The Judgement

12

At last word came that Attila was marching on Rome.

Aetius rode down the Flaminian Way from Ravenna to cut him off, with a force of little more than one thousand men. A ludicrous number. He had hoped that the citizens of Ravenna, Fiorentia, Rome itself, might have joined him in this last, wretched battle in Roman history, little more than a skirmish. But the people had already fled.

As Aetius and his column neared the half-abandoned city on the seven hills, however, they met an extraordinary sight: a cortege headed by the Bishop of Rome, Leo, proceeding north, unarmed, to meet Attila. Priests in their chasubles carried crosses, banners, censers, and chanted hymns; the gold of the monstrances and dalmatics gleamed in the Italian sunlight; Bishop Leo himself, stocky and round-faced and cheerful like the Campanian countryman he was, riding a plump white horse slightly too small for him, was flanked by long lines of choirboys and deacons.

‘What the hell is this?’

The bishop reined in. ‘Master-General Aetius? Join us. Ride with us. And allow us to talk with Attila first, before-’

‘Talk with Attila! Your Holiness, with all due respect, talking with him, pleading with him, paying him off – at this late stage – is like a hind pleading with a lion, when the lion has already got its teeth in her arse!’

The bishop smiled indulgently. Such vigorous similes reminded him of his country boyhood. ‘ Talk with Attila,’ he resumed composedly, ‘before you and your brave soldiers line up to face him for battle.’

Aetius stared. Then he gave the order to fall in behind.

It was near the Mincius river that Attila and the Bishop of Rome had their talk. The gentle farmland of Virgil and Catullus, now trampled by barbarian cavalry.

In Leo’s small party of priests and chaplains was also a burly old fellow with a white beard, and a younger man with brown eyes. Some said they were all the way from Britain, but others doubted that as a tall tale. Many tall tales grew up about that meeting. That Attila and the Britons and the papal party exchanged ancient Sibylline verses, and that after he had heard them in full the dread King of the Huns, the Scourge of God, hung his head, and began to pull his men back and turn them round. Some even claimed that Rome was saved by Attila’s superstitious dread of the Christian Church, and a few old, garbled rhymes. Others commented that Attila’s force was spent anyway; he had been defeated on the Catalaunian Fields.

The meeting did confirm one thing. The legions of Rome truly belonged to the past. Attila did not fear armies, but he feared the god of the Christians: the god who had thundered at him from the dark depths of Rhemi cathedral. The old military power of Rome was extinguished, but the new power of the Catholic Church had replaced it.

‘It was not the priest of the Christians who made me depart,’ said Attila, ‘but that other, in the white robe, standing behind him.’

Orestes frowned. ‘There was none such.’

‘He bore a flaming sword.’

Orestes fell silent and then stepped out of the king’s tent. He heard a sing-song voice away in the darkness.

‘The Great Spirit wills it.

Dry your eyes.

The white man comes.

A People dies.’