The Judgement

11

Another man moved across the battlefield, too, carrying a bare sword. He cared not. He muttered to himself, of Rome, and of China, moving among the dead. They were all gone into a world of light. Was it not so? Angelic work, then. He did not smile. Eternity’s work.

The moon was reflected in pools of horse-blood. As if it had fallen to earth.

There was a looter rifling through the wallets of the dead, stealing enamelled brooches, fibulae, rings from broken fingers. Maybe a villager or even one of his own, but he killed him anyway. Stepped up silently behind him and drove his sword down into the back of his neck. But immediately in the darkness, there was another. He felt weary. You cannot kill them all.

There was a warrior dying one-legged. There was a still-kicking horse. He was tired of killing. Tired among the heaps of the dead and dying, among the pools of blood and the broken weapons of war, among the dead rainbows and the fallen moon lying reflected in the pools of blood. He knelt abruptly and planted his sword in the earth. Let it remain there among the cold and dead.

At dawn, Attila realised that the Romans could attack him no more. They, too, were exhausted, what remained of them. He gave the order to break camp and the bedraggled remnant of his horde rode away east.

Once they were gone, the Romans and the Visigoths did likewise. Two-thirds of the men were wounded and dying, and the column moved very slowly. A vast silence settled over the Catalaunian Fields, and over the heaps of the innumerable dead.

That winter, there were many wolfpacks in that country.

Broken in spirit, the rag-tag army of Attila and his embittered mercenaries wreaked horrible, fitful revenge on the native populations through which they passed on their sullen retreat to their homelands. Some Burgundian captives were roped and dangled from trees and and used for target practice. They made the Burgundian children watch, thinking it amusing they should see their fathers stuck to death with arrows.

Their amusements left splayed bodies by the roadside, women with child torn open, the unborn whelps harrowed from their wombs and set on pikes. Molten gold was poured into the mouths of captured Jews, whom the mercenaries derided as Christless unbelievers. The last encampments and cave-dwellings of the quiet forest people of the Bohemian Forest, who hunted dormice and foraged for roots and berries, brown-eyed and dreamy and silent, a tribe of children, who even in that age lived on as they had lived in Europe for centuries, perhaps for millennia, speaking a language that no one else understood, as if from Eden before the Fall: they, too, were extinguished by the Harrowing of Attila, a nameless, unknown, preterite people, innocent as air. They were rounded up and put to the sword, going to their deaths mildly as they had lived, their small villages of straw huts left smoking in their sunlit glades. All suffered from the hordes of Attila.

Europe groaned and bled, and the King himself rode on in silence at the head of his defeated murderous horde, eyes fixed ahead, indifferent to the devastation left in his black and smoking wake. All the world burning and nothing left to save. If he could not be the Master of the World, he would be its Destroyer.

Only one thing is more terrible than an approaching army, they said in those days: a retreating army. With all hope and all order gone, left to derive only a bleak satisfaction from wreaking on the weak and defenceless the wholesale destruction that they had failed to wreak on their armed enemies, in sour reprisal for their fate. Even dumb nature suffered, punished by their sullen wrath. Whole late-summer forests were put to the torch, laid waste like tindersticks, entire landscapes left ashen and silent and denuded of life.

Down the roads into Italy and the East, the people came fleeing. See them fleeing, harried by the wind, blown like chaff before the empty wind, puppets dancing to its ancient tragic roar, through the desolate fields. Through the long ages.

Aetius was right to believe that Attila had failed yet would not stop. Destruction had become the very air he breathed. Death had become his life.

Aetius eventually arrived back in Ravenna to face Valentinian’s harshest accusations and demands to know what had become of his army. Aetius told him with exaggerated calmness that there was no Roman army left to speak of. Perhaps they should negotiate with the Visigoths, the only remaining armed force of any significance in Western Europe. Valentinian howled and rent his robes, and bit his tongue till he spat out blood on the white marble floors of the palace.

Then the unbelievable news came to them that Attila was on the march again. He had looped back across Noricum and was riding down towards Aquileia. That he still had the men to fight and, more unbelievably still, the will…

It had all been for nothing. There was none left to oppose him. He would ride into Ravenna, and then Rome, and burn them flat. How many men had he still? All of ten thousand: the tattered remnant of his once mighty army, the rest having either been destroyed upon the Catalaunian Field, or else deserted and vanished back into the vastness of Scythia. But still, ten thousand of the most loyal rode with him – and the Romans had none to oppose him. None. The Visigoths could not be expected to fight for Italy as they had fought for Gaul.

Outside the palace, Aetius told the last of his close guard, ‘You should go now. Take ship for the east. There is no more for you here.’

Arapovian stared hard at him with his coal-black eyes, and at last nodded. ‘I would feel like a deserter,’ he said, ‘except that, as at Viminacium, there is nothing left to desert.’

‘You have served Rome well, Easterner. As well as any.’

Arapovian pulled himself up onto his horse.

‘Where will you go now?’

‘East, as you say. Not to my country – it no longer exists. But east somewhere. Perhaps a long way east. The further the better.’ He kicked his horse into a walk.

‘God go with you, Easterner.’

Arapovian raised his right hand and called back, ‘And with you, Master-General Aetius.’

‘And you, Centurion?’

Tatullus grimaced. ‘I stay. As ever.’

Lastly he went to a simple lodging house and asked to speak to two of the lodgers. Moments later, they appeared at the door. Lucius and Cadoc.

Aetius told them of Attila’s approach. ‘You should sail home now, for good. Forget about Rome, as Rome forgot about you.’

Lucius shook his head. ‘Britain will wait for us. Even I cannot exactly explain why, but we, my son and I, are still needed here, with you. We stay until the end.’

Every night now, Attila suffered visions and broken sleep. He saw his horsemen riding up the steps of the Roman Capitol, gouging out the eyes of emperors’ statues with their spearpoints. In his dreams he ceaselessly called the name of Rome, and of Aetius.

Aquileia offered him no resistance. Rounding up its notables, he demanded to have one Nemesianus brought to him. That venerable senator was old and too weak to move, he was told. But his villa was He galloped away, Orestes barely able to keep pace with him.

He dragged the white-haired old senator out of his bed and out onto the fine terrace looking down upon the great city of Aquileia, and the autumn Adriatic beyond. He waved his drawn dagger over the city.

‘All this,’ he rasped, ‘all this will be destroyed first. Because of you.’

Nemesianus was on all fours, weeping. Orestes halted his horse and dismounted with half a dozen warriors. The senator stared at them – their tattoos, shaven heads, weals, garlands of teeth and jawbones – with sick disbelief. Then he turned back to Attila, almost sobbing, ‘But why me? Why me? ’

Attila squatted down on his haunches and sighed, stropping his dagger on a fine sandstone paving-slab.

‘D-d-don’t, don’t do that,’ stammered Nemesianus. ‘D-d-dalmatian stone, the finest…’

Attila looked at him with arched eyebrows, and laughed. He continued stropping. ‘ Why me? ’ he repeated. ‘A question the gods find tiresome.’

The old man had bitten his lower lip till it bled. The spots of blood stood out against his ashen face like berries in old snow.

‘Forty years ago,’ said Attila, ‘on the road to Aquileia, there were three children. They were small, weak, hungry. There was no one to care for them. And then you came along the road.’

Nemesianus looked hopeful. ‘Forty years ago is a long time. Perhaps it is difficult for you to-’

‘There was a boy, a rude barbarian boy, his cheeks scarred with the blue tattoos of his people. A frightful creature.’ Attila drew his hair back over his gold-hooped ears and the man saw and groaned. ‘There was another boy, a blond Greek slaveboy.’ He pointed his dagger at Orestes. Nemesianus stared to and fro. Blood spotted his embroidered robe.

‘And there was a little girl. Her name was Pelagia. She was the sister of the Greek slaveboy. He loved her dearly. She was six years old.’

There was silence but for Nemesianus’ sobs. Then he began to say ‘Please’ over and over again.

Attila eyed him. ‘Shsh,’ he said softly.

Nemesianus fell silent.

‘The tattooed barbarian boy loved her, too, for she was as innocent as the spring. Perhaps because she was everything he was not.’

The old man began shaking his head very slowly. ‘No, no, no,’ he murmured under his breath, almost inaudibly.

‘You took them in, you cared for them.’ Attila shook his head likewise, as if in sympathetic sorrow. ‘Oh, how you cared for them.’

He stood up and went over to the old man. ‘So this is the answer to your bleating question, “Why me? O cruel gods, why me?”’ He locked the old man’s head in the crook of his left arm. ‘The gods are not cruel, after all. They are but just, and their punishments are hounds of heaven on the traces of our sins. In time, over long years, sometimes as much as forty years after the sin has been committed and enjoyed and forgotten, those tireless hounds of heaven will find you out. They run all night through the midnight forests, their path ahead lit by the fire in their burning eyes. They will neither slow nor cease, noses to the ground, following to its source and origin the stinking scent of your sins which cry to heaven for vengeance.’ He held the dagger motionless in front of the old man’s left eye. ‘Do you see now? Do you see, why me?’

With a jab and sideways flick of the daggerpoint, he impaled and dug out Nemesianus’ eye. The aqueous blob flew from the dagger’s end and splatted onto the ground, quivering there slightly like some primeval sea creature dragged untimely from the deep. The old man howled and struggled and tears flowed from the socket where the roots of his eyeball hung out over his lower lid, like the gory roots of some unearthed plant of flesh and blood. Tears and blood flowed down his furrowed old cheeks, and his liverspotted hands tightened round Attila’s thick forearm in feeble opposition.

‘Do you see now?’ said Attila again. ‘No. I fear you still only half see.’

Another jab and flick, and there were two sightless eyeballs losing their lustre in the dust. The old man’s twin eyesockets welled with watery blood.

‘Now you see,’ said Attila. He released Nemesianus’ head from its lock and wiped his daggerblade clean on the old man’s robe. ‘Now you see.’

Nemesianus collapsed and lay groaning.

‘You will not, I fear, be able to see the imminent burning of your beloved city.’ He stowed his dagger inside his leather jerkin. ‘But you will smell it well enough.’

He looked at Orestes. The Greek nodded. And they rode back into Aquileia.

It was a great city, a great port, one of the greatest in all of Italy. And now? Now the site of Aquileia can barely be found. No more than a heap of stones over which the south wind sighs. Sighs and moves on.

After Aquileia, Attila rode on across Italy and burned Patavium, Vicentia, Verona, Placentia… At Mantua a local poet called Marullus addressed florid verses of praise to the conqueror. Attila had him burned on a pyre of his own books.

Not until he came to Mediolanum did he learn that Galla Placidia had died a year before. He ground his teeth and flogged the man who told him. That night he dreamed of staggering through a gallery of statues, sending them crashing to the ground, crushing them underfoot. Galla in a green stola stepped between them and vanished before he could break her. At the end of the hall sat a horned king on a wooden throne, his hands no more than claws, divested of kingly robes, nothing but a filthy loincloth on him, his old dugs sagging low, his hair matted with fur and feathers. The king raised his head slowly, eyes bloodshot, haggard, horror-struck and then the terrible smile…

Attila awoke, screaming.

Orestes calmed him. ‘We are getting near Rome.’

‘And Rome is coming to meet us,’ said Attila. Ravenna itself was no more than a court of chattering apes in togas. They still talked of buying Attila off.

Valentinian demanded to know, ‘Why? Why? What does he want?’

‘Do not enquire too deeply into that black heart, Majesty,’ Aetius said quietly ‘You might lose your way as in a midnight labyrinth, and never find the light again.’

‘He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’ The emperor was clutching himself now, staring at Aetius fixedly. ‘A great friend. You knew him well.’

‘A long time ago.’

Aetius set about marshalling the last band of soldiers he could.

In Mediolanum Attila had himself installed in the Imperial Palace, where he ceaselessly walked its endless marble corridors, muttering to himself. He seemed in no hurry to advance on Rome. Some whispered that he was filled with superstitious dread, remembering the fate of Alaric, who had marched into Rome triumphant and died only six days later.

Despair and fury competed in his breast. One day in a deserted vestibule he found a vast mural depicting the kings of Scythia kneeling in tribute to a succession of Roman emperors. Roaring through the deserted corridors of the palace, he demanded that the mural be repainted depicting himself on the throne and the emperors of Rome kneeling to him. Afterwards, for no obvious reason, he had the terrified mural-painters executed.

At other times he ranted of his grandiose plans, while his little force beyond the city walls ebbed by the day. He would soon take Rome, and then Constantinople – that would become his base. Then he would turn on the tottering Sassanid Empire of Persia, and then India, and finally the Great Wall. They would destroy China itself, the greatest and most ancient enemy of all…

He would be king of the world.

His men felt aimless and abandoned as they looted the country round about. Orestes stayed with him, as did the witch Enkhtuya and, on the farthest fringes, appearing and disappearing again daily like dew, the shaman Little Bird.

‘A king had a mighty empire once,’ said Little Bird, ‘but what did he give it away for? For a bigger empire.’

Attila frowned.

The shaman laughed. ‘The boundless and infinite Empire of Nothing.’ He dared to lay his hand on Attila’s hoar head. ‘O Little Father of Everything and Nothing.’

‘Silence, fool, or I shall take away your tongue.’

‘Take it freely, master. You have already taken everything else from your people.’

A savage blow, a stamp on his ankle, an agonised cry, and the little shaman limped from the palace.

A strange, feathered creature sat on a stone lion in the forum of Mediolanum and sang to the frightened people.

‘In our loneliness wandering

Stormcloud and empty steppe

We thought these things would never cease.

‘We saw the white man bowed to earth

With his swords and his spears and his gold,

His cities, his streets, his cloud-capped palaces,

And with the People’s land,

And with the vanished lion’s hide

He hunted to nothing, the fierce Libyan lion,

And we thought, this cannot last. This will cease.

‘Twice now, O my people, we have been wrong.’

He raised his arms up and laughed. The people of Mediolanum scurried away.

One day Little Bird tiptoed into the palace, and found his master seated alone on one of the old imperial thrones in a vast audience chamber. He was talking with himself, his eyes roving over the frescoed walls and ceiling, seeing nothing. Little Bird could have wept, but instead he sat down before the Great Tanjou and waited. Attila stared at him. At the heart of his madness was despair, as perhaps at the heart of sanity there is hope.

The King suddenly stood and swept his arm wide. ‘Be still and hear me, O People!’

Little Bird sat looking up at him, cross-legged and wide-eyed, a child in his seventh decade.

There was a long silence, Attila standing with his head hung low on his breast. Then he said, so softly that Little Bird strained to hear, ‘He is very wroth with us, he has utterly cast us off, we are rejected and despised. It is in the book of the Christians – I knew it as a boy. Long Roman winter afternoons with the pedagogue, a hostage, the cold sun sinking low beyond the bars. We are the people of Gog and Magog. I despised the bones and rags and worshipped fragments of the saints in their charnel-house churches, and the prophecies of their holy books, but now they come back to haunt me in my age. Now I go to the house of death myself with faltering steps, and I leave my people abandoned by their God.’

‘Oh, my mad master, do not say so.’

‘We will be blown away as the old song says, “like the wind, like the wind”. And of the great Hun people in after-years there will be neither sight nor sign in all the wide world, as if we had never been. And is it I…? A King of Kings from Palestine, a King of Terror from the East. Oh, my dreams are relentless now, they come to me nightly without cease, those seers and tellers beside the haunted stream beneath the trees in that misty morning in my boyhood long ago, when I had none but my beloved Orestes to comfort me. We laid his sister in the earth…’

Little Bird went to him.

Attila did not see. His eyes roved. ‘Comfort is not, consolation is not, in the midnight my heart murmurs that even the gods are not! You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me, you have taken my hate from me and my love from me; sad is my song now, my head is heavy, my heart hums a song of ash. And you who have taken all from me are nothing but a formless Void without voice or sense or feeling, the Beginning and the End of all things, for ever and ever.

‘Their prophecies hum about my ears like angry flies. Two empires were o’erthrown… One empire’s birth was Italy, the other was his own. And is it I…? It is a thought that I can hardly bear, oh, help me bear it, little shaman, as you would help an old man staggering under a burden. Fortune’s fool, history’s halfwit.’ He leaned forward and put his hands on Little Bird’s skinny shoulders.

Little Bird winced as if the touch was as cold as Scythian frost. ‘You might as well ask a mouse to bear a boulder on his back, my master.’

Attila’s arms fell by his sides again, and he sat back again.

‘In my hoar old age I thought I had had reverence, piety, glory, empery, and now it is gone from me, everything is taken from me, my empire stutters and fails like a pauper’s tallow candle. A seer once said my beloved son Ellak would inherit my empire. I know now what empire he spoke of: the great, the infinite empire of nothing.’

‘Do not say so, master.’

‘My sons quarrel with one another and soon enough they will war with each other, once their father is gone and nothing remains of him but fading footprints and bones. My Checa is gone the way of all flesh, motes of dust in the sun, the ribs of long-dead cattle bleached white, no birdsong, no sweet waters, an empty desert place, a tattered village beside a dying lake.

‘I am as broken as the earth riven by ice. There is none to help me bear it; a king must die alone. My heart sings with grief, a lonely, mountain-top grief which only a dying king can know. The Madness of King Goll. I heard the Celtic slaveboy singing, long ago, who knew the ancient prophecies of the Sibyl. The grey wolf knows me

… The hare runs by me, growing bold… “They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.” King Goll, old friend, I know you, and I see your face in the water. Is it I who has brought them to this pass and this predestinate end?’ He stirred and trembled, his eyes wild, his hands gripping the finials of the alien throne. ‘Oh, I shall go mad! Oh, let me not be mad!’

‘O Father,’ said Little Bird, laying his head in his lord’s lap, ‘my heart will keep company with yours as both break.’