Attila

6

In the hot morning he lay in an uneasy doze when he was woken by low voices by his bedside. He opened his eyes.

Beside his bed stood Serena and, behind her, General Stilicho himself.

‘Well, my young wolf-cub,’ said the general, smiling. ‘And what headaches have you been causing the empire this time?’

Attila said nothing. He didn’t smile.

Serena reached down and laid a cool hand across Attila’s forehead. ‘Foolish boy,’ she said.

He wanted to glare at her but couldn’t. Her eyes were so gentle.

‘Here,’ said Stilicho, tossing something onto the bed. ‘This is for you. But only if you promise me never to try to escape again.’ Now he was stern, soldierly. ‘Do you promise, lad?’

Attila stared down at the package by his side, and looked up again and met the general’s eye. He nodded.

Stilicho believed him. ‘Open it when we’ve gone.’

Serena bent and kissed him, nodded to her husband, and departed.

Stilicho hesitated for a moment, then sat down on a small wooden stool, a little awkwardly for a man of his soldierly frame. He rested his elbows on his knees, rested his chin on his clenched fists, and scrutinised the boy long and hard. The boy waited expectantly.

‘I’m riding north for Pavia tomorrow,’ said Stilicho. ‘Serena will remain here in the palace.’ He fell silent a while, then said, ‘The Gothic armies are regrouping under Alaric. You have heard of him?’

Attila nodded. ‘He’s a Christian, too, though.’

‘He is. If he sacks Rome, he has promised to touch not a stone or a tile of any Christian building.’ Stilicho smiled. ‘Some chance. The Gothic armies won’t be sacking anywhere soon, least of all Rome. But. .. ’ The great general sighed. ‘We live in difficult times.’

Attila looked down. He felt obscurely guilty.

Stilicho was searching for the right words. He felt somehow that it mattered, deeply, what he said to the boy at this moment. Almost as if… almost as if he’d not be seeing him again. As those ancient Sybilline Books had said… He put all thought of those haunting Books from his mind, and said, speaking as slowly and carefully as he would to Galla at her most predatory, ‘Difficult times. Strange times.’ He looked hard at the boy, and said simply, ‘Do what is right, Attila.’

The boy started. The words surprised him.

Stilicho went on, holding the boy’s eye. ‘I have always served Rome, though I am of barbarian blood. But then, we were all barbarians once. What was great Rome herself, in the days before Numa and Romulus and the Ancient Kings? A village on a hillside.’

The boy smiled uncertainly. He was unaccustomed to hearing the general speak in this way.

‘What else is there but Rome, to hold back the blood-dimmed tide? To continue… History itself? Without Rome, the world would be again a place of dark forests and witchcraft, legends and ghosts, horned warriors, human sacrifice, those terrible Saxon pirates… Without Rome, the world would fall back again into the world before history. Do you see what I am saying, boy?’

Attila nodded hesitantly. The two stared at each other and then the boy’s gaze dropped.

‘Someone said to me,’ he said hesitantly, ‘someone said that the Romans are all hypocrites, and no better than anyone else. They go on about barbarians doing human sacrifices, and how disgusting it all is, and how they need Roman law and civilisation and all that – but what is the Roman arena but one huge human sacrifice?’

‘Who told you that?’ asked the general, frowning.

Attila shook his head.

Stilicho knew better than to try and wring it out of the little mule. He sighed and said, ‘We have lived through centuries of struggle, we Romans. We are not a soft people. No society is perfect; but judge it by its ideals. We have made laws, we have set limits. There are no more gladiators, you know that. The Christian faith has introduced us to guilt – and no bad thing, perhaps. Only criminals and prisoners of war are now executed in the arena, which they fully deserve. Likewise, a master no longer has the power of life and death over his slaves. He can even be tried in court for their murder. Over centuries of struggle, things do get better. Can you say that of life and law in the barbarian lands?’

Attila said nothing.

Perhaps it was fruitless. Stilicho brooded for a while, and then he started again, in a vein the boy barely understood.

‘Prophecies fulfil themselves.’ He spoke softly, with deep sadness. ‘And in our time, the twelve hundred prophesied years of Rome will come to an end. We might destroy all evidence of the prophecies themselves – we might indeed burn the Sibylline Books, as has been commanded by the powers-that-be. But the prophecies would remain. They are not confined by a single scroll of vellum, nor ended by its burning. Prophecies are things of power. Beliefs are things of power, of real power, in the world. An army that believes in something will always destroy an army that believes in nothing – no matter how great the odds against it. But what do we still believe in? Do we still believe in Rome? Or do we believe in those ancient and implacable Books, which tell only of Rome’s allotted twelve hundred years?’ He shook his head. ‘I should have burnt them all and had done with them.’

There was a silence.

‘But that cannot be the end of everything. It cannot all have been for nothing. It cannot!’ Stilicho’s voice was raised almost to a cry of anguish, his fists tightly clenched. ‘Those twelve long centuries of suffering and sacrifice cannot all just be lost in time, like dead leaves in the wind. The gods could not be so cruel. Something must survive of them.’

He lowered his voice. ‘I am sorry, I – I am making little sense.’ He compressed his lips, and then started again. ‘The believers, those who defend what they know in their hearts to be right, will always triumph. I have seen a small, weary group of bloodied and battle-weary soldiers, surrounded by ten, twenty times as many of their enemy. But those outnumbered men were loyal to each other. They trusted in themselves, and in each other, and in their god. I have seen a band of no more than sixty men, infantry only, protected only with light mail and leather, armed with only shield and spear and sword – no javelins, no missiles, no artillery, no cavalry back-up or reconnaissance, no archers or slingers, nor even the time to set staves and put out caltrops. But still I have seen them lock shield to shield, clutch their spears in defensive undergrip, and I have seen them hold themselves proudly against as many as a thousand mounted warriors – and walk from that field bloodied but unbowed. Undefeated.’ Stilicho nodded. ‘I know, because I was one of them.

‘An army that believes in its cause will always defeat an army of unbelieving savages, who believe only in the flame and the sword. Remember that, Attila.’

The general stood and resumed his usual aloof demeanour. ‘You have to believe in something. So believe what is right.’

He stepped towards the door of the boy’s chamber, and threw a last glance back. He nodded at the package on the bed. ‘You can open it now,’ he said.

The door closed behind him.

The boy unwrapped the package and found inside the wrappings of fine oiled linen a most beautiful sword, as long as his arm, with gold scrollwork in the handle and a honed double blade that was sharp even to the lightest touch. It was of finest carburised steel, and rather old-fashioned type, the gladius hispaniensis or Spanish sword, a beautifully sinuous and dangerous shape with a swelling then tapering blade and an exceptionally long point. No shield or armour known to man could withstand a straight under-arm thrust from a sword such as this. He wrapped it in its protective oiled cloth again and laid it under his pillow, and daydreamed.

When he finally arose and went out into the courts of the palace, he found that the other hostage children had heard of his escape. They were fascinated. Hegemond, the fat Burgundian boy with the sleepy eyes, waddled up to him in the palace gardens, where they were playing beneath the mulberry trees, and asked if it was true.

Attila was wary. He had heard enough questions from these lumbering, slow-witted German children before. Is it true that the Huns coat themselves in animal fat and never take baths? Is it true that the Huns eat only meat and drink only fermented mare’s milk? Is it true that the Huns are the offspring of witches, who were driven out of Christian lands and coupled with the demons of the wind and the desert? ‘Yes,’ he used to nod solemnly. ‘It’s all true.’

Hegemond made it clear to Attila that he was invited now to join their gang. ‘Even if you are a Hun.’

But the boy kept his distance and his proud aloofness, as he always did. He watched the German children shout and play at soldiers for a while, amid the Paestum roses in the hot Italian sun. Then he turned away.

That evening, he had a visitor very different from the morning’s. He was drifting off to sleep when there came a knock on his door. The knock was clearly a formality, however, as the door then promptly opened and a tall, lean figure stepped inside. It was Eumolpus, one of the head palace eunuchs.

He stood at the end of the boy’s bed. ‘A message from Serena,’ he said coldly. ‘You are to have no more converse with her. Neither with General Stilicho, should you ever meet again.’

Attila stared at the eunuch. ‘What do you mean?’

Eumolpus smiled thinly. ‘I am so sorry, perhaps your Latin is still not good enough for you to understand even so simple a command as that. I repeat: you are to have no more converse with Serena. Ever again.’

‘By whose order?’ said the boy, pushing himself up on his elbow.

‘By the order of Serena herself,’ shrugged Eumolpus. He added, for his own personal amusement, ‘She says she finds your company… distasteful.’

He had gone too far.

There was a split second of deafening silence in the little room, and then Attila, screaming ‘You lie!’ sprang from his low bed and hurled himself at the startled eunuch with his teeth bared and his fists flying.

The guard heard the eunuch’s screams and rushed in, tore the raging boy away from the wailing Eumolpus and knocked him smartly to the floor. Then he turned back to the eunuch, who was lying speechless across the bed, and gave a low whistle.

‘Jupiter’s brazen balls,’ he gasped.

The eunuch looked as if he’d been savaged by a Caledonian hunting dog.

‘Well, don’t just stand there swearing,’ blubbered Eumolpus through the blood that spilt from his battered mouth, and with a shaky hand held to his throat where the boy had bitten deeply into it. ‘Get a physician.’

That night, for the first time, Attila was locked and bolted inside his chamber, and a guard of three was posted on his door.

He couldn’t sleep anyway. His heart thumped with a black rage that would keep him awake for years.

Stilicho was abruptly summoned the following morning to the Chamber of the Imperial Audience before his departure for Pavia.

When he got there he found not the emperor seated upon the throne, but Princess Galla Placidia. Honorius had already departed for the safety of his palace amid the marshlands of Ravenna.

Galla sat resplendent in robes of gold and – most shockingly of all – imperial purple. Flanking her over-decorated marble throne of purest Carrara marble were two of her most trusted palace eunuchs, Eumolpus himself and Olympian. Stilicho tried not to stare but he could see, even from the lowly and distant place where he stood, a humble suppliant at the bottom of the steps up to the dais, that Eumolpus had several stitches across his cheek, and an unusual kind of linen swaddling round his throat. In addition, both he and Olympian were wearing… make-up. Their eyes were rimmed with kohl like those of whores from the backstreets of the Suburra, or of Oriental despots, or Egyptian pharaohs of old, whose downtrodden people believed their ruler to be a god.

As we hold our emperors to be now, thought Stilicho.

When the men in power start wearing make-up, it’s time to start worrying. And Galla’s eunuchs were very much in power. He bowed and waited.

At last, Galla addressed him. ‘You have been to the temple building and destroyed the last of the Books?’

‘I have, Your Majesty.’

‘Pagan superstitions such as that can have no place in a Christian empire such as ours. Do you not agree?’

Stilicho gave a tilt of his head.

‘We will have an audience with the Bishop of Rome and all his principal deacons,’ Galla continued. ‘We will make it clear to them that they must preach an end to such pessimistic superstitions of the past. Rome is a Christian empire now, and under the protection of God. Those ancient scrolls are nothing but the raving of a harridan in a cave.’

There followed an awkward silence. Galla enjoyed awkward silences. They affirmed her power. In the Chamber of the Imperial Audience, no one could speak until they were addressed by the Imperial Throne.

What would Cicero have said? thought Stilicho sourly. That great orator. For all his pomposity and his self-regard, the last great voice of Free Rome. Who died for his oratorical pains, his severed head and hands delivered in a sack to Mark Antony, that sozzled lecher and braggard. His wife, Fulvia – now on her third marriage – had snatched Cicero’s head from the sack, spat on it, then yanked out its tongue and stabbed it with one of her hairpins. A fine example of Roman womanhood all round.

Stilicho waited, nursing his thoughts.

At last Galla said, ‘Remind me, Stilicho, what was the name of the barbarian chieftain who destroyed Publius Quintilius Varus’ three legions in the Teutoburg Forest, in the otherwise glorious reign of the Emperor Augustus?’

‘Glorious indeed,’ replied the general, ‘for in the reign of Augustus Christ was born.’

Galla closed her eyes slowly and then opened them again.

Stilicho regarded her warily. ‘He was called Arminius, Your Majesty, which is the Latin version of his real name, Herman, meaning “Man of War”. “Herman the German”, the troops called him.’

‘Arminius,’ Galla nodded. Of course, she knew it already. ‘As many as twenty thousand soldiers, along with their families and attendants, cut down in the dark forests of Germany, over the course of two or three days. It must have been terrible. The worst disaster ever to befall Roman arms.’

Stilicho hesitated, still trying to work out what she was up to. But it was impossible: you might as well try to guess the next strike of a snake. ‘The worst,’ he admitted, ‘at least since Hannibal and Cannae. When sixty thousand men were lost in a single-’

Galla was not interested in Stilicho’s military-historical musings. ‘And Arminius was raised – raised and educated – in Rome itself, was he not?’

‘He was, Your Majesty.’

‘As was that other great enemy of Rome, King Jugurtha of Numidia?’

‘I believe so, Your Majesty.’

‘And do you think it possible that, like Jugurtha, Arminius’ early years in Rome, watching the exercises of the troops on the Campus Martius, might have given him a keen sense of his future enemy, and how they operated? So that when he came to turn upon them in that dreadful, sunless forest in the dark heart of Germany, he was very well advantaged? Thanks to what he had learnt in the heart of his enemies’ capital as a boy?’

Now Stilicho understood her game, and he feared in his heart for the wolf-cub.

He spoke slowly. ‘I think that is unlikely, Your Majesty. After all-’

Galla held her hand up. Her point had been made. ‘You may go.’

Stilicho held Galla’s hard gaze without blinking, and for far longer than was polite. And then, contrary to all Palatine protocol, he turned his back on the Imperial presence and departed without a bow.

Galla’s hands clutched the arms of her throne, tense with fury, and as cold and white as purest Carrara marble.