The Judgement

2

The moment Aetius stepped from the ship, the worst was confirmed.

‘Sir, the Huns have crossed the Danube. They have fallen on Margus Fair.’

‘Very well.’ He nodded and turned away.

All was ready. It was time to begin.

It was time for the end to begin.

He turned back, looked the man in the eye. ‘And Viminacium? Can that be true?’

‘As far as we can tell, yes, sir. Flattened.’

‘So they have siegecraft?’

‘They or their auxiliaries, yes, sir. They took down the walls of the fortress in a day and a night, if reports are correct.’

Christ. ‘And the VIIth Legion?’

The optio shrugged. ‘Gone.’

He winced. ‘That was a good legion.’ He straightened up. ‘To the palace.’

Emperor Valentinian received him coldly. ‘My good and faithful servant. How precipitate your return.’

‘Those were my orders, Majesty.’

‘There was no need.’ Valentinian took his time, cradling his hands in his lap, gazing fondly down at them, stroking an open palm. He hummed a little tune. Aetius waited patiently.

Eventually Valentinian said, ‘It is true about this Hun nuisance. But lines of communication have been re-established, by sea and river, with Ratiaria, and by land with the Eastern Field Army at Marcianopolis. They are marching out to engage the savages even as we speak. They may have destroyed them already.’

‘Under General Aspar?’

Valentinian’s eyes flared wide with anger.

‘Forgive my interruption, Majesty. But their commander-’

‘The Field Army, all five or six legions, will engage or has engaged these savages, this ridiculous, puffed-up little man Attila, somewhere on the River Utus. Yes, under Aspar. News is expected at any time. And so you see’ – he smiled – ‘there is really nothing useful for you to do here, Master-General. As ever. You may as well go back to Sicily and play with your boats.’

‘Your Majesty.’ He bowed. ‘If I may, I should like to wait and hear the happy news from the East along with you.’

Valentinian waved his hand. ‘As you please.’

Only a day later, the emperor was white with fury. ‘Our Brother in Constantinople accuses us of cowardice! Curses rain on him. Foulest curses!’

He mumbled of Lilith and Seth, ancient Hebrew demons.

Aetius tried to steady him.

He pulled away. ‘He says we refused him help. How dare he! If he had asked we might have gone to his aid. We are no cowards! Those horsemen do not frighten us!’ He seized a cushion and looked as if he were about to tear it apart in his thin white hands.

Aetius looked away. He could not bear to watch these puerile rages. But he knew who was at the root of this discord. Neither Theodosius nor Valentinian, being played like puppets against each other, but another ruler altogether. A ruler of a very different stamp.

Everything moved at a terrible pace in those days, in that summer. Each new piece of intelligence came like fama pinnata, winged rumour, but at the pace of catastrophe.

Another letter arrived in Constantinople from Aetius a few days later (I know because I, Priscus, took the letter and read it myself.) It contained a genuine offer of help from the Western Legions. They would not be starting on the Africa Campaign now. Six of the finest, twenty thousand men, both infantry and cavalry, could sail from Sicily direct for Constantinople. Seven days’ sailing at most. Or they could come ashore at Thessalonika, cut across the flat plains of Thrace and attack the Huns’ flank as they marched south. But my lord the emperor Theodosius would not even look at the letter. He ordered it to be burned, saying how he now knew who his true and loyal friends were.

There was a chamberlain in the employ of the Byzantine court in those days, a man called Pytheas. A man I had never felt at ease with. Theodosius admired and trusted him, but, alas, he was a poor judge of character, for all his lucubrations over the Characters of Theophrastus. Books, not life, had taught our emperor; and I am sorry to say, bibliophile and library dweller as I am myself, that thus far they had proved poor teachers. This Pytheas had grown very rich from corruption and manipulation of the funds of the Public Largesse. He held numerous offices, this state-salaried parasite: sinecures such as Overseer of Marble Procurement, Secretary of the Imperial Customs-Houses, Chief Clerk of the Records of Imperial Liberality, Accounts Archivist for the Province of Syria, Chancellor of the Domestic Wardrobe, and so forth. And in every department he was corrupt. But he had grown richest from another source altogether, from beyond the bounds of the empire, though none of us knew it then. He worked for Attila.

I remember a private audience he had with the emperor. I silently took notes, in my role as Chief Clerk-in-Consistory.

Pytheas hesitated and then said, ‘My Lord, it is my heavy duty to bring you further distressing, but surely untrue, reports from the Danube frontier.’

‘Go on,’ said the emperor, poring over a manuscript on his wooden lectern.

Pytheas sighed theatrically. ‘At Viminacium… My Lord, I fain would not believe it is true’

‘ Go on,’ said Theodosius.

Pytheas glanced aside at me but he did not register me.

‘At Viminacium,’ he said, speaking with exaggerated care, ‘it appears that alongside the Huns were fighting – were seen fighting – men with covered shields. But shields were evidently lost in the battle. And when the Hunnish hordes passed on southwards, some of our own men managed to retrieve them.’

I found this doubtful in the extreme. ‘There were none of our own men left alive,’ I objected.

Pytheas’ look could have turned a Gorgon to stone. ‘Remember you are but a scribe, Priscus of far-famed Panium,’ he said sarcastically, ‘however elevated a scribe. So scribble, and be silent.’

The emperor hardly registered this argument.

Pytheas continued, with a sigh and a leaden heart on his sleeve. ‘The recovered shields were painted red, with a gold rim, and a large black eagle in the centre.’

Now at last Theodosius raised his small, short-sighted eyes from his manuscript and looked around, puzzled.

Pytheas nodded. ‘Yes, my Lord. The insignia of the Legio Herculiani.’

The Herculian Legion. One of the very finest. A Western Legion, under the direct command of Master-General Aetius.

Theodosius still looked baffled. And then Pytheas, the consummate actor, produced his theatrical masterstroke. He called out, and a slave entered the room, walking backwards so that he might not gaze upon the countenance of the Divine Majesty. He laid two objects at the chamberlain’s feet, and then hurried away. Pytheas picked them up. One was a big round wooden shield with a bronze boss and gold-painted rim, decorated just as he had said with the black eagle insignia of the Herculians. The other was a long spear, with dyed feathers twined in behind the spearhead, and the shaft crudely decorated with shamanic runes of power. A Hun spear. He raised them up and held them side by side. Fighting together, thus.

The visual impact was tremendous.

The emperor staggered forward, his wooden lectern crashing to the floor. ‘No!’

‘My Lord,’ said Pytheas, ‘it is my sincerest hope that this is a terrible misunderstanding.’

But the image of Western Legionary and Hun spear-man fighting side by side was indelibly imprinted upon the vivid, vulnerable imagination of the emperor.

‘Indeed,’ said Pytheas, ‘it may even be that this is some malign plan of Attila’s, to drive a wedge between east and west.’

Oh cunning chamberlain! Not the first to realise that, by stating the truth so candidly, you can drive it away.

‘No!’ cried the emperor. ‘I have heard enough. First I was refused aid, then General Aetius wished to bring his army direct to our capital, without alarming us. Now I see why! My cousin Valentinian has said before that he always suspected Aetius’ ultimate aim was to make himself emperor, with help from the Hunnish hordes if necessary. Now I see that it is true. This will not be the first time the West has turned against the East. Remember Mursa, one hundred years ago. That was a calamitous battle.’

It pained me, Priscus, to hear that name. The list of military catastrophes in the last century was long: against the Goths at Adrianople; against the Persians, and Shapur, King of Kings, at the Night Battle of Singara. Yet Mursa was the greatest wound of all, and self-inflicted, the ruinous feat of Constantine the Great’s squabbling sons, and the usurper Magnentius; an empire rending itself to pieces, at the cost of sixty thousand casualties in a single day.

But now my beloved pupil Aetius was master-general in the West. Rome would live to fight again, and better. I prayed for it. Yet day by day, through the brilliant machinations and insinuations of Attila and his network of spies and accomplices, information continued to trickle through to baffle the scholarly, naive, gullible, well-meaning Emperor Theodosius, too unskilled by far in the ways of men. So far from doing evil himself that he suspected none, or he suspected the wrong men – unerringly erring in every judgement he made.

After Pytheas’ departure, I made so bold as offer advice to my lord the emperor. He had appointed no good advisers: the greatest failing of all for a ruler of men.

The first casualty in war is truth, I told him sententiously. He did not appear to listen, but he did not silence me, either.

‘It is not in Aetius’ nature to deceive,’ I said. ‘Remember, my lord, I was his tutor for a brief while.’

Theodosius looked up, brow furrowed. ‘That’s right,’ he said softly. ‘So you were. I had forgotten.’

‘He was not the best of students,’ I murmured, with a fond smile of remembrance. Then, with more attack, ‘But Attila is the Great Deceiver. He will try every trick.’

He seemed in an agony of indecision. I saw the man beneath the stiff golden robes, his very spirit writhing. How he hated to be emperor. It was nothing but a burden to him. Not for the first time, I was grateful I was not a ruler or a politician, whose lives are a long, thankless, much-scorned series of choices between lesser and greater evils. Politicians, unlike poets, do not live in the world of the Good and the Beautiful.

Then he waved me wearily away.

I slept poorly that night. Sometime towards dawn I stood out on my little balcony overlooking the still waters of the Golden Horn. Moonlight coming towards me in a silvered pathway; wisteria and judas trees, night-scented jasmine, nightingales in the pines; two night fishermen out on the water, drawing fish into their nets with lanterns on hooped sticks. By the moonlight I could see the ancient symbol of the stylised eye painted on the prow, white and blue, to ward off evil. Behind me, the city’s golden domes and cupolas would be shining beneath the round-faced moon, unimaginably beautiful. The great statue of Constantine aloft on its pillar, only a little lower than God. Would all this fall? All the strange wonders of this magical city, caught between east and west (wonders which I, Priscus of Panium, had written up with modest scholarship, in a little guide-book regarded with no small admiration among certain literary circles in the city)? The strange triple-headed brass serpent on its pillar in the forum, taken by Constantine the Great himself from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, made to celebrate Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea, 479 years before the birth of Christ. Or the towering column of Pharaoh Thutmose III, unimaginably ancient, the polished hieroglyphs in the polished granite, as clear as when they were cut there by slaves in ancient Egypt millennia ago, in a kingdom long since vanished. So even the greatest empires fall into night. The iron law of change applies to everything. All is metamorphosis. Yes, one day, sooner or later, even all this would change and fall.

The Ancients said hope was merely a sign of foolishness. We Christians now do not have their pessimistic strength.

There is chaos and ruin. And so there is grace and light.

In the marsh-girdled palace of Ravenna, there was an atrocious mix of pride and panic in those days. There was mistrust, plots and delusions of plots, wars and rumours of wars. Aetius, despite his best efforts, could not persuade the emperor to release any Legions to go east. Were the finest then simply to sit in Sicily, while the Huns ravaged all Moesia and Thrace? Yes, apparently.

Meanwhile, Valentinian harped on endlessly about what he called ‘my punitive expedition’, which had apparently stung the Huns into invasion.

‘We would not have heard from them again, had I led it in person,’ he explained to the assembled courtiers listening sycophantically, and to Aetius. Unusually for Valentinian, he was out of doors, taking the air in the palace gardens. The group passed beneath fine mulberry trees, between rows of box hedges, among statues of interestingly deformed children and little cupids strangling geese. ‘I would have shown those Hunnish hairy men.’

He called on one of his favourite court scholars, an orator named Quintilianus, to tell again what was known of the Huns.

Quintilianus bowed low as they walked. ‘Your Eternal Majesty. Like unreasoning beasts, these Huns are entirely at the mercy of the maddest impulses. They have no understanding of right and wrong, their speech is shifty and obscure, they know nothing of true religion or piety. Their greed for gold is limitless, they are fickle, prone to fury, serpentine of tongue. Their physical appearance is the outward sign of their inner animality. They have flat faces, yellowed skin like old parchment, high cheekbones which leave no room but slits for eyes. They stink of meat, milk and mutton fat, which they lard upon their coarse bodies as protection against the savage Scythian winters that they love so well. They ride brutish mounts, often quite naked, or dressed in the most tattered, ill-cured animal skins, which add to their foul odour.’

Valentinian nodded with pleasure at this eloquent description.

‘And now this dreadful people is against us,’ murmured another courtier. ‘People say that we live in desperate times, and surely the End is coming.’

‘How dare they say that!’ cried the emperor, turning and flailing his purple skirts, revealing his pearl-studded kid-skin boots. ‘Those who breathe such treason, I will have them racked and scourged, I will have them crucified in the Colosseum. Let them be an example, let their screams be heard, let the sands run red with their watery blood!’ He was dribbling slightly. ‘Let them-’

The wooden door to the enclosed garden opened and a tired old woman, tall once but now bowed and bent, shuffled in. Valentinian’s gaze rested on her a moment, and then he turned away and continued.

‘I was surprised to hear that my punitive expedition has not worked, but it was done inadequately, you see. They had no military understanding; they held back too much, my men.’

That it was an eastern legion meant nothing to him. The world was his and everything therein. No one really existed for Valentinian but himself. The rest were but figures in his own fevered dreams.

Returning to the palace alone, Aetius found the old woman in the porphyry-pillared entrance hall.

‘Your Majesty,’ he said, bowing.

‘Aetius,’ said Galla Placidia, her tired green eyes betraying a momentary pleasure. ‘I am glad you have returned.’

Aetius regarded her steadily, his expression too perhaps showing the faintest pleasure on seeing her. ‘One can only play King Theodoric at chess so many times.’

‘And lose?’

‘Deliberately, I assure you.’

There were those in the court of Ravenna, and in senior positions in the Western Army, who were said to have talked to Aetius in utmost secrecy, to have joined together in urging him to seize the imperial throne for himself, to set the diadem on his head and the purple about his shoulders. They said that Valentinian was a babbling fool leading the empire to destruction. But Aetius said that it was as the Church taught: the emperor was God’s annointed, for some purpose hidden from the eyes of men.

‘Then we should have killed him before he became emperor,’ said Germanus, a stocky red-head with a round, rubicund face, one of Aetius’ best, most forthright generals.

‘You cannot kill a boy.’

‘Would you not have killed Hannibal in boyhood, had you been able? Think how many lives you would have saved at Cannae.’

Aetius shook his head.

‘Or Judas Iscariot himself?’

Aetius murmured, ‘“In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.”’

Germanus regarded him blankly. He wasn’t a great one for poetry.

Aetius sighed. ‘Had Christ not been betrayed to crucifixion, how would our sins have been forgiven? Judas, too, was an instrument of God.’

‘But the emperor’s a gibbering fool!’ sputtered Germanus.

Aetius counselled him to lower his voice. ‘I know that,’ he added. ‘Many emperors are. But it is not for us to rescind the appointments of heaven. They are St Paul’s “powers that be”.’

‘Even if those powers are betraying the empire to disaster?’

Aetius said nothing.

‘You owe it to the senate and the people,’ persisted Germanus, ‘the good old “Senatus populusque romanus”, to defend the weak and undefended, the widowed and orphaned, the Christian peoples of Europe.’

‘And so I shall defend that Christian peoples of Europe!’ retorted Aetius, beginning to anger. He quelled his undignified passion, and was silent for a time. Eventually he added, ‘But not that way.’

He said they must live the life that God had allotted to them. He was a general of men, a commander of soldiers, not an assassin. He would do his duty. So must they all.

Valentinian continued to insist that, though the western legions languished, the Eastern Field Army would soon deal with Attila.

‘Besides,’ he said with a peculiar smile, ‘there are other operations afoot.’

For the Vice-Regent of God in the West, Defender of the Church, Shield of the Faithful, had given himelf up to degrading superstitions and the practices of witchcraft, which appeal only to those who are simultaneously corrupt and stupid.

Galla Placidia herself came to Aetius one evening, shaking and white. He insisted she sit. She refused wine.

‘My son,’ she gasped, and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders trembled, and Aetius realised that he was seeing her cry for the first time in his life. Men dying he could cope with. But women crying… At last he summoned the resolve to reach out and lay his broad right hand on her shoulder. Immediately she came round, like someone waking abruptly from a dream. She wiped her eyes with a small white cloth, then stood and walked slowly round the room.

‘My son… is mad,’ she said.

Aetius waited.

As conscious as Aetius that time was running out, and perturbed by what secrets lay in Valentinian’s private chambers beneath the palace, Galla’s patience – and perhaps, she admitted now, her wilful self-delusion – had at last evaporated. She had demanded entrance. A eunuch had been so insolently adamant that she was not permitted entry that she had grown enraged, given him a mighty cuff for a woman of her years, and entered the chambers in a fine rage.

She was met by a horrible sight, but one she had known in her heart she would find – she bit her lip almost to bleeding. There stood her son, clutching a ridiculous willow wand, naked but for a purple silk cape around his upper body, and wearing a primitive animal mask. The small chamber was in gloom except for flickering candles in grubby candelabra. In the impenetrable dark, a slave sat in a corner beating a drum. Foul concoctions steamed in pots, necromantic brews of curdled milk and bitter herbs. There were skulls around the floor, and in the centre, around the emperor, a chalk circle inscribed with the names of JHWH and Hermes Trismegistus.

The great magician turned.

‘Have you brought her?’ he mumbled behind the mask. His eyes flared wide in the chiselled holes, and he snatched the mask off. ‘Mother!’

He wore kohl round his eyes like a harlot. She went closer. His naked belly was a sagging little white pouch like an old man’s, though he was only in his early twenties, and, shame upon shame, his lower parts were smeared with fat, probably mixed with opium and henbane, wolfsbane and hemp. She prayed it was only animal fat. His pupils were black and dilated.

She could not speak. Almost unconsciously she held her arms out to him, her eyes blurring. Her son…

He regained composure of a sort; even smiled. ‘Who is this coming to the sacrifice?’ he slurred. ‘For Abraham, it was his son. For me, apparently it is my mother.’

She stood trembling, still speechless.

‘But you are no virgin, are you, mother?’

Finally she regained control of herself, and called to the eunuch at the door. ‘Bring more light!’ To the unseen slave in the darkness, she snapped, ‘And stop beating that wretched drum if you want to sleep tonight with the skin on your back.’

At that Valentinian went berserk.

‘I am God’s anointed, not her! Drum, slave! No light, no light, this act of darkness shall transpire in darkness! Snuff the candles, senators! “Render unto Caesar”, did not Christ say? Then render unto me, mother! Down on your knees!’ He tore off the flimsy silk cape. His nipples, too, were rimmed with kohl. ‘Render unto me, to me!’ His voice was a bestial shriek. He arched his skinny white chest towards her. Suddenly he was staring intently at her breasts, his lips curled back like a rabid dog’s, teeth bared, his gaze darting to her stricken face and back again, without embarrassment, his eyes glittering with maniac light. He leaned closer, almost touching her, teeth showing in a silent snarl, and Galla knew in that terrible moment what he wanted. His sick desire was to bite off the breasts that fed him, to lunge at the mother who still overshadowed him, and mutilate her into powerlessness.

She stepped back. She called him by the nickname he had as a little boy.

Slowly he came out of the nightmare, though his eyes still glittered and stared.

Then he twirled naked on the spot, apparently oblivious of his nakedness before her, and waved his willow thyrsus.

‘I do but jest, mother,’ he said gaily. He tossed his wand away and rubbed his hands together briskly, as if to free them from dirt. He looked down. ‘Call me Adam, for I am naked, yet not ashamed.’

Galla felt differently. ‘Bring his Majesty a robe,’ she snapped to the eunuch as she swept from the room.

The eunuch obeyed and went.

Galla lingered unseen in the shadows of the antechamber.

The eunuch returned with a clean linen robe. Following the emperor’s orders, he also brought a platter bearing a fieldmouse drowned in spring water, two moon beetles, fat from a virgin nanny goat, two ibis eggs, two drams of myrrh, four drams of Italian galingale and an onion. The slave recommenced drumming. Valentinian masturbated into a clay dish, pounded his semen together with these ingredients, poured in oil, and then sculpted a raw figurine with quivering fingers. Then he placed the figurine, a foul anthropic caricature stuck with eggshell and mouse-fur, before one of the grimy candelabra and raised his eyes ceilingwards.

‘I come announcing the blasphemy before heaven of Galla Placidia, that defiled and unholy woman. Take away her sleep, put a frenzied passion in her thoughts, and a burning heat in her soul. Make her mad before you destroy her, O gods.’

‘Having heard that,’ said Galla, ‘I departed.’

Aetius poured a small goblet of wine. Still she refused.

‘A general is not accustomed to having his orders refused,’ he murmured.

A risky strategy. She looked up. But then she smiled the faintest smile and took the goblet.

‘And no moon beetles drowned in it, either, I assure you.’

She drank and set the goblet down again. ‘My son is mad,’ she repeated. ‘He is emperor and he is mad. I do not understand the will of God.’

How tragic it had been, this flinty, green-eyed woman’s life. At least one, perhaps both, of her husbands murdered. Her daughter a slut, pregnant by her own chamberlain when still a girl, and even now still in confinement in the Palace of Hormisdas in the East. Galla never saw her. Instead she saw, daily, her son, who was an idiot, and a malevolent idiot at that.

Aetius said nothing. He would not lie, so there was nothing to say. The murder of any ruler was wrong. But there was this thin, world-weary care-worn woman sitting before him, whom in a way he did love. He had to remind himself that she was only a few years older than he was. They had grown old together, but she far faster than he. Life on the battlefield might be hard, but it was nothing like so hard as life at court. That friendless and airless world into which she had been born, a fetid world of backstabbings and complots, at whose heart she had remained out of sheer duty. No, he could not rebel against his emperor. And he could not kill this woman’s only son.

They drank more wine, toasting each other.

‘To wine!’

‘The peasant’s solution to all ills!’

They stepped outside.

Galla said, ‘I still do not understand why Theodosius is angry with us.’

‘It was Valentinian’s decision to attack the Huns, remember. The VIIth Legion carried it out. Attila attacked the VIIth Legion in return, and has destroyed it, if reports are correct. So of course Theodosius feels he is paying a terrible price for carrying out his cousin’s wishes. It was a brilliant stroke. The Huns have people working among us. As you have noted, Attila has attacked right at the border between the two empires. He is also playing havoc with communications – I do not yet understand how. I fear his grasp of intelligence is phenomenal.’

They stood in companionable silence and anxiety. The stars glimmered over the palace roofs. There was the sound of the trickling dolphin fountain in the courtyard, and the mesmeric hum of mosquitoes coming in from the marshes for the evening feed. Aetius slapped his forearm.

There were many things they could have said but sometimes it is better to say nothing. They stood together, looking out into the darkness with their thoughts: thoughts of decline and fall, of empires’ collapse; of how the manifest destiny of Rome seemed to have grown obscured almost to vanishing point in these latter days and years. Behind them they felt centuries of history, a weight both pleasant and unpleasant, comforting and burdensome; the gaze of many steadfast emperors upon them, Augustus, and Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius; Constantine the Great, of the House of the Flavians, direct forefather of Flavius Aetius; and Vespasian, too, that old soldier, who had his bust sculpted to show his laughter lines and his bald pate, and who liked to joke, ‘If you want to know whether the emperor is truly divine, ask the man who empties his chamber pot.’ He had even joked on his deathbed, saying sarcastically, ‘Good grief, I think I’m turning into a god!’ Not all Rome’s emperors had been mad with power.

Further off still, through distant mists of time, the stern, unflinching grey eyes of the old republic, which looked on the world and saw it clear, as it was, and were not dismayed. No Scipio or Cato had ever sought refuge in spells and charms. Now he and Galla and Theodosius were the last heirs of Rome. How would they be judged? What would their legacy be?

Down below, in his occult chamber, was the latest ruler of Rome, mad as the mist and snow. What swamps the Imperial Palace of Ravenna stood on, or was sinking into; swamps which no mere engineer could drain. What empire could find firm foundation in such base ooze, the sewage of dark centuries? In troubled times, end-times, people turn to strange cults and practices. Conscious of their ebbing power in the real world, they turn to fantasy power, and to beliefs and false enchantments that would shame a stronger man. Normality itself falls victim, and everywhere there is the triumph of pained uncertainty and panicked delusion.

And we sit and fester, brooded Aetius: Africa uncaptured, the empire slowly starving to death, and our offer of aid turned down by Theodosius, the scholar-emperor. Perhaps he was riding to war against the Huns even now, his head full of Homer’s hexameters. O Christ, our Saviour… Aetius thought of the Hun horses, their heads like bullock-heads, battering down men and walls in a ceaseless charge, men flying apart, lines of lightly armed Greek peltasts fleeing before their furious onslaught. In his dreams sometimes he saw those horses of the Asiatic steppes galloping down on him, screaming, their faceless riders lashing them forwards without mercy, their mouths curled back against the cruel bit, tongues lolling, the very teeth of those brute-headed horses smeared with blood… But one rider was not faceless. One rider’s face he knew of old.