The Judgement

4

Attila crossed the frozen Rhine six miles south of Argentoratum, the bitter winter suddenly his ally, the great river as solid as a marble pavement. It took his titanic army over a week to ride from east bank to west over the sparkling ice. He rode with his remaining Chosen Men and his best warriors, and then the rest of the Hun people behind. There rode with him the Kutrigur Huns under their leader, Sky-In-Tatters, and the people of the Oronchan Valley under Bayan-Kasgar; Hepthalite Huns, White Huns, Black Huns, Huns from the shores of the Aral Sea and the very northern limits of the Scythian steppes, clad in furs, with their wicked curved bows and their quivers bristling with arrows.

Now there also rode with him Gepids from the Transylvanian hills, under their King Ardaric; Sarmatian horse-warriors, and blue-eyed Alan lancers, an Iranian people, cunning and untrustworthy. The ancient Persians, it was said, had been taught three things as boys: to ride a horse, to shoot an arrow, and tell the truth. The Alans still excelled at the first two.

There were stocky, bearded Rugians from the far northern shores of the Baltic Sea, Scirians in leather body-armour, carrying long javelins and battle-axes, and flaxen-haired Langobards with great two-handed swords. As the horde passed through Germania they were joined, as Aetius had guessed, by Thuringians, Moravians, Herulians, Burgundians, and even the sons and grandsons of those nationless freebooters who had once ridden under the banner of Rhadaghastus, and been so savagely defeated by the Huns themselves upon the Tuscan plain.

The losses that Attila had sustained at Viminacium and the other cities of the East, at the battle of the River Utus, and finally beneath the walls of Constantinople – a few thousand in all – had been made up forty- or fifty-fold. The chilly dust-cloud and the steam from their horses could be seen a day’s march away. His army shook the earth as it rode west.

In the cities along the Rhine they slew every living thing they found. They would have driven off the sheep and cattle as their own, but already they were overburdened, and it was late winter still, and not enough forage. So they took only what they could carry from those wealthy cities, loading it onto their groaning wagons: armour damascened with gold and silver, silken stuffs, rugs and furs all heaped together with sacred objects looted from burned churches, reliquaries studded with precious stones and housing the bones of forgotten martyrs, chalices, pat-tens, jewel-encrusted gospels they could not even read.

Among those they captured at Colonia Agrippina was a nobly born Cornish maiden called Ursula, who was to be betrothed to a son of a patrician in the city, and her eleven maidens. After amusing themselves for a while trying to make the girls fall to their knees and worship their god Astur, the Huns ravished them and slew them and hung their bodies from the walls of the city, along with many others. The Cornish maid was soon declared a saint, and a legend rapidly grew up about St Ursula and her Eleven Thousand Virgins. In this way, history was already reverting to myth, and in place of sober chronicles a new age was being ushered in which would prefer extravagant tales and foolish superstitions to hard-headed facts. It was as if Attila was drawing in, in the very wake of his horse as he rode, a new dark age which would cover all of Europe.

The invaders laid waste the lovely valley of the Moselle, which Ausonius had once so rapturously praised, with its handsome villas amid lush meadows, its valley sides thickly planted with green vines, its bargemen transporting bales of cloth and casks of wine, shouting out to the laughing girls dressing the vines as they passed. At Augusta Treverorum the citizens showed spirit merely by shutting the gates, but Attila had his men drive forward at spearpoint women and children captured from the surrounding farms and villages, and threatened to slaughter them all unless the citizens of the town opened the gates and treated with him. The gates were duly opened to save innocent lives, at which the Huns slaughtered them all anyway, captives and citizens alike. At Mediomaurici there remained not a building standing except the solitary little chapel of St Stephen.

Often they came to towns and cities already deserted, and then the Kutrigur Huns galloped forward with particular alacrity, like hounds on the traces, putting their hunting and tracking skills to use. Almost always they found the absconded citizens, huddled in terror in a nearby stretch of forest, and put an end to them there.

After two or three weeks of wreaking havoc all down the Moselle, Attila and his horde left behind them a two-hundred-mile-long valley of the dead.

In all this destruction they met not a breath of opposition, yet all the time Attila himself grew more and more silent, solitary and withdrawn. He also became increasingly superstitious, never tiring of consulting Enkhtuya for signs and portents, and demanding to know when the Western Roman Army under Aetius would be marching north to meet them. Every night there were strange ceremonies in his tent, with fur-clad shamans beating deerskin drums to summon the ancestral dead, and antlered sorcerers dancing with rattles, flagellating themselves, wailing nasal incantations. The future was descried in the foam of boiling water, the entrails of chickens, sticks flung at random; by scapulimancy from signs read in the heat-cracked shoulderblades of cattle, and from the gyrations of smoke from burning incense. The portents were always good, but the Great Tanjou looked more and more like a man haunted by some vast and nameless sorrow.

Someone sang,

‘Turn back, turn back, my mad master,

For things are not as they seem,

My dreams are awakened to nightmare,

And all the world is a dream.

‘Such are the wages of vengeance,

Such is anger’s yield,

My master with all his sad captains

Lying silent in the field.

‘Kites and crows his companions,

His banner a banner of blood,

All treasures, all holy things

Lost in the flood.’

Attila did not silence the singer. He only bowed his head. So let it be.

From the Moselle, Attila’s army swung west through the dark and dense Carbonarian Forest: the country of the Batavians, of ghoul-haunted birchwoods and fens, stagnant ponds, thick mosses, dripping ferns, and foul-smelling bogs which could suck down a horse entire and close over its last pitiful struggles in silence as though it had never been.

One night as they lay encamped in that haunted country, Orestes heard his master crying out in terror. He ran into his tent with his sword drawn, and saw to his horror that Attila was rolling on his pallet, eyes wide and mouth foaming, yet apparently still asleep, unable to see. Orestes thought the King had gone mad. He dropped his sword and, seizing his shoulders, tried to shake him back to sense. The next thing he knew was an agonising pain in his side. Attila had stabbed him.

Orestes sat back, clutching his ribs. The wound was not deep but it bled badly. Gradually the king regained consciousness, staring wild-eyed. Orestes drew his hand up from his side, his fingertips wet and red. He held them before Attila. Attila stared at him, the wild light going from his eyes, reason returning, and with it that depth-less sorrow. How haunted he looked. He drew his arm across his spittle-flecked mouth and stared up at Orestes, panting.

‘I dreamed,’ he whispered, almost inaudibly, his voice a dry and exhausted croak between gasps, ‘I dreamed that you had turned against me, that you came into my tent to kill me, saying that I was mad, for I had vowed in my madness to slaughter my way into heaven.’

Orestes said nothing, pressing his side to stop the bleeding. Attila seemed oblivious of his hurt. At last, the Greek said that his Lord should sleep now, and went to find a comrade to bandage him up.

As he left the tent, he glanced back. Attila sat up on his furs, staring around, lips working, seeing nothing.

The next city the Huns came to was Rhemi, all but abandoned like the rest. Bishop Nicias had refused to desert his post, however, seeing the threat of death as any true Christian should: nothing but a portal to eternity. With him there remained a handful of Gallo-Roman knights, too young to have wives or children and so perfectly contented to die likewise, but adamant that they would not flee before the heathen invaders.

The weather turned bitter, and there were flurries of snow. The great host of Attila remained outside the city, but Attila himself, having heard of this holy man’s stubbornness, rode on through the narrow streets with a small company of his favoured warriors and Chosen Men. They were wary of ambush, but none came. They emerged into the main square of the city, with the fine facade of the cathedral on the eastern side, facing the Basilica, and the splendid baths and the portico of the marketplace along the other two sides. Attila sat his horse and stared around. A cold spring wind blew through the square, and the horses stamped their hooves. The ghostliness of the depopulated town was eerie and unreal. Even more so the little group across the square from them, on the steps of the cathedral, a Christian priest and eight youthful knights, gazing back at them, silent and unafraid.

‘What is this?’ roared Attila with sudden anger.

‘Welcome to our city,’ Bishop Nicias called back. ‘I believe you have travelled far.’

Such mocking insouciance enraged Attila all the more. The eunuch priests of that pale, etiolated, defeated Christian god were not supposed to face death as fearlessly as his finest warriors. They were supposed to kneel and plead and whimper, before having their heads snatched back and their pallid, lamb-like throats briskly cut. Attila drove his heels into the flanks of his skewbald pony and cantered across to them. His warriors instantly fanned out and nocked arrows to their bows, training them on the little group on the cathedral steps. It could still be a trap. A hundred soldiers might lie in wait inside that stern grey cathedral.

Attila reined in fiercely before the nine, his sword hanging loosely from his right hand.

‘Do you not fear me, eunuch priest? I will shortly slay you where you stand.’

Bishop Nicias looked mildly puzzled. ‘Well, first, I am no eunuch, having all my parts intact, as the Good Lord made me.’ At this wretched jest, his accompanying knights actually smiled. Attila shot them furious looks. ‘Second, why on earth should I fear you, just because you are about to part my spirit from my mortal flesh? It will only free my soul to fly heavenwards and be with my Christ. Death is the fate of all men. It is your fate, too, great Lord Attila.’

Attila gazed at him intently. ‘Do you truly not fear death, old man?’

‘Truly not. But I know you do. Which is why I have remained behind here, on the steps of my cathedral: to invite you to throw down your sword, and enter in, and be baptised in the name of Christ. I am here in the hope of saving your immortal soul.’

Attila’s fury erupted, and he raised his sword and brought it down. The holy man died where he stood, unflinching, slumping almost gently to the ground before Attila’s horse. A moment later, arrows slammed into the eight knights, killing some and mortally wounding the others. Even then, not one of them reached to draw his weapon and fight, as if the example of their bishop had been his last word to them. Attila himself loomed over them and finished them with thrusts of his sword.

His men gathered round him, but crying, ‘Leave me be!’ he drove his heels into his horse’s flanks and surged forward, up the steps, over the bodies of the slain and in through the great west doors of the cathedral. The moment he had passed through, they slammed shut.

His men waited, perturbed. Orestes had visions of Attila’s horse leaving bloody hoofprints all down the white marble paving of the aisle.

He appeared a short while later, still mounted, dragging the doors open again awkwardly from the saddle. He stared up at the sky. ‘Strange,’ he muttered.

Orestes said, ‘My lord?’

He still gazed upwards, as if searching heaven. ‘That there should be thunder out of so clear a sky.’

His men exchanged anxious glances.

‘Great Tanjou,’ said Chanat, ‘we heard no thunder.’

Attila’s reaction was shocking. He rounded on the venerable old warrior and gripped him about the throat with his mighty left hand. With his right he held his swordpoint to his throat. Chanat’s horse whinnied and backed away, but Attila held on with a vicelike grip, his own horse moving in tandem.

‘You lie!’ he cried, and the stately buildings around the square echoed back, lie, lie, lie. ‘You heard thunder! You lie, to make me think I am hearing phantoms, that I am haunted by the Christian god there in his charnel-house church! You would have me think myself mad, ride out into the wilderness, fall on my sword, that you may plant the first of your own seed on the throne of the Huns!’

But Chanat was no man to be bullied, even with a swordpoint at his throat. ‘No, my lord,’ he said quietly. ‘The first of my seed, the Lord Aladar, died serving you under the walls of Constantinople. And we do not lie. We heard no thunder.’

Attila’s eyes bulged, his mouth worked. Then he released Chanat, and sank back in his saddle. There was a long silence. In a nearby street, the cold wind slammed a wooden shutter back and forth in a desolate rhythm. Finally he pulled his horse around, his expression once more blank and hollow, tossed his sword away to clatter on the worn cobblestones, and rode back out of the square.

Geukchu glanced enquiringly at the old warrior, almost with sympathy.

‘I still endure,’ growled the old warrior. And he said it as if he were under a curse.

They rode after Attila, only Orestes dropping down from his horse – clutching his side still bandaged and sore from the stab-wound – to retrieve the sword. For was it not the sword of Savash?

The northern battle group under the command of Geukchu had swept through the valleys of the Mosa and the Scaldis, destroying the cities of Tornacum and Cameracum along with many others, and then descended on the city of Lutetia, on the island in the River Sequana in the country of the Parisii. Attila’s horde was approaching likewise from the east.

Here again, history has already become legend; and yet it is an established fact that the Huns did not, after all, ever capture or destroy Lutetia, but passed it by and rode on south. Some say that the men of the city were preparing to flee, horrified by the sight of not one but two approaching dust-clouds: on both northern and eastern horizon. But the women of the city, made of sterner stuff, insisted that a holy maid called Genevieve had promised them the city would never fall to Attila.

‘A holy maid!’ scoffed the men. What did holy maids know of war and warriors?

The women said she was praying to God even now, quite calm and resolute, in the circular Baptistery of St Jean-le-Rond. Some of the men went to look, peeking in on her, and saw that it was as the women said.

Across the river, the Hun horsemen were already massing. The modest walls of the city and the narrow stretch of river seemed little protection. Even less did the prayers of an unworldly young girl called Genevieve. But a large group of the women took refuge in the Baptistery with her, singing hymns and psalms, and then men joined them, crowding around outside. The spring air resounded with many voices lifted in praise of the Lord God of Hosts, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And when they looked again, they saw that the Hun horsemen had miraculously disappeared.

It is impossible to distinguish the truth from the legend of St Genevieve. But, for whatever reason, the Huns never laid a violent hand upon Lutetia. Maybe it was entirely pragmatic of Attila to wish to push on south as rapidly as possible. He wanted to destroy another enemy, before that enemy could join up with the Roman Army. He wanted to make it to Tolosa.