The Scourge of God

It made the hair bristle on our necks. The invaders were charging to reach the crest before we did. So now our own drums doubled their tempo and our own ranks began to trot, then run. I drew my sword, the blade rasping as it cleared my scabbard, and the surrounding officers did the same. All we could see was the green sward of the gentle ridge now, and yet the pounding of the Gothic infantry charging toward us was so loud and heavy that the vibration of the earth could clearly be felt.

Then the sky went dim as it filled with arrows.

How can I describe that sight? No man had seen it before, or is likely to ever see it again. It was like a wind of chaff, a canopy of clattering wood, a hiss of missiles that tore the very air apart with a sound like the ripping of a sheet. It was a hum like a plague of locusts. Now the legions were running in awkward formation, lifting their oval shields overhead, and the first storm broke on us even as another volley—and another and still another—followed in an endless pulse of wicked shafts.

The arrows struck with a rattle like hail, the unlucky screaming or whoofing as some missiles found gaps in the shield ceiling and they went down. In an instant my own horse was hit and pitching forward, spilling me into what had become a meadow of wooden shafts jutting from earth and men. I landed hard, stunned, and at first wasn’t sure what had happened. Then another rattle as the next volley came down, miraculously missing my sprawled form. The screams of my horse made me realize that arrows were steadily punching into its neck and flanks. Finally gaining some breath and wits, I yanked at the shield of a dead man and pulled it over me just in time before the next salvo came sluicing at me. How many arrows were fired in those first moments? A million? And yet it was just the prelude to what would be an endless day.

Now I heard the air being rent anew with an angry sizzle, and dared to peek up. It was the heavy bolts and flaming projectiles of our own Roman artillery, returning the volleys.

And I saw our own archers running forward. Now arrows flew in both directions, so many that some collided in midair and spiraled down to earth like fluttering seedpods. As men fought, the shafts broke and crackled underneath like a skin of ice.

There was a vast roar, a sea of voices. Then a clash as the two charging wings, Roman and Ostrogoth, met at the crest of the desired ridge. The bang of the collision actually echoed across the battlefield like a clap of thunder, a great violent shock of wall hitting wall; and here the discipline of Aetius’s Roman line began to tell. They bent and rippled but did not break, even as the Ostrogoths recoiled slightly.

I crawled out from under my protective shell and hoisted the shield to my arm. With the melee joined, the storm of missiles had slackened. Three arrows were stuck in my oval disk of protection, reminding me of my earlier lone combat with Skilla. I was still somewhat stunned by the squall of arrows, and had to remember what my task was. Ilana! Life!

The thought of her jolted into my consciousness again, and it energized me for the work at hand. For the moment I was an infantryman and as desperately needed as every other Roman that day. The two sides were locked together in front of me in a vast scrum, and when enough men went down to provide a gap I waded atop groaning bodies and added my own sword and muscle to the clamor. Ahead I could see the Ostrogoth Valamer and his brothers Theodimer and Val-odimer urging their troops on, and our crazed Anthus trying to hack his way toward his rival Cloda. Romans and Huns fought for empire. The allies on both sides fought ancient feuds.

I wish I could tell you of swift parry and clever thrust, but I remember nothing like that, or much of any skill at all. Just a sea of Gothic heads, some with helmets and some without, pushing up the ridge and we Romans grunting and pushing and stabbing and slashing down it. Each side shoved against the other. By the grace of a few paces, we had gained the tiny advantage in altitude that made all the difference. I held up my shield while things hammered on it, like intruders trying to break down a door, and cut blindly with my own blade, usually hitting something hard that reverberated in my hand . . . but sometimes striking softer things that howled. Men clutched at my ankles, and I swore and stabbed at them. A man beside me lurched backward, his face cleaved with an ax: I remember that because the gore sprayed like a fan, spattering half a dozen of us all around. I don’t recall much else. Entire ranks seemed to go down on both sides, as if swallowed by the earth, only to have replacements close in right behind. I tripped on something, a body or a spear, and fell with an awkward gasp, exhausted already. I was down on all fours, my back exposed, and I tensed myself for a final thrust. But, no, the line moved past me, fresh Romans taking my place. Goths were toppling, retreating, as Aetius’s legions pressed. I was to learn later that this first fight was vital, giving our armies an advantage we never surrendered in the long nightmare to come, but the significance of this early action wasn’t apparent to me then.

I stood upright in time to see the mounted Skilla being carried backward by the sea of retreating Goths and Gepids, shouting at them in Hunnish to stand firm. They cried oaths in their own language, trying to reorganize after the death of so many of their chiefs. I doubt he saw me; I was too low.

Horns blew and Aetius halted his advance just downslope of the crest of the hard-won hill. Thousands of bodies marked its summit, some utterly still and others twitching and moaning as blood gushed out, their jutting and splintered bones jostled by reinforcements as our men dressed their ranks. The Romans killed those Ostrogoths they found who were still alive, even as the Ostrogoths took the few Romans they’d captured and gutted or dismembered them before our eyes. Here, where height gave the throw of Roman javelins a few yards’ advantage, we caught our breath.

And now the battle began in earnest.

If the ground had trembled before, now it shook—and it shook with violence reminiscent of the earthquakes that had toppled the walls of Constantinople a few years before. Survivors told us later that Attila had disdained lending his cavalry to help the Ostrogoths struggle for the ridge, because he thought the hillock insignificant in the context of great cavalry charges. He shouted to his warlords that the unmounted Romans were slugs who could be covered by dust and ignored, while the real battle would be decided by horsemen.

So with a shout he led the cream of his army at Sangibanus and his Alans in the center, vowing to ride down the king who had somehow failed to surrender Aurelia. If Attila cleaved through there, the battle would be over. The Huns rode with a high, wavering yip, firing sheets of arrows. I remembered Zerco’s early lesson in war by the Tisza River and wondered just when, if ever, these horsemen would run out of shafts—and whether it would be too late when they did. I also wondered if Aetius had been wise to bet his center on Sangibanus, because our general seemed in no hurry to envelop the Huns with his two wings. Until he did, the battle would ride on the Alans, Liticians, and Olibriones. We held our breaths as the Huns charged.

Our armies tried to slow them with missiles, our arrows fewer but our heavier artillery cutting wicked furrows in the oncoming assault with stones, ballista bolts, and flaming kettles of fire that tripped whole swathes of Huns. At the same time, the Alans were charging forward on their horses, many with their own deadly scores to settle with these eastern barbarians who had besieged their city and killed members of their families. The combined ranks were riddled with arrows as the space between the two cavalries closed, men sinking. With a few more volleys, perhaps the Huns could have cleared a gap for themselves and sliced our army in two. But even the steppe warriors could not fire fast enough; and their numbers were so huge that instead of simply being overwhelming, they were getting in the way of one another.

None of the nations assembled had experience controlling such an assembly. So at last the centers met, and that collision dwarfed what I had seen on the ridge, a slamming together not just of men but heavy horses. I hadn’t seen the western ocean yet, but I sensed this is what it must sound like, the boom of breakers against rock, as tens of thousands of horsemen plowed into one another. Horses neighed and screamed, lances and shields splintered, and some collisions were so violent that spear tips, helmets, armor fragments, or even pieces of bodies erupted into the air. The bits cart-wheeled lazily, seeming suspended for hours, before raining down.

All was then swirling confusion, but the Huns were not equipped for the kind of brutal close-quarters hacking that the bigger and more heavily armored Alans had adopted in the West. Hun ponies were eviscerated, running backward with dead riders entangled in their tack, dragging their own entrails. Light lamellar and leather armor were punctured and shredded under the assault of hard Alan steel. Horsetail banners that had not fallen for generations toppled. Whole clans of Huns were trampled under in the desperate center, their long family sagas snuffed out in a few anxious moments of carnage. Even as the Ostrogoths were advancing again on our Roman lines, Aetius was exulting and waving the huge iron sword, one arm already bandaged and bloody.

“They’re holding! They’re holding!” Now the center’s infantry was coming up, and the Hun horses were balking even as their masters urged them against the ranks of spear-men. I could imagine Attila’s frustration.

Line after line of Hun cavalry went down, and to continue this close-quarter mismatch was madness. The barbarians broke to retreat and re-form, even as still more horns and drums sounded and Attila’s left wing began to advance toward Theodoric and his Visigoths on the right. If they could not break us at one point, then maybe at another!

Now the battle was well and truly joined along miles of front, great tides of men surging back and forth under the singing arc of uncountable arrows. There was no hope of any one man controlling the fury that followed. It was the havoc of horse and foot, spear and arrow, sword and biting teeth. Whole companies seemed to be swallowed, and yet as soon as they disappeared in the slaughter, fresh companies pushed ahead.

The Ostrogoths charged us Romans again and then again and then yet again, surging up the ridge to try to take the advantage. Each time they had to clamber up a slope slick with blood and thick with the bodies of their comrades, a hedgerow of stiffening limbs and broken weapons. The Gepid king, Ardaric, went down with a spear wound and was carried away, delirious; and the ambitious Cloda the Frank sank somewhere in the carnage, his corpse deliberately trampled by the hooves of his brother’s steed. Each time the Ostrogoths charged, the disciplined legions made them come through a wave of javelins. Hundreds of Goths grunted and went down with each volley. The Goths clawed and spat and stabbed at us, but the loss of the ridge crest was proving catastrophic to them. Too many warriors were dying, and Attila’s right flank was weakening. What if Aetius could begin to squeeze them upon the Hun center, as he hoped?

But the sun was still high; fresh Ostrogoths kept appearing, their numbers seemingly as endless as grains of sand.

We Romans could not be dislodged, but neither could we advance. Men were staggering from exhaustion after each attack, chests heaving, the blood running down their limbs in bright sheets. During pauses they let their shields slump to the ground and crouched behind them for a while in an attempt to recover and to keep from being shot.

I found myself back with Aetius and was given the horse of a dead centurion. Mounted once more, I could better see the battle, but reunion with our general was not entirely reassuring. Clearly he was now growing as frustrated at this failure to break the Ostrogoths ahead of him as Attila had been frustrated at failing to crack our center. “We have to fold them and we can’t!” he muttered. “This fight may finally be settled elsewhere.” He glanced worriedly down the rest of the line.

Indeed, now Attila displayed his talents as a tactician. On the right of our forces, far to the south, Theodoric and his Visigoths had accomplished what we’d hoped. In a great, heroic charge their cavalry had hurled themselves on the Vandals, Rugi, Sciri, and Thuringi. It was like a snowy avalanche against sapling timber, a great barbarian nation charging against lesser or less-numerous ones, and our right wing seemed destined to crumple their left. Again the price was terrible, a generation of warriors falling to the remorseless scythe of arrows, but then the lances of the Visigoths struck home and their foes were hurled backward toward Attila’s laager. So swiftly did Theodoric and his men advance, crying for revenge for Berta against the Vandals, that they rode far in advance of our center. A dangerous gap began to open between them and the rest of our army.

Attila saw this and charged into it, leading his Huns against the Visigothic flank.

It was as if Theodoric’s men were a charging, snarling dog, suddenly brought up short by a chain. The Huns struck the side of their advance like a shock of lightning, pouring in a volley of arrows at brutally short range and then riding over the fallen to cut at the Visigoths with their swords. The Visigothic charge faltered, the retreating Hun allies turned, and suddenly Theodoric, the spear tip of his people, found himself in a sea of enemies.

I could see this struggle only at long distance, and made little sense of it, but the songs afterward recalled how the high king of the Visigoths, father of the mutilated Berta, his hair iron gray and his anger made of iron, spied Attila. Instead of retreating he kicked his horse toward the Hunnish king, roaring that he had found the devil himself and meant to kill him, and Gaiseric next. Attila was equally maddened by the roar of battle, urging his own horse toward his foe, but before the leaders could close, a pack of snarling Huns surrounded the Visigothic king’s entourage and cut it off, puncturing it with arrows and stabbing with swords. One, two, three, and then four arrows thunked into the torso of Theodoric. He reeled, dizzy, crying in his last moments to his old pagan gods as well as to his newer Christian one, and then spilled from his saddle where he was trampled into bloody pulp. The Huns screamed with triumph and the Visigoths broke in disorder, fleeing back to their original starting point. Yet Attila’s men were also in such disorder after charge, countercharge, and melee that he couldn’t immediately follow. Many had drifted within range of Roman artillery and crossbows, and the Huns—who Attila had so carefully conserved over the years by forcing their allies to do the hardest fighting—were dying in unprecedented numbers.

It was now that all hung in the balance. The Visigoths had retreated in disarray, their king dead. The Alans had lost half their number in the desperate center, and only the support of the Liticians and the sturdiness of the Olibriones kept them from breaking entirely. The wing of Aetius with its Franks and Saxons and Armoricans held the high ground but was still unable to advance; and Attila himself still had a vast force milling in front of us, encouraged now by the fall of Theodoric.

Both sides had scored triumphs. Which would prevail?

The two armies hurled themselves at each other again, more desperately than ever.

And then again.

And again.

Hour followed hour. The rain of arrows slackened because, as Zerco had predicted, not even Huns had an inex-haustible supply. The longer the fight went on the more they were forced to come to grips with the heavier Western cavalry, and the more grievous their own losses became. The dwarf’s forecast was proving grimly right. This was no lightning raid or standoff archery contest; this was the brutal and fundamental kind of close-quarters fighting that western Europeans excelled at. None of us on either side could fight endlessly without rest, however, and so ranks surged, battled, and then, exhausted, retired while new men took their places. The ground became pocked with bodies, then marbled, and then carpeted with a meadow of carnage such as chroniclers had never imagined. Nothing approached the cost of what some would call the Battle of Châlons, some Maurica, and some simply as the Battle of Nations. Men sensed that here was a hinge of history, the difference between darkness and light, oppression and hope, glory and despair; and neither side would give up. If their swords broke they fought with broken swords, and if their weapons snapped again at the hilt, then they rolled on the ground, grappling for each other’s throats and reaching for each other’s eyes, gouging and kicking in a frenzy of unreasoning fury. Each death had to be revenged, each yard lost had to be retaken; and so instead of slackening the battle grew ever more intense as the afternoon wore on. It was hot, a huge pall of dust hazing the battlefield, and wounded men screamed equally for their mothers and for water.

The butchered who still breathed crawled to the thread of the brook between the armies in order to drink, but the human body holds more blood than one can ever imagine. It gushed out in sheets on the ground, soaking it to capacity, and then formed rivulets that became brooks and then turned into streams, a vast tide of blood soaking across the trampled meadows. The blood finally filled the little stream that men crept toward, so that when they reached it they found only gore. They died there by the hundreds, choking on the blood of their comrades.

I threw myself into the fray like everyone else, still mounted, my sword once more sheathed so that I could use a longer spear to stab down at the Ostrogoths and dismounted Huns who’d become mixed in the swirling confusion. My weapons came up red but I have no idea who I killed or when, only that I thrust desperately as the only way to preserve my own life. All reason had left this combat, and all strategy, and it had come down to a brutal test of will. I realized finally that it had slackened on the right flank because the Visigoths were holding back after the death of Theodoric, meaning the Huns had more ability to push against our own wing. I feared that without Theodoric’s leadership the Visigoths might abandon us altogether.

I had no understanding yet of the Visigothic heart or their desire to avenge the king. They were not withdrawing but reforming.

Meanwhile, Attila was concentrating his force on our left and center. The battle was beginning to pivot. Aetius and his heavy infantry were making progress against the Ostrogoths, forcing them down the slope of the ridge and across the bloody brook, bending them toward the Hun center and the laagers of his wagons. But at the same time the Alans, even braced by the stoutness of the Olibriones, were bending as well, the gap growing between them and the Visigoths on our right flank. The whole combat was slowly wheeling.

The Huns were the key, and with charge after furious charge they crashed against our lines, each time driving a little deeper, their horses hurdling mounds of the dead. I found myself fighting at the junction of the Romans and the Alans, intercepting Huns who broke through the infantry ranks. I dueled with a deadly, remorseless efficiency, realizing how much the past year had changed me. Killing had no shock anymore. It had become the ceaseless business of this ceaseless day. Shadows grew long, the grievously wounded bled to death before they could crawl to any help, the field became a mire of trampled grass and bloody mud. Still it went on.

And then came Skilla.

Once more he’d spotted me. Then he fought his way to me so that here on this vast field of carnage he and I could come to a final end. The duel I should have finished in Hunuguri would now be finished here.

His quiver was empty, arrows long since spent, and he was as spattered with blood as I was, whether his own or others I cannot say. A year of frustration had lit a dark fire in his eyes; and while neither of us could control the outcome of this huge battle, we could perhaps control each other’s fate. He used his horse to butt aside a wounded legionary, the man stumbling long enough that another Hun killed him, and then he came at me, our horses snorting as they wheeled and bit. I threw my spear and missed, narrowly, and once more reached for my scabbard. Our swords rang and we twisted in the fight, trying to keep each other in sight as our tormented steeds turned, snapping; and I was as eager to kill him as he was to kill me. But for him, I would long since have escaped with Ilana! But of course we would not have escaped, the war would have come anyway, except Attila may have come with his magic sword as well. Was that part of Skilla’s frustration—that he had unwittingly become a part of strange destiny? How inexplicable the Fates are.

I was weary and past weariness by this time, as exhausted as I’ve ever been in my life. And yet Skilla came with a fresh ferocity as if none of this long battle had ever happened. I felt my wrist turning under his blows. I was sweating with fatigue and fear, waiting for him to make a mistake and yet finding none. I was making too many. Finally I parried a blow badly, my blade nearly flat to his stroke, and my spatha snapped in two.

For a moment I was stunned, looking at the stunted weapon stupidly. Then he swung again, his throat gushing a victorious “yah!” that sounded half strangled, and I avoided decapitation only by leaning so far backward on my horse that I felt its tail on my head. In desperation, I tumbled off my horse into the scrimmage below, a hell pit of churning limbs and dying men. I looked for a weapon, crawling between horse and human legs, soldiers grunting above, as Skilla cursed and tried to urge his frenzied horse after me.

I found an ax, its dead owner still gripping its haft, and yanked. It took a heave to break it free because the owner’s fingers were already beginning to freeze. Then I scooted sideways on the ground. A hoof came near and I swung at its foreleg. Skilla jerked his pony away, eyeing me but also looking around as he backed in case some other Roman came at him from behind. I stood now with the ax, planning to unhorse him as I had in Attila’s makeshift arena, kill him once and for all, and finally hack my way to Attila’s camp.

I was insane with exhaustion and desperation. All I wanted was to seize Ilana and flee this madness forever. But Skilla was wary, remembering the same combat I did, and I saw him finger his quiver with regret that he didn’t have an arrow. There were hundreds around us on the ground, of course, some broken but others whole, and I grimly waited for him to reach for one, figuring that was the time to charge at his horse and kill it.

Then I was dimly aware of horns blowing at a volume not yet heard in this battle, and the song was so great and so high that it reminded me of tales of angels ascending and Joshua at Jericho. What was going on? I could see nothing but struggling men and churning dust, the light now low in the west. This long day was drawing toward darkness. Then Skilla sidestepped his horse into a gap in the fighting and bent to pluck an arrow.

I ran at him, raising the ax.

On clear ground, perhaps, I could have done it. But I stumbled on a corpse, his pony skipped out of reach of my swing, and in an instant Skilla had three arrows in his hand and was nocking one on his bow. There was no room for me to run, no shield to lift, and he was too close to hope that I could dodge. I felt defeated, and a vast regret settled on me as if I could have avoided all this if I had only done . . .

what?

He pulled to kill me.

And then suddenly a wave of Huns spilled into us like an avalanche, crashing into the flank of his pony, and the shaft went wide. The Hun warriors were in disarray, their eyes wild and their voices hoarse, yelling warning even as they scooped up their fellows and carried them away from us like a retreating wave. They were fleeing, and a cursing Skilla was helplessly caught up in their panic.

Pushing against the Huns, I saw, was a stormy wall of my own cavalry, a scrambled mix now of Roman and Visigoth and Frank and Alan, yelling themselves hoarse as they rode over Huns too slow to escape. I ran myself, sideways, to get out of the path of careening horses. Now all the horns were blowing, Roman and Hun alike, and the whole field seemed in vague motion from west to east, as if we were on a plate that had been tilted. The battle was sliding off toward Attila’s camp.

I found a mound of dead and clambered up on it to see what was going on. What I observed stunned me. The Visigoths had not broken from the battle, as I had feared. They had rejoined it. But this time they came in an unstoppable wave under Theodoric’s son Thorismund, and their charge was carrying all before it like a flood from a dam. Here was revenge for the death of their king and the mutilation of their princess! Many Huns were still fighting furiously, others were ridden under, but tens of thousands were retreating to the wagon laagers that Attila had arranged as crude forts, taking refuge there.

They were whipped.

The sun was glimmering on the western horizon. “Advance!” Aetius was roaring as he rode among us. “Advance!”

Had the old iron sword worked? Was this to be the final destruction of Attila?

I went forward with the others, but for most of us it was more a stagger than a charge. We had been ferociously fighting for the day’s full second half; the battle had become an apocalypse of death; and it was hard to merely lift a weapon, let alone wield it. The Huns were in no better shape. Yet when they reached the wagons they reached water, and it re-vived them enough to take up their bows and fill the sky with defensive arrows. Our own bowmen and war machines were out of range, and so when this black rain fell out of the dusk none of us had any missiles to return or the stomach to go further. Not even me, who wanted Ilana. I was astonished to be alive, drunk with fatigue, and unable to fight longer. We retreated out of range of the Hun arrows, the battered armies separating by a mile again, and collapsed in the charnel house that was our field of victory. The sun was gone, and darkness seemed a blessing. So I found a skin of water on a slain legionary, drank, and faded into exhausted oblivion.

XXVIII

I

THE SWORD OF MARS

Icame to my senses some hours later. The moon had come up to illuminate the field of the dead. The butchered stretched as far as I could see, farther than any man had ever seen: None would recall any battle as huge and horrible as this one. Who could stand to count? No one ever tried to bury them all. We instead fled from this place when it was all over, letting nature reclaim the bones.

It was an eerie, haunted night, the moans of the wounded creating a low keening and their anguished crawling producing scuttling noises like small animals or insects. Dogs long abandoned by their masters in the summer’s invasion came to eat at the edges of the carnage. So, I was later told, did wolves, their eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Howls and snarls lilted at the edges of the armies.

It had taken the entire world, it seemed, to stop Attila, and even now none of us was certain he had been stopped for more than an evening. He had retreated, yes, but would he ride out of his laager again on the morrow? Alternately, could Rome sustain another assault on his wagons? An entire generation had been half wiped out in a single long afternoon and evening, and the cost of this battle would be remembered and whispered for centuries. Never before had so many died so quickly.

It was not just men but horses, thousands of them, too. By the moon I could see the corpses of soldiers and animals formed curious patterns: lines, crescents, and circles that marked where the fighting had been the fiercest. It was like the design of an intricate, macabre carpet. Some of those who survived were wandering the field looking for friends or loved ones, but most on both sides had simply collapsed in exhaustion so that the dead were swelled by vast numbers of the sleeping and unconscious. There was already the stench of blood and piss and shit. By tomorrow’s noon there would be the smell of rot as well, but for now our army nested among the fallen.

I had not the slightest idea what I should do. I’d seen so much horror in the past year that life had become incompre-hensible. I felt disconnected, drained, dreamy. Only chance had kept Skilla from killing me this time. Why? What was God’s purpose in all I had seen? I could find Aetius, but to what end? I could crawl toward Ilana, but she seemed as elusive and remote as ever. Attila’s surviving army still stood between us. I could again fight Skilla but he, too, never seemed to die. Oddly, he’d become the one warrior I felt closest to. We shared a love, battles, and a historic journey; and I wondered if, when this was over, we could stop fighting and simply share wine and kumiss in front of a hot fire, trying to remember the cocky young men we’d once been before the slaughter here.

Was he gone forever, swept away by the Visigoths’

charge? Or hunting for me still with taut bow and arrow?

I explored my body and was astounded to find no wounds despite my bloody clothing, and my bruises and sores. I was not equal to three-quarters of the warriors who had died and yet here I was, breathing, when they were not. Again, why?

I once thought experience would solve the mysteries of life, but instead it seems only to add to them.

So I sat with these foggy thoughts, as useless as my own broken sword, until finally I noticed a dark form weaving toward me through the dead, as if looking for a fallen companion. The task would not be easy. Inflicted wounds had been so brutal and the slain so trampled that many were past recognition. I admired this figure’s loyalty.

It turned out to be loyalty of a different sort, however. His form became disquietingly familiar, and suddenly my exhaustion was replaced with anxiety. I stood, swaying. He stopped, the moon behind him and on my face, and spoke softly to me from thirty paces away. “Alabanda?”

“Don’t you ever rest?” My voice quavered with weariness.

“I’ve not come to fight you. I’m tired of killing. This day wasn’t war—it was insanity. It has destroyed my nation.”

Skilla gazed out at the moonlit bodies. “Ilana needs our help, Jonas Alabanda.”

“Ilana?” I croaked the name.

“Attila has gone mad. He fears final defeat tomorrow and has built a pyre of wooden saddles and his richest possessions. If Aetius breaks through the wagon wall, he intends to light it and hurl himself into the flames.”

My heart hammered at this unexpected information.

Were the Huns really that desperate, or was this some kind of trick? “If Attila dies, perhaps Ilana goes free,” I suggested groggily.

“He has chained her to the pyre.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Do you think I would come to you if I didn’t have to, Roman? You’ve been a plague to me since I met you. I came within moments of killing you yesterday, but the gods intervened. Now I know why. Only you can save her.”

“Me?” Was this a trap? Had Skilla decided to win by guile what he’d been robbed of in repeated combat?

“It’s impossible to rescue her,” he said. “The pyre is surrounded by a thousand men. But Attila will still take the sword for the woman.”

So this was it. “The sword of Mars.”

“He blames its loss for the evil that has befallen our people this day. Half the Hun nation is gone. We cannot attack anymore, that’s obvious, but we can retreat as an army, not a mob. Attila’s sword will give my nation back its heart.”

“It is you who has gone insane!” I cried. “I don’t have the sword, Aetius does. Do you think he wants to give it back now that final victory is within our grasp?”

“Then we must steal it, like you stole it from Attila.”

“Never!”

“If we don’t, Ilana will burn.”

I looked out into the darkness, my head aching. Had I come so far, and fought so hard, only to see the one I loved consumed by flames because of victory? How could destiny be so cruel? And yet what Skilla was asking me to do was to risk sure Roman triumph for a single woman, to put into Attila’s hands the symbol he needed to rally his battered army.

I had no guarantee the Huns would let Ilana go if I turned over the sword. They might simply burn both of us for amusement. Maybe this was Skilla’s way of killing me—by luring me to his camp with the promise of Ilana.

Or maybe he truly loved her, too, loved her so much that this madness somehow made sense to him. So he thought it should make sense to me.

I stalled, trying to think. “If we save her, which of us gets her?”

“That will be Ilana’s choice.” Of course he would tell me that, because I would assume she’d choose me. She was Roman. Yet what did I really know? The only word of her survival had come from Skilla himself. For all I knew she’d died in Hunuguri or had married Attila or even had married Skilla! He would tell me anything to get the sword. And yet, looking at him—this man I’d come to know too well through too many combats—I knew he was telling the truth. Knew it in my gut more than my mind. War had given us a curious comradeship.

If I did nothing, she would die. If I acceded to Skilla’s plan, there was a good chance that both Ilana and I would die. And so no chance existed, or did it? The seed of a desperate alternative began to form in my brain.

“I’m not even sure where the sword is,” I said as I thought. What if it now served a different purpose—to demoralize instead of empower?

“Any fool knows where it is. We saw Aetius lift it. Where your general sleeps, there sleeps the sword.”

“This is madness.”

“The madness is men’s preoccupation with that old piece of iron,” Skilla said. “You and I both know it has no power beyond what superstition gives it. That relic will not change what happened here, or what must happen tomorrow. My people cannot conquer the West—there are too many to conquer. But the sword saves Ilana and it saves my kagan. It saves my own pride.”

I looked at him, wondering how my plan could possibly work.

“We must work together, Jonas. For her.”

At the outer fringes of the battlefield, where the Roman armies rested, tens of thousands of surviving soldiers were sleeping as if clubbed, every fiber drained by the fight we had just been through. Thousands more wounded had been carried or had crawled here to die. Fresh troops were still coming up to the field, so universal had been the response of resistance in Gaul. The work of war went on. These newcomers were making lanes of advance through the dead by piling them like cordwood. They were bringing fresh supplies of food and water, wheeling catapults and ballistae forward, and were readying for a resumption of battle on the morrow. Others were being sent into the battlefields to retrieve spent bolts and unbroken arrows. I paused to speak quietly to a carpenter working on a catapult, and took the tool he charged eight times too much for.

Torches lit the way to the complex of tents that marked the headquarters of Aetius. I’d left Skilla behind, telling him to lie still like one of the Hun corpses to avoid discovery. I would get the sword by persuasion or not at all; the two of us could not hack our way through an aroused Roman army.

I went by myself knowing that my general would think me a lunatic. Yet didn’t I have some claim to the weapon? Could I tamper with the sword? Was a gamble any worse than renewed slaughter?

If Aetius needed any reminding what his profession was, the night’s sounds provided it. I could hear the shriek of the wounded from all points of his headquarters compound.

Trestle tables had been set up within a stone’s throw; and limbs were being hacked, set, sewn, and bound for those unlucky enough to be grievously wounded and yet still alive. It was a demons’ chorus, despite the vaunted skill of Roman surgeons. A ditch and wooden stockade had been erected around this nexus of the army, and I worried that I might be stopped from entering, ending my ploy before it began. But, no, Jonas of Constantinople was well known as the general’s aide, envoy, spy, and adviser. With my face wiped clean, I was let pass with a salute of respect from the sentries. I walked toward the sword, listening to the cries of the dying.

What is one more dead? I asked myself. Even if it was me?

“We thought you had perished,” one centurion remarked with more prescience than he knew when I came to the tents.

I saw Visigothic and Frankish sentries and a little galaxy of lamps in one of the tents and heard a low murmur. The highest-ranking kings and generals were still awake, apparently, debating what to do when the sun came up. Aetius would be in there, but I needed to speak to him privately.

So where would Aetius have put the old sword? Not on the council table as a symbol of his own luck. He would diplomatically leave it aside and pay attention to the pride of the kings he’d bound to him. This triumph must be theirs as well as his. The weapon would wait in his sleeping chamber.

“The general has asked me to fetch maps and the great sword,” I lied. Aetius traveled with charts of the entire West, poring over them in the evenings the way a merchant might a budget. As his aide, I’d fetched them a hundred times.

“Is he ever going to sleep?” the sentry asked, betraying his own wish to do so. He looked heartsick, like all of us.

“When victory is final,” I replied. “Let’s hope the sword will end things.”

I lifted the flap, peering inside for additional sentries.

None. So I hesitated deliberately, knowing that an errand which might not arouse suspicion in an exhausted sentry would nonetheless puzzle a loyal fool. Something moved around the corner of the outside of the tent, small and furtive, and I was satisfied. I went inside.

It was dark, so I lit a single clay lamp. There were the trunks and stools of his kit I’d seen many times: here his bed, there his folding desk, and there a heap of sweaty and blooded clothing. But where was the sword? I felt with my hands. Ah! It lay blanketed on his cot like a courtesan, as necessary as love. I caressed the familiar roughness of pitted metal, heavy and ungainly. How odd its size! Had gods really forged it? Was it fate that Attila had found it, giving him courage to try to conquer the world? And more fate that I had delivered it to Aetius? How life plays with us, favoring one moment and fouling the next, raising us up and then dashing our hopes. Again, the sense of it all eluded me.

I took out the file I’d purchased and set to work.

Shortly afterward, someone big filled the entry of the tent. “So you decided to take back what you gave, Jonas Alabanda?” the general asked softly.

“I’ve decided to give it in a different way.”

“I was told by a special sentry that I might want to see what you were up to.”

I smiled. “I relied on that sentry to be on duty.”

A small shadow emerged from behind. “I’d get far more rest if I didn’t have to look after you, Jonas,” Zerco said.

“Please, sit.” I gestured to the camp stools as if this tent were mine. “I’m as surprised that you two are on your feet as I’m surprised I’m on mine.”

“Yes,” said Aetius, taking my invitation. “How important all of us must be, to be so tireless. And what are you planning to do with that? Kill Attila? Are you trying to file it sharp?”

I put the file aside. “I’ve been informed the woman that I love is chained to a funeral pyre. She’s to be burned tomorrow with Attila, if we attack and he loses the battle. A Hun told me this, and I believe him.”

“Skilla,” the dwarf surmised.

“I seem as bound to him as you seem bound to Attila, general, or you seem bound to Aetius, Zerco. Bound by fate.

He’s a young warrior, the nephew of the warlord Edeco, who I fought in Noricum when you first encountered me and the sword.”

“Ah, yes. A bold Hun, to have followed you so far into Roman territory. Is he the one who saluted you this day?”

“Yes.”

“Now I have a better idea why. He wants you to trade the sword for this woman?”

“Yes.”

“He loves her, too?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe Attila will accept this trade?”

“No. He will take the sword, of course, but he wants revenge for our setting fire to his palace. I’ll die if we go to his camp, and accomplish nothing.”

The general smiled. “Then I fail to see the logic in your plan.”

“There’s no possibility of escape from Attila’s laager. No possibility of rescuing Ilana. And for me, no possibility of life without that rescue. I’ve watched many men die for what they believe in, and now I’m prepared to die for what I believe in: her.”

The general looked bemused.

“I plan to ask Skilla to take her and trade myself for her life. The Huns have a word for it, konoss. A payment of debt. It’s the way families and clans settle disputes. I will pay konoss with my life for hers, and konoss to Skilla with the sword, in return for his solemn promise to care for her as best he can.”

“Letting Attila rally his troops with this symbol, after all we did to get it here,” Zerco accused, “so one woman can be given to one Hun, instead of burned!”

“Yes.” I shrugged. “I can’t bear the thought of her dying, not after so many others have died. Could you bear the thought of losing Julia, Zerco?”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then Aetius spoke again.

“I acknowledge your willingness to sacrifice, but do you really think I’ll let you take the sword for such a pointless exchange?”

“Not take it, exactly.”

“What then?”

I explained my plan.

They were quiet a longer time now, turning over the risk in their minds.

“Attila must be distraught and defeated if he is planning to throw himself on a pyre,” Aetius finally said.

“Indeed.”

“My own army is in no better shape. My men have endured casualties on a scale none of us have ever imagined, and the havoc is threatening to break our alliance. Thorismund leads the Visigoths after the death of his father, but his brothers thirst for the kingship just as much as he does. The Visigoths who charged with such implacable fury and unbroken unity at sunset will be a divided people by dawn.

Similarly, Anthus has been satisfied with the body of Cloda and fears further sacrifice. The Franks have already fought two days in a row. Sangibanus hates me for putting him and his Alans in the center. The Olibriones scarcely have endurance to go another day; they are not young men. And so on. Our horses need more water. Our war machines are short of ammunition. Our quivers are empty. All the problems that plague the Huns plague us as well. But we have one more.

Attila is a tyrant, and as long as he lives he can keep his coalition of Huns and subject tribes united by fear. My power, in contrast, is simple persuasion, and only the threat of Attila has persuaded our nations to unite. Even as Attila threatens to destroy the Western Empire, he has perversely welded it together. If he’s annihilated in our attack tomorrow, our own unity disappears instantly and with it the influence of Rome. Our allies won’t need us anymore. Attila is as necessary to Aetius as Satan is necessary to God.”

I was puzzled. “You want him to prevail?”

“I want him to survive. Neither of us can afford an attack tomorrow. But if he withdraws crippled but with face, I have the tool—fear of the Hun—that I need to keep the West together. Two days ago, his existence was the greatest threat to Rome. Tomorrow, his absence would be the greatest threat.

I’ve held this Empire together for thirty years by balancing one force against another, and it’s how I’m going to hold it now. I need him to retreat, demoralized, but not lose.”

“Then you’ll give me a chance to try this?”

The general sighed. “It is risky. But the sword has done what it can in my hand.”

I grinned, dizzy with relief and fear.

Zerco laughed at my expression. “Only an amateur fool, exhausted by battle and heartsick with love, would come up with an idea as absurd as yours, Jonas Alabanda!” He nodded, to confirm this judgment to himself. “And only a professional fool, like me, could think of absurdities to improve it!”

XXIX

I

THE LAAGER OF ATTILA

Skilla and I struggled across a battlefield as treacherous as a marsh. The moon had set to a deeper darkness but now the sky was blushing in the east, giving barely enough light to illuminate the grotesque path we must take. We stepped carefully to avoid the blades, arrows, spear tips, shards of shattered armor, and bodies. On and on the havoc stretched, thousands upon thousands upon thousands. Worst were those who were still alive, twitching feebly, crawling blind as snails, or begging pitifully for water. We had none, so we passed quickly by. There were too many! By the time we drew near the Hun encampment, I was finally and forever done with war.

Once more I had strapped the great sword of Mars on my back, but this time it felt like I was carrying a cross. Could this gamble possibly work? I was about to find again, and possibly lose forever, the one person I truly cared about.

Having once escaped the lion’s den, I was walking back into it. Fool, indeed.

Skilla had tethered his pony on the field’s edge, a dark silhouette with neck down as it munched dew-wet grass, oblivious to the historic carnage. Nearby was another horse with a form that seemed gladly familiar.

“We will ride, not walk, to see Attila,” he said. “I brought your horse.”

“Diana!”

“I added her to my string after you fled.” He turned to me in the pearl gray light and grinned that familiar flash of teeth. “She’s only good for milking, but I kept her anyway.”

Suddenly I felt a rush of a feeling of brotherhood with this man, this Hun, this barbarian, that so flooded my body that it felt disorienting. My most hated enemy had become, after Ilana, the one I felt closest to: closer, even, than Zerco.

We were partners trying to save a life, instead of taking one.

And yet I was planning to betray him.

We mounted and rode. My Roman dress drew attention, of course, but Skilla was well known even in this vast army, and the light had grown strong enough that he was easily recognizable. Huns sentries rose warily from the meadow grass but stepped aside to let us pass. We reached the great circle of Hun wagons, a laager half a mile in diameter with similar, smaller laagers scattered about it like moons. Weary Hun ponies grazed between in vast herds. Ranks of Hun archers still slept in the shadow of the wagons, ready to be roused if the Romans advanced.

Our horses jumped one of the wagon yokes and we went on, encountering a second line of wagons inside it, like the second wall of Constantinople. I wondered if Edeco had recommended this from his memories of my home city. We jumped that as well and came to the tents and the awful, carefully prepared funeral pyre of Attila. The pyre towered twenty feet high, a riotous jumble of saddles both fine and plain, silks, tapestries, carved furniture, furs, robes, jewelry, perfumes, staffs, and standards. Much had been looted in just the past few months. Clearly the kagan intended to not only take his own life if the Romans broke through but also prevent them from capturing his possessions.

I recognized Ilana, huddled against the heap of saddles, and my heart was wrenched. She was asleep, or at least slumped, with her eyes closed. I had expected a beaten and emaciated slave, but instead she was dressed in a spectacu-lar silken gown and dotted with jewelry. What did this mean? Had Attila taken her as a wife or concubine? Was this last journey for nothing?

I touched Skilla’s arm, stopping him and his horse. “Listen. I want you to promise to care for Ilana and take her far away from this place, far from all these armies.”

“What?” He looked at me in confusion.

“Attila is not going to let us go. You know that. But he may let you go, with Ilana, if I offer myself as konoss. My life and the sword in recompense for the fire at his palace, in return for yours and Ilana’s.”

He looked at me in disbelief. “I did not bring you here to die, Roman. If I wanted that, I’d kill you myself.”

“It’s not what you want but what Attila wants. Think!

This is Ilana’s only chance—to be given to you. Attila will expect you to marry her and serve him. But give me your word you’ll slip away from this madness so she can live a normal life. You’ve seen the Empire, Skilla. Live with her within it.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “You never understand a thing, Roman! I’ve seen your Empire and I don’t like it! Too many people, too many possessions, too many laws!”

“But it’s her world. She’ll never be happy in yours. You know this, and you must accept it. This is what you must promise, if I give myself as konoss.”

“And if I don’t?”

I reached behind my back to loosen the big sword, lifting it clear and laying it across the front of my saddle. “Then I will die trying to kill Attila, Ilana will probably perish, and you yourself will be crucified for bringing me to his tent.”

He shook his head in disgust, troubled by my proposal, and it occurred to me that perhaps he felt fellowship for me as I felt for him: that perhaps he had sought me out on the battlefield not just from calculation but from loneliness. It’s also unlikely he fully trusted me. But finally he shrugged.

“Very well, sacrifice yourself. I will go wherever Ilana asks me to take her.”

“Thank you.” I gave a slight bow, strangely content. All my diplomacy had led to catastrophic slaughter, and all my efforts to free Ilana had led to her being imprisoned more hopelessly than ever. Bargaining my own life, after the sacrifice of so many others, felt oddly liberating.

I’d expected, however, some degree of surprise and gratitude. Instead, he seemed to regard me with irritated impatience. “Just don’t kill yourself until we get Ilana.”

We rode the last few yards and dismounted. How bizarre this reunion with Attila seemed! Here I was, a lone Roman amid thousands of Huns after the worst battle on Earth. Men clustered around us like sniffing dogs. One, with a bloody bandage, looked particularly familiar and I peered closer. It was Eudoxius, the Greek doctor! Here he was, in the army he’d dreamed of, and his old nemesis Aetius might crush him at any moment. He recognized me, too, and his look was one of loathing.

Not just Ilana but a dozen beautifully dressed women were linked with light chains to the pyre, awake now and looking frightened. Attila’s lust for conquest had led his people to disaster, and if he must die he wanted to bring those closest to him down with him.

Ilana herself was looking at Skilla and me with wonder.

She’d come groggily awake at the noise of our approach, and then her eyes had widened with recognition in the growing morning light. She seemed bewildered by our apparent partnership: We stood together as allies, both of us spattered with dried blood and grimed with the filth of combat. Then she saw the sword and her eyes clouded. I knew she wanted Roman victory, and revenge on Attila, more than her own life.

The kagan erupted from his tent.

If the Scourge of God had slept at all, it was in the battle mail and animal skins of yesterday, spotted with the gore of his enemies. His hair was wild and stringy, his thin beard grizzled, and his piercing eyes rimmed and red from worry, or lack of sleep. I was shocked and I think Skilla was, too: Attila seemed to have aged a decade since I’d seen him, and perhaps a decade in a day.

“You!” he cried, and I confess I jumped. I’d seen him wield power too often. But now he looked as if the shock of this battle had thrown him from the mount of reason. Never had so many Huns died so quickly. Never had Attila retired from a battlefield, victory not in his grasp. Now he was hunched behind his wagons, waiting for Aetius to finish destroying him. I hadn’t realized until this moment how decisively the Romans had won. The kagan’s spirit had been broken.

I lifted the sword for him to see. “I come from Aetius, kagan.”

He looked at me suspiciously, but instantly native crafti-ness replaced surprise. “He wants to parley?”

“No, I do.” I pointed at Ilana. “That woman is blameless for what happened in Hunuguri; I stole her from your compound, took your sword, and set the fire. Her only sin was to be kidnapped by me. I’ve come to offer konoss. I’ve brought you back the sword and for her life I offer myself. Kill me, but let the woman go.”

Attila’s eyes narrowed. He turned to Skilla. “What is your role in this?”

“I pledged I would bring back the sword. I have.”

The king grunted. “And do you still want what I promised in return?”

He nodded. “Ilana is to go with me.”

She cried out. “Jonas! This makes no—”

I interrupted. “I’ve come unarmed to save the woman I love. My life is a small price to pay for hers. Give her to Skilla, and let their blessing be on the sword of Mars.”

He looked from one of us to the other, a trio about to become two. “You care this much for a druugh? It was a Hunnish nickname for her genitals.

I swallowed. “Put me in the flames instead.”

Still Attila hesitated.

“It’s konoss, kagan,” a chieftain spoke up. “You must accept it.” I started in recognition at the voice and realized Edeco had come up. He wasn’t looking at me but at his nephew Skilla with curiosity.

The king scowled. Was this a trick? “I have to accept nothing.” His look became narrow and greedy. “Give me the sword.” His warlords were nodding, eager to have this talisman back to rally their men.

“Let her go to Skilla first.”

“Give me the sword first. Or should I just kill you now?”

I hesitated, but what choice did I have? I walked to him, and he grasped the iron haft, resting its heavy tip in the grass. We were inches apart.

His look was a half smile. “Now it will not be so easy.”

I put my own hand back on the sword. “I made a bargain.”

“Which I am going to change.” He turned his head and ordered. “Unchain the girl.”

I was sweating, despite the cool of the morning. They un-locked Ilana and she rose stiffly, perplexed and wary.

Attila raised his voice so others could hear. “She can leave, konoss will be paid, but no Roman assassin will dictate the payment.” He grinned at her. “She will choose who goes with her . . . Skilla or the Roman.”

“What?” she exclaimed.

“The other will take her place on the pyre.”

“No!”

“What madness is this, kagan?” Edeco demanded. Skilla had blanched, looking at his king in bewilderment.

“She refused a better bargain when I offered it two nights ago. So let her make one now. Which of her suitors does she choose to kill?”

“I cannot make that choice. It’s monstrous!”

“Then I will lock you back to that pyre with the other women and set fire to it now! Which one!”

I felt sick, things spiraling out of control. Where were my allies? Would Attila really kill Skilla instead of me? What kind of unjust game was this, to play with people’s lives, to threaten the three of us with the arbitrary fate he had given poor Rusticius? How many innocents must this tyrant condemn? As I watched Ilana stand there, stricken, horrified, confused, my rage boiled over. Maybe it was Chrysaphius who was right, not Aetius. Eliminate Attila and our greatest problem was solved!

I shoved, butting him; and because of the surprise, I, Attila, and the sword went sprawling on the ground. Before the surprised older man could gather himself I’d wrestled myself behind him with the blunt but still-lethal sword at his neck, dragging both of us toward the pyre so I could use it as a shield for my back. The sword was so long it was like holding a pike pole against his throat.

“This sword has become his curse!” I cried. “Harm us and I take off his head!”

“Roman trick!” Edeco roared. His hand was at his sword.

Other Huns raised weapons. But all hesitated because Attila was my shield. Eudoxius, I noticed from the corner of my eye, was slipping sideways out of sight. Now what?

“No trick, warlord!” another voice cried out. “Beware its curse, Attila!”

At last! Two figures on horseback were pushing through the small mob of Huns that was gathering around us, ignoring their angry muttering like men ignoring the growl of dogs. They were on a single horse, the smaller one looking at my desperate stance with wonder.

“So you have found a lover, Alabanda,” Zerco called.

Hun attention swung momentarily from me to the newcomers.

“Think what has happened to your people since you found that sword!” the tall one was shouting. “Think where it has been, with the Romans!”

“What is this?” Attila gasped in frustration against my hold. “Can any man in the world walk into my camp?”

A chieftain in escort fell to his knees and looked in stu-pefaction at the tableau we presented: Attila and I locked like wrestlers, Ilana and Skilla white-faced in shock, Edeco looking murderous. “He said he had an urgent message from Aetius,” the Hun pleaded. “He said if I didn’t let them through it would doom us all. I remember the dwarf. He’s a demon, lord. But most of all I remember this holy man.”

“Holy man?” Attila squinted harder. “By the gods! The hermit!”

Edeco started, too. He seemed to recognize a man I knew as Bishop Anianus.

“The halfling I loathe,” Attila said. “And you, I remember you. . . .”

“As I remember you, Scourge of God,” said Bishop Anianus. I was baffled. Had these two met? “You have scourged the West of its sins as intended. Now it is time to go back to where you crawled from. Leave the sword. The thing you lusted for has been corrupted for your kind.”

“Corrupted?”

“Bathed in holy water, blessed by high bishops, and anointed by a vial of blood from the savior. Do you think Aetius is fool enough to let this youth give back a tool of Hun power in exchange for a single woman! This is no longer the sword of Mars, Attila. It is the sword of Christ.

For you, it has been cursed, and if you take it with you, your people will be utterly destroyed.”

Attila twisted angrily, so I pressed the blade anew. “Let us go and I let you go,” I whispered.

“You dare come here to offer bad prophecy?” the king challenged the bishop.

“I come here to offer fair warning. Think! Could this young fool steal the sword from the tent of Aetius? Or did the general let him have it? Ask him.”

Attila twisted his head. “What is true?”

“Aetius said he wanted you to survive—”

“Think!” interrupted Anianus. “That sword has brought you no luck, Attila.”

I could almost feel the king calculating. “Then it curses the Romans as well,” he tried. “Look at the battlefield, warlords. They lost more than we did.”

Zerco laughed. “Which is why you cower in your laager!”

Now Edeco’s sword was half out of its sheath, but I shouted warning. “Don’t!” I bent to the king’s ear. “My life for yours. Ilana for the sword. I can’t hold you much longer.

I must slice and kill us both, or leave.”

There was silence. Sweat spotted us both. Ilana seemed to have turned to marble. Skilla seemed dazed by all that was happening.

Finally Attila grunted. “All right.” None of us moved, not certain we had heard him right. “Go. You and the witch. Go, and be a plague on Aetius instead! You’ve both cursed my camp since you came to it. Leave the sword and I give you safe passage.”

I sensed movement at the edge of the pyre, coming behind me. We didn’t have much time. “I have your word?”

“You have my word. But if I see you in battle again, I will kill you.”

I released him and stepped away, holding the old sword at the ready and careful of treachery. Attila’s eyes were like the point of a spear, but he made no move toward me and issued no command. Eudoxius, I saw, had been trying to sneak behind the pyre to get a shot at my back with a bow and arrow, but now he stopped, too, the arrow half drawn.

Attila rubbed the red welt at his neck. “The sword, Roman.”

Stooping carefully, I laid it in the grass, then began backing for Diana. “I need a horse for Ilana,” I said.

“Give her one,” the kagan growled.

I swung up onto Diana and Ilana mounted her horse.

Skilla looked at us with quiet sadness, finally accepting that he’d never have her.

“Skilla, come with us,” I tried.

He straightened then, proud, contemptuous, confident. “I am a Hun,” he said simply.

“Skilla . . .” Ilana spoke, her voice breaking. “I know what you’ve—”

“Get out of here,” Attila interrupted, “before I change my mind.”

Skilla nodded. I wanted to offer my strange enemy-friend something, but what? Not Ilana. She was quietly weeping, tears running down her cheeks.

“Go,” Skilla said in a choked voice. “Go, go, Romans, and stop corrupting us.”

“Now!” Zerco whispered urgently.

I was dazed that I was alive, that Ilana was behind me, that Anianus had appeared, that the sword I had carried so long lay untouched in the grass. Our horses began to move, Huns reluctantly stepped aside, our own lines glinting on the horizon. It might work!

I heard a familiar voice. “Here’s a better ending, kagan.”

Our heads swiveled and I saw Eudoxius, his face con-torted with hatred, draw his bow. The iron of the arrowhead trembled slightly as he aimed at Ilana.

“No!”

He shot as Skilla leaped without thinking, trying to spoil the aim. Instead the arrow struck him and the Hun was pitched forward by the impact, falling onto his back. He looked in disbelief at the shaft jutting from his breast.

Eudoxius gaped in horror.

“A Hun keeps his word,” Skilla gasped, a red froth at his lips.

There was a roar of outrage, and the Greek turned and flinched. Edeco’s sword came whistling down and cleaved the doctor nearly in two.

“Now, now!” Zerco cried. “Ride! Ride for our lives!”

Attila howled and picked the great iron sword out of the grass with two hands and came running at us like a madman.

I kicked my horse between him and Ilana, and he swung, hard, and narrowly missed. I felt the wind of the passage.

The massive blade cracked the rim of my saddle, nearly buckling Diana.

And broke. The old iron shattered into fragments that flew like a broken glass, spinning at the circle of startled Huns and making them duck in superstitious horror. The Hun king looked at the iron hilt in disbelief.

“You have cursed yourself!” Anianus shouted.

Then we kicked and bent low over our horses. A Hun had stepped out to grab my reins, and I rode over him. Then another caught at Ilana, dragging. I looked. The German girl Guernna! My love clubbed with her fist and the slave dropped away, braids flapping as she rolled.

The wall of the inner laager loomed, and we made for the low wagon tongues. Now a couple arrows buzzed past but they were high, the archers fearful of hitting fellow Huns.

Shouts rang out, but they were ones of confusion. Who had shot Skilla? Who had Edeco killed? What had seemed to be an orderly parley had turned into chaos.

I glanced back. Attila and Edeco were frozen, staring at the shards of the sword. My file had done its work.

I let Ilana get ahead of me and saw her horse bunch and jump. In an instant, I followed her over the wagon trace.

Now we had the inner laager obscuring and shielding us from the Huns at Attila’s tent and we sprinted for the outer one, some Huns just now waking up, groggily staggering to their feet as we galloped past.

We blasted through a campfire, scattering pots and people, and came to the second laager. A few Huns moved to stop us but they were bowled over. Again we leaped, hooves clicking as they nicked the edges of the wagons, and then we were onto the battlefield beyond, racing over the forms of the dead. Something winked up high, and I glanced up to see missiles falling. “Arrows!” I shouted.

They hissed as they fell around us, but none struck.

Now Romans were shooting in return. Ilana rode grimly on, arrows plunking the ground, her gaze horrified as she saw closely for the first time the full butchery that had occurred, the endless carpet of bodies. We rode fast amid and over them. Then we were past even that horror, men cheering Anianus, and finally reined up at the compound of Aetius. Winded, I looked back in wonder. Attila’s laager was two miles safely behind, and Ilana was flushed and bright beside me.

We were free.

The Roman general was already mounted and in armor, ready for battle if it came to that. “What happened?”

“Skilla saved us,” Zerco said.

“And the sword broke,” Anianus added. “A sign from God.”

The general nodded. “Indeed.” He smiled knowingly at me.

“When I held it to Attila’s throat I feared it might break instead of cut.”

“Attila’s throat!”

“It’s called diplomacy, general. He’s alive, demoralized, and beaten, as you wished.”

Aetius shook his head, as dazzled as I by the turn of events. “And this is the woman you were ready to risk whole nations for?”

“You helped save her from burning.”

“I can see why. So, what will Attila do next, young diplomat?”

I took breath and considered. “He seemed in shock at the battle and at the shattering of the sword. If you give him the chance, I think he’ll withdraw.”

“Bishop, do you agree?”

“I think his followers will take its breakage as evidence of Christian power, commander. I’d hold my attack. If you advance, you may win or lose, but if you wait . . .”

“I don’t think men will follow my advance. They’re too sickened.”

“Then guard your lines, gather your dead, and pray. What you began yesterday with your victory, Alabanda has finished today with that sword.”

I was reeling with exhaustion, sorrow, and exultation.

Skilla dead, the sword broken, Ilana back, Attila beaten . . .

She put her hand on my arm. “Let’s go home,” she whispered.

But where, after all we’d seen and done, was home?

Once more the horizon was filled with smoke, but this time of retreat, not advance. Attila did not ignite his pyre, but he burned surplus wagons and the plundered goods that were too numerous for his depleted army to carry. Then he started back the way he’d come, his invasion of Gaul over. Aetius followed slowly and at careful distance, not anxious to provoke another fight. The Visigoths peeled away to take their fallen king back to Tolosa. Anthus rode out with his Franks to solidify his claim. The huge assembly was breaking up.

The thunderclouds rumbled on and on and then finally let loose a torrent of rain that began to wash away the bloody pollution of the tiny brook. Armor began to rust, bones to powder, seeds to sprout. The greatest struggle of the age began to sink slowly into the earth.

Zerco and Julia elected to remain in the entourage of Aetius. “I’m too malformed to live an ordinary life,” he told me, “and too easily bored to lead a serious one. My future is with the general.”

“It’s still a dangerous road.”

“But not boring. See if you don’t join me on it, after you farm a year or two.”

Aetius had given ample money for my services, and offered far more if I’d stay and serve as aide and diplomat. I was not tempted. Ilana and I went west.

I will say little of our reunion, as it was a private thing, except there were a thousand things to say and a thousand things that could go unsaid. Anianus married us in a grove of poplar. We clung to each other afterward like limpets holding fast to a rock against a raging sea, until our lovemaking left us sated and exhausted. Then we rode with the bishop back toward Aurelia, away from Attila.

What were we looking for? We didn’t know, and scarcely spoke of it. There were a thousand depopulated farms we could have stopped at, but each seemed to hold too many memories of the families who had lived there. So we came to Aurelia and passed by its battlements, finally taking a boat down the Loire River. How lazy the summer current was, and how soothing! When we met people who wanted to share rumors of the movement of armies, we ignored them.

We didn’t want to know.

At last we stopped at a high-banked island in the river, a mile-long refuge from the tumult of the world, its grass tall and yellow and the air golden with late summer. Flowers spilled down its banks, birds flitted through the lacy trees, and insects gave a soft buzz. We walked its length, burrs of seeds clinging to our clothes.

My purse was enough to hire labor to build a house and farm, I judged. Here was the land I’d fought for, against all expectation, and here new nations were rising from the ashes of the old. The West had been saved but changed, irrevocably. The Empire was passing. It had fought its last great battle. Something different—something we and our children would forge—was taking its place.

We walked the meadows of the island to choose a house site, eating wild apples in the sun. My initial preference was for its eastern end. “So we can look back to where we came from,” I told Ilana.

She shook her head, walking me back through the trees to the island’s western point, facing the warm afternoon sun.

“I want to look to the future,” she whispered.

So we did.

EPILOGUE

Attila was defeated at the battle of Châlons, in A.D. 451, but at Aetius’s urging was not destroyed. The balance of power that “the Last of the Romans” tried to achieve among the barbarians required that the Huns be contained but not extinguished. Had Aetius not used Hun warriors many times to chastise other tribes? Did Attila’s threat not justify the continuation of the Roman Empire? It was the grimmest kind of realpolitik, but wise in its realism. Attila would never truly recover from Châlons, and in all the centuries hence, no eastern barbarian would ever penetrate that far again. The alliance had saved Europe.

History did not stop, of course. The emperor Valentinian, who had hidden in Rome during the bitter contest, was as jealous of the great victory as he was thankful for it. He grasped at this news of peace and mercy. He also blamed Aetius for letting Attila get away.

Certainly the Hun’s ambitions were not yet sated. After licking his wounds, Attila invaded northern Italy the following year with his depleted army, hoping to rebuild his reputation by sacking Rome itself. But his weary forces entered a region suffering from famine and plague. Disease killed more Huns than swords did. When Pope Leo met Attila to plead that he spare Rome, the kagan was looking for an excuse to retreat. It was his last great campaign.

The next year Attila took another bride, a young beauty named Idilco, as if to assuage his failure. But after bringing her to his bed on his wedding night, he had a nosebleed while in a drunken stupor. In A.D. 453, he drowned in his own blood.

His bizarre death marked the end of the Hun empire.

None of his heirs had the charisma to unite the Huns as Attila had, nor to hold other tribes in thrall. The Huns tore themselves to bits, a storm that had passed.

The success of Aetius doomed him in the jealous eyes of the Western emperor, of course, who took the general by surprise by leaping from his throne and running him through with a sword just one year after Attila’s death. A year later, in 455, the general’s followers assassinated Valentinian. Just as Attila was the last great Hun to make his people a menace, Aetius was the last great Roman to hold the Empire together. With his death, disintegration of the West into new barbarian kingdoms accelerated. Within a generation, the Western Empire was no more. The vision of Romulus seemed indeed to have come to pass.

And Honoria, the vain and foolish princess who had helped start such great events? She too disappeared from history, a Pandora who haunts the fields of Châlons.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Few subjects are more deserving of the label “historical fiction” than a novel about Attila the Hun. The most un-believable things about this story—the plea to Attila for rescue by a Roman princess, the assassination plot of Chrysaphius, the mutilation of Theodoric’s daughter by the Vandals, the sword that Attila claimed came from the god of war, and the existence of such characters as the rebel Eudoxius and the dwarf Zerco—are true. It is the prosaic details of how the people of the fifth century dressed, ate, traveled, and lived that must be surmised and guessed at by the novelist, from the meager findings of archaeological and historical research. The few Roman commentaries we have of the period pay little attention to the everyday details we would find so fascinating now, and this author was pressed into using more educated invention than I would have preferred. What I have described is as accurate as I could make it, based not just on book research but on exhibits in France, Austria, Germany, and Hungary, and Roman archaeological sites across Europe. This novel is not an anthropology text, however. Even the most tireless scholars of the Huns admit to how little we truly know.

Since the Huns and the barbarian nations they encountered had no written language, our primary information about them comes from the Romans and Greeks, who understandably had their own prejudices on the subject. The archaeological record is meager because steppe nomads could carry only a small amount of material with them, almost all of it perishable. The Huns minted no coins, carved no stones, forged no tools, sowed no crops, and made no permanent likenesses of their kings. There is gold jewelry that can be attributed to their era, and some pottery and bronze cauldrons that almost certainly belonged to them, even if made by someone else. We know the stories of head flattening are true because we have Hun skulls that show the deliberate deformity. But their songs, legends, and language have vanished. We have far more information on much older societies, such as the Babylonians, or more exotic ones, such as the Mayans, or more geographically remote ones, such as the Eskimo, than we do the Huns.

It is all the more fascinating, then, that with the possible exception of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun is the most famous barbarian in world history. In fact, he’s the one barbarian king whose name ordinary folk, uninterested in history, recognize in casual conversation—even if they aren’t precisely sure who he was or what he did. That Attila remains so well known after nearly sixteen centuries is tes-tament to the tremendous impact he had on the imagination of the world, during a reign briefer than Adolf Hitler’s. To the people they attacked, the Huns became synonymous with catastrophe, invasion, and darkness. The Hun legend remained powerful for century after century: so much so that Allied propagandists in World Wars I and II could invent no greater insult than to call the Germans “the Huns.” Never mind that it was the ancient Germanic nations who were in the forefront of resistance to the steppe nomads! Just as Nazism as a potent movement disappeared with the death of Hitler, the Hun empire crumbled with the death of Attila.

His end meant the end of the Huns as a threat to Europe.

We have no reliable portrait of Attila. The medallion on the jacket of this novel is a gripping portrait, but it was drawn centuries later and only loosely fits the verbal descriptions we have of the great king. The addition of devil-like goat horns in the hair suggests that the artist exercised considerable freedom of expression. Attila’s exact birth date, early life, rise to power, detailed military tactics, and precise methods of administration are mostly unknown. His burial place has never been found, and the circumstances of his death remain a mystery. Some contend that he indeed drowned in his blood after a drunken stupor, but others have theorized that he must have been murdered. In terms of empire, it could be argued he had no lasting influence on the politics of Europe. Yet Attila is the one barbarian we remember. Why?

The only parallel to this irony that I can think of is Jesus of Nazareth, another for whom we have no likeness and who seemed to die ignominiously, only to become the source of one of the world’s great religions. While opposites in their careers and purpose, both men obviously had a charisma that left a permanent impression, and a legend and legacy far greater than the immediate facts of their own brief lives.

In Attila’s case, the reason he is remembered, I believe, is because of the threat he represented and the immense sacrifice that was required to stop him. Simply put, if Attila had not been defeated at the Battle of Châlons (also known as Maurica, for a Roman crossroads, or the Battle of Nations or the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields) the remnants of Roman civilization preserved by the Christian Church would have been extinguished. The rise of Western Europe would have taken far longer, or it might have been simply absorbed by Islamic or Byzantine civilization, and the planet’s history of exploration, conquest, and development would have played out far differently. The fact that Pope Leo helped persuade Attila to retreat from Italy in 452, which was trumpeted by the Church as a miracle, obviously added to the barbarian’s legend. The more menacing Attila seems, the more miraculous the pope’s success appears. Similarly, in the Nordic and German legend the Nibelungenlied, Attila is the basis for the character of Etzel, evidence of how he passed from history into song. In that saga, Etzel is the King of the Huns who the vengeful widow Kriemhild marries and who murders on her behalf: playing a role in story not too different, perhaps, from his role in life. The story of great Eastern invasion echoes and reechoes in Western literature, down to Tolkien’s use of it in The Lord of the Rings. The Avars would come in the seventh century, the Magyars in the tenth, the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the Turks would besiege the gates of Vienna in the seventeenth century, and the Soviets would conquer in the twentieth. Attila’s story resonates so strongly because it is, in part, Europe’s story.

This opinion of the importance of Attila, argued by Gib-bon in his classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in the nineteenth century by historians such as Edward Creasy in his book Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, is not as popular among modern historians today. Scholars make their reputation by debunking the theories of their predecessors, and some argue that, unlike Genghis Khan, Attila essentially failed as both conqueror and empire maker. To them, Châlons was but an episode in a long saga of Roman decay and the Huns a people who vanished like smoke. All that Flavius Aetius, “the Last of the Romans,”

achieved at the battle, they contend, was brief continuation of a dying status quo. That Aetius let Attila survive and retreat would seem to make the campaign of 451 even less significant.

Added to this dismissal is disbelief that the Battle of Châlons-sur-Marne (which actually is believed to have occurred closer to present-day Troyes, France) was anything near the titanic struggle portrayed by ancient and medieval historians. These chroniclers suggest numbers engaged of five hundred thousand to a million men, and a death count of one hundred sixty thousand to three hundred thousand soldiers. Such estimates indeed seem fantastic, prone to the hyperbolic exaggeration of the early Dark Ages. Modern scholars routinely cut estimates of the numbers engaged and casualties inflicted in some ancient battles (but not others, for reasons never clear to this author) to a tenth or less, simply out of disbelief in such staggering figures.

I endorse a view somewhere between these ancients and moderns. Just as believers in Christianity argue that something happened after Jesus’ death to spark a new religion, however improbable the Resurrection is for some to swallow, so I suggest that something so set Attila’s campaign in Gaul apart from the ordinary barbarian invasion that the memory of it reverberates to the present day. “The fight grew fierce, confused, monstrous, unrelenting—a fight whose like no ancient time has ever recorded,” wrote the late ancient chronicler Jordanes. “In this most famous war of the bravest tribes, one hundred sixty thousand men are said to have been slain on both sides.” The writer Idiatus puts the number killed at three hundred thousand.

Given that the total casualties of the American Civil War’s bloodiest single day, at Antietam, were twenty-three thousand, such a number seems improbable in the extreme.

How could the armies of late antiquity supply, move, and command such numbers? And yet something extraordinary happened at Châlons. Ancient armies, particularly barbarian ones, required none of the complex supply we take for granted today: Great numbers might indeed have been assembled for a season’s campaigning. What American would believe in the days before Pearl Harbor that by 1945, the United States—with half its present population—could afford to have enlisted sixteen million men and women under arms? Or that the Soviet Union could absorb twenty million dead in that war and still be counted one of the winners? Or that at Woodstock, New York, half a million young people would assemble for an outdoor rock concert in the rain?

People do extraordinary things. Attila’s greatest battle was probably one of them, though its precise details will never be known. Even its location is vague. Personal inspection of the beautifully rolling countryside between Châlons and Troyes showed a hundred places that fit the vague details of hill and stream described by Jordanes. French military officers have made a hobby of looking for the battlefield, without success. This imprecision is not unusual. The exact site of many decisive ancient battles such as Cannae, Plataea, Issus, and Zama are not known. The ancients didn’t make battlefields into parks.

We are hampered because our primary sources about the Huns are so meager. There are three that seem primary. One is the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote of the early Huns. Another is Olympiodorus of Thebes, whose account of a visit to the Huns was lost but who was used as a source in the surviving accounts by other ancient historians. A third is Priscus of Panium, who accompanied the ill-fated embassy, with its assassination plot, to Attila.

He is the inspiration (though the real historian was older and better connected) for Jonas. It is probably a lost fragment of Priscus that provides the later Jordanes with a vivid word picture of Attila: “Haughty in his carriage, casting his eyes about him on all sides so that the proud man’s power was to be seen in the very movement of his body . . . He was short of stature with a broad chest, massive head, and small eyes.

His beard was thin and sprinkled with gray, his nose flat, and his complexion swarthy, showing thus the signs of his origins.”

What was the Hun homeland? We don’t know. Some scholars put their starting point as far east as Mongolia, others on the steppes of Russia. Their origin was a mystery to the Romans, but legend has them appearing on the world stage after following a white deer across the marshes at the Straits of Kerch into the Crimea.

So, what in this novel is “true”? All the principal characters, with the exception of Jonas, Ilana, and Skilla, are real-life historical figures. I’ve invented details of their lives and words to fit my story, but their general role is fairly accurate.

My depiction of the embassy to Attila and the campaign of 451 roughly follows the occasionally confusing account we have from Priscus and other historians. The “facts” include a possible conspiracy by the Huns and King Sangibanus to betray Aurelia (Orléans), and Attila’s desperate construction of a funeral pyre after the awful battle. Yet even the most basic points, such as whether Orléans was really besieged, or whether Attila really built the pyre, are recorded in some accounts but not in others. Such are the problems of the history of late antiquity.

To research this book I’ve not only read what accounts we have but also retraced Attila’s likely invasion route in Europe. I visited museums, looked at surviving artifacts, and did my best to bring back to life a period of extremely complex politics and culture. The task is not easy because no nation wants to claim the Huns. Even the Hungarian National Museum, while it does have a single room briefly discussing this mysterious people, declines to point out that its nation’s name stems from them. While Attila is still a popular name in Hungary and Budapest even premiered a rock opera about the famed king in 1993, the country prefers to date its origin from the Magyars.

Yet what a pity that records are not more complete! Recent studies have tended to cast “barbarians” in a more favorable light. Perhaps the Huns deserve better. And my suspicion is that the reality of that tumultuous time was far stranger than what I have imagined. It must have produced true stories, now lost, of conflict and heroism as fascinating as those in the Wild West. How people must have struggled to keep their footing on the cracking ice of the Roman Empire!

I have invented a great deal in my plot, of course. There is no recorded theft of the great sword; all we have is mention of its existence. (Hungarian royalty actually claimed to have rediscovered the sword six centuries later.) As far as we know, Zerco was merely an unfortunate jester, not an imperial spy, though he was married as described and traded back and forth between Aetius and Attila. While Eudoxius did lead an unsuccessful revolt against Rome and fled to Attila, there is no record of his being an envoy to the Vandals— even though the threat that Gaiseric represented to Rome did enter into Attila’s strategic thinking. Bishop Anianus did rally troops on the walls of Aurelia, and a hermit did call Attila “the Scourge of God,” but my suggestion that the two are the same person is fictional. There is no report of a fire at Attila’s palace set by a woman named Ilana, and Jonas’s pivotal role in great events is, alas, made up. In short, I freely embroidered already fascinating history to tell a good yarn.

I must also apologize for inflicting on the reader a vast and confusing geography of world war at a time when names were in flux. Caesar’s Gaul, for example, was actually by this time known more by the names of its Roman provinces, such as Aquitania. The Frankish triumph that 348

H I S T O R I C A L N O T E

would give it the name France was still in the future. The Celtic city of Cenabum had become the Roman city of Aurelia or Aurelionum, evolving into the French city of Or-léans. To help orient modern readers, Constantinople is today’s Istanbul, the ruined city of Naissus is the Balkan city of Nisˇ, the abandoned fort of Aquincum is in the suburbs of Budapest, the Roman tower that Skilla attacks is southeast of Austria’s Salzburg, the “wasps” of Sumelocenna are in modern-day Rottenburg, Augusta Treverorum is Germany’s Trier, and Tolosa became France’s Toulouse.

Who was Attila? What did he mean to history? In many ways his story is as foggy, and fascinating, as that of King Arthur. One thing we do know. The kingdoms that survived the assault of the Huns and the collapse of the Romans, evolved into Western Europe—and thus the civilization that still dominates the world today. When those ancient and doughty warriors beat back the Huns, they laid the foundation for our modern security. To go to the farmland around Troyes and imagine the ghosts of tens of thousands of charging cavalrymen, deciding the fate of the world is a moving experience.

A reader can also visit the island on which Jonas and Ilana finally settled. It’s in the Loire River at the town of Amboise in the heart of French château country, the only island high enough in that region to escape frequent flooding.

Near where the couple’s home stood there is a splendid view westward of the river and its gentle valley.

There is also a sad war memorial, partially sunken into the earth, recording the names of local men killed in recent wars. Unsurprisingly, a section on that memorial has been left blank, providing room for future inscriptions.

So does history march on.

About the Author

WILLIAM DIETRICH, author of Hadrian’s Wall, is a novelist, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, historian, and naturalist who lives on an island in Washington State. Visit his website at www.williamdietrich.com.

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Praise for Pulitzer Prize winner WILLIAM DIETRICH

and

THE SCOURGE OF GOD

“Fascinating . . . Late antiquity hasn’t produced many historical novels, despite being packed with events and characters so bizarre that they verge on the surreal. Novelist William Dietrich . . . is one of the few who have undertaken to mine the drama from this neglected age . . . Dietrich’s fictional characters . . . are recognizable and credible . . . He effectively depicts the butchery, confusion, and chaos of the ancient battlefield . . . An immensely readable glimpse of what the death struggle between Rome and Attila might have been like.”

Tacoma News Tribune

“Full of rich, often gruesome detail, woven through with raw passion, this historical novel depicts Attila and his Huns in a welcome light: barbarians, albeit savage, yet refreshingly human . . . For readers who find history books dull and dry, Dietrich has the antidote.”

Seattle Times

“Rousing . . . The story unfolds swiftly and satisfyingly.”

Publishers Weekly

“[Dietrich writes] page-turning historical fiction seething with action, adventure, and romance.”

Booklist

“[A] strong novel . . . Well researched and told in a language that makes the reader believe . . . Reading

[ The Scourge of God] is a very good idea.”

Oregon Statesman Journal

Books by William Dietrich

Fiction

THE SCOURGE OF GOD

HADRIAN’S WALL

DARK WINTER

GETTING BACK

ICE REICH