Attila

5

Attila breathed free air for the first time in a year. Although the air was that of a great and populous city rather than the wild air of Scythia, nevertheless it was free. And nothing but a few hundred miles now lay between him and his beloved homeland.

He turned left out of the palace, and hurried down the street to the corner, with the great extension to the Palatine complex built by Septimius Severus to his left. He rounded the corner and headed for the shadowy arches of the great Aqueduct of Nero below, and the darkened streets beyond. He had it all mapped out in his mind.

Down to the foot of the Palatine Hill, another left round the Arch of Constantine, with the great, looming mass of the Colosseum to his right. Then, slipping into the alleyway behind the ancient Temple of Venus and Roma, and then the Temple of Pacis – a very small and insignificant temple, by Roman standards – he hurried onwards, making for the nameless and dangerous backstreets of the Suburra, with the three hills of the Quirinal, the Viminal and the Esquiline rising up behind.

After the day of triumph and the games, the midnight streets of the poorer parts of the city were filled with drunken, jeering people. They swayed and staggered about arm in arm, emerging from the pervigiles popinae, the city’s numerous keep-awake bars, or else disappearing into one of the many brothels in the district, whose line of trade was signalled by a statue of Herm outside, with his erect and outsized penis painted in eye-catching scarlet.

The populace chanted songs about the greatness of Rome – or their emperor.

‘The Emperor Honorius

Was sitting in the bath-house,

His arse was out the window

But his cock was in the hall!

His hair, oh! it was glorious,

All dressed with art laborious,

But his balls were like a chicken’s

When his sister came to call!’

Sometimes, for the sake of variety, they broke into songs about the superiority of their favourite chariot team, the Blues or the Greens. Their tuneless roaring was interrupted only by the need to pause from time to time and vomit forth bellyfuls of sour new wine into the flowing gutters. The moment a mob of Blues supporters ran into some Greens, of course, all pandemonium broke out. But, as history so powerfully tells us, people enjoy fighting each other, and need little excuse to begin. A rival chariot team is certainly sufficient reason for bloodshed.

Indeed, in that glittering, God-crazed other capital to the east, Constantinople, didn’t the crowds run riot and kill each other over the choice of its priests, as had happened recently with the election of Bishop Eustachius? Or even over changes to the liturgy? But they were a mad, excitable, Asiatic lot over there. At least in Rome the people had the good sense to confine their violence to matters of sport.

For the most part, Attila deftly avoided these scenes of debauchery and tumult. Only occasionally did he pause to gaze in wordless contempt at the squalor and vice that made up the underbelly of this great city. As always, he could not help but compare the Roman plebeians’ behaviour with that of his own quiet people, back on the great plains, their solemn feasts, their simple dignity, their self-reliance and absolute self-control. Drunkenness they regarded with disgust: an adult trying to make himself like a child again – or even a madman. And as for the idea of the daily dole given out in Rome gratis to this scrounging, unwashed rabble…

For it had been with disbelief that the boy had first learnt that, every day, the Roman state gave out food, for free, to anyone who came to queue for it. Originally it had been a magnanimous gift of bread handed out only to the poor or the terminally idle; but then that free bread had become a right. More recently, in the reign of Emperor Aurelian, the daily dole had grown into a lavish, seductive hand-out not only of bread but also of pork, oil and wine, to hundreds of thousands of the shameless mob. But of course nothing in this world was free. The dole was given to the rabble in exchange for their quiescence. In exchange for their very hearts and minds.

The boy knew that his people, the nation of the Huns, would never be softly seduced and Romanised like other barbarian peoples. To the Huns, as to the boy himself – a Hun, indefatigably, to his soul – such a surrender of oneself as this daily dole, such a pitiful abdication of one’s own pride and self-reliance, would be a source of dishonour and shame unspeakable. Among the Huns, most proud and warlike of peoples, for a man not to be able to provide meat for his family, with the art and labour of his own hand and eye, would have been a humiliation scarcely endurable.

The boy slipped into a still narrower, darker alleyway, where the second or third storeys of the houses seemed almost to meet above his head, He blackened his face a little with mud, and messed up his hair, never exactly coiffed at the best of times. Then, looking much like one of the thousands of ordinary urchins in the slums of Rome, he reappeared on the main street. He glanced skywards again, and found that great constellation which the Romans called Ursa Major, the Great Bear, but which to his people was known as the Wings of Astur, King of All that Flies. From there his eye moved up to the North Star. He allowed himself a small smile, and he turned right and followed it, heading north.

Behind him a drunken old man, sprawled in the gutter and holding a flagon of cheap wine aloft, cried, ‘Vivite! ait Mors. Venio! Live! says Death. I am coming!’

In the banqueting hall, Galla sensed that all was not right when the attendant did not return. She snapped her fingers from the imperial dais, and gave orders for slaves to be sent immediately to check the troublesome hostage’s cell. She despatched two court clerks to question the guards on the eastern gate. When they returned, she asked them a single brief question, and only halfway through the clerk’s stumbling reply her hand flew out and struck him stingingly across the cheek. Some of the guests saw what happened and snickered.

Then she turned and ordered an attendant officer to send out a search party at once. She wanted the Hun boy found within the hour. For as a hostage, she knew, Attila was one of Rome’s strongest guarantees that the Huns would not turn against Rome.

The whey-faced adolescent reclining beside her, in his gold-embroidered robe of Tyrian purple, and with a silver diadem upon his brow, albeit slightly askew, paused in between slurps of wine, and stammered at her with eyes agog, ‘Wh-what is the matter? You look angry with me.’

Galla forced a pleasant smile. ‘Not with you, dear heart. Just with some of the incompetents whom I have entrusted with some important business.’

‘Wh-what business? Is it dangerous?’

‘No, not at all. Slave!’ She clicked her fingers and another slave came running. ‘His Sacred Majesty’s cup needs refilling.’

‘I, I…’ said His Sacred Majesty, holding out his cup. The slave filled it to the brim.

Galla smiled at him.

Honorius hiccupped and smiled uncertainly back.

A hoarse and manic voice reached the boy’s ears, and rounding a corner he saw a preacher standing on the steps of a church, railing against the sins of the people as they swept past in their mocking laughter: men with winestains down their front, linked arm in arm with tripping, painted harlots.

But not all who passed by laughed. Not the blind and the mute and the lame; not the leprous outcasts of mankind, hauling themselves forward on their knees and their knobbled and fingerless fists; no laughter from the child pickpockets and the bare, ragged orphans, prostituting themselves for a crust of bread. All the friendless and the many nameless and unloved, whose pitiful, lonely cries moved the heart of God Himself, they say, when He walked as a man on earth.

The preacher was an extraordinary figure, his bare and bony arms reaching out from a cloak which was no more than a tangle of rags, his hair wild and elf-knotted, his lips cracked and dry, his eyes bloodshot, and his nails grown long and filthy as the claws of a bear. His voice croaked harshly and he gestured jerkily, and some who passed by, even in their licentious drunkenness, felt themselves commanded by his voice to halt and listen to his terrible and apocalyptic words. The boy stopped and listened, too.

‘Woe unto you, O great Babylon!’ cried the preacher. ‘For you that were proudest among the nations, and mightiest among the empires of the world, how you are laid low! Hearken unto my words, all ye that pass by, steeped as you are in the stink and stew of your own wickedness! For as the Lord said unto the prophet Ezekiel, “I will bring the worst of the heathen, and they will possess your houses, and your holy places shall be defiled. For the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence. Destruction cometh, and you shall seek peace, and there shall be none. And you shall hide your faces in the mountains like the doves of the valleys, and your children shall be clothed with desolation, and your princes themselves shall hunger like beggars in the streets.”

‘For you have escaped the armies of the Christless barbarians that encompassed you about, O proud Rome – but not for ever shall your impunity endure! No, not for ever, nor for a year, nor even for the waxing and waning of one moon; for I say unto you, that before one moon is waxed and waned the armies of the north shall sweep down upon you, and your infants shall be dashed in pieces at the head of the streets, and ten thousand Roman nights shall be nights of horror!’

‘Tell us something we don’t know!’ cried a wag from the crowd, hooting with laughter.

The blazing, irresistible eyes of the scarecrow preacher turned upon the wag, and he said softly, ‘Aye, and Rome went laughing to her death.’

Such was the power and mystery of the preacher’s eyes and voice that the wag was silenced and the laughter froze upon his lips.

The scarecrow preacher said, ‘In after years, and in the last years of Rome and in the last age of the world, when God shall raze all clean and Christ shall come again in His glory, in those latter days, which shall come to pass before one of you here has passed away, so that you shall see it all with your own eyes – then a prince of terror shall come from the east, and he shall be called the Scourge of God. And his armies shall raze your proud temples and your palaces to the earth, and his horsemen shall trample your children into the dust, and everywhere your pride shall be laid low, and your haughtiness be made a laughing stock.

‘For mighty princes there have been before you on the earth, and proudly stood Sidon and Babylon, Nineveh, and Tyre. And now all, all are gone and have left not a wrack behind. They are blown away like grains of sand on the wind by the wrath of the Lord God of Israel, and their proud palaces, and their cloud-capped towers, and their demoniac temples with their altars of Moloch, stained red with innocent blood – they are all laid low.

‘For nothing that is of man alone endureth, but only that which is of God. And the blood of the innocent, and the weeping of the widow, and the tears of the orphan cry to heaven for justice! And even as I speak these words unto you, Holy Jerome sits in his skylit cell in Bethlehem, beating his breast with a stone for the sins of the world! And his heart cries out that though our walls shine with gold, and our ceilings, and the carven capitals of our proud pillars, yet Christ dies daily at our doors, naked and hungry in the person of His poor. For man is cruel in his heart from his infancy upward, and scorns the teaching of Christ Jesus. But God sickens to see the wrong that is wrought on the earth. And He will gather His children unto Him: the meek, the gentle; the sowers of peace and the lovers of concord, and all those that hate injustice, and are righteous in their hearts. But the proud empires of the world shall be swept into the fiery abyss, whence cometh no sound but the wailing of the wicked for all eternity!’

The preacher preached on. He would preach until daybreak and beyond, until his voice cracked and dried in his throat. But the boy turned away with head bowed and made his way into the darkened streets beyond.

There he began to run. He couldn’t have said why, but suddenly terror or disgust seized him, and he sprang forwards and broke into a pell-mell run, and felt as if he must run all night and all the next day before he would be safe.

Racing through the jostling, drunken crowds, he ran hard, head-first, into a huge, round-shouldered ox of a man coming the other way. He could smell the wine on his breath even as he detached himself and made to run on again.

‘Oi, watch your step you little heathen!’ the man bellowed down at him.

‘Watch yours.’

The man stopped moving on, swayed, and looked back blearily at the boy. ‘What did you say?’

Attila stopped likewise and looked back. His eyes never wavered. ‘I said, watch yours.’ Under his tunic, his fingers touched the handle of his stolen knife. ‘You’re drunk,’ he added. ‘I’m not.’

The man turned round properly and planted his feet wide apart. Now he didn’t seem so drunk, as if the promise of a brawl, even with a little gutter-born puppy such as this, had instantly sobered him up.

In the flickering torchlight of the street a goat was being slaughtered under a canvas awning, ready to be skewered from end to end and roasted on a spit. People gathered around, fumbling for coins and tottering where they stood. It wasn’t every day that Rome could celebrate a triumph over the barbarians these days, and the rabble were clearly determined to continue eating and drinking, singing and fornicating until dawn.

The goat’s resigned and pitiful bleats filled the air for a few moments. Then it was silent, and its lifeblood flowed over the dark dust between the two antagonists. A small crowd had already gathered to watch the fight.

‘Take him out, Borus!’ called one of his companions.

Borus took a step forward, his sandalled foot splashing in the pooling goat’s blood, and he looked down and then up again furiously, as if this too was the little heathen’s fault.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ he said, softly this time, his voice filled with menace.

Attila looked on, unimpressed. ‘You’d have done it anyway,’ he said, ‘you great oaf.’

‘Right, that’s it!’ roared the man, advancing on the boy with great lumbering strides. ‘You’re going to get a-’

‘Don’t you dare touch me. Do you know who I am?’

The man was so astonished and the crowd so amused by this haughty reprimand, coming from this slight, scowling ragamuffin with the mud-caked face, that they paused as one body and waited for the explanation.

The man folded his arms and rocked back on his heels. ‘Oh, I am so sorry. May the Lord have mercy’pon my sinful soul. And who might you be, pray?’

The boy knew he should keep silent, that he should say nothing, be nothing; that he should slip away into the shadows, no more than a street urchin like the thousands of nameless others who lived in this city’s alleyways like rats. But his pride overwhelmed him.

‘I am Attila, son of Mundzuk,’ he said, ‘the son of Uldin, the son of Torda, the son of Beren-’

The crowd started laughing, and their laughter drowned his small, proud, steady voice. He continued to list his genealogy, but he could not be heard. The crowd whooped and hollered with inebriated glee, and clapped their hands, and more were joining them all the time. Meanwhile Attila’s antagonist only encouraged them all the more, walking slowly round the still boy, as if viewing this strange, stunted specimen from all possible angles. He folded his brawny arms across his chest, furrowed his brow in puzzlement, and then grinned around at his audience with complicit mockery.

‘-the son of Astur, the King of all that Flies,’ finished the boy, his voice never faltering, but trembling now with rage.

The crowd gradually fell silent.

‘And who might they be, Attila, son of Mud-Suck?’ asked Borus, sweeping his arm across his chest and bowing very low. The crowd began to laugh again. ‘They sound to me like names it’d be unkind to give a horse.’

The crowd erupted with fresh laughter.

‘You aren’t descended from a horse, are you?’ he enquired. ‘You don’t look like – although as a matter of fact, now I consider, you do smell a little ripe and horse-like.’

The boy’s trembling hand was clenched firmly round the handle of his knife. His feet did not stir, though an urgent voice in his head was telling him, Flee now! Drive your way through this mocking crowd and run like the wind, and never, ever look back. Or they will find you. They will come after you and they will find you.

But his feet did not move, and his pride and anger boiled like lava within him.

The crowd fell silent again, in expectation of further entertainment.

‘I am of royal blood,’ said Attila softly. ‘And I am bound for my homeland beyond the mountains. Now let me pass.’

‘The lad’s drunk!’ shouted an onlooker.

‘Mad, more like,’ said an old woman. ‘Mad as a sunstruck badger. Set the dogs on him, I say.’

‘Put him in the Circus,’ slurred another, before turning aside to vomit on someone else’s feet. A scuffle broke out, but most people’s attention remained on the strange, mad boy who thought he was a king.

It was only because a fistful of mud hit Attila in the face that his ox-like antagonist got near him. One of the crowd had thrown it, and Attila turned his head in a fury to see who it was, wiping the mud from his face and his still-tender eye where Galla had slapped him only last night. Immediately, and with surprising swiftness, the torchlit shadow of his huge opponent fell across him. Before he could move, Borus had picked him up in a single sweeping bear-hug, and raised him high above his head. The crowd bayed in delight as the man shook the boy violently.

‘Your Majesty!’ he cried. ‘Oh, your Sacred Majesty, oh, Attila, son of Mud-Suck, son of Udder, son of Turda, son of Arse-Lick – let me raise you high up above the level of the common herd, so that you may loftily survey your mighty kingdom! And then let me – but alas, alas, I have dropped Your Majesty in a horrible great puddle of blood! Oh woe is me, oh forgive me!’

Attila lay stunned for a moment in the small quagmire of dust and goat’s blood while the crowd, growing in size all the time, jeered and laughed with the contagion of raucous herdlike delight. More onlookers spilt from the taverns round about, and the air was thick with dust and wine-fumes and scornful, jeering laughter.

The boy looked up and around at their creased and wine-flushed faces with a black, scowling hatred. In his heart he cursed all Rome.

Borus paraded around the natural ring of spectators like a Cypriot wrestler, flexing his biceps and smiling broadly. He didn’t notice the boy getting to his feet again, his hair matted with blood, his face streaked and his once-white tunic half torn from his back and thickly dyed a darkening red. He didn’t notice the boy reaching into his bloodstained tunic and producing a sharp knife with a rope-bound handle. He didn’t notice the boy stepping up behind him.

But he did notice a sharp and agonising pain in the small of his back, and reeled round to see the boy standing facing him, knife held out in his right hand, his left hand splayed for balance and deflection.

The laughter and smile froze on every watching face. Everything had suddenly changed. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

The man stared at the boy, in pain and astonishment more than anger. The very night was silent and watchful with fear.

‘Why, you… ’ he said shakily. He pressed his hand against the wound. It was in his kidneys. He reeled again. ‘You… ’

He staggered towards the boy, but it was hopeless. The boy skipped out of his way with ease. Borus turned and reached a bloody hand towards him, more as if he were pleading than threatening.

Attila stopped again and stared back at him. Then he turned and said to the crowd, softly, his voice never raised, his eyes scanning each of their horror-stricken faces, ‘If you do not let me go now, I will kill every one of you.’

This time, they heard his words.

The crowd – as many as fifty or a hundred people – seemed to be in collective shock. Absurd though the boy’s threat was, something about the way his alien, slanted eyes glittered in that barbaric, blue-scarred face, allied to the steadiness of his arm, which extended the short blade of the fruit-knife towards each of them turn, slowly revolving, silenced them all. There was something about him, as they said later…

As the quiet, implacable force of his threat sank in, the crowd actually began to part before him, like the sea parting before the God-driven command of Moses. And there is no doubt that, incredible as it would seem, the boy would indeed have walked away from them at that moment, leaving his huge opponent kneeling in the dust, looking like a man who has just wrestled with an angel; like Jacob at the brook Jabbok, wrestling with his unknown antagonist blindly in the night, never knowing that his opponent was of God.

But the uproar had by now come to the notice of the city guard, and as the sullen, bewildered crowd began to make way for the boy, a voice of a different stamp altogether rang out in the midnight air.

‘Clear the way there, clear the way! Come on, you drunken scum, get out of my way.’

Sensing a different danger, the boy turned on his heel and held his dagger out again.

The crowd parted, and there stood no drunken street-bully. There stood a tall, grey-eyed lieutenant in the chainmail uniform of one of the Frontier legions, with a ragged scar across his chin and a scornful smile playing on his lips. Behind him stood a dozen of his men.

The lieutenant was surprised to find that the cause of all this ruckus was this one small, dusty, bloodstained boy.

For a moment, the boy extended his knife-hand towards the soldiers themselves – all twelve of them.

The lieutenant glanced at the crop-headed, tough-looking man by his side. ‘What do you reckon, Centurion?’

The centurion grinned. ‘The lad’s got spirit, you’ve got to admit, sir.’

The lieutenant looked back at the boy, his right hand resting easily on the pommel of his sword. He didn’t trouble to draw it, and when he smiled his eyes were as cold as ice.

‘Drop it, son,’ he said quietly.

Attila returned his gaze for a moment. Then he sighed, straightened and dropped the knife at his feet.

The lieutenant turned to his men. ‘You, Ops, Crates, tie him up, arms behind his back.’

Still kneeling in the dust, Borus saw the boy being tied, and he relaxed, and felt his legs trembling, and then he stretched out his arms and fell, and lay in the dirt. His head was throbbing. He rolled half over. His mouth felt bitter, metallic, and his back felt strangely cold. He was bewildered. His eyelids kept drooping, he didn’t know why, and his limbs ached and tingled. He prayed. He could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs – or fluttering, rather, like a bird trapped and panicking in a bone cage. He gazed into the stars above and prayed to every god he could name. His eyesight blurred, and it seemed to him as if every star was growing into a radiant circle of light. He prayed to Mithras and to Jupiter and to Isis and to Christ and to the very stars themselves.

The stars looked silently down.

‘And you,’ the lieutenant called to Borus, ‘get home to your wife. That wound needs seeing to.’

Borus didn’t stir.

One of the soldiers went over and knelt beside the fallen man and touched his fingertips to his neck. Then he stood up again. ‘He’s dead, sir.’

‘Why, you little-’ roared a man in the crowd, ‘I’ll-’

Two soldiers blocked his way with crossed spears, and one knocked him sharply back with a kick to his midriff.

But the crowd’s mood had turned ugly and belligerent.

‘You murdering swine!’ screamed an old woman.

‘Slit his dirty neck!’

‘String him up! Look at him, the little demon, look at that look in his eye! He’ll kill us all, give him half a chance!’

Several women in the crowd crossed themselves. A man clutched the bluestone he wore round his neck to ward off the evil eye.

The lieutenant regarded his captive. ‘You’re popular,’ he murmured.

The boy glared up at him with such unabated ferocity that even the lieutenant was momentarily nonplussed. Then he demanded his name.

The boy ignored him.

‘I asked you,’ repeated the lieutenant, leaning down, ‘ what is your name? ’

Still the boy ignored him.

From the angry crowd, a voice cried, ‘He said his name was Attalus or some such.’

‘Attalus, son of Turda, son of Arse-Lick,’ cried another.

For the first time, the lieutenant noticed the blue scars on the boy’s cheeks, eerily visible in the sidelong torchlight.

‘Not…?’ he wondered softly. He turned to his men. ‘Lads,’ he said, ‘I think we could be in for a little donative.’ He turned back to the boy. ‘Strip.’

The boy didn’t stir.

The lieutenant nodded, and one of his men stepped forward, gripped what remained of the boy’s tattered tunic at the neck, and ripped it down to the waist.

The crowd gasped. They had never seen anything like it.

The boy’s back was decorated with the most fantastic swirls and curlicues, weals and welts, some made by needles and blue ink, some more cruelly cut in with a knife and then sewn up with a horsehair in the wound to ensure that the scar remained bold and prominent. It was the way of the Huns.

Not Attalus. Attila. The fugitive.

Princess Galla Placidia would be grimly pleased at his recapture. She seemed to have a strange obsession with the boy.

‘Well done, lads,’ said the lieutenant. ‘And the rest of you,’ he said, raising his voice again, ‘disperse. Or we’ll make you – which will hurt.’

The crowd sullenly and reluctantly began to move away. One of them walked over to Borus and covered his face with a cloth.

The lieutenant asked him if he knew the dead man. He nodded.

‘Then you’ll see to his corpse,’ he said.

He turned back to his troop. ‘Right,’ he barked, ‘back to the Palatine. On the double.’

‘Word of advice,’ said the lieutenant affably as they marched back up the hill, the boy’s arms trussed tightly behind him like spatchcock chicken. ‘Next time you’re on the run, try not to attract so much attention to yourself by killing someone.’

The boy said nothing.

‘Lucky for you we came along when we did, anyhow. They’d have torn you limb from limb.’

At last the boy spoke. ‘They wouldn’t have got close.’

The lieutenant grinned. After a while he said, ‘And the man you put down?’

‘Self-defence.’

The lieutenant nodded. It was clear enough.

‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ the boy blurted out.

The lieutenant saw in some surprise that the boy’s eyes were bright with tears – not such a tough nut as he made out.

The lieutenant nodded again. ‘It’s OK, son. It happens. You did well to defend yourself.’

The boy tried to rub his nose with his bound arm, but couldn’t reach. If he sniffed the lieutenant would hear him, and he didn’t want that.

They marched left into the Vicus Longus and began the long ascent towards the Palatine. At one point they passed the scarecrow preacher again, and the boy glanced at him with consternation and almost with fear.

‘Nutter,’ said the lieutenant.

‘Are you a Christian?’ asked the boy.

The lieutenant grinned. ‘We’re all Christians now, son. Much good may it do us.’

At last the drunken mob were beginning to thin out for the night. They made way when they saw a squadron of Frontier Troops approaching, looking on curiously from the doorways and the alleys at the strange, small, spiky, half-naked captive bound with rope.

‘I’d untie you if I thought you wouldn’t try to escape again,’ said the lieutenant, a little more gently.

‘But I would.’

‘I know you would.’

‘And I’d succeed, too.’

‘It’s possible.’

The boy looked up at the lieutenant, and for a moment something like a fleeting smile passed between them.

‘So… you were trying to get home?’

The boy didn’t answer. Instead, surprisingly, he asked a question. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘my dad was a soldier before me, from Gaul originally. But I served in the Legio II “Augusta”, in Britain, at Caerleon. You won’t have heard of it.’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ said the boy. ‘It’s in the west of the province, a frontier fortress to keep down the Silurian tribes.’

The lieutenant laughed with astonishment. ‘How in the Name of Light do you know that?’

The boy ignored the question. ‘What were you doing in Britain?’

The lieutenant began to wonder if he should be talking quite so much. There was something about the lad that was… unusual.

‘Well, my mother was a Celt. My father married her over there. So I guess I’m half and half. But we’re all Celts under our Roman skins, or so we like to think. We – me and the lads here – served over there until just recently. Then-’

‘Then the emperor called the British legions home? Because Rome was in such trouble?’

‘Hold your horses,’ said the lieutenant easily. ‘Rome’s no home of mine. My home’s Britain. And anyway Rome’s not done yet. We’ve dealt with worse than Goths before. Remember Brennus and his Gauls? They sacked Rome itself. And Hannibal? And the Cimbri?’

‘But what’s wrong with the Palatine Guard defending Rome? There’s thirty thousand of them out at the camp.’

‘Jove’s balls, you really do know it all, don’t you? Well, you know what we Frontier Troops think of the Palatine Guard back in Rome. A little… soft, shall we say. Too many hot baths and too little real fighting.’

‘Is there still fighting in Britain?’

‘More and more these days,’ said the lieutenant sombrely. ‘The Picts are always raiding in the north, and now we have the Saxon pirates to contend with, all along the eastern and southern coasts. And our Count of the Saxon Shore is about as much use as a paper bucket. So yes, Britain has its problems, too. But from now on’ – he spoke with uncharacteristic hesitancy – ‘they’ll… they’ll just have to fend for themselves.’

The boy pondered for a while. Then, ‘What else is Britain like? Your country?’

‘My country?’ The lieutenant’s voice softened again. ‘My country is beautiful.’

‘Mine too,’ said the boy.

‘Tell me about it.’

So they passed the time on the return march describing to each other in loving detail their respective countries.

The boy liked the sound of Britain: plenty of space, good hunting, and no fancy cooking.

‘Well,’ said the lieutenant as he watched his men untie the boy and hand him over to the Palace Guard. ‘Just remember, next time: keep your pride and your anger to yourself. Patience is a great military virtue.’

The boy gave a wan smile.

‘Shake,’ said the lieutenant.

They shook hands. Then the lieutenant barked an order, and his men fell into line. ‘Well, lads, our nightwatch is just about over. In two days’ time we march to Pavia, under the command of General Stilicho. So make the most of Rome’s glorious whores while you can.’

At that glorious news, all the men raised their fists in the air and roared their hurrahs. Then they wheeled and marched away into the night. The boy looked down the street after them for a long time.

He was taken and bathed, and escorted to his cell, and a guard was posted permanently outside his room. He drifted into a light, twitching sleep.