Attila: The Gathering of the Storm

by William Napier

  One twilight evening, an old crone scuttled into the palace and was led to that darkened chamber. There, to cries of the utmost distress, she performed her horrible craft with abortifacient herbs: tansy and mugwort, asafoetida, called ‘devil’s dung’ from its foul smell, and infusions of boiled pennyroyal. Once these ancient and unhallowed emmenagogues had begun to take effect, and the poor girl’s innards felt as if they were being crushed in a giant fist, the old crone had the girl held down and splayed, while she peered and delved and dragged with specula and long, hooked needles. Finally she pulled forth the swollen purple remnants of a three-month old foetus, which she tied up in filthy linen rags and tossed into a pail by her side. Mopping up the copious blood and tissue, she said by way of consoling the girl that the creature would not have lived anyway, for its spine was badly deformed.

  Honoria lay in silence for more than a week, her mind moving through blank despair to grief, to bitterness, recrimination, and thoughts of blackest revenge. Even confined as she was, she managed to establish communication with others in the palace and beyond, in return for the promise of rich future rewards. Her plot was no less than to have her idiot brother murdered, and Eugenius, her slave-born lover, placed on the throne in his stead. It is hard to know whether to laugh at her audacity, or pity her naivety in thinking that an empire can be so easily overturned.

  The plot was discovered, and she narrowly escaped with her life. Valentinian, in hysterical rage, wanted her killed instantly, and swore he would do it himself, ‘with a brooch-pin if necessary’. Galla restrained him, and persuaded him that his troublesome sister would be better sent into exile far away. The chamberlain Eugenius, needless to say, was put to death in the slowest and most horrible way, with prolonged and multiple tortures applied especially to those manly parts which had caused such disgrace to the imperial family. But let us not dwell. Some punishments may be just, but not edifying.

  A few hours later, in the middle of the night, there was a knock at the door of Princess Honoria’s prison chamber. Her silence was taken as consent. The heavy door was unbolted from the outside, and a large silver platter covered with a cloth of crimson velvet was set beside the girl’s couch where she lay. Too young and innocent still to suspect what she should have suspected, she leaned down and drew off the cloth and saw what was there. Her screams of horror were heard through half the palace.

  Eventually the princess, broken of spirit and blank of face, was taken from her prison-chamber and led to the women’s quarters, where she was dressed and coiffed as plainly as a nun, and sent under guard down to the port of Ostia. Thence she took ship for Constantinople. And once there, she was kept a virtual prisoner in barred chambers, in a high tower of Theodosius’ imperial palace, under the grim supervision of the chaste and unsmiling Pulcheria. Honoria was the only non-virgin among a bevy of dreary chanting virgins.

  It was to be twelve long years before the world heard of her again. But when it did - when her extraordinary plan, long hatched in the bitterness of her heart at last came to vengeful fruition - the world itself was shaken to its roots. Ultimately, indeed, the Western Empire was destroyed as much by the vengeance of Honoria as by anything. Never underestimate the power of a beautiful woman, who is prepared to use her beauty in the pursuit of power. As Helen was the doom of Troy - so Honoria was the doom of Rome.

  More recently, a secret messenger from the Huns had come to the court of Constantinople from one Bleda, who called himself the rightful King of the Huns. He brought strange news: fat, gold-greedy old King Ruga had been murdered on his throne by a mysterious newcomer from out of the wilderness, Attila, a lost son of the royal house now grown to manhood. Theodosius heard the message and was troubled, and sent the news on to Galla Placidia in Ravenna, for she knew more of the Huns than he did. They were a coarse, half-animal people who had lived peacefully and almost forgotten somewhere beyond the Pannonian borders for more than a generation. But Theodosius was troubled, nevertheless, and felt he had some vague memory of this new name among them. He had heard stories, when a child ...

  In Ravenna, Galla received the message personally. Her expression was one that her son had never seen before, and it surprised him.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Mother? What is it?’

  She looked ashen grey, shocked, angered, and afraid all at once. At first she could barely answer, shaking her head in disbelief. At last she said, ‘The Huns have a new king.’

  ‘Those malodorous, slitty-eyed horsemen? Well? What of it?’ Valentinian sneered. ‘They wear fur jackets stitched from the skins of fieldmice, I heard!’

  ‘They do not wear the skins of fieldmice,’ said Galla in a curious, flat tone. ‘They wear hardened-leather body armour. Sometimes the skins of wolves, which their boys kill at the age of twelve as an initiation rite, out in the wild, armed with only a single spear.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ said Valentinian. He sat back and crossed his arms.

  She appeared to ignore him, looking far away, somewhere.

  Valentinian felt a spasm of anger with his mother - a not infrequent sensation. She was so ... superior. How did she know all this? Who was actually emperor, anyway?

  ‘They are the most dangerous of all the barbarian peoples,’ she said.

  ‘They’ve been living happily on our borders now for three decades without a murmur!’ cried Valentinian. ‘Probably a useful barrier between us and a whole lot worse out there in Scythia. The Huns are not our enemies.’

  ‘They are now,’ said Galla.

  Attila sat back and considered all that his spies had told him, stroking his wispy grey beard, his eyes glittering with amusement and quicksilver intelligence. Then he laughed, a short, abrupt bark of a laugh.

  How many weaknesses! How many faultlines in Rome’s impregnable-seeming carapace!

  Galla was still alive, and the power behind the throne in the West. That cold, green-eyed monster, the torment and torture of his boyhood years: she had hunted him across Italy like vermin, and would have killed him like a rat. But now he would return, that little rat-boy whom she would have exterminated. That little nuisance. He would return and she would quake to look him in the eye. His eye, which had seen such things . . . He would return at the head of an army of warriors as numberless as the stars. The enervated legions of Rome would barely stand and fight against them.

  She would see her world brought down in flames. The green vineyards of the Moselle, the wheatfields of Gaul, the sun-warmed olive groves of Toscana, all trampled into dust. The villas of the rich in Campania left scorched and blackened ruins in their wake. The proud palaces and temples of Rome itself, the solemn courts of law, the churches and cathedrals of the Christians, all dragged down and razed to the earth, the common clay earth, their mother, whom the Christians so haughtily despised. All of Galla’s beloved empire trampled into ruins by the horses of the Huns.

  Let her know. Let her know. It is sweet to know that she still lives, that cold, green-eyed woman. Oh, how sweet to know that she still lives. And that she will live on to see her fate come to pass and her empire fall.

  On top of that, her daughter was a slut! He jerked back his head and laughed again. Her son was Western Emperor, and as much of a fool as his uncle before him. In the East, Theodosius was no match for his grandfather, Theodosius the Great. He preferred calligraphy to battle.

  How many armies? The Western Army could still command a hundred and eighty regiments in the field, and the Eastern a further hundred and fifty. And the man who commanded them was no fool.

  His smile faded.

  Aëtius. Almost unconsciously Attila had tried to avoid thinking of him. He didn’t want this name on the mental list of his enemies. The others he would bring down and devour with pleasure, as a lion does an antelope. But Aëtius . . . A man worth killing. A man worth sparing.

  ‘His family?’ snapped Attila at his gathering of spies. He turned to a woman who had returned straight from Ravenna.

  She looked
blank.

  ‘Aëtius,’ he rasped. ‘The general.’

  She shook her head. ‘He has never married.’

  Attila looked puzzled.

  ‘They say,’ said the woman, ‘that he still loves Athenaïs, the empress.’

  ‘What has that to do with it? Doesn’t he want sons?’

  She shook her head. She did not understand, either.

  Attila sat back and brooded. The honourable lover. The honourable soldier. The last of the Romans worthy of his respect. His boyhood friend. His greatest enemy. His shadow, his nemesis.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘In the court of the Visigoths. The Court of King Theodoric, at Tolosa. He has offended Emperor Valentinian again by his plain speaking.’

  Attila smiled thinly. ‘I fear Valentinian will suffer still greater offence before long. And then he will have need of his Aëtius.’

  But he understood Aëtius’ exile.

  Such a man could not but be viewed with suspicion and sullen resentment by the craven Emperor Valentinian. Generals such as Aëtius invariably eyed the purple for themselves: so it was commonly held. Therefore it was with wearisome frequency that news was brought to Aëtius in his campaign tent: there was a plot against him, and he must flee to save his life. Sometimes the news came, so it was rumoured, from Galla Placidia herself. He would go into exile, to the court of the Franks or the Burgundians or the Visigoths, against whom he had fought all his life. Those huge, brawny, red-faced Germanic warriors always welcomed him like a brother, pressing foaming goblets of ale into his hand and urging him to stay with them for good, to ride against Rome and take it for himself. And he would sup his ale and thank them for their hospitality and say no more. When they laughed at him, he merely smiled. And when word came that the imperial court had forgiven him for whatever imaginary crime he had committed, he would mount his horse, bid his magnanimous hosts farewell, ride back south unescorted, and take up command of the Western Army again without a word of reproach.

  Such was the man the blue-eyed youth had become. How clearly Attila remembered him, standing solemnly there in the waist-high feathergrass of the steppes, the day he first set eyes on him. The tall, proud, clean-limbed boy, who spent his earliest years in the alien camp of the Huns, as Attila spent his in Rome. When they rode out together across the Scythian plains on those long summer days, all life and all the world lay bright and sunlit before them.

  Attila gruffly dismissed his spies from his presence, and passed his hand over his eyes, unfocused, deep in memories.

  They had ridden out together one day, he and Aëtius and their two slaveboys, just the four of them together, and killed that monstrous boar, and dragged it all the way back to camp! And now he learned that Aëtius, too, had spent much of his manhood life in exile from his own beloved people.

  All humour had gone from his eyes, all sardonic merriment at the absurdity of the world. Surely there was a meaning and a pattern to it after all; and the dramatist of the world was a tragedian.

  A sadness like an old man’s filled his eyes.

  That straight-limbed Roman boy, who had stepped forward with his hand on his swordhilt when Ruga struck Attila across the face, who would have drawn his sword in Attila’s defence. The two of them had lain all night on a wagonbed out on the plain for punishment, bound and tied, laughing, shivering, shouting off the jackals ...

  Oh, Aëtius.

  O you gods. You gods.

  Part II

  THE BINDING OF THE TRIBES

  1

  THE SWORD OF SAVASH AND THE TRIBUTE KINGS

  The news spread like a plains fire from the Danube to the shores of the Aral Sea: the Sword of Savash had been found!

  Savash was the Hun god of war, and it was told in legend that whoever found his sword should wield power over all the earth.

  The tale of its discovery was strange.

  A shepherd was out on the plains when he saw that one of his animals had cut its foot. He followed the trail of blood back through the grass and a beautiful sword half-buried in the ground. Fine scrollwork, a sinuous, tapering blade, the like of which he had never seen before. Superstitiously he took it back to Attila, and the king seized his opportunity. Raising the sword above his head, he declared that the Sword of Savash had been found.

  One man alone among the crowds did not cheer but stared, and then his usual impassive features took on a look of shock. It was Orestes the Greek. He alone among all those cheering people saw that the sword the king held aloft was none other than the sword given to the boy Attila, by a Roman general called Stilicho.

  An act of grossest cynicism? The duping of his own people by their cunning, unprincipled king? Dazzling them with a magical ‘sword of the gods’, really forged in some imperial armoury in Italy, in the heartland of their enemies?

  But no. It was not so simple. The shock on Orestes’ face gradually settled into acceptance again.

  Attila often liked to murmur the mysterious rhyme, ‘Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust, /Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.’

  Orestes understood his blood-brother of old well enough by now.

  Attila proclaimed himself King of all the Huns from the Danube to the Wall of China. He received Indian pearls and eastern silks and Baltic furs in tribute. At night he stood and addressed his people in the midst of their feasting, and told them that their empire would soon cover the whole world; and they believed in him.

  A great altar of wood was built, as high as the king’s palace. Many animals were slain, and the altar was sprinkled with the blood and fat of sheep and cattle and horses.

  In the days that followed, upon hearing the news that spread eastwards over the vast plains of Scythia, many came to visit and pay their respects: petty princelings, rulers over tiny, scattered bands of White Huns from the shores of the Caspian, bow-legged chieftains of the Hepthalite Huns from beside the Aral Sea. From even further east came others who hardly looked like Huns at all, and dressed, you would say, more like bandits than kings. They came on their tough little horses from the lush green grasslands in the shadows of the Tien Shan mountains, and bowed to King Attila, and then they stood again and hugged him as a long-lost friend. He received the same fond greetings from those desert Huns who came from south of the Holy Altai, and the unspeakable deserts of the Takla Makan.

  His people’s hearts grew large to see how widely loved and known their king was among all the wide-wandering Hun peoples, and they began to guess where he had ridden in exile, and what sufferings he must have endured and what feats he must have performed to have won the hearts of so many. Like a hero from the mythology of the people. Like Tarkan himself, when he performed his Seven Labours to win the hand of the Tanjou of Baikal’s beautiful daughter, whose beauty had petrified every other suitor into a pillar of sandstone.

  Attila received them all gracefully, and showed them the magical sword, which, kneeling, they kissed in silence and awe. Yet more impressive was the demeanour of the man who held the sword. Those hard tribal leaders of the plains and the mountains and the deserts knew well enough that any charlatan could wave a pretty sword aloft and claim it was the Sword of Savash. But here was no charlatan. Here was a man who radiated such power that it thrilled through their bones as they stood before him, like some wild contagion. This was the half-legendary son of Mundzuk, sent far eastwards into exile long ago. They had heard the tale. And now here he stood, king in his own right, possessing an aura of kingship which made the lesser princelings stand proud with fear and devotion. So the camp of King Attila grew.

  White Huns and Yellow Huns, riven with feuding and enmity by ancient tradition, gathered among the tents of the People of Attila, and at his urging, his careful persuasion, or sometimes his fiery oratory, they began to see themselves as one mighty people, united by blood, language and the worship of their ancestors, the heroic Sons of Astur.

  The gathering of the scattered tribes turned into a full-scale festival of the people, and went o
n for days, and then weeks. From dawn to dusk there were games and celebrations, and all evening there was feasting and drinking among the tents of the Huns. In the hot summer night in the shadows there were new liaisons formed between the sons of Attila and the daughters of the princelings, and vice versa. And in the morning many a young maiden’s cheeks (though maiden no more) were flushed, and her eyes were cast down in shame, mingled with remembered pleasure; and many a young man’s eyes kept wandering from the game in hand to a girl sitting meekly on the sidelines, and many a ball was fumbled, to the huge scorn and mockery of his fellow players.