Attila

2

Rome, late August 408

The Imperial Palace lay in silence under the starlit summer sky.

The boy was sweating under his thin bedsheet, his brow furrowed with furious concentration and his hand clutching the handle of his squat little knife. Tonight he would creep out of his chamber into the shadows of the palace courtyard, he would slip past the nightguards unseen, and he would gouge out the eyes of the Emperor of Rome.

He heard the nightguards go past his door, talking in low, lugubrious voices. He knew what they were talking about: the recent defeat of the rag-tag barbarian armies of Rhadagastus. The Roman army had defeated them, sure enough, but only with the help of their new allies: that ferocious, despised tribe from the east. Without the help of such allies, the Roman army was too weak and demoralised to take the field against so much as a phalanx of perfumed Greeks.

When the guards had gone, and the tremulous orange flicker of their torches had died away, the boy slipped out from under his sheet, swiped the sweat from his face with a cupped hand, and crept to the door. It opened easily, for he had taken the precaution of dripping olive oil over the hinges during the day. Then he was out into the courtyard. The heat of the Italian summer night was oppressive. Not a dog barked from the alleyways, not a cat screeched from the rooftops. The distant hubbub of the great city could not be heard tonight.

He heard the footsteps coming closer again. There were two of them: battered old soldiers, retired from the Frontier Guard. The boy pressed himself into the shadows.

The two guards paused for a moment and one stretched back his hunched shoulders. They were only a few feet away from the boy, standing between two columns against the moonlight, silhouettes as black as doors into a tomb. As black and sightless as a blinded emperor’s eyes.

‘And then, Rhadagastus said, he’d fill the Senate House with straw and set a torch to it, and leave it nothing but a field of blackened rubble.’

The other guard, tough old soldier that he was, fell into a pensive silence for a moment or two. Even if the Senate was nowadays only an emasculated shadow of its former self – even if, as everyone knew, the empire was really run by the imperial court and its few plutocratic cronies, regardless of what the Senate might or might not want – nevertheless, the Senate House represented all that was proudest and most venerable in Rome. For a barbarian force to sweep in and destroy it… That would have been a shame unspeakable.

But the barbarians had been defeated. For now. With the help of other barbarians.

In the shadows behind the two old soldiers crouched the boy with his knife.

Every night, he had to pass down that long, lonely corridor in this remote, silent courtyard of the palace on the Palatine Hill, followed by the blood-chilling gaze of the first and greatest emperor. At the far end lay his miserable little chamber – no lavish suite for him – with its single guttering cheap clay lamp, as if he were no more than a slave. Such was his accommodation: a bare wooden bed in a windowless cell at the back of the palace, immediately adjacent to the kitchen quarters. The indignity of it all was not lost on the boy, Rome’s supposedly most valued hostage. In other chambers around the palace lived other young hostages of other barbarian peoples: Sueves and Vandals, Burgundians and Gepids, Saxons and Alemans and Franks; but even they looked down upon him as the lowest of the low, and refused to admit him to their conversations or games. And their contempt kindled further his always fierce heart.

Tonight he would have his revenge on those unforgiving imperial eyes, and on all those months of slaps and sneers and scornful Roman laughter. The Romans were terrified of omens, as riven with superstitious dread as any people he knew. They feared the garbled prophecies of every toothless old hag in the market-place, every misbegotten birth of ewe or mare, every portent that their wide eyes saw in the wind or the stars.

The boy believed in Astur, the god of his people, and in his knife; but the Romans, like all weak people, believed in everything. When they saw that great first emperor of theirs suddenly blinded.. . Then the boy would see what happened to that scornful Roman laughter. It would freeze in their lilywhite throats.

In the tumult of tomorrow’s celebrations and games, he would escape. He would soon be far, far away from this corrupt and festering city, heading north into the mountains. After many weeks’ or months’ hard journeying, he would descend from them again with the sun behind him, and he would be back on the wide and windy plains of his beloved steppe country before the first snows fell. Here, he was nothing but a hostage: a barbarian hostage, caged in a windowless chamber in this decrepit Imperial Palace, in this crabbed, cobwebbed, anxious, doomed old city. But there, among his fierce, free people, he was a prince of the royal blood, the son of Mundzuk, the son of King Uldin himself. Uldin was the son of Torda, the son of Berend, the son of Sulthan, the son of Bulchu, the son of Bolug, the son of Zambour, the son of Rael, the son of Levanghe…

The names of all those ancient generations were graven on his heart; for the Huns, like the Celts, committed nothing of value to paper or stone, for fear that strangers and unbelievers might discover their holiest mysteries. Among which was this secret genealogy, these links in the divine chain of kingship that led back to the great hero Tarkan, the son of Kaer, the son of Nembroth, the son of Cham, the son of Astur, the King of All that Flies: he who wears the Crown of the Mountains upon his head, and tears the clouds asunder with his terrible talons, in his kingdom of the blue sky over the Altai Mountains and the snowbound Tien Shan. He who devours his enemies before him like the storm; who among the Eastern People is also called Schongar, the head of the ancestral tree of all the wide-wandering Hun nation.

What did the Romans know of this? All men beyond the frontier were mere barbarians to them, and Roman curiosity stopped at their own frontier walls.

Here in Rome, this son of the Sons of Astur was deemed little better than a slave or a spoil of war. He thought of the wide plains of Scythia and his heart ached with longing for his homeland, for a sight of the black tents of his people, and for the great herds of horses moving slowly through the thigh-deep feathergrass. Among them was his beloved white pony, Chagelghan – well named, for she was indeed as fast as lightning: chagelghan in the language of the Huns. When he was back on the plains, he would mount her barebacked and unbridled, with only his legs’ strength and his fists in her thick white mane to hold him, and they would ride for unbounded miles over the steppes with the feathergrass whipping past his knees and her haunches, the wind in her mane and his hair. Here, in this bitter and withering empire, everything was stifled and bounded, every parcel of land was owned, every horse branded, every straight, unblinking road paved and named, every field and vineyard fenced off – and these Romans had the stupidity to think themselves free! They no longer knew what freedom was.

But he would have his freedom again. His parting gift to Rome would be the blinded eyes of that great emperor; and then he would escape. They would send out soldiers to search for him, he knew. He knew his own value. They would send out whole armies to prevent his escape. But they would never find him once he was out in the mountains and the wilds, no more to human eyes than a ghost or a shadow.

The boy didn’t breathe. He pressed further back into the darkness and made himself invisible. One of the elders of his tribe, a solitary and often silent elder called Cadicha, had taught him how. Cadicha had travelled for many long years in the endless wildernesses of Central Asia, and seen many strange things, and knew how, so it was said in the tribe, to make himself appear like a gust of sand in the wind, or a single solitary tree. Cadicha taught the boy what to do. He pressed as far back as he could into the shadows of the niche. Against his bare shoulder he could feel the cold marble of the pediment, surmounted by yet another pompous marble statue of some defunct hero of Rome. His fingers were sweaty round the coarse rope handle of his dagger. He could smell the salt-sea smell of the rope, damp with his sweat.

He was small for his age, more like a boy of seven or eight than one on the verge of adolescence; his people had always been scorned for their small stature. But what did they know, those enfeebled Romans with their cold sneers of superiority, or those long-limbed, flaxen-haired Goths? Look at his people’s horses: smaller than any other breed in Europe, but hardier by far. They could carry a man for an hour at full gallop and not tire.

He still didn’t breathe, and he closed his slanted eyes, lest they should glitter like a cat’s from the darkness.

The guards talked on, within a few paces of him.

Some guards they were. Old and tired and half deaf and ready to fall. Very like the city they guarded. They were talking now of his people, and of how Rome had defeated the barbarian army of Rhadagastus only with the aid of barbarians. How Stilicho, master-general of the Roman forces, had joined forces with another barbarian tribe to win his victory: this tribe called the Huns.

One of the guards snorted. ‘Half animal, they are. Eat nothing but raw meat, wear only animal skins, and their victory rites after a battle… You think the arena looks a mess after a triumph, but you don’t want to be one of their war-captives, I can tell you.’

‘No greater power in this world than to be so feared,’ said the other guard.

‘Well, aren’t you the philosopher tonight.’

The second guard stared out over the moonlit palace courtyard, and then said softly, ‘Well, we shall see them for ourselves tomorrow, at General Stilicho’s triumph.’

‘Emperor Honorius’ triumph.’

‘I do beg your pardon,’ came the mocking reply. ‘Yes, of course, the emperor’s triumph.’

There was silence for a while, and then one of them said, ‘Do you remember that night on the Rhine?’

‘Of course I do,’ said the other. ‘How could I ever forget it? You saved my poxy life, didn’t you?’

‘Don’t start thanking me for that again.’

‘Wasn’t going to.’

‘Anyway, you’d have done the same for me.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

The two old soldiers grinned at each other, but their grins soon faded.

Yes, they remembered that night on the Rhine. In the last days of December, when the river froze solid, and the barbarian hordes came galloping across the moonlit ice as if they were coming into their kingdom: Vandals and Sueves, Alans, Lombards, Goths, Burgundians. Yes, they remembered that night, and all the nights and the weeks and the months that came after.

The first guard bowed his head at the remembrance. ‘I thought I saw Rome go down in flames that night.’

They brooded.

‘Is the story of Rome finished?’

The other shrugged. ‘It’s been a long story,’ he said. ‘And it could yet have one almighty firestorm of a final chapter. The fall of Rome would outshine the fall of Troy as the sun outshines a candle.’

‘We’ll have a place there, too,’ said the other, ‘and die deaths as glorious and heroic as the death of Hector himself!’

They snorted with derisive, self-mocking laughter.

Then one said, ‘Come on then, old Trojan.’ And wearily the two comrades-at-arms, now relegated to the status of lowly palace guards, with their stiff old joints and their scars that still ached on frosty nights, moved slowly on down the corridor, their sandals slapping softly on the marble tiles.

The boy relaxed, eased himself away from the cold marble and breathed again. The moment the guards had turned the corner out of sight, he crept out of the niche and scuttled along in the shadows towards the other end of the corridor.

There in the pale, washed light of the moon stood an imposing bronze statue of Caesar Augustus himself, a great brawny arm commandingly outstretched, wearing the plate-armour uniform of a general of four hundred years ago. His eyes shone in the moonlight, his painted black eyes with their unearthly gleaming whites. Round the base of the statue were carved the words ‘ PIUS AENEAS ’. For were not the Caesars direct descendants of the legendary Founder of Rome himself?

By dawn tomorrow, Augustus would look very different: with his knife the boy would turn that cold gaze blind.

He scrambled swiftly onto the pediment, and then, feeling as if he was in some strange dream, began to climb up the bronze figure. He clenched the knife between his teeth and, reaching up, managed to grab hold of one of Augustus’ larger-than-life-sized hands. He braced his bare feet against the statue’s legs and hauled, stretched up again and hooked his left arm round the emperor’s neck.

He froze. The guards were coming past again.

They couldn’t be. They had done their dozen circuits of the courtyard, as regular as the wheeling stars, in true Roman fashion, and now they should be moving on to another of the palace’s countless courtyards. In his urgency he must have miscounted.

He kept as still as the statue itself while the guards passed beneath him, both looking sombrely down. They didn’t see him, hunched there on the imperial giant like a malignant incubus. And then they were gone.

He leant back and, gripping the statue with both thighs and one arm, took the dagger in his right hand and eased the blade under Augustus’ alabaster right eyeball. A little scraping and levering, and it popped out cleanly. He caught it deftly with his knife-hand as it fell, the size of a duck egg, and dropped it inside his tunic. Then he turned his attention to the left eyeball, again slipping the thin blade in and easing it ‘And what do you think you are doing?’

The voice was colder than any statue of marble or bronze.

He looked down. At the foot of the statue stood a young woman of twenty years or so, in an emerald-green stola, belted at the waist, her hair worn in a severe style, tightly plaited and bound round her head. It had an almost reddish tinge, and her skin was very pale. She was tall and bony, with a fine nose, a thin and sharply defined mouth, and cool green, unblinking, catlike eyes. Her physical presence was one of both brittleness and sinewy tenacity. Now she arched a cool eyebrow enquiringly, as if merely curious, or even amused at what the boy might be doing. But there was no amusement or mere curiosity in her eyes. Her eyes made the boy think of fire seen burning through a wall of ice.

‘Princess Galla Placidia,’ he whispered. ‘I-’

She wasn’t interested in explanations. ‘Get down,’ she snapped.

He got down.

She looked up at the mutilated face of Caesar Augustus. ‘He found Rome brick and left it marble,’ she said softly. ‘But you, you found him bronze, and left him… mutilated. How very characteristic.’ She looked sourly down at the boy again. ‘It is so important to know one’s enemies, don’t you think?’

The boy looked smaller than ever.

She held out her hand. ‘The other eye,’ she said.

He could feel it, still nestling there in the folds of his tunic.

‘I…’ He swallowed. ‘When I came by, one eye was already gone. I was just trying to make sure the other one wouldn’t fall out as well.’

He didn’t understand what had happened when he slammed against the wall behind him. Only when he groggily pulled himself to his feet again did he feel the side of his face stinging with pain. The livid welts of the blue tattooed scars that stood out from his cheek, the mark of his people, cut into his flesh by his mother when he was still in his cradle, tingled with increasing intensity. He touched his fingertips to his mouth, and found that the odd tickling sensation over his numbed lips was the trickle of blood.

He clutched the knife hard in his right hand and took a step forward. His teeth were furiously clenched.

Galla didn’t flinch. ‘Put it away.’

The boy stopped. He continued to clutch the knife, but he couldn’t take another step.

The princess’s eyes, both cool and burning, ice on fire, never left him. ‘You have been nothing but a plague since the day you arrived here,’ she said, her voice as cutting as Toletum steel. ‘You have had the finest Gallic tutors in Rome, to teach you rhetoric, logic, grammar, mathematics and astronomy… They have even tried to teach you Greek!’ She laughed. ‘What touching optimism! You have, of course, learnt nothing. Your table manners are a continuing disgrace, you do nothing but scowl and sneer at the other hostages, your barbarian… equals. And now you are growing destructive as well.’

‘Rhadagastus would have done much worse,’ blurted the boy.

For a fleeting instant, Galla hesitated. ‘Rhadagastus is finished,’ she said. ‘As the triumphal Arch of Honorius will demonstrate when it is unveiled at the ceremony next week. Which you will attend.’

He looked up at her wide-eyed. ‘Strange it’s not called the Arch of Stilicho, really, isn’t it? In my country, when a battle is fought and won-’

‘I am not interested in what goes on in your country. Just so long as it does not go on here.’

‘But we’re allies now, aren’t we? If it hadn’t been for the help of my people, Rome would probably be overrun with barbarians by now.’

‘Hold your tongue.’

‘And they’d do far more damage than this.’ He waved at the mutilated statue that towered over them. ‘If Rhadagastus and his warriors had got into the city, apparently they were going stuff the Senate House full of straw and set fire-’

‘I order you to hold your tongue!’ said Galla furiously, advancing towards him again.

‘-to it, and leave it and all of Rome nothing but a field of blackened rubble. As the Goths might next, they say, now that Alaric is their leader, and a just brilliant general, who-’

The princess’s cold and bony hand was raised to strike the little wretch a second time, and his slanted, malevolent Asiatic eyes glittered as he taunted her, when another voice rang out from the far corner of the courtyard.

‘Galla!’

They heard the swish of a stola over the paved floor, and there was Serena, the wife of Master-General Stilicho, advancing towards them.

Galla turned to her, hand still raised. ‘Serena?’ she said.

Serena contrived a curtsey to the princess as she hurried forward, but the look in her eyes was anything but humble or obedient. ‘Lower your hand.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘And you, boy, go to your room.’

He backed up against the wall and waited.

‘Do you presume to order me?’

Serena faced Galla Placidia and her eyes did not flinch. She was shorter than the princess, and perhaps twice her age, but there was no denying her beauty. Her hair was simply coiffed, and her stola of white silk left her neck and shoulders bare but for a slim necklace of Indian pearls. Her eyes, edged with fine laughter lines, were dark and lustrous, and few men in the court were strong enough to refuse her wishes when she expressed them in her low and gentle voice, turning her gaze and her wide smile full upon them. But when angered, those beautiful eyes could flash fire. They flashed fire now.

‘Do you think it wise, Princess Galla, to maltreat the grandson of our most valued ally?’

‘Maltreat, Serena? And what would you have me do when I catch him outraging one of the most precious statues in the palace?’ Galla moved almost imperceptibly nearer to her. ‘Sometimes, I wonder if you really mind about such things. One would sometimes think your sympathies were as much barbarian as Roman! Ridiculous, I know. But of course, I understand that your husband-’

‘That’s enough!’ flared Serena.

‘On the contrary, it is not nearly enough. Since your husband was of unbaptised and barbarian birth himself, I – and indeed many others in court circles, though you may be comfortably unaware of it – many of us have begun to suspect that you have difficulty in distinguishing between what is truly Roman and what is not.’

Serena smiled scornfully. ‘It has been a long time since even the emperors themselves were Roman born and bred. Hadrian was Spanish, as was Trajan. Septimius Severus was Libyan. P-’

‘I know my history, thank you,’ cut in the princess. ‘What is your point?’

‘My point is that you seem to be suggesting that my husband is not truly Roman on account of his birth. Romanitas no longer has anything to do with birth.’

‘You wilfully misunderstand me. I am rather suggesting that you and your husband’s party-’

‘We have no “party”.’

‘-are in grave danger of forgetting the very principles of Roman civilisation.’

‘When I see a grown woman striking a small boy, I do not see civilisation, Princess,’ Serena said acidly. ‘Nor do I see subtle diplomacy in evidence, when that boy is the grandson of our most valuable ally.’

‘Of course, some would argue that, since you are merely the wife of a soldier, however peculiarly… elevated that soldier may have become, your views are of no consequence. But I would not like to be so uncharitable. Or so’ – Galla Placidia smiled – ‘complacent.’

‘You see ghosts, Princess,’ said Serena. ‘You see things that are not.’ She turned aside and laid her hand on the waiting boy’s shoulder. ‘Away to your room,’ she murmured. ‘Come now.’

Together they went down to the corridor to the boy’s chamber.

Galla Placidia stood clenching and unclenching her white, bony fists for some time. Eventually she turned on her heel and strode away, sightless with fury, her silk stola sweeping the ground before her as she went. In her darting mind’s eye she saw suspicions, plots and jealousies scuttling away like malign and chattering sprites into the dark shadows of the imperial courtyards; her haunted green eyes cast restlessly from left to right as she walked, and found nothing worth their constancy.

Serena halted at the door to the boy’s chamber and turned him gently but firmly to face her.

‘The knife,’ she said.

‘I – I dropped it somewhere.’

‘Look at me. Look at me.’

He glanced up into those penetrating dark eyes and then looked down again. ‘I need it,’ he said miserably.

‘No you don’t. Give it to me.’

With great reluctance, he handed it over.

‘And promise me you will do no more damage in the palace.’

He thought about it and said nothing.

She continued to fix him with her dark eyes. ‘Swear it.’

Very slowly, he swore it.

‘I am trusting you,’ said Serena. ‘Remember that. Now go to bed.’ She pushed him gently into his chamber, pulled the door shut behind him, and turned away. ‘Little wolf-cub,’ she murmured to herself with the trace of a smile as she went.

One of the palace eunuchs came to Galla’s door and knocked. She nodded for him to be admitted.

It was the sharp-witted, sardonic Eutropius. His vital intelligence was that Serena and Attila had been seen outside the boy’s chamber, making what appeared to be a mutual promise or pact.

When he was gone, the princess rose and strode restlessly around the room, imagining conspiracies and secret conversations everywhere. She pictured the Huns in secret negotiation with Stilicho, of the boy somehow passing messages from Stilicho and Serena to his own murderous people encamped far out on the wild Scythian plains. Or even to his grandfather, Uldin, who, mistakenly in her opinion, would take part in the imperial triumph tomorrow, alongside Stilicho – as if the equal of a Roman general!

She saw too her brother, Emperor Honorius, ruler of the Western Empire, back in his palace in Mediolanum, or hiding away in his new palace at Ravenna, safe behind the mosquito-ridden marshes, giggling to himself as he fed grains of the finest wheat to his pet poultry. Honorius, her idiot brother, two years her junior: the eighteen-year-old Ruler of the World. ‘The Emperor of Chickens’, malicious tongues at court had christened him. Galla Placidia knew it all, both from her network of informants and from her own piercing green eyes, which saw through everything and everyone.

Let Honorius stay in his new palace: it was better, perhaps, that he was kept out of the way. Ravenna, that strange dream-city, connected symbolically to the rest of Italy only by a narrow stone causeway across the marshes. Ravenna, with its night air filled with the croaking of frogs; where, they said, wine was more plentiful than drinking water. Let the emperor stay there. He would be safe and quiet, alone with his chickens.

She stood late into the night looking out onto the Great Courtyard, listening to the peaceful splashing of the Dolphin Fountain, and knew that sleep would not come. If she laid down her humming head now, she would only dream of ten thousand thunderous hooves, of painted barbarian faces, blue and scarred with the scars and burns that those terrible people gave their children in infancy. She would dream of a black, unending rain of arrows, of fleeing multitudes weeping and stumbling over a parched and desolate country, or running to hide, in the mountains, from the wrath and the judgement to come. She would cry out in her tormented sleep, and dream of churches and forts and palaces aflame in the fallen night, like the burning towers of tragic Ilium. Her thin, bony shoulders sagged with the weight of the empire of a hundred million souls. She clutched the heavy silver cross round her neck and prayed to Christ and all His saints, and knew that sleep would not come.

She would have been even more troubled if she had seen the strange ritual that took place in the boy’s bare cell before he at last crawled into bed and slept.

He squatted on the floor, retrieved the alabaster eye from the folds of his tunic, and set it carefully down in the intersection of four floor-tiles, so that it wouldn’t roll. After a few moments’ consideration, during which he and the unsocketed eye stared grimly at each other, he reached under his bed and pulled out a rough stone. He lifted it above his head, then slammed it down as hard as he could on the eye, flattening it instantly into powder.

He set down the stone, reached out, took a pinch of the alabaster powder between forefinger and thumb, and raised it to his mouth.

And he ate it.