Attila:The Scourge of God

FOURTEEN

When Titus appeared at the west gate of Ravenna’s imperial palace and requested an interview with Boniface, he was met with a polite but firm refusal. ‘Sorry sir,’ replied one of the guards. ‘We’re under orders not to admit you.’

‘But it’s of vital importance I see the Count,’ insisted Titus. ‘The only reason I’m debarred is because I used to work for Flavius Aetius. I’ve now left his service.’ He produced the parchment Aetius had given him. ‘Look, here’s my certificate of discharge, signed by him. Just show it to someone in authority, and repeat what I’ve told you. I don’t mind waiting.’ With feigned absent-mindedness, he began playing with a tremissis, a small gold coin worth a third of a solidus, part of the diminishing funds he had saved from his pay while serving Aetius.

‘See what I can do, sir,’ said the guard, palming the coin with a conspiratorial wink. He summoned a temporary replacement from the guardroom, and set off through the gardens for the main buildings. Half an hour later he re-appeared, accompanied by an official. ‘You’re to go with him, sir.’

Titus followed the man through the gardens, along a wide passage between the four central blocks, then down a long peristyle and through a portico into the imperial apartments — they were familiar from that long-ago encounter with the Empress and her son. The official opened a door and ushered Titus into a hallway, empty save for two burly Nubians wearing slaves’ short, sleeveless tunics. The click of a key turning in the lock behind him, told Titus he had walked into a trap.

He knew instinctively that resistance was futile, that these men were trained athletes whose skills would outmatch his own, but nevertheless he put up a fight. As the Nubians closed on him, he gave the leader a kick in the solar plexus which would have felled a normal opponent. It was like kicking a tree trunk; the man merely grunted and came on. Titus’ second blow — a neck-breaking jab with the heel of his hand against the other’s chin — produced a similar reaction. Then his arms were seized and wrenched behind his back. The pain was excruciating. Realizing that just a little more pressure would break them, Titus surrendered and allowed himself to be led from the hall. He was marched down a corridor into a large pillared chamber, in which were seated the Empress Galla Placidia and her son, Valentinian. A sulky-looking lad of twelve or thirteen, Valentinian was tall and strong for his age. He had inherited the long nose and fine grey eyes of his grandfather, the great Theodosius, but the weak chin and petulant mouth were those of his imperial uncle, the feeble Honorius.

‘Is it arrogance or merely stupidity that causes you to persist?’ asked Placidia in a glacial voice. ‘You become tiresome. Not content with once assaulting the Emperor, you have attacked a bishop in his palace, so the Pope informs us, and then have the temerity to demand an audience. Somehow, you have survived the measures we took to have you silenced, and have cheated the Ferryman. That wasn’t warning enough, it seems. Do you really think that this will make a difference?’ And she held up Aetius’ document discharging Titus.

‘Mother, I have a suggestion,’ Valentinian lisped, his tone eager.

Placidia’s expression softened. ‘We have a suggestion,’ she corrected mildly. ‘Yes, Flavius?’

‘An attack on our person was foiled by these two loyal servants, who intercepted and killed the would-be assassin before he could reach us. Clever, don’t you think?’

The Empress smiled indulgently. ‘Well, it would save a lot of bother, I suppose. Very well.’ She nodded to the Nubians.

One wrapped his arms round Titus in a vice-like grip. The other took Titus’ head between his hands, and began to twist. Terror flooded Titus as he tried to fight the pressure. It was no good; his head turned inexorably — in a few seconds, barring a miracle, his neck must break.

In a pain-filled haze, he was dimly aware of Valentinian staring into his face, murmuring, ‘Blink for me.’

A miracle happened. The door opened and in walked a huge and familiar figure: Boniface. ‘My apologies, Your Serenities, I didn’t mean to-’ He broke off as he took in the scene.

‘Help me!’ Titus managed to croak.

Looking both astonished and concerned, Boniface raised his hand in a commanding gesture. Relief swept through Titus as the pressure on his neck eased.

‘Would someone please explain?’ said Boniface in puzzled tones.

‘This man was trying to kill me,’ said Valentinian sullenly.

‘It’s not true!’ cried Titus desperately. ‘You remember me from Africa, sir? I brought you a letter from Count Aetius.’

‘That’s right, so you did,’ said Boniface. He gestured to the slaves, who released Titus and stood aside. Turning to the Empress, he said placatingly, ‘Aelia, my dear, there must be some misunderstanding. I know this young man. He may have served the traitor Aetius, but. . a murderer? Surely not. In my youth I fought under his father against Radogast the Goth. A finer soldier than General Rufinus would be hard to find.’

‘It was you I came here to see, sir,’ declared Titus, gingerly feeling his neck. ‘I no longer serve Aetius. Look: the Empress holds in her hand my official discharge.’

‘Aelia?’ queried Boniface, his tone friendly yet holding a hint of reproof.

The Empress shrugged, conceding defeat. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said. ‘It’s probably best we let you deal with him. You’ll be doing us a service by taking him off our hands — we were beginning to find him a trifle tedious.’

‘So you’ve left Aetius,’ said Boniface, when he and Titus were ensconced in the Count’s own suite of rooms within the palace. He shot Titus a keen glance. ‘You may be interested to know that I received a letter from Aetius the other day, suggesting we hold a parley next year, at-’

‘-the fifth milestone from Ariminum,’ broke in Titus excitedly, ‘on the Aemilian Way.’

‘Now, how in the name of Jupiter did you know that?’ asked Boniface, visibly impressed.

‘Well, sir, it goes back to a meeting I had with one of your old soldiers, a disabled veteran called Proximo.’

He held back nothing, but told of his conversation with Proximo and the attempt on his life; the discussions with his father; the confrontation with Bishop Pertinax; the stormy meeting with Aetius; finally, his investigations from Ariminum. ‘It was those words, “His Philippi”,’ he finished, ‘that made me realize Aetius intends springing a trap.’

‘Well, thanks to you, I can start planning how to unspring it,’ said Boniface. ‘Proposing a parley near the Rubicon,’ he murmured reflectively. ‘Cunning. It shows he understands my fondness for historical conjunctions. A weakness, I admit — and one he was clever enough to exploit. I’m grateful to you, extremely grateful.’ He looked at Titus appraisingly. ‘So, young man, you wish to enter my service, you say. I’m flattered, of course. But after my — shall we say — less than distinguished record in Africa, I’m rather puzzled as to why you should wish to.’ And he gave a self-deprecating smile which Titus found oddly touching.

‘My father believes in you, sir. Let’s just say I trust his judgement.’

‘In that case, welcome aboard, Titus Valerius. Tomorrow we’ll swear you in as one of my agentes in rebus, then you can start being useful straight away. I have a little job that I think would suit your talents.’

The five horsemen trailing Titus spurred their mounts from a plod to a walk — the speediest gait possible on the steep, eastward-facing foothills of the Apennini mountains. Titus smiled as he did likewise, welcoming the chance of a little excitement in what had looked to be an uneventful assignment. His horse, a pure-bred Libyan, had been supplied by Boniface from the palace stables. It came from tough, fast, tireless stock, and he was confident it could out-distance his pursuers. As far as he could tell at a distance of several hundred paces, their horses were chunky Parthians, sturdy and reliable, but not to be compared in speed and endurance to North African breeds.

Who were these men? wondered Titus. Their horses looked like Roman cavalry mounts, suggesting their riders were soldiers. Perhaps from a faction opposed to Boniface, who had seen Titus leave the palace? Brigands on stolen army horses? Brigandage was a growing problem: many peasants and workmen, driven to desperation by excessive tax demands, were leaving the fields and cities for the outlaw life.

Meanwhile, nothing could dampen Titus’ euphoria on this glorious late-autumn day. All his troubles seemed to be evaporating. The rift with his father was healed; Gaius was recovering his health and well-being in the bosom of his new German family; and the running of the Villa Fortunata was back on a sound footing. Titus was the father of a strong and healthy son. Lastly, thanks to Boniface, Placidia’s vendetta was over; and Titus had exchanged service with a self-seeking schemer, for honourable employment in the cause of Rome. Despite his elation however, he couldn’t stifle his sadness that Aetius, his lost leader, had proved to be an idol with feet of clay. But Titus had come to terms with changing that allegiance, and felt that his hard decision had been justified.

Boniface had entrusted him with the delivery of two messages, one each to the garrison commanders at Placentia and Luca.¹ The first was to be given strict instructions (backed up by written orders from the Count) to allow Aetius free passage through Placentia on the way to his meeting with Boniface at the fifth milestone from Ariminum — whenever that should happen. The commander at Luca was to be handed a sealed letter from Boniface. The Count had emphasized to Titus that the contents were of vital importance, and must on no account be allowed to fall into the hands of a third party.

After completing the first part of his mission, Titus had stopped overnight at an inn in Placentia. The following morning he retraced his steps along the Aemilian Way for a dozen miles then, as instructed, turned to the right, off that broad and arrow-straight highway on to a side road leading to the village of Medesanum. He paused to consult a sketch-map which Boniface had had prepared for him. His route, north-south to Luca, struck obliquely across four rivers — the Tarus, the Parma, the Entia, the Secies² — and the spurs dividing them, each spur higher than the last until the main crest of the Apennini was reached. On the far side of the watershed, in Etruria,³ the route then followed the valley (known as the Garfagnana) of the River Sercium, all the way to Luca.

Barring the Garfagnana, the route was, Boniface had warned him, a hard and testing one: rugged and remote, traversed only by mule tracks. But it was the most direct and quickest way to reach Luca from Placentia, and it was a matter of great urgency that the commander at Luca receive his missive as soon as possible. At the conclusion of his briefing, the Count had said in tones of resigned sadness, ‘Your role, Titus, is preferable to mine. To paraphrase Tacitus: yours to cross steep mountains, but at least they do not change; mine to deal with men, who are inconstant.’ Titus had no doubt that he was referring to the perfidy of Aetius, the ‘friend’ who had deceived and then betrayed him.

Boniface was right about the route being hard. It entailed a stiff climb of several miles and fifteen hundred feet, up hillsides clothed with trees and scrub, with cultivation giving place to pasture. At the ninth hour Titus reached Medesanum, a scatter of small stone houses grouped around a church and a taberna. During the ascent Titus had become aware of being followed, so, stopping at the inn just long enough to rest his horse and swallow some bean soup, he pushed on towards his next objective, the little town of Fornovium on the far side of the Tarus. He would be easier in his mind once the width of a river was between himself and his pursuers.

Instead of a conventional river flowing between banks, Titus encountered a wide plain of dazzling rocks and sand, with beyond it the huddle of buildings that was Fornovium. Was this the Tarus? he wondered in amazement. There was no bridge, but the few narrow rivulets winding through the bed looked easily fordable. As he was about to urge his horse forward, he was stopped by a shout from a shepherd tending his flock nearby. The shepherd, a tall mountaineer with kindly eyes, explained that those innocuous-looking rami were treacherous: many people, unaware of the danger, had been drowned while attempting to cross. Titus gratefully accepted the man’s offer to show the way. Testing the ground with his crook before each step, the shepherd preceded Titus across the first stream, which rose neck-high in the deepest part. Leading his horse, Titus followed, and was surprised by the unexpected power of the icy current; he kept his footing with difficulty on the shifting boulders of the bed. The second stream proved impassable where first encountered — it was dangerously deep and fast-flowing — so Titus and his guide followed it upstream for nearly a mile to where an ‘island’ stood above the river-bed.

Here, the shepherd located a ford by an ingenious trick which greatly impressed the young courier. Lobbing stones in succession into mid-stream, the shepherd noted the difference between splashes until he located shallow water. Where it was deep, the stone sank with a hollow ‘plump’, the displaced water rising in a vertical spout; where shallow, both sound and splash were more diffused. Thus, slowly and with circumspection, the remaining five channels were negotiated, and at last the two men stood dripping on the farthest bank.

After thanking the shepherd, and rewarding him with a handful of nummi, Titus appealed to him not to show the way to a group of five riders, should he happen to encounter them. He, Titus, had dared to court the daughter of a rival family, he explained, for which temerity her relatives had vowed to pursue and kill him. The shepherd’s eyes sparkled with delight at being made privy to an affair of honour and the heart. ‘Ad Kalendas Graecas!⁴ Never!’ he exclaimed, dramatically placing a hand over his heart.

After the shepherd had departed, Titus concealed himself and his mount in a copse, and watched the river, his clothes slowly drying in the warm evening sunshine. Presently, the mysterious quintet appeared on the far side. Dusk was not far off, and he doubted they would try to cross the Tarus before morning: this was confirmed when they began gathering driftwood for a camp fire. Reassured that he would not be followed until after dawn, Titus pushed on to Fornovium.

After a night at an inn which was notable less for its hospitality than for its insect life, Titus was in the saddle before sun-up. Looking back as he left the town, he spotted on the far side of the Tarus eruptions of glowing dots where his pursuers were kicking out the embers of their fire. How would they fare crossing the river? Drown with any luck, he chuckled.

He rode on, past noble stands of chestnuts, their leaves a glory of gold and russet, meeting no one except an occasional shepherd or group of carbonarii, charcoal-burners. The foothills were now behind him, and he was into the Apennini proper. All morning he made good progress, switchbacking up and down the ridges separating the three remaining rivers this side of the watershed, but overall climbing steadily. The second river, the Parma, he forded as he had the Tarus; the others he was able to cross by rickety wooden causeways. All the time he checked his route by sightings of a strange rock looming on the southern skyline, a vast square column thrusting up from a sloping base.⁵

Early in the afternoon — about the eighth hour he reckoned — Titus came to the mouth of a deep and silent valley, hung with enormous woods and sloping upwards to where it was closed by a high grassy bank between two peaks. This bank, he felt, must be the central ridge of the Apennini, the watershed beyond which lay Etruria and journey’s end.

An hour later, Titus dismounted on the crest. Looking back, he surveyed with a quickening of the pulses, all the Aemilian plain, the old province of Cisalpine Gaul, unrolling northwards from the mountains’ base, and on the far horizon a line of sharp white clouds. But they were motionless, and he soon realized they must in fact be the Alpes. Far below and miles away, five crawling dots told him the pursuit had not been abandoned. He was not worried; all being well, by dusk he’d be in Luca, his mission safely accomplished.

Crossing the watershed marked by a line of cool forest, Titus heard on every side the noise of falling water, where the Sercium, springing from twenty sources on the southern slope, cascaded down between mosses and over slabs of smooth, dark rock. A glade opened, giving a view down the Garfagnana, whose western wall was a high jagged massif, with cliffs and ledges of a dazzling whiteness. Snow, thought Titus at first. But no: these must be the mountains of Carrara, quarried for their marble these five hundred years. He rode on, filled with pleasant thoughts of the bath, food, and rest that awaited him at Luca — no doubt to be followed in due course by congratulations from a grateful Boniface for a task well done.

Titus had begun to relax when his horse suddenly checked and stumbled. Titus dismounted and examined its legs, but could find no damage. Then his eye caught the glint of metal a few paces behind; it was a solea ferrea, a broad iron cavalry horseshoe. He quickly checked his horse’s hoofs, and found that the off front shoe had been cast, while a rear shoe was so loose that it would likely have come off within another mile. Cursing the imperial farrier who had done such an evil job, Titus realized that the game might well be up. To ride on would be to lame his horse to no avail, for his pursuers must now inevitably overtake him. Nor could he expect to fare any better on foot; in this steep-sided valley, here clothed with grass instead of sheltering woods, he was as effectively trapped as a penned steer. Relieving his mount of its harness and saddle, which he concealed in bushes (a futile gesture, he admitted), he left it to graze and, for want of a better alternative, trudged on downhill, his saddlebag containing the precious missive slung over a shoulder.

He had gone perhaps three miles when he came to a strange and solemn place, a veritable ‘town’ of cone-shaped tumuli. Etruscan tombs from a thousand years before? Feeling like a hunted animal run to earth, he entered a tunnel which opened out of one of the tombs. As a hiding-place it was hopeless. His pursuers had only to spot his horse to know that its rider could not be far away. Still, at least the narrow entrance meant they could not surround him but must come at him singly. At least he would go down fighting.

So this was how his bright dreams were to end, Titus thought bitterly: in failure, and death at the hands of unknown killers. All he could do was ensure that Boniface’s message to the commandant at Luca remained secret. He removed the parchment scroll from his saddlebag and tore it into tiny pieces which he proceeded, with some difficulty, to swallow. Gulping down the last fragment, he looked out of the tunnel’s entrance and saw, with a sinking of the heart, five distant riders moving down the valley. When the distance had closed to a hundred paces, he could see them clearly at last: five soldiers, their leader a giant of a man.

Five against one: despite his fighting skills, those odds were too great. But at least he could try to take one or two with him. Drawing his sword (as an agens in rebus, he had been issued with uniform and weapons), he backed a few feet into the tunnel. While he waited, inconsequent details of his surroundings registered in the dim light filtering from the entrance: strange wall-paintings showing dancing-girls, boar-hunts, wrestlers, musicians, dead souls led away by good or evil spirits.

Footsteps sounded outside. A series of questions as to the purpose of his journey was fired at Titus by his unseen hunters. Ignoring the temptation to bargain for his life, Titus maintained a stubborn silence. If he had to die, he would die with honour.

A pause, then laughter sounded outside the tomb: Titus determined grimly to inflict maximum damage before he went down. Then a familiar voice called out, ‘The game’s over, Titus. You can come out now.’

His brain in a whirl, Titus emerged to find a smiling Boniface standing there. ‘Well done, Titus Valerius,’ said the Count. ‘You gave us a good run for our money. We can all go home now.’

‘But. . my mission, sir? The messages?’

‘The first, to the commander at Placentia, was genuine. The second was a subterfuge.’

‘And the horseshoes were loosened, I suppose?’ Titus felt anger begin to stir inside him.

‘You suppose correctly; the deed was done when you stopped at Placentia.’ Boniface shrugged, and smiled apologetically. ‘The second message was intended to be confidential. So naturally you didn’t read it. Ah, did you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Well, if you had, you’d have found it was a poem by Catullus. What did you do with it, by the way?’

‘I ate it, sir.’

Boniface stared for a moment, then gave a shout of laughter, in which he was joined by his four men. The fury and resentment that had begun to build up in Titus abruptly dissolved, and he found himself joining in. It was less amusing when he and his saddlebag were searched, but he knew it was necessary.

In a gesture oddly reminiscent of Aetius’ after Titus had saved him from the catafractarius, Boniface grasped Titus by the arm. ‘Don’t be angry, my young friend,’ he said. ‘In my position, I have to be sure that those who serve me can be trusted. I’m glad to say you passed my little test like a true agens.

¹ Piacenza and Lucca.

² The Taro, Parma, Enza, and Secchia.

³ Tuscany.

⁴ ‘To the Greek Kalends’, a Roman proverb, roughly equivalent to our colloquialism ‘When Hell freezes over’ (see Notes p.430).

⁵ Known today as Castelnuovo, from the nearby town of that name.