Attila

4

That night, after the Huns had departed to their temporary camp beyond the walls of the city, a great feast was held for Emperor Honorius and his glorious victory over the armies of Rhadagastus.

The vast colonnaded dining hall of the palace was filled with couches arranged round a long central spread of tables, with as many as three hundred guests in proud and self-congratulatory attendance.

The hostage children were all commanded to attend: Hegemond and Beremond, the two plump Burgundian boys; the tall, fair, quick-witted, laughing Franks; the two slothful Vandal princes, Beric and Genseric; and all the rest. Attila sat scowling in their midst, none of them daring to come too near him. Even the fierce way he handled a fruit-knife frightened them.

Nearby, to the boy’s solace, were Serena and Stilicho. But it was Count Heraclian – flatterer, charmer, true-born Roman of ancient descent, and outstanding military incompetent – who found the highest favour with the emperor, sitting much nearer to the head of the room than Stilicho. At the end of the hall, on a raised dais of rich green Egyptian marble, were two huge couches of dazzling white and gold, upholstered in purple; and on them reclined the imperial brother and sister, Galla and Honorius. Honorius ate a great deal, his sister little. Their drinking patterns exhibited much the same difference in temperament.

The food and wine were magnificent. There were oysters brought all the way from fog-bound Britain, kept cool in iced sea-water during transit, and now laid out in little osier panniers still fronded with glossy green seaweed. There were the finest garum sauces imported from Bithynia and Gades; and exquisite offerings such as honey-roast peacock, boiled thrush, camels’ trotters, and a ragout of nightingales’ brains. Many of the guests cooed with delight over these fabulous delicacies, as did the other hostage children, feeling greatly privileged to be sampling such fare. The Hun boy however, ill-mannered to the core, took one taste of the Spanish flamingoes’ brain pate on a little sliver of soft wheaten bread, and spat it out again in disgust. Even Stilicho heard the noise of his revolted hawking from where he sat, and, turning round, saw what had happened. He turned back quickly, stifling a grin.

There were dolphin fishballs, boar boiled in sea-water, squid sausages, and those greatest of culinary rarities, deer’s-milk cheese, hare’s-milk cheese, and even rabbit’s-milk cheese; which, no doubt in the interest of several guests later that night, was said to be beneficial in counteracting diarrhoea.

There were red-mullet roes on beds of nasturtium leaves, and rams’ testicles, and moray eels in fermented anchovy sauce; there was ewe’s-placenta-and-simnel cake, jellyfish omelettes, and slivers of smoked crane, from birds which had been blinded early in life so that they would grow all the fatter. There were sows’ nipples in tuna brine, and auroch’s penis in a pepper and mulberry sauce. There were roast geese that had been force-fed figs for the last three months of their lives, and there was a rich pate made from the liver of a pig that had been drowned in red wine. And the wines themselves! There was Pucinum, from the Tergestine Gulf, and sweet Marino, from the Alban Hills. There was a rich ruby Chian (dangerously heady), a twelve-year-old Numentian, and even a Falernian, of the world-renowned Opimian vintage, as the label on the neck testified: almost one hundred years old, and, to everyone’s agreement, only now reaching its best.

‘Sir?’ asked a slave, extending a bottle towards Stilicho.

The general shook his head. ‘Water.’

The imperial cooks, all one thousand of them, had excelled themselves in hard work and ingenuity. True to the Roman fashion, they had taken immense pains to disguise one kind of food amusingly as another. How the guests’ laughter tinkled to the gilt-and-painted ceiling, when they realised that what they had taken to be a pigeon, roasted and glazed with honey, was in fact made entirely out of sugar. And what exquisite imagination had gone into creating that boiled hare, which had then had its fur sewn back on, and kestrels’ wings attached to its back, so that it looked like some kind of strange miniature Pegasus!

The whole thing was an absolute triumph of Roman taste and creativity, and the magnificence of the banquet was greeted with almost universal acclamation. The guests ate and drank with gusto, and retired frequently to void their bladders, their stomachs, or both.

There was the usual dinner-party conversation: about the dreadful hot weather they’d been having recently, and how they longed to get out to their little place in the country, just as soon as the triumph was over. The quality of life was so much better in the hills of Campania this time of year, and so much nicer for the children, too. And the impoverished country people could be quite charming, in their funny, uneducated attitudes and opinions.

The guests paused to take another frog’s leg or two from the silver dish before them, to crease up their faces and break wind, or to cleanse their fingers in golden bowls scented with rose petals, and dry them on the hair of a passing slave.

One could still pick up a very nice little villa, with a few acres of vines and olive trees, for really very little. They had heard good things about the area around Beneventum, for instance, that lovely old colonial town on the Via Appia, beyond Capua. A little remote and primitive, it was true, and not as easy to get to as Capua; but nevertheless charming, simply charming. Capua had been rather ‘discovered’ nowadays, and was suffering from what they called ‘Neapolitan overspill’, whereas further up into the hills, around Caudium and Beneventum, one still felt one was in the real Italy. The Via Appia was not as well-maintained as in the past, of course – they lowered their voices a little here – and one tended to arrive rather travel-sore. And one couldn’t get fresh oysters for one’s dinner parties in the local shops there for love nor money. One rather had to ‘make do’ with what local produce was on offer, which could sometimes be somewhat rough and ready: barley bread, horsemeat sausages, figs, that sort of thing. But all the same, a few weeks in the hills of Campania, at one’s little villa, could be such a relief from Rome. One did need it, really.

Then they talked about the ridiculous property prices in the city: now even apartments on the Aventine were sought after. Soon people would be claiming that it was fashionable to live west of the river! And there were grumbles about economic migrants from the north, especially Germans, and how they had no manners, no sense of law and order, and lowered the tone of an entire neighbourhood when they moved in. They wore ridiculous trousers, had too many children, and smelt funny.

At last, with wine-jugs and dishes nearly empty, the court chamberlain arose, banged his golden staff on the ground, and prayed silence.

‘Your Divine Majesty,’ he said, bowing so low to the emperor that it looked as if he might slip a disc. ‘The most beauteous Princess Galla, senators, masters-general, prefects praetorian, magistrates, bishops, legates, quaestors, lictors, ladies and gentlemen assembled, I give you our most esteemed poet, the equal of Lucretius, nay, Virgil, nay of great Homer himself – ladies and gentlemen: pray silence for Claudius Claudianus.’

To a rather thin scattering of applause, a fat, sweaty, dark-complexioned man got to his feet and looked anxiously around at the three hundred guests. One or two smiled politely back. They knew what was coming.

The poet craved their pardon, begged their indulgence, and nodded and bobbed repeatedly towards the imperial dais, although he never quite managed to raise his eyes directly to it, for fear, no doubt, that he might be dazzled and blinded for life by His Imperial Majesty’s effulgence. Then, producing an ominously thick scroll from the folds of his toga, he declared, in a surprisingly strong and sonorous voice, that he would like to read to the assembled company a brief panegyric he had dashed off that morning, in praise of the emperor’s magnificent victory over the barbarian hordes; and he asked his listeners’ forbearance, since he had only had so brief a time to work on it.

In fact, it was well-known that Claudian had literally dozens of panegyrics already written and stashed away in the library of his handsome villa on the Esquiline, designed to cover every conceivable occasion, and to be brought out as and when required. But everyone was too polite to say so. Besides, for all the snide comments made behind his back, Claudian was very popular with the emperor.

He coughed once and began.

‘O beloved Prince, fairer by far than the day star,

Who shootest thine arrows with an aim more sure than the Parthians,

What stumbling praise of mine shall match thy lofty mind?

What encomia thy brilliance and thy beauty?

‘On a couch of gold midst Tyrian purples didst thy mother give thee birth,

And then what presages were there for good fortune!

Horned Ammon and Delphi, so long dumb, now broke their silence,

And the rock of Cumae, shrine of the raging Sibyl, spoke again!’

The burly legate beside Stilicho shifted on his elbow and muttered sourly, ‘Don’t remember that myself.’

‘I think I’m going to puke,’ mumbled the general in return. ‘And it’s not those dodgy British oysters, either.’

The two men bowed their heads and stifled their chuckles.

On the dais, Galla turned her head.

There was more.

‘When in the heat of the chase, thou guidest thy coursing steed

Amid the towering holm-oaks, thy tossing locks streaming out in the wind,

Surely the beasts of their own accord fall before thine arrows,

And the lion, right gladly wounded by a prince’s sacred hand,

Welcomes thy spear and is proud so to die!

‘When after thy toils of venery thou seekest the shade of the woods,

And freest thy weary limbs in dreaming sleep,

What a passion of love inflames the Dryads’ hearts,

How many a Naiad steals up with trembling foot to snatch an unmarked kiss!’

Many guests chuckled appreciatively at this delightful image. Even the emperor himself giggled into his goblet. Claudian paused generously to allow him to do so, before resuming again.

For there was yet more.

‘Who, though he be more uncivilised than the wild Scythian,

And more cruel than the beasts, but will,

On seeing near at hand thy transcendent loveliness,

Not readily seize the chains of slavery,

And offer thee a ready servitude?’

Attila tested the little fruit-knife against his thumb-pad.

‘Then shall all the world bow to thee, O most noble Prince!

E’en now I foresee the sack of distant Babylon,

Bactria subjected to the Law, the fearful pallor of the Ganges’ banks before thy name!

For to you all the world shall bend the knee;

The Red Sea give you precious shells, India her ivory,

Panchaia perfumes, and China bolts of yellow silk.

And all the world confess your name, your empery

That is without limit, without age or boundary!’

The applause lasted almost as long as the poem.

A little later on in the banquet, Galla was passing behind the couches, on her way to speak to one of her chamberlains, when she happened to overhear a drunken and indiscreet guest asking his neighbour absent-mindedly if the emperor himself had even been at the Triumph that day?

‘Because if he was, I certainly didn’t notice him,’ slurred the guest. ‘Like everyone else, I was all eyes on the divine Stilicho!’

Galla paused.

Unaware that they were being listened to, the other guest said sotto voce, ‘Our Sacred Majesty was probably too busy feeding his pet chickens.’

They chuckled furtively into their goblets of wine. Then one of them glanced up and caught sight of the princess standing right behind them. The warm wine he was swallowing came painfully back up his throat.

Galla leant forward and plucked a fried lark from the silver dish beside them.

‘Pray continue,’ she said, smiling sweetly, as she snapped the little bird’s legbones in two.

She arranged further business with her head chamberlain, who nodded and departed soon after. Returning to the imperial dais, she noticed that, amid the hubbub of the hostage children, the Hun brat was nowhere to be seen.

She summoned another attendant, who told her that he had been excused.

‘How long ago?’

‘Well,’ stammered the attendant, a runnel of sweat coursing down his brow, ‘some while ago now.’

‘Go and get him.’

The attendant searched the lavatories high and low. There was no sign of Attila. He made his way back to his cell in the slave quarters, knowing his time at the palace was ended, and prepared for the worst.

The Hun boy was by now moving stealthily around the Great Court, in the cool green shadows of the Dolphin Fountain.

The palace was no easier to break out of than to break into. But Attila had planned his escape with meticulous care, patiently observing every movement of the palace guards over this past year of his captivity, every locking and unlocking of the gates, and picking up every whispered password. Despite his native ferocity, he could be patient when need be. His father, Mundzuk, had always told him that patience was one of the great virtues of all nomad peoples. ‘Nothing can hurry the sun,’ he would say. The wide-wandering Huns were certainly good at waiting, and the boy himself had all the patience and rhythm of the nomad. Useless to struggle against the sandstorm – but the moment the sandstorm ceased you could take your chance. Seize it in your fierce hands for it might not come again. The Romans were like men trying to move the sands of the desert, like the sands of the Takla Makan when the east wind blew – and in the night the wind came and blew the sand back again. Their work would never be done.

The boy had also worked out the rules governing the frequency with which the palace password was changed, and felt nothing but scorn at how easy it was. From the kalends to the ides of each month, the password was changed at noon; and from the ides back to the next kalends, it was changed at midnight. In other words, eavesdrop on the password used just after midnight in the second half of any month, and it would get you through any gate in the palace until the following midnight.

He had even worked out the encryption system commonly used around the palace, and, again, was scornful at its laziness and complacency: like a Greek merchant over-confident of the safety of his ships at sea, even in the stormy, dog-star month of October.

It was based on the encryption system that Julius Caesar himself had devised for his military communications. Perhaps those hours and tedious days at the hands of his wretched pedagogue, Demetrius of Tarsus, during which Attila was instilled with the rudiments of Roman history and culture, and therefore, supposedly, with an appropriate respect and reverence for the empire – perhaps those lessons hadn’t been wasted after all.

During August, A, U, G, S, and T were used to represent A, B, C, D and E – and then the rest of the alphabet was shifted five letters down against the code alphabet accordingly. In August, ‘Caesar’ was written ‘Gatpao’. The following month, the first seven letters would change to S, E, P, T, M, B and R, and ‘Caesar’ would be written ‘Psmosn’.

The boy worked all this out in secret, by listening from shadowy corners, by picking up scraps of paper, by brooding in his loneliness and solitude, like a wolf, or a spider. Like the slow-moving Iron River of Scythia for which, some said, he was named.

And all the while that he was breaking the palace code system in secret, his irascible Greek pedagogue was beating him regularly for being slow-witted over his books.

As well as these more intellectual preparations for his escape, Attila had amassed practical aids, such as the sharp little fruit-knife from the banquet, a store of low-denomination copper coins, a bag of oatmeal he’d stolen from the kitchens, and some corks.

Soon after nightfall on that night of victory celebrations over the barbarians, Attila quit his place at the lower tables of the banqueting hall, and made swiftly for his chamber, where he collected his treasures. Then he slunk through the near-deserted courts of the palace, praying to his father Astur to guide and shield him, until he approached the guards in the main gatehouse, trembling so badly with fear that he could barely trust himself to speak.

‘Halt! Who goes there?’

He said nothing, went nearer.

‘I said, halt!’

Attila halted.

The moonlight shone on the Palatine guard’s black cuirass and his plumed black helmet. He was a tesserarius – a password-officer. He glared down at the boy. ‘Give me your name.’

Attila hesitated, then said softly, ‘Cicero.’

The guard reacted with some surprise. ‘Who gave you the password?’ he growled.

‘None of your business,’ said the boy. ‘Nor do I have to tell you my name. The correct password is “Cicero”. So let me pass.’

The guard hesitated a little longer, his meaty fist clenched round his spearhaft. Then reluctantly he lowered it and nodded to the boy to pass. His fellow guardsmen began to draw back the heavy ironbound gates. Already the tesserarius could imagine, with uncomfortable vividness, the feeling of his centurion’s vinewood knout descending on his back. But what could he do? A password was a password.

The boy slipped past him and vanished into the street. The guard looked out after him, but already he was lost to view.