with happiness.

Lucius looked at the guard. ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘You could have got a year’s pay in gold for her.’

The guard shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ He looked at the ground. ‘A year of gold for a lifetime of bad sleep.’

Lucius clutched the man’s arm, then let it drop. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with such urgency that the guard flinched. ‘Thank you.’

Then he stepped up on the stone mounting-block beneath the wall, seized the low pommel and cantle of the military saddle, and hauled himself carefully up onto Tugha Ban’s broad back. He nodded once more to the guard and then rode on down the street.

Not everyone is false; not everything is fallen. Though great Rome herself may fall, not everything will fall.

‘You look out for yourself, now,’ the guard on the gate called after him. ‘We live in funny old times.’

So we do, thought Lucius. So we do.

He rode out of the west gate of the city, and through the encircling camp of the Goths by moonlight, riding and looking so steadily straight ahead that those who challenged him did not pursue their challenge in the face of his silence. Some said that he was a ghost. None would stay his flight with sword or spear.

He rode along the banks of the widening Tiber and saw the well-fed water bats skimming the surface of the river, hawking at gnats in the darkness, and he wondered that bats should be better fed than men. Surely Rome was being punished by the gods. He rode on down to the port of Ostia. At dawn he stopped to bathe in the river, only to remount and ride on still sweat-stained and travel-weary. How could you wash yourself clean in a river where starved and skeletal bodies floated by?

The sun rose over the great stone warehouses and mighty wharves of Ostia, but many of them lay in ruins now, stricken and blackened at the hands of the Gothic invaders. In the harbour, the smashed masts and the sunken wrecks of the great African grain-ships still showed above the flat, calm waters where they lay. There were very few people about, and those he encountered looked warily at him and said nothing. Where before, for centuries, sunrise in summer would have seen thousands of workmen arriving or waking here for their day’s work, now there were only a handful. The shipwrights and chandlers, caulkers, sailmakers and netmenders were gone. And the merchants and traders, too, who had come here from all over the Mediterranean, bringing precious marble and porphyry from the east for the buildings and monuments of Rome, and Egyptian cotton and linen, and all the fruits and spices of the Levant – there were none. Where were the hundred different languages of the known world, haggling over prices, rising into the early morning air in a babel of polyglot voices? Where were the lightermen and stevedores, pushing their wooden hand-barrows, unloading ship after ship of its treasure-store of silks and linen, sacks of grain, ingots of silver and tin? And hefty, roped bundles of furs, and barrels of precious Baltic amber, slaves from Britain, and huge, rangy hunting dogs from Caledonia, straining on their studded leather collars: deer-killers and wolf-slayers, all ivory teeth and eyes like Baltic amber.

All that great hubbub was gone. Ostia lay under the warm and constant sun, a ghost of her former self. The great quayside cranes with their granite tackle-blocks and their huge oak crossbeams stood silent, blackened with fire, some still smoking gently like mournful, extinguished dragons. Only the occasional cry of a lone yellow-legged gull broke the silence.

On the far side of one of the smaller harbours, Lucius could see a small, broad-beamed cargo ship, a square-rigger with a red sail faded by salt and sun. He rode round the cobbled harbour wall and found three men lading her with corked amphorae and crates of fruit. Evidently the Goths had no taste for dried apricots. But everything else that had lain in the warehouses they had destroyed or looted, loaded into their great wheeled wagons, and taken away.

‘Where are you bound for?’ he called out to the three dogged sailors. They ignored him. He called out again, more strongly.

One of them set down his amphora in its wooden stall. ‘No place you’d want to go,’ he said.

‘Tell me.’

‘Gaul,’ he said. ‘Port of Gessoriacum.’

‘Take me. Take me north, to the coast of Britain, and sail me into port at Dubris, or Portus Lemanis. Or Noviomagnus, even better.’

‘You got money?’

‘Not a fig.’

The man grinned at one of his fellows: the cheek of it. Then he shook his head. ‘Out of our way. We’ve got a load more lading to do before we sail, and we’ve no desire to cross Biscay in September storms.’

Lucius dismounted. Before they could stop him, he had lifted a heavy wine amphora onto his right shoulder and was walking across the wooden gangway on board. It cost him more in pain than the sailors ever knew, the still unhealed wounds across his back cracking and oozing afresh over his straining muscles. But he made not a sound, gave not a sign. He set the amphora down in the rack, and went back to get another.

The sailors eyed each other and shrugged.

They’d reckoned the lading would take all morning. It was done by the fifth hour, thanks to the stranger’s willingness and heft.

The captain, the one who had spoken to him, leant against the gunwale of his ship. ‘So you want to go to Gaul?’

‘No, you want to go to Gaul. I want to be set down at Noviomagnus.’

‘“Set down?” You know what it’s like sailing into British coastal waters these days?’

Lucius shook his head. ‘No, I’ve no idea. That’s your job. But when you set me down at Noviomagnus-’

‘If.’

‘When. Then I’ll find you payment of five silver pieces before you sail for Gaul.’

The captain debated democratically and in muffled tones with his two crew-members for a moment. Then he grunted, ‘You’re on. Only go and get what you can for the horse first. Try the customs office over there. What you get will serve for now as down-payment.’

Lucius shook his head. ‘Where I go, she goes.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘Look, sunshine, I’m the captain of this ship, and a captain on his ship is a little emperor at sea. What he says is law. No one even farts on this leaky old bucket without my permission, see? And the one thing I won’t have on my ship is horses.’

‘Or cats,’ said a crewman.

‘Or women in their courses,’ said the second.

‘Or anything made of lindenwood,’ said the first.

‘Or-’

‘All right, all right, you twittering idiots, we all have our funny little superstitions. Yours is cats and bleeding wenches, and mine is horses.’ He looked back at Lucius. ‘And my superstition tells me that ships, weather and horses go together like wine, women and chastity. One hint of a storm, or Jove gets irate and starts hurling bolts at us, and horses start stampeding all over the hold. Nothing but a bloody nuisance, horses is. So if you want to keep your horse, then it stays with you.’

‘You don’t know Tugha Ban,’ said Lucius, patting her on the withers.

‘How very true that is. And you know what? I have no wish to make the lovely lady’s acquaintance, neither. Now bugger off and-’

Lucius stepped up onto the ramp, leading Tugha Ban behind him.

‘If she causes you any trouble on the voyage,’ he said with quiet determination, ‘I will cut her throat and roll her overboard myself. You have my word.’

The captain scrutinised the strange, grey-eyed horseman. And he saw that he was, indisputably, a man whose word meant something. ‘Ten silver pieces,’ he grunted. ‘You’re aboard.’

‘Ten silver pieces,’ agreed Lucius. ‘When you set us down at Noviomagnus.’

The late summer seas were calm and the voyage was uneventful, but for one incident when they anchored at Gades to take on more fresh water. The two crewmen came back staggering under huge amphorae.

When they had set them down, and swiped the perspiration from their faces, one said, ‘Rome’s fallen. The gates were opened to the Goths by some bleeding-heart old matron who couldn’t bear seeing all the people starving like that. Like the Goths was going to come trooping in and open a bloody soup kitchen. So in they march and sack the city top to bottom.’

Neither Lucius nor the captain said a word. It was written.

‘Then Alaric their king went off south and died of poisoning, they say. Dirty work, maybe.’

Lucius looked up.

‘His brother rules the Gothic nation now. Athawulf, he’s called. Just as much of a sharp one as his big brother, they reckon. And you know what? You know who he’s gone and married? Or who’s gone and married him, rather?’ The sailor stretched his aching back. ‘Times we live in, I don’t know. He’s only gone and got himself hitched to the emperor’s sister, hasn’t he?’

Lucius stared open-mouthed. ‘Princess… Galla Placidia?’ he said hoarsely.

The sailor pointed a forefinger at him. ‘That’s the one. Emperor’s sister, and a right handful, they say. And now she’s only gone and given herself in marriage to the King of the Goths!’

Lucius’s head sank down on his chest and he spoke no more.

But that evening, as the ship pitched gently through the waves, and the stars came out in the late summer sky and the moon went down, and the golden shores of Hispania retreated behind them into the night, the captain and his two crewmen sat and wondered at the strangeness of their passenger, the grey-eyed British horseman. For Lucius sat alone in the prow of the old cargo-ship, staring up at the stars with his fists raised to heaven, his head thrown back, laughing to himself as if he had just been told the funniest joke in the world.

The sailors’ garbled, dockside intelligence was broadly accurate.

On the night of 24 August, 410 years after the birth of Our Saviour, Rome fell. For the first time in nearly eight hundred years, the proud capital of empire heard in its streets the tramp of a barbarian army.

They came pouring through the Salarian Gates to the sound of triumphal Gothic trumpets. Many of the starving multitude welcomed them as an end to their suffering. Furthermore, Alaric, the Christian king of his people, gave strict orders that, while any loot belonged to his men by jus belli, no churches, chapels or other places of Christian worship were to be touched. And no holy women were to be subjected to the usual jus belli, either. And his Gothic warriors – cross-gartered, long-haired, moustachioed barbarians in outward form – conducted themselves with restraint and even nobility.

Sacking certainly took place, and many centuries of treasures were lost – which had been sacked in their turn from weaker, colonised peoples, of course. But tales of atrocity and torture, such as one expects to hear at the collapse of a great city, were few, and often disbelieved. The Goths’ reputation for both martial ferocity and a certain proud clemency towards those weaker than themselves was once again confirmed. Indeed, the worst atrocities that took place during those fateful few hours were committed, it was said, not by the fair-haired invaders but by disgruntled slaves taking private revenge on cruel masters and mistresses for years of oppression, under cover of chaos and the night.

The houses the length of the Via Salaria were put to the torch, to light the army’s way into the heart of the city. And once there, amid the seven hills, many of Rome’s great towers and palaces were brought down in ashes and dust. The Palace of Sallust on the Quirinal Hill, beside the Baths of Diocletian, that architectural jewel containing the unnumbered treasures of Numidia, and every miracle of the jeweller’s and goldsmith’s, the painter’s and the sculptor’s art, was fired and destroyed in a single night, its contents vanished for ever. Likewise the palace of the fabulously wealthy Anician clan was seen from afar off, aflame in the night. Wagons piled high with gold and silver, silks and ornaments and purples, were soon trundling out of the gates towards the Gothic camp.

In the Forum, the mighty statues of the heroes of Rome were roped and pulled down by rearing horses and their drunken, whooping riders. In the fiery light of the burning buildings, those monuments of the ages came crashing to the ground: Aeneas and the early rulers of Rome, the honoured generals of the Carthaginian and Macedonian campaigns, the deified emperors, great Hadrian and Trajan themselves. Even Caesar’s solemn mask, melting into the flames as he if were no more a man of bronze but only a pitiful figurine of wax…

Some of the wealthier citizens fled ahead of the invaders, and sought refuge on the little isle of Igilium, off the Argentarian promontory. The woods there grew thick with huddled and hungry refugees, still strangely attired in rich robes and gold-embroidered dalmatics. But on those summer nights they shivered like any beggar in his rags, to see Rome burn across the bay, and all their vaunted wealth go up in smoke. Others took ship for Africa or Egypt; still others took the veil. But none truly escaped the wrath of those days.

In Hippo, on the African coast, Bishop Augustine began to brood about the meaning of the Sack of Rome, and to contemplate the writing of his great masterpiece, The City of God. For the city of mankind’s longing must be a city that endures for ever, a celestial Rome. For here we have no abiding city…

And in Bethlehem in far-off Palestine, Holy Jerome in his sky-lit cell wept at the news that the world was at an end. ‘My voice is choked with sobs as I write these words,’ he lamented. ‘The city that conquered the world is now herself conquered.’

He also wrote, in a letter to a friend, a line that has become famous throughout the world. ‘All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.’

The Goths stayed only six days in the city before their creaking covered wagons rolled out again, laden with the treasures of half the world. Alaric marched south, his thirst for gold and glory not yet wholly appeased, and his Gothic horde sacked the city of Capua, the proud, sybaritic and luxurious capital of Campania. Along the Neapolitan coast, that playground of the rich and powerful for centuries, even the gorgeous villas of Cicero and Lucullus were filled with long-limbed Goths reclining on silk-upholstered couches, quaffing huge bejewelled goblets of the finest Falernian, and rejoicing in their mastery of the world. In their drunken vainglory, these haughty German warriors forgot that there were still other tribes – and one tribe in particular – that might envy them their easy conquest of Rome.

Alaric marched south again for Messina, his eyes on the rich pickings of Sicily just across the straits. But the weather was by then turning rough, with late summer and early autumn storms, and rising Sirius presiding as always over the season of storms that sailors have dreaded since man first presumed to travel in Neptune’s realm. And that very night, after a fine banquet in his palatial tent, cooked for him by his boasted new Roman chef, Alaric was suddenly taken ill with some mysterious form of poisoning, and died. His chef had in fact been a gift from the household of Princess Galla Placidia herself…

The unfortunate creator of the banquet was put to death, just to be on the safe side. And Alaric was given a burial fit for a conqueror and king. His generals, with massive slave labour from the neighbouring townships, diverted the River Busentius from the walls of Consentia, buried their lamented king in a triple casket in the muddy riverbed, then returned the river to its course. All those who had worked on the burial were slain, and to this day the exact place of Alaric’s burial has not been discovered. Doubtless it never will be.

To unanimous acclaim, Alaric’s capable, vigorous, taciturn younger brother, Athawulf, was made king in his stead. And the Gothic nation, abandoning its dreams of conquering Sicily, which seemed to them fore-damned, returned northwards to Rome. And there, to general astonishment, and not a little sardonic laughter, it was soon announced to the populace of the city, and to the Gothic nation, that King Athawulf, as a sign of the new concord that now existed between the Gothic and Roman peoples, would take as his bride the beautiful Princess Galla Placidia, sister to Emperor Honorius, and a spotless virgin of only twenty-two summers.