Attila

PROLOGUE

The Monastery of St Severinus, near Neapolis, ad 488

My father always told me that there are two things you need to be a great historian. ‘You need to be able to write,’ he said, ‘and you need to have things to write about.’ His words sound ironic to me now. Yes, father: I have things to write about. Things you would hardly believe.

I have the greatest and most terrible of stories to tell. And in these dark ages, when the skills of the historian are rare to find, I may very well be the last man on earth who can tell it.

My name is Priscus of Panium, and I am nearly ninety years old. I have lived through some of the most calamitous times in the history of Rome, and now that story is ended, and Rome is done. Titus Livy wrote about the Founders of Rome. It falls to me to write of the Last Defenders; and of the Destroyers. It is a story for bitter winter nights; it is a story of horror and atrocity, shot through with saving gleams of courage and nobility. It is in many ways an appalling story, but it is not, I think, a dull one. And although I am very old, and my palsied hand shakes as it holds the pen over these vellum pages, nevertheless I believe I have the strength remaining in me to tell the final chapters of the tale. Strange as it may seem, I know that when I have written the last word of my tale my time on earth will be done. Like St Severinus, I know the day of my own death.

St Severinus? He is being buried, even as I write, in the chapel of this monastery where I scratch out my last days. He lived as a missionary, a holy man and a servant of the poor, in the province of Noricum, beyond the Alps, and he played an unexpected role in the last days of Rome. He died some six years ago, but only now have his devoted followers been able to bring his body back over the high Alpine passes, and down through Italy, miracles attending his progress every step of the way. Who am I to question such miracles? We live in mysterious times.

This monastery where I now live, on the sun-warmed coast near Neapolis, cared for so kindly by monks whose faith, I confess, I hardly share, this monastery itself, now dedicated to St Severinus and to the religion of Christ, has a strange and instructive history. Once it was the luxurious seaside villa of Lucullus, one of the great heroes of republican Rome, in the first century before Christ; in the time of Cicero, Caesar, Pompey and the rest. (There were giants on the earth in those days.) Lucullus was celebrated above all else for his brilliant victory over Mithridates, King of Pontus; although epicures have always joked that, as achievements go, they much more admire his introduction into Italy of the cherry.

After Lucullus’ death, the villa passed through various hands, until finally, by one of the many strange ironies that so delight Clio, the muse of history, it became, after his forced abdication, the residence of the last Emperor of Rome: little, golden-haired, six-year-old Romulus Augustulus.

Today it is home to over a hundred monks, who are now standing round the coffin containing the mortal remains of their beloved St Severinus, their voices rising to heaven in their sad, melodious chanting, amid the smoke of incense and the glitter of sacred gold. It was Severinus who told Odoacer the Ostrogoth that his destiny lay in the sunlit lands to the south. It was Odoacer who deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, disbanded the Senate, and declared himself the first barbarian King of Italy.

There is little else you need to know about me. I live a simple life in my quiet cell, or hunched in the chill scriptorium, with only my vellum and my pen and my eighty years of memories for company. I am but a recorder, a scribe. A story-teller. When people are gathered round the fire on a cold winter’s evening, they listen to the story-teller’s words, but they do not mark his face. They do not look at him as they listen. They look into the fire. They do not see him; they see what he tells them. He, as it were, does not exist. Only his words exist.

Plato said there are three types of people in life, as at the games. There are the heroes, who take part, and enjoy the glories of victory. There are the spectators, who stand and observe. And there are the pickpockets. I am no hero, it is true. But I am no pickpocket, either.

The sun is going down, far out over the tired Tyrrhenian Sea, where the great grain-ships used to ply their way through the salt furrows from North Africa to Ostia, to feed the million mouths of Rome. Now they sail no more. North Africa is a hostile Vandal kingdom, the grain-fields are lost, and the Vandals have looted and taken back with them to Africa any treasures the Goths had not already taken – even the priceless treasures of the temple in Jerusalem, which Titus brought to Rome in triumph four centuries ago. What has become of those treasures? The golden Ark of the Covenant, which contained the commandments of God Himself, they say? Melted down into Vandal coin long since. Likewise, the Column of Trajan today stands bare of the great bronze statue of the soldier-emperor that once stood atop its height, and the bronze itself is melted down in the smoking backstreet smithies, and turned into belt buckles and bracelets and barbarous shield-bosses.

Rome is a shadow of the city she once was, and not immortal after all. No more immortal than the men who built her, though we once believed it when we cried, ‘Ave, Roma immortalis! at the triumphs and the games. No, not an immortal goddess, only a city like any other; like an old and tired woman, ravaged and abused and cast aside, deserted by her lovers and weeping sore in the night, like Jerusalem before her, and Troy, and timeless Thebes. Sacked by the Goths, ransacked by the Vandals, captured by the Ostrogoths – but the most damage was done by a people more terrible and yet more invisible than any of these: a people called the Huns.

In the ghostly shell of Rome today, the stray, half-starved cats scratch about in the ruins of the Forum, and weeds grow from the cracks in the once golden buildings. Starlings and kites make their nests in the eaves of palaces and villas where generals and emperors once talked.

The sun has set and it is cold in my chamber, and I am very old. My supper is a little white bread and a mouthful or two of thin, watered wine. The Christian monks with whom I live, in this high and lonely monastery, teach that sometimes this bread and this wine are the flesh and blood of God. It is true that wonders are many, and even this may be so. But to me it is only bread and wine; and it will suffice.

I am an historian with a great and terrible story to tell. I am nothing, but it seems I have known everything. I have read every letter, every scrap of chronicle and history that survives from the times I have lived through. I have known and spoken with every principal player upon the stage of history during those tumultuous and world-shaking years. I have been a scribe in the courts of both Ravenna and Constantinopolis, and I have served both General Aetius and Emperor Theodosius II. I have always been a man in whom people have confided, while remaining discreet myself; although when intimate gossip and rumour have come my way I have not closed my ears, but have listened as attentively as I would to the most solemn and objective accounts of mighty deeds and battles, believing with the playwright Terence that ‘Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.’ They are fine words, and stand for my motto, as they might for any writer whose subject is human nature itself. ‘I am human; and nothing human is alien to me.’

I have known the Eternal City on the Seven Hills, I have known the scented court of Ravenna, I have known the golden, heavenly City of Constantine. I have travelled up the mighty Danube river, and through the Iron Gates and down into the heartland of the Huns, and heard from his own lips of the extraordinary early years of their dread king himself; and survived to tell the tale. And I have stood on the wide champaign country of the Catalaunian Fields, and seen where two of the greatest armies of all time came so bloodily together, in a clash of arms and a cloud of fury such as no other age has ever known, and where the fate of the world was decided: a fate so strange that it was unforeseen by any of the combatants. But some wise men knew. The singers and the seers and the Last of the Hidden Kings: they knew.

I have known slaves and soldiers, harlots and thieves, saints and sorcerers, emperors and kings. I have known a woman who ruled the Roman world, first in place of her idiot brother, and then for her idiot son. I have known an emperor’s beautiful daughter, who offered herself in marriage to a barbarian king. I have known the last and noblest Roman of them all, who saved an empire which was already lost, and died for his pains at the point of an emperor’s dagger. And I have known the small, fierce friend he played with in his careless boyhood, on the wide and windy plains of Scythia – the boyhood friend who in adulthood became his deadliest enemy; who rode at the head of half a million horsemen, darkening the sky with their storms of arrows, and destroying all in their path like a forest fire. At the last the two boyhood friends faced each other as old and tired men, across the battle lines upon the Catalaunian Fields. And though neither could see it, it was a battle they both must lose. Our noblest Roman lost all that he loved, but so too did his barbarian enemy: Romulus’ dark brother, the shadow of Aeneas, whom men called Attila, King of the Huns, but who also rejoiced in the name his terrified victims gave him: the Scourge of God.

Yet, out of that fury of battle and destruction at the end of the world, a new world was born; is still being slowly and miraculously born, out of the ashes, like hope itself. For as a wise man used to say to me, with his old and care-worn smile, ‘Hopes may be false; but nothing deceives like Despair.’

And all these things are God. So says the wisest of all poets, grave Sophocles. Unfathomably he describes to us all things both light and dark: nobility and courage, love and sacrifice, cruelty, cowardice, atrocity and terror. Then he calmly tells us:

And all these things are God…