The Judgement

6

A messenger turned off the road into the camp, stiff and cold from his night ride.

He had come at the gallop from Narbo. Princess Amalasuntha…

Aetius raced back to Tolosa, and straight to the royal quarters of the palace. Even as he approached, he could hear a terrible, bull-like roaring.

A ship had come in from Carthage. It bore a small party of Gothic maids, and the princess. She had been expelled by Genseric, who had become suspicious that she was a witch trying to put his son Euric under a spell, and then eventually convinced that she was planning to kill both her husband and her father-in-law. She, an innocent girl of no more than sixteen summers.

But there was worse…

The expelled and humiliated party was on its way. A column of wolf-lords rode out to escort them home.

Never would Aetius forget the glimpse he had of the girl as he looked down from an upper window of the palace. He saw her being helped down from the carriage, and remembered how he had seen her only two years before, a flash and a blur of long fair hair and laughing smile, as she threw her slim arms round her father’s great hoary head and covered him in kisses. And now…

There was wailing and grieving as in a Greek tragedy. The elderly Queen Amalfrida looked near to collapse as she leaned on one of her six sons, speechless with sorrow. Another son turned away, unable to look, at once broken-hearted for his sister and burning with a rage for vengeance. And old King Theodoric himself took his daughter in his arms and wept, and held her to his great chest, but very gently. For her head was wrapped in bandages stained with blood: her ears and nose had been cut off by Genseric in punishment for her imagined sorcery.

As in Greek tragedy, sorrow followed on the heels of sorrow, like hounds in a slavering pack. The sweet princess, hardly understanding what had befallen her or why, a pawn in a great game played between cruel god-kings or gods, developed a fever as she lay in her bed, and within hours they were saying that her blood had become poisoned by infection. She died the following day, her mother holding one hand and her father the other, begging her parents not to sorrow, and giving her blessings to them and to her brothers and to all her father’s people.

None was cruel enough to whisper that perhaps it was a blessing. The queen was speechless with grief, but the King’s voice was heard throughout the palace, his agony all the greater because he felt he himself was to blame. His revenge would be terrible.

He cried out in the old Gothic as he took his daughter’s body in his huge arms and clutched her to his chest, and all those who heard closed their eyes and turned away.

‘ Me jarta, O me jarta, ’ he lamented. ‘My heart, oh, my heart,’ his own great heart almost cracking in remorse. ‘May God forgive me. She was my all, my heart, my soul, she was my dawn, my evening sun, my lamp, my stay, my staff, her mother’s daughter, my only comfort. How I loved her. My tongue is too weak to tell.’

At last he laid her down, and the girl’s mother and father clung to each other by her silent bedside and wept until they could weep no more.

Soon the whole of Tolosa was in uproar, with everywhere the sound of horses’ hooves and tramping men. Aetius asked for one last audience with the King. He was denied: ‘The King is busy with preparations for war.’

Aetius pushed the guard aside, burly as he was, and strode into Theodoric’s council of war. With him round the table stood his two eldest sons, Theodoric and Torismond, and his two wolf-lord commanders, Jormunreik and Valamir. The rest looked up at Aetius’ entrance, silent and grim-faced, but Theodoric did not. The fact that Aetius’ darkest warnings about Genseric had turned out to be true did not endear him to the King, far from it. They only compounded the warring guilt and anger in Theodoric’s breast.

He growled, ‘My heart is set, Roman. We sail for Carthage tomorrow.’

‘You cannot.’

Theodoric exploded into fury, a fury all the more terrible because it was half grief. The table shuddered under his great thumping fist, and then he strode round to Aetius and roared in his face, ‘Do not come between me and my wrath, Roman! Do not involve me and my wolf-lords in your puny squabbles with your enemies! We have a nobler cause by far. Which is to lay Vandal Africa waste from Tingis to Leptis Magna, and leave nothing behind but a desert of the dead. None shall reckon our vengeance for what that accursed Genseric did to our daughter, but it shall be a vengeance visited on him and his seed and his people a thousandfold – ten thousandfold. The very name of Vandal shall be wiped from the earth, and I will slay all his sons and daughters before him, and I will gut that accursed cur of a king with my own sword and hang his still-breathing body from the towers of his burning capital, to watch over his kingdom’s final cataclysm.’

Aetius did not flinch and his voice was low. ‘My heart breaks for you and your sweet daughter, friend Theodoric. Do not doubt it. Nor would I come between you and your wrath or your righteous vengeance.’

‘That is good, or I would strike you out of my way with my own fist.’

‘But if you ride against the Vandals, and we ride against the Huns, our forces are divided. Remember the wolf with one jaw.’

Theodoric glowered at him, but the passionate old man was thoughtful for a moment, his chest still heaving.

‘They were Vandal ships at Constantinople,’ continued Aetius, still quietly. ‘The Huns and the Vandals are in alliance. They mean to divide the world between them, and this is only the start. I give you my word, when we ride north against the Huns we will find Vandal horsemen fighting alongside them. And I also give you my word that, when we have defeated the Huns and wiped out the name and seed of Attila, Rome will be your ally until death, and we will ride against Vandal Africa together.’ He dared to seize Theodoric’s thick, gold-banded wrist. ‘Brothers-in-arms, riding together till ruin and world’s end.’

An ancient Teutonic phrasing, this last. It worked on Theodoric’s very soul. At last he turned back to his council.

‘It sickens my stomach and wrings my heart not to ride out in vengeance this very day. But there may be wisdom in what our Roman friend says. Vandals may already be fighting with the Huns. What say you?’

The four at the table looked at one another.

She was buried in a coffin of solid gold, in the most beautiful mausoleum in the Cathedral of St Mary the Virgin in Tolosa. Aetius thought he had never seen such deep and sincere mourning among the ordinary people for the death of a princess. It was as if the sweet girl had been the daughter of all the Visigoths, and they remembered the sunlight she spread wherever she went.

Her mausoleum was inscribed with a verse in both Gothic and Latin. It read,

Hic Formosa iacet.

Veneris sortita figuram

Egregiumque decus

Invidiam meruit.

Here lies Loveliness.

Hers was the beauty of Venus,

And hers the envy of heaven

For a gift so rare.