The Judgement

7

Catastrophe followed hard on the heels of the small success of unmasking the spies. A brief and bitter communication came to the Imperial Court from Adrianople.

The Eastern Field Army under the command of General Aspar, Magister Militum per Thraciam, leaving from Army headquarters at Marcianopolis, engaged the Huns on flat country near the River Utus. Overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers, however, and the speed and ferocity of the enemy, as well as their unexpected mastery of both artillery and the heavy cavalry charge, the six legions and all their auxiliaries were destroyed. General Aspar himself continued to fight with utmost gallantry on foot after his horse was killed under him, but eventually he, too, was slain.

It is believed that the Hunnish army is continuing to advance south.

In Constantinople, there was outright terror at the news. Now there was nothing but a few centuries of the Palatine Guard, and scattered auxiliaries down at Trajanople and Heraclea, to stand between them and this demonic army of a million heathen horsemen. Who ate children’s flesh, they said, and drank bat’s blood mixed with wine. Some citizens fled across the Bosphorus to Asia Minor. Others prayed for twenty hours a day to the Holy Mother. All were infected with panic, as contagious as the plague.

Theodosius begged Aetius for Western aid, and the general duly wrote again to Ravenna. But he warned that there would be little time and that, now Valentinian knew of the Huns’ power, he might prefer to keep his legions for his own protection: frontier legions as well as field army.

The reply soon came by sea. There was to be no aid. Theodosius’ curses rained down on his cousin’s head.

‘He will fall on us soon now,’ he said. ‘This Attila, God’s punishment upon us. Yet in what have we so sinned? I do not know.’ He gave a deep sigh: the sigh of the foredefeated. ‘First he will devastate all of Moesia and Illyria, Thessaly and Thrace, and then he will fall upon this city. We cannot stand against him with only a few hundred ill-trained auxiliaries and the Guard. We will have to negotiate.’

‘We still have the Walls,’ said Aetius.

‘Not all of us are behind the walls.’

‘True,’ said Aetius. ‘In the provinces, the people must shift for themselves. But the city will be saved. And there will be recompense, I promise you. When Attila turns westwards against Rome, he will not meet with such easy victory.’

‘You do not understand,’ said the emperor haltingly. ‘Not all the

… imperial family is behind the walls.’

Aetius frowned. ‘The Princess Honoria?’

Theodosius smiled mirthlessly. ‘No, she is still in my sister Pulcheria’s charge. I mean… the Empress Eudoxia.’

The empress. Athenais. He had not allowed himself to think of that name for years.

‘She is in Jerusalem?’

‘Would that she were. No, she is visiting the convent at Azimuntium.’

‘I do not know it.’

‘A small hill-town near the Pontine coast, of ancient Thracian origin. Indeed, it is proposed by some of our most eminent mythographologists that the site may in fact be etymologically cognate with that of the Homeric-’

‘In the path of Attila?’

The emperor’s voice dulled again. ‘In the path, as you say, of Attila.’

‘Why was I not informed of this before?’

‘Your services were needed here – as indeed they still are. The Holy City must needs be defended even more than…’

‘Even more than the empress.’

‘Do not speak with such quick judgement,’ cautioned Theodosius, his voice low but his gaze again fixed on the general. ‘I know you, Gaius Flavius Aetius. You think yourself a man of very different mettle from mine. But an emperor’s choices are never easy, especially in time of war.’

Aetius bowed his head a little.

‘We have intelligence that the empress remains safe in the convent of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, Virgins and Martyrs, behind the considerable walls of that venerable hill-town. But the country round about is lawless, and the Huns draw closer daily. She will require an escort. I cannot spare the Imperial Guard, but I thought perhaps your

… rubicund friends from Gothia?’

Aetius smiled at the emperor’s feline words. To a man like Theodosius, the Goths would for ever be the barbarous immigrants who had caused the disaster of Adrianople, seventy years before.

‘Very well,’ said Aetius. ‘I will take my wolf-lords.’

‘You will be back in one week.’

Aetius bowed.

He was on the brink of departure when more news came. Two Hun ambassadors had arrived from the camp of Attila.

The emperor’s eyes lit up. ‘You see, we can negotiate! The empress will be safe. They wish to make peace.’

‘They do not wish to make peace. They come only to reconnoitre. This is a trap of Attila’s. Do not trust him. Blindfold the ambassadors, do not let them see the Walls, do not let them near anyone, do not let them speak except in a closed cell.’

But the emperor was no longer listening, his whole being flooded with relief. Theodosius hated war, with a fierceness more usually found in men who have experienced the crimson foulness of the battlefield themselves. For in truth no man dies well who dies in battle. And hating war, he had already sent out emissaries to find the approaching barbarians and their terrible king, and sue for peace. What could he offer them? Land? Their own kingdom south of the Danube? The whole province of Moesia, even? So far, none of the emissaries had returned, but now he revealed this new twist to the general. Voices were soon raised.

‘The emissaries have not returned, Eternal Majesty, because their crow-pecked corpses are even now hanging from trees all along the Egnatian Way!’

Aetius’ anger was barely controlled. In the West, as a letter from that good general Germanus had informed him, many of the lesser troops were already beginning to desert from the Roman side. News of the destruction of the Eastern Field Army on the Utus had already reached distant ears, and now the Western Field Army was also ebbing away. Terror, as Attila observed, is a powerful weapon; and very cheap. If only the Western legions could be embarked forthwith, Aetius urged, and sail for the East, the very mission itself might steady them. Galla Placidia had tried to persuade her son of this very policy, but Valentinian and his advisers were set against it. The Western Army must remain for the defence of the West. Germanus wished his commander well, and trusted that the Huns in the East could still be resisted. Aetius wrote back that for now he would have to trust in walls, not men.

Theodosius remained cold in the face of Aetius’ temper, and spoke of how all men in their hearts love reason.

Aetius paced, and clenched his fists unreasonably.

‘Is a man rational when in love?’ he cried. ‘A woman when she is defending her child against some wild beast, armed only with her own rage, fighting off a ravening lion with her bare hands, or a puny knife she has snatched from the table? And she will triumph, too, for she fights for everything that she loves, whereas the lion fights only for his dinner, and will soon slink cowardly away.’

‘You have seen this?’ asked Theodosius, wide-eyed.

Aetius suppressed a spasm of irritation. At times the learned emperor could be the stupidest of men. ‘I speak in a figure, Your Majesty. Reason does not reign supreme.’

He tried to explain – rationally – what he knew and understood of Attila, and his idea of himself and his demonic destiny.

The emperor listened, brow furrowed. ‘But this is madness!’ he said incredulously. ‘It is almost as if you are suggesting that Attila has no aim but to avenge the insults he suffered as a child – with vengeance in the form of purest destruction!’

‘To destroy his enemies is the sweetest thing to him, and his enemies are all those he feels have insulted him and his people. The more he destroys, the stronger he becomes. If you buy him off with gold, that makes him stronger too. It will not buy peace. Attila scorns peace, and loves power. Gold will only buy him more weapons, more armour, more warhorses, the service of freebooters and shiftless mercenaries.’

Still the emperor looked perplexed and angry.

Aetius approached him as closely as he dared, and fixed his eye urgently. ‘Majesty, you must imagine that Attila has sent you a message saying simply, “We do not want anything from you. We want to destroy you.”’

‘But it was on the orders of the Western Empire that the original attack on the Huns was mounted.’

‘And the Western Empire’s turn will come. But it was an Eastern legion that executed that order, a legion itself now destroyed. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. The Lord God punished them all.’

‘You are comparing Attila to God?’

‘Not my comparison, Attila’s own. Attila Tashur-Astur – “Flagellum Dei”.’

Theodosius pondered a moment, and then another party entered. It was Pulcheria, the emperor’s absurdly pious and misleadingly christened elder sister, a sour-faced woman in her sixth decade. With her came one of her closest counsellors, the lean, saturnine Chrysaphius, and a small, wiry man called Vigilas. She spoke quietly to the emperor, and a moment later Theodosius asked Aetius to leave them. Matters had already progressed from the military to the diplomatic, he said smoothly, despite the master-general’s ‘pessimism’ and ‘negativity’; further advice from him was now redundant.

The two Hun ambassadors were Geukchu, an intelligent-looking fellow in a fine silk robe, not in animal furs and skins as they had expected; and a quiet, very polite, bald-pated companion, Greek by birth, who introduced himself as Orestes. Within minutes, Theodosius felt he had mastered them. They brought the emperor some wonderful treasures, including a Cimmerian leopard in a cage; they paid him great respect, kissing the purple hem of his robe, and they said that yes, they would be happy to receive a Byzantine embassy in return. They were sure an accommodation could be reached in this unfortunate matter.

Behind them, Theodosius’ eyes met the gaze of Chrysaphius, and the counsellor, almost imperceptibly, nodded.

That night, Geukchu and Orestes dined and drank late into the night with Chrysaphius and Vigilas, and in the morning they took their leave of one another like brothers.

The emperor insisted that Aetius lead the Byzantine embassy to the Huns, despite the general’s lack of enthusiasm. He could combine the mission with escorting the empress home afterwards. Chrysaphius and Vigilas would go, too, the counsellor handling the actual negotiations; and he also sent his trusted Clerk-in-Consistory, modest Priscus, to record the historic meeting, along with a small retinue of guards. Aetius wished to take the two Visigothic princes and their fifty wolf-lords on the long and perilous journey, fully armed. The emperor grudgingly agreed. Those wolf-lords ate like oxen in winter. It would be good to be rid of them for a while.

A note came to Aetius from the Princess Honoria, smuggled out via a bribed slave, bribed in God knew what manner. The disgraced and dishonoured daughter of Galla Placidia and sister of Valentinian, long held in virtual captivity in the women’s quarters, she wrote mockingly that she too would like to ride out and meet this Attila. She thought he sounded interesting. Aetius grunted with grim amusement, sniffed the delicate little note and found it was indeed perfumed, then screwed it up and tossed it into the nearest brazier.

And so it was that I, Priscus, rode out that day with the man I still thought of as my beloved pupil, upon the most perilous journey of my life. Sailing back and forth from Italy to Constantinople was bad enough, but this was virtually into the wilds of Scythia! I took a flask of very strong red wine, heavily sweetened, to keep me warm; and an extra woollen blanket.

Thus prepared, I took my brief place upon the stage of History, tentative, blinking, and for what I hoped would be but a short scene. The public theatre is sufficiently unpleasant, what with the rotten fruit and the catcalls, but the stage of History is far worse, and for those who take their place upon it, the play often closes early.

I also took with me many scrolls to record this historic venture. In the night I dreamed that I was reading them over, and that I had called my account ‘A Journey Through the Thirteen Cities of the Ruined Lands.’

We rode out that morning through the Golden Gate, heading westwards along the shores of the Sea of Marmara on the ancient Via Egnatia, which people had travelled for six hundred years towards Thessalonika, and then over the Dinaric Alps to the Adriatic coast at Dyrrachium. But before Thessalonika we would turn north away from the coast and up into the hills. The wolf-lords and their two princes rode the finest white Cappadocian horses from the imperial stables. That favour, at least, the emperor had allowed his allies, though they still mourned their own drowned chargers, lying deep beneath the waves and far away.

Under a late summer sky heavy with stormclouds, Aetius was trying to keep other ghastly images at bay. The battle of the River Utus: is that how history would remember it – if at all? The Beginning of the End, far more surely than Adrianople, seventy years before. Six legions gone. Another at Viminacium, another at Ratiaria. Other cities destroyed since then, he was sure. He was glad he had not seen it, but he could imagine the scenes of carnage all too well.

They had mastered artillery and the heavy cavalry charge already. A bludgeoning bullock-headed charge: no lightly dancing, lethal arrow-storms now, but a heavy cavalry, gleaming and newly armoured from the armouries of Ratiaria, thumping into the aghast Byzantine line and shivering it to splinters. Shards of shieldwood and flying teeth, lost limbs, open mouths screaming silently, flailing, falling, trampled into the reddening mud. The Huns must have learned fast, clad in the laminar plate of their slaughtered foes, clutching long lances resting in slings and couched tightly under bulging biceps. Their squat muscled horses galloping in fast, a pummelling gallop with huge heads stretched forward and low, juddering into the Byzantine line like battering-rams, men flung aside, horses’ eyes rolling to the whites like those of horses gored by bulls, Roman horses rising up under the punch, staggering, toppling their own riders back into the melee, legs flailing, hooves turned upwards, kicking, horses screaming, their lips curled back over long yellow teeth and terrible horse cries, the foul stench of blood and ruptured bowels, the earth slippery with loosed innards and gore, the horror…

‘Deep in thought, Master-General?’

It was Prince Theodoric at his side, his voice light and young and jaunty. Aetius said nothing.

‘Worried about the Huns?’ asked Torismond, equally brightly. ‘Never fear, the mighty Visigothic nation will vanquish them by Christmas.’

‘Mind your tongue, little brother,’ cautioned the more sensible Theodoric, glancing round. The Hun ambassadors Geukchu and Orestes with their small party of Hun warriors rode at the back of the column. ‘This is just us. Our father’s people are not at war with the Huns.’

Aetius said softly, ‘They will be.’

‘Attila’s aim is Rome,’ said Theodoric, ‘and Constantinople.’

‘His aim is the world.’

‘Well, I pray that this embassy fails,’ said Torismond.

Aetius glanced sideways at his rubicund friend from Gothia. ‘It’ll fail.’

‘And then I pray that we meet some of ’em out there!’ he added eagerly. ‘A war party!’ He even leaned forward in his saddle as he spoke.

‘Pray that you don’t,’ said Aetius.

The threatened storm passed and we rode on west across the burning Thracian plains. Already many of the farms and homesteads were deserted. The people had fled, refugees stumbling back to the already overcrowded city of Constantinople, in dread of the approaching wrath. ‘The Huns are coming’ was the whisper throughout all that country. ‘Flee for your lives. The Huns are coming.’ The people, too, had no faith in embassies.

One solitary man stood at the side of the road watching us pass, clutching his hoe like a spear. Then he called out sardonically at our band of sixty or so, ‘You’re going to need a bigger army!’

We said nothing and rode on.

One night, as we camped, a snake appeared beside where Chrysaphius was standing. The counsellor froze in horror, a townsman to his marrow, but in a trice the little fellow Vigilas had drawn a gleaming dagger from his cloak and skewered the snake through the head.

Aetius regarded him curiously.

Later he addressed him casually in simple Gothic, and then Aramaic, but the fellow looked blank. He spoke only Latin and Greek, the former somewhat stiffly. A poor linguist for a diplomat.

‘He is my personal bodyguard,’ said Chrysaphius defensively. ‘Let us concentrate on the task in hand, Master-General.’

Aetius assured him that he was all concentration.

Sleeping out at night was bad, although, as it turned out, far from the worst horror that we would face. How I longed night after night for the hot baths and cool chambers of the Palace of the Emperors, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, silvered by the moon. Instead I went along, and saw things that I have never forgotten and would never have dreamed.

For the first time I saw with my own eyes the horrors of war. I, Priscus of Panium, obedient son, studious pupil, humble scribe in the Imperial Court of Theodosius II, and lately raised to the post of Chief Clerk-in-Consistory. How tearfully proud my parents would have been, had they lived to see! I was never meant for the battlefield, and was a little fearful even of that more playful battlefield which lies between the opposing armies called Men and Women. I was happier, generally speaking – but for an occasional scampering visit to the local bawdyhouse on the Street of the Golden Cock just behind the Hippodrome – to keep myself to myself, and to stay peacefully and diligently among the scrolls and texts of the ancients, reading and writing and dreaming of other ages than this.

But now I was riding out to see the world as it is. I do not think that I have known the same peace of mind since seeing the world as it is. My dreams have been more vivid, and more troubled. In the old days I barely remembered my dreams at all, but now they come to me in the silence of the night, messengers and harbingers unsought. I have less of my old equanimity now. But perhaps I will be a better chronicler for it. There is no reason to think that Tacitus and Thucydides were happy men.

Of the things I witnessed, I asked myself, did the armies of Rome not commit similar atrocities? Yes, they did. Perhaps not on such a scale; perhaps not with such malevolent randomness or glee, perhaps with rather a dutiful grimness. But if you are the victim, does it matter whether your killer is grinning or grimfaced when he cuts your throat? I tried to discern that the violence of Rome was a means to an end, committed to secure peace, stability and the rule of law, but the violence of the barbarians was committed for its own sake, for the pleasure of terror, and as such would never cease or find satiety.

But I do not know any more. I do not enjoy the ordered comfort of such thoughts. I know little with certainty, and I can only record what I saw. At my age I no longer have opinions, only memories.

I had hope

When violence was ceas’d, and War on Earth, All would have then gone well, peace would have crowned

With length of happy days the race of man;

But I was far deceived…

And one battle looks much like another when you survey the corpses after.

Our journey was long and arduous, and I often slept in the saddle. I remember a violent storm, and fires of blazing reeds, detonated by the lightning and burning up even in rain. I remember weariness and disorientation, tiredness beyond measure, and the sun appearing to rise in the West one morning. A bad omen.

When we came to the ruins of what had once been a city, the omen was fulfilled: the first of numberless settlements, villages, towns and cities we were to encounter, destroyed and utterly laid waste by the hand of Attila. The rich and golden cities of the Eastern Empire that would never again recover from his wrath. Through all the destruction, our two Hun ambassadors, our guides through this wasteland which their own people had created, seemed not a bit contrite. Guilt they doubtless regarded as a form of cowardice, like most barbarians. Only at a certain rest stop did the one called Orestes, Greek by birth – shame on him! – wave his hand over the void before us, and say softly, ‘You see now why it would be in your interests to negotiate.’ He almost smiled. Aetius’ face was dark with fury and he did not speak. Not for days.

The city was a blackened skeleton of its former self, a skeleton of wood and stone, flattened walls, arches and buttresses broken off and hanging in space. Like Philippopolis and Marcianopolis, it had been a bishopric, and the Huns had knifed and stripped its bishop and hung him from the walls.

‘They would have spat in the face of Christ if they could,’ I muttered.

‘As did the Romans once,’ said Prince Theodoric beside me.

I could think of nothing more to say.

A few had survived the firestorm and the arrow-storm, and them we pitied most, for they must have envied the dead. Sick people sheltered beneath the broken walls of the churches. Rachitic or tubercular children, riven with coughing, held out their clawed hands to us for food, but we could not help. A small girl cradling an infant in her lap sheltered beneath a smashed stone altar table, dark eyes peering up at me through filthy hair. In a demolished side-street, a mere pattern of rubble now, there was another huddle of children, lips withered with hunger, worm-filled bellies like sails before the wind. Near them, though they appeared mercifully oblivious, lay two adult corpses, scalped, their temples stained as if with some dark chrism. Here I tired and could no longer look at the sights of the city.

I rode over paving-stones grouted with dried blood, my horse trampling over a tattered prayer book, an illuminated euchologion, torn pages turning to no purpose. My ears rang with sad litanies of mortal flesh and blood. My old pupil said, remounting and pulling his horse away, ‘And the emperor believes he can negotiate with this.’

A little further on he stopped again. His head was bowed and his big, scarred hands gripped the front of his saddle. I saw to my astonishment that, although his shadowed face was set as hard and grim as ever, tears ran down his furrowed cheeks and fell in dark splotches on the saddle leather. Yet why should I be astonished? That was Aetius to the core: the deepest passions, under iron control.

He turned in the saddle and looked back. The column of wolf-lords in their scarlet cloaks was riding out after us, and the Byzantine ambassadors, and the two wordless, expressionless Huns. We were leaving the sick people and the starving children behind. Aetius said, his voice trembling, ‘All we can do now, to help them, is defeat Attila.’

I understood. He was almost asking me to forgive him for riding on and not helping, here and now. I nodded. It was agony, but there was nothing to be done here. We had no food, no medicines, no resources. The people were too sickly to move, let alone make it all the way back to the safety of Constantinople. In a few days they would simply… vanish. Their souls would be gathered in. I nodded again, I hoped consolingly. We must do the emperor’s bidding and speak with Attila. Then we must ride back to the city. There were a million or more people there whom we could save. And beyond that… the rest of the empire.

The two princes reined in, flanking Aetius on either side, behind them the powerfully built wolf-lords Valamir and Jormunreik. No word was spoken but, as is the way of men, the meaning was plain. They rode with Aetius: to whatever doom.

The two Huns were not addressed again.

We camped on a nearby hillside in the coarse tussock grass. We would rather have camped in the lush watermeadows down by the river, but the water was befouled, and there were too many bones of the slain littering the country round about.

Over the following days we passed more ghosts of towns and cities, each as bad as or worse than the last. On the road we glimpsed trickles of frightened fugitives who fled from us into the woods before we ever reached them; and one old woman, who could not flee. It is terrible to see a mother wailing over her child, but worse still to see an old woman wailing over her aged husband, lying broken in the mud, snapped like a dry twig. He with whom she thought to live out her last quiet days.

After the devastated cities of the plain we ascended into low foothills and then rough, barren mountains, over mighty gorges, treacherous wilds barely touched by the magisterial hand of Roman law, where men dressed in sheepskin jackets tied around the waist with twisted leather, and women were safe only beside their own hearthfire. We traversed many rivers by dugout canoe, and villagers fed us on mead rather than wine, and on millet not wheaten bread.

Later in our journey there were no villagers left. We could only forage like beasts.

We came to a fire-blackened valley, and among the still-smoking stubble there were other black shapes, not of sheaves but of men, women, children, infants burned in their mothers’ arms, mothers clinging to their children, mouths open, black and charcoal. From such unimaginable weathering, we can only hope their souls do well to fly. In the night there was a downpour from a summer cloudburst over the valley, and in the dawnlight the bodies were ash-grey under the rain, some of them no more than washed white bones showing like strange root-crops through the folded grey mud half covering them like sodden earthen shrouds.

Our Hun guides remained expressionless throughout. The one called Geukchu only commented that this would be the work of their brothers the Kutrigur Huns, in their battle-madness. But he did not say it in exculpation.

We moved on a way before we camped that night, but it was not far enough. The smoke from the campfires rose into the night air as we lay on our backs and stared into the heavens, dreaming bad dreams open-eyed. Through the drifting smoke, the starry sky, those white celestial worlds where all things are pure and good, far above this sinful sublunary world so darkened by violence and wrath, and by the furious selfhoods of ambitious men. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the little child shall lead them, saith the Lord. And they shall not kill nor hurt in all my Holy Mountain.

But how long, O Lord? How long?

It seemed to us that the viper and his venom would outlast all our days; that the bloodlust of Attila might rise even to the heavens and stain the white radiance of eternity, as the heavy smoke rose from that blackened charnel field, thick and greasy from where the bodies still smouldered, a choking veil between our wondering upturned faces and those white celestial worlds now lost to our sight.