Attila

7

That evening, General Stilicho sat brooding in his white canvas tent on the edge of the army encampment outside the town of Falerii, beside the River Tiber. A long day’s march from Rome, but he always drove his men hard.

He was listing the priorities that faced him. First and foremost, he must face Alaric’s army in the field and defeat it. As palace whisperers said he should have done more thoroughly to the armies of Rhadagastus.

Alaric would not be easy. The barbarians no longer fought like barbarians. They fought like Romans. In the good old days, barbarian tactics on the battlefield, whether Gothic, Vandal, Pictish, Frankish, or Marcomman, had been pretty much the same wherever you went. They were as follows: 1. Group together on the battlefield any old how. Put the wives and kids in the chariots behind you to watch the show. 2. Bang your weapons and shields together, and shout insults at the enemy. Especially insult the size of his genitals. 3. And then… Chaaaaarge!

The barbarian horde of twenty or thirty thousand vainglorious individuals would rush in on the tight-packed ranks of the bristling Roman legion, numbering six thousand at the most but working together as a single ruthless unit, and the horde would be cut to pieces. All males captured or wounded were beheaded on the battlefield. Wives and kids were sold into slavery. End of story.

But now… now they fought on command, in rank and file. They turned and wheeled and switched fronts with the ease of a drilled Roman legion. And they were bloody good horsemen, too. It would not be easy. But that was what must be done first, nevertheless. Alaric’s power must be destroyed. If Uldin and his Huns could be called upon again, all well and good. If not, the Romans would have to stand alone.

Then he must return to Rome, to that nest of vipers, and, and.. . And what? In his mind, he could hear the soft, pleading voices of his closest friends urging him to seize the throne for himself. ‘For Rome,’ they said, ‘and for the sake of good government. Raise your legions and come down to Rome. The people will acclaim you.’

And then there was the heavy burden of the slim scroll that he still carried in his pouch. The knowledge that if it fell into the wrong hands…

He glanced up. It was a lieutenant of the Palatine Guard who attended him now, a high-born palace soldier in his shiny black leather breastplates. The only blood on his blade the blood of those he’d executed down in the palace cells, after a good few hours of torture. Stilicho looked sourly at him.

‘Sir?’ said the lieutenant ingratiatingly.

‘You’re dismissed,’ said the general. ‘Send me a lieutenant from one of the Frontier detachments.’

The lieutenant blanched. ‘With respect, sir, I hardly think a Frontier soldier will have the necessary manners or the knowledge of court etiquette to satisf-’

The Palatine officer felt the general’s wrath blast him full in the chest like a blow from a ballista. He staggered backwards out of the tent and hurried off to fulfil his orders, the general’s parade-ground language ringing vividly in his ears.

A few minutes later there came a rapping at the bar over the door of the tent, and the general ordered him on in. He continued to read a while. Despatches from Gaul. They did not make good reading.

When he finally looked up, he saw a tall, grey-eyed lieutenant standing in front of him, with a ragged scar across his chin.

He gave him his fiercest glare. ‘How d’you get the scar, soldier?’

The lieutenant didn’t flinch. ‘Tripped over a dog, sir.’

Stilicho looked down and then up again, his eyebrows quizzically raised. ‘Repeat.’

‘Tripped over a dog, sir. In a backstreet in Isca Dumnoniorum. Drunk as a skunk on British mead, sir. Bashed my bonce on a stone watertrough as I went down.’

Stilicho suppressed the urge to smile. He pushed back his camp stool and stood and walked over to the lieutenant. The lieutenant continued to stare straight ahead without a flicker of the eyes. Stilicho stood as tall as him, and he adopted that most unnerving of positions, to the side of his man, but just out of his field of vision. Every drill decurion’s favourite bullying point.

‘A little clumsy, eh, soldier?’

‘Damnably clumsy, sir.’

The general leant close so that he needed only whisper in the soldier’s ear. ‘Some soldiers might have had the wit to make up something a bit more… soldierly? Such as, it was an axe-stroke from a giant Rhinelander that nearly took your head off? Or a bloody great two-handed Frankish sword – but you ducked out of the way just in time, so it only nicked you on the chin? Have you no imagination, soldier?’

‘None whatsoever, sir.’ He raised his scarred chin even higher. ‘Useless memory, too, sir. Which is why I always have to tell the truth.’

Stilicho stood back and grinned. He liked what he saw and heard. He returned to his desk and waved at the canvas stool before it.

‘Sit down, soldier.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Cup of wine?’

‘No, thank you, sir. Keeps me awake at my age.’

‘What is your age?’

‘Twenty-five, sir.’

‘Hm. Wish I was twenty-five again. At my age, wine only puts me to sleep.’ The general poured himself a glass of watery wine anyhow, and sat down likewise. ‘So, how many men in your command?’

‘Just eighty, sir.’

‘A lieutenant, commanding eighty? Where’s your centurion?’

The lieutenant grinned as he thought of his centurion. ‘Still alive, sir. More scars on him than a butcher’s chopping board, but still very much alive. But I know, sir, it’s fucked-up. Pardon my language, but there’s just not… not enough… ’ He trailed off, feeling that what he was about to say was tantamount to treachery.

But Stilicho was ahead of him. ‘I know, I know,’ he said wearily. ‘Not enough men to go round. I’ve heard it all before.’ He leant forward and ran his hands over his face and brooded. Then he resumed. ‘And you’re a Brit?’

‘Sir.’

‘Married?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So when you marched out of – where were you stationed?’

‘Isca, sir. Dumnonia.’

Stilicho nodded gravely. ‘I know it. Pretty, dark-eyed girls, they say.’

‘Dead right, sir. I married one of ’em.’

‘And so when you marched out of Isca, on imperial orders to return to Italy, to defend Rome at all costs, you left a wife behind?’

‘Yes, sir. And two children.’

‘And two children,’ Stilicho repeated. ‘Tough order. Miss them?’

‘Like hell, sir. I… ’ He hesitated. ‘I hope one day to go back there, sir. When all this is done.’

‘Britain is now beyond the frontier, soldier. You do understand that?’

‘I do, sir. But it’s not yet finished.’

‘Hm.’ Stilicho stroked the thinning grey stubble on the top of his head. ‘But your lot had plenty of desertions?’

The lieutenant looked shamefaced. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Hm. So you joined at – eighteen?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you’ve got another thirteen years to serve before you get pensioned off. That’s a long time to go without seeing your wife and kids. And a long time for a wife to go without seeing her husband. If you know what I mean.’

‘I’m not complacent, sir.’

‘Remember Emperor Claudius. He only had to go down to the port of Ostia for a few days, and his wife went and married Gaius Silvus.’

‘My wife is no Messalina, sir.’

‘No, no,’ said the general with some haste. ‘And you’re no Claudius, I’m sure, but only a mere mortal like the rest of us.’ He grinned. ‘You know what the Divine Claudius’ last words were, according to Seneca?’

The lieutenant shook his head.

‘ “Oh dear, I think I’ve shat myself!”

The lieutenant smiled. Then Stilicho resumed more seriously, ‘And when you get pensioned off, you won’t get a farm in Britain for your service, not any more. You’ll maybe get something in Gaul. And maybe not.’

The lieutenant said nothing.

The general sighed and felt a great weight on his shoulders. It was the weight of responsibility, plus the weight of this good lieutenant’s tragic loyalty. And there were thousands more like him, who would not desert their last post.

‘OK, soldier. Now give me a game of draughts before you go. You play draughts?’

‘Badly, sir.’

‘Me too. Excellent. Means the game won’t last long and we can soon go to bed.’

The game lasted, as the general had predicted, only a few minutes. The lieutenant won.

‘Badly indeed,’ said Stilicho grudgingly. He sat back and stretched. ‘OK, soldier, you can go. Reveille at first light.’

‘Sir.’

Stilicho sat for a long time on his own, gazing at the scattered draughts before him by the light of the guttering candle. He heard the howl of the wolves at the river’s edge, eerily nearby, come down from the hills above to drink, or to lie in wait for their prey, when they came to drink likewise. And he heard the answering howl of the camp dogs calling to their cousins beyond, in the wilderness. Like men, penned in the safety of their cities, longing for the ungoverned wilderness in their turn. Bored with civilisation and its heavy demands, its frustrating interdictions, and longing for the old forest ways, and the new dark age.

Stilicho reached out for more wine, and then stopped himself. Freedom comes when you learn to say no. He slept at his desk.

Over the next few days of the march to Pavia, the general came to like his new aide-de-camp, the British lieutenant, more and more as they rode alongside each other. Lucius was his name.

‘And my horse,’ said the lieutenant, leaning forward and patting the long, grey, powerful neck, ‘is called Tugha Ban.’

The general eyed him a little sardonically. ‘You have a name for your horse?’

Lucius nodded. ‘The finest grey mare from the stock of the wide horse-country of the Iceni. And where I go, she goes.’

The general shook his head. Horse-lovers.

‘What do you think of the Palatine Guard, soldier?’ he asked. ‘As a Frontier Guard yourself?’

‘Begging your pardon, sir, but in all honesty I’d rather not say.’

‘Hm,’ murmured Stilicho. ‘I think they’re a bunch of posturing nancy-boys myself.’

The lieutenant grinned and said nothing.

‘You’ll dine with me tonight, soldier. Just the two of us. I’ve things I want to discuss with you.’

‘Sir?’

‘Tonight, soldier. At the twelfth hour.’

They dined well, and Stilicho insisted the lieutenant took at least a cup of wine.

‘I’m no wine expert,’ he said, ‘but this Opimian is pretty good, don’t you think? The vines grow overlooking the bay, and it’s supposed to have the taste of the salt sea in it.’ The general took a glug, rolled it round his mouth and swallowed. ‘Actually, I can’t taste anything of the sort, it’s just what the wine snobs back in Rome claim.’

The lieutenant liked this Stilicho.

They talked of the army, the barbarian invasions, the state of Rome. The vulnerability of Africa, and its vast grain-fields; and the inscrutable nature of the Huns.

‘They could yet be our salvation,’ said Stilicho.

‘Or… ’ said Lucius, and left it hanging in the air.

‘Hm,’ said the general. ‘It’ll pay to keep cosy with them, certainly. And take care of our Hun hostages, too.’

He poured them each a fresh cup of wine, Lucius not refusing. A moment later, he said, ‘You believe in prophecies, lieutenant?’

‘Well,’ said the lieutenant slowly, ‘I’m no philosopher, but I think I do. Like most people, I suppose.’

‘Exactly!’ The general banged his fist on the table and his eyes gleamed.

‘In my part of Britain, sir… I don’t know if I should say, as we’re all Christian now, I know, and they weren’t exactly popular with Julius Caesar… ’

Stilicho frowned. ‘Who, the Christians?’

‘No, sir, the druithynn and the bandruithynn – the holy men and women of Britain, the priests of our native religion.’

‘Ah yes, the druids. Caesar detested them, and the power they wielded. Which was why he pretty much wiped them out, I thought, on the Isle of Mon?’

‘He killed a lot of them, sir. But some escaped, to their cousins, over the water in Hibernia.’

‘Ah yes, Hibernia. Never could get the hang of Hibernia. They’re all mad there, aren’t they?’

Lucius smiled, and then said enigmatically, ‘Well, they don’t build straight roads over there, let’s say. But after the massacre on Mon, it was the home of the druithynn for the next four hundred years.’

‘And now…?’

‘Now they’re returning to Britain. Even though we’re all Christians now, even in Hibernia, the druithynn are returning. And many of the people, especially the country people, are still faithful to the old religion.’

Stilicho nodded. ‘Don’t tell me. The things that still go on in the hills and the villages – even in civilised Italy. I tell you, soldier, your average village Saturnalia still makes a night in a Suburran brothel look like dinner with the Vestal Virgins.’

‘In Dumnonia, sir, in my village, the marriage bond is held as sacred as it is among the strictest Christians of the East. But that’s not the case everywhere in Britain, especially on the great feast days of our Celtic year – like with your Saturnalia. In Dumnonia we still have the midwinter festival of Samhain, and then Beltane-’

‘And that’s when men really have to watch their wives, huh?’

Lucius grimaced. ‘And as for the young people not yet married.. . ’

The two men brooded for a while on the thought of young Celtic girls with no clothes on, and then harrumphed simultaneously and came back to reality.

‘How did we get onto this subject?’ growled the general.

‘Prophecy, sir.’

‘Ah yes.’ He poured more wine.

‘And I meant to say,’ said Lucius, ‘that prophecy is very strong among the druithynn – except that nothing is ever written down. Prophecies are considered to possess too much mana – that is, sacred power. Once they’re written down, anyone can read them.’

Stilicho nodded, his burning brown eyes in his long, lugubrious face fixed on the lieutenant. And then, without changing his gaze, he reached down and picked up a scroll from the table, upended it and shook. Another tattered scrap of a scroll fell out, and Stilicho unrolled it and pressed it out flat upon the table. It was brown with age, and blackened with burns round its edges.

‘Only two weeks ago,’ said the general, very slowly and softly, ‘on the orders of the Princess Galla Placidia, I went to the Temple of Capitoline Jove, which is now a Christian place of worship, of course. And I took up the Sibylline Books, and I burnt them. I scattered the ashes off the Tarpeian Rock like dead leaves. And when I looked back, this one scrap had fallen from the brazier and survived. One of the priests emerged – not a man I had ever respected for his spiritual fervour or intelligence. A fat old senator called Majoricus. In earlier days he was actually one of the quindecemviri – the Fifteen Men – who guarded the Sibylline Books with their lives. But once Theodosius shut the pagan temples for good, Majoricus knew pretty quickly which side his bread was buttered and became the most vociferous and fervent of Christians overnight. So he never had to leave the temple at all, it was said. A kind of holy sitting tenant, whom the new landlord – the God of the Christians – couldn’t have got rid of even if He’d wanted to.’

The two men chuckled.

‘So there I was, burning the last of the Books, when Majoricus came waddling over and retrieved this scrap of parchment from the floor. He looked it over and then he pressed it into my hand, saying that this was the very last Sibylline prophecy of all and that I must keep it. He didn’t know why, but he said it must be meant. He said, mysteriously, that “God has a thousand and one names.”

‘Now I had only reluctantly burnt the Books in the first place. Galla had said they were a wicked pagan superstition anyway, and they would sap the morale of the Roman people, with their endless foretelling of doom and destruction. But, with some surprise – at myself, you understand, for I am not a man who is generally much influenced by what fat old senators tell me to do-’

‘I imagine not, sir.’

‘All the same, at this moment, I did as that fat old priest commanded me, and I kept this last scrap of parchment. But it troubles me what I should do with it now. I do not know if my time will last much longer.’

‘Sir, you seem to me a very fit man.’

Stilicho hadn’t meant that at all. But he said nothing. Instead, he pushed the scroll across to the lieutenant. ‘I want you to have this. Guard it with your life.’

Lucius frowned. ‘Why? Why me?’

‘Call it a hunch. I’ve lived all my life listening to my hunches. My wife says it’s a female gift, but it’s one I’ve always received with gratitude. I usually get it right. Hunches tell us things that nothing else can. Here. It’s yours.’

Lucius gazed down at the scroll. There were two columns of verses, written in ancient temple-hand, in ink now yellowish-brown with age. Some lines were in long, bombastic hexameters, and others were brief, even vulgarly rhyming riddles, like the rhymes of barbarian peoples, which surprised him.

‘Read one,’ said Stilicho.

By the light of the candles beside him, Lucius read out in his deep, clear voice: ‘One with an empire,

One with a sword,

One with a son,

And one with a word.’

The general nodded. ‘And read those last hexameters.’

The lieutenant read, ‘When Romulus climbed to the rock,

Brother Remus stumbled below.

The dead man saw six, the king twelve,

And the book of Rome is closed.’

He looked up again. ‘This is… this is the prophecy that gives Rome twelve centuries to stand?’

‘And in our time… ’ said Stilicho. He opened his great hands wide. ‘In your hands is the very last prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl, before she vanished for ever from our history. These are the verses regarding the end of Rome. They are difficult and obscure, like all the Sibylline verses; and they say that whoever seeks to interpret them will do so only to misunderstand them. Nevertheless, I pass them on to you.’

‘To me? Why?’

‘I feel somehow – I do not know why – that these last and most terrible verses must not be destroyed after all, but must be taken far, far away from Rome, beyond the frontier. For in some strange way, as yet unforeseen, they may yet save Rome. Or the spirit of Rome, if not the monuments and the temples and the palaces.’

The general leant forward passionately, his dark eyes blazing afresh. ‘Do your duty, man: take them back to Britain with you.’

‘But I have thirteen years yet to serve, sir, unless I get leave.’

‘You go when you go,’ said Stilicho vaguely. ‘A burden they are, but remember them. Galla fears them, and the Church fears them, and yet I think it need not. For they are things of power if rightly used, and may yet save Rome in some way I cannot foresee. The Books have never been wrong – only wrongly interpreted.’ He sat back and looked suddenly like a weary old man. He passed his big hand across his brow. ‘I could not destroy that last Book. It seems to me that those who start out by burning books end up by burning men.’

The two men sat in eerie silence for a while. The camp outside was all but silent. An owl hooted, the sound carrying through the still, airless night. But within the tent, the two troubled soldiers seemed to feel the wind of the centuries pass by, brushing their very skins like a ghost. They felt both small, and burdened with something far greater than they could comprehend. The end was coming, they knew, but it was not an end whose shape they or any mortal man could see clearly. And it was all the more terrifying for that.

The lieutenant saw in his mind’s eye a woman in a long white robe walking sightlessly through a thick sea-fog towards a cliff edge like the green and windswept headland of Pen Glas, above the beloved Dumnonian valley he called home. He wanted to cry out, but was dumb and helpless, and he saw the woman walking on with a stately dreaminess towards that teetering edge and the black-fanged rocks far below. And he thought that the woman was Clio, the Muse of History herself.

‘You see things.’ It was the general’s voice cutting in sharply.

The lieutenant came back from his reverie with an effort. ‘I… ’

‘Unusual for a soldier.’

‘My… my people in Britain have often been fili, barda – poets and seers and such – as often as they’ve been soldiers.’ Lucius tried to laugh it off. ‘You know what a reputation we Celts have.’

Stilicho made no comment. Instead he said, ‘There’s another thing I want from you.’

‘Sir?’

‘I’m sending you back to Rome tomorrow.’

‘But, sir, the Palatine Guard have requested no Frontier Guards within the city precincts. That was why me and my lads were packed off with you to Pavia, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so. And we’re up for it, too – crack at the Goths and all that. But I don’t think-’

‘And the whores of Rome beginning to wear your men out too, eh, soldier?’

Lucius grinned. ‘Lads were beginning to say they were a bit exhausted, yes, sir. Said that, after Rome, going back to the Pictish frontier would be a holiday.’

‘Well, the Pictish frontier is abandoned for good,’ said Stilicho grimly. ‘But there are plenty more frontiers still to fight for. The Rhine and the Danube must be held.’

‘Sir.’

‘Anyhow, I am well aware of the tensions between the Palatine Guard and Frontier troops who get stationed back in Rome. But those are my orders, and I am, as the Palatine Guard might need to be reminded from time to time, master-general of all Rome’s armed forces. So never mind those nancy-boys. You and your century will return to Rome tomorrow. I want you to look out for someone for me.’

‘Sir?’

‘Among the hostages there’s one who really matters – for obvious reasons just now. The Hun lad, name of Attila.’

The lieutenant grinned. ‘I’ve met him.’

The general was startled. ‘You have?’

‘It was my squad who brought him in, that night he escaped from the Palatine after cracking the codeword.’

Stilicho stared hard at the lieutenant. ‘That is no coincidence, I feel sure,’ he said quietly. ‘Well, as you may have gathered, there’s something special about the lad. I don’t know what.’

‘Eagle sitting on his shoulder,’ joked the lieutenant. An old proverb.

‘Something like that,’ said the general, almost to himself. ‘The eagle, the storm-bringer.’ Then, more briskly, he said, ‘Anyway, I want you to look out for him. No more escape attempts, of course. But look out for him in other ways, too. We really don’t want to piss off his grandfather, Uldin, at this stage.’

The lieutenant nodded.

‘The boy longs to be home, I know, but I don’t want him running off into the streets again. Far too dangerous, especially given his appetite for a fight. But if ever things changed – circumstances – and you felt he was in more danger in Rome than running free… Do you follow my meaning?’

‘I believe so, sir.’

‘The Huns – the Huns are not our enemies. They are not empire builders, so they have no reason to be empire destroyers. They neither fear the destruction of their own homeland nor desire that of another, a philosopher once said of them. After all, how could their homeland be destroyed? It is not a city or a country. It is the earth itself. How can you destroy the forests and the plains of Scythia? They don’t want to capture Rome. They want freedom, the wide open plains, pastureland for their horses and their cattle, good hunting. They don’t envy what the Romans have. They don’t want to take up residence in the Palatine, or recline in the Baths of Caracalla with lots of pretty Greek bumboys around to oil them and whatnot. And they will never, ever turn Christian. They will keep to their own religion, and their own kind.’

‘And they’re pretty good warriors, too.’

‘Pretty good?’ echoed the General. ‘I saw them tear into Rhadagastus’ army – who were no school-boys – and demolish them as if they were slaughtering a flock of sheep. God help us if they should ever turn against… ’

There was a heavy silence.

‘It would be like a beast-fight in the arena,’ said the lieutenant, ‘between a bear and a buffalo.’

‘Exactly.’ The general took another glug of wine. ‘It would get messy. But, as I say, I don’t see that it’ll ever happen. As long as we keep on friendly terms with them, there’s no reason to see the Huns as a threat.’

‘I take your meaning, sir.’

‘And the hostage lad is a part of that. So guard him well, and see that no harm comes to him. I’m fond of the lad.’

The lieutenant nodded. ‘You have my word.’