XXI
THE SCOURGE OF GOD
The armies of Attila were too huge to advance on any single road or path, so they ascended the Danube valley in a series of parallel columns, engulfing the ancient border between Rome and Germania like a wave. The Hun cavalry went first as the tip of the arrow, striking ahead of any warning and overpowering weak garrisons before they had time to prepare. The heavier Ostrogoth cavalry came next, their big horses, heavy shields, and long lances crushing any line that resisted. Should the inhabitants instead try to seek refuge in a tower, fort, monastery, or church, they then would be left for the long snake of infantry, its ranks speckled with mercenaries and engineers with the skill to build catapults, siege towers, and battering rams. Roiling columns of smoke marked where each pocket of resistance had been overcome.
Never had the Huns assembled so great an army, and never had its supply been so challenging. They stripped the land like locusts. Those who hid emerged to desolation. The upper Danube valley had become a wasteland. Every house was burned. Every granary was emptied. Every vine and fruit tree was chopped down. It was not so much conquest as depopulation. After slaughtering the men and raping and enslaving the women, the Hun cavalry took particular care to kill infants and pregnant women. No generation would be left to seek revenge. The few surviving orphaned children shivered in the woods like animals. Abandoned dogs went feral and fed on the corpses of their former masters.
One by one the outposts of civilization became ruins. Astura, Augustiana, Faviana, Lauriacum, Lentia, Boiodurum, Castra Batava, Castra Augusta, Castra Regina . . . all were erased from history. It was as if the earth was swallowing civilization. Ash drifted in the air instead of apple blossom, and every smashed home had the forbidding smell of burnt timber, rot, and damp decay. Dried blood spattered intricate mosaics. Wall murals were smeared with the brains and effluent of the owners who died looking at them. The prophets were right: The armies of doom were signaling the end of the world. Never in a thousand years would Europe forget this march. Evil had come on shaggy steppe ponies, and the angels had fled. It was the spring when days grew darker.
Attila was well pleased.
He paused one afternoon to eat the looted rations of a ruptured Roman fort called Sumelocenna, its garrison massacred with particular fury because it fought so uncharacteristically bravely. Attila rested his boots on the body of a tribune they said had been named Stenis, noticing that the dead man’s tunic was closed by a golden clasp in the shape of a wasp. The king bent to rip the brooch free. He had never seen its like before and would give it to Hereka. “The man who wore it stung,” he would tell her.
No officers had trained Attila in the arts of war. No courtiers had coached him in the grace of nobles. No singer had persuaded his rough fingers to touch harp or lyre. No woman had soothed his constant anger, that simmering rage from a childhood of beatings and harsh training and a manhood of treachery and war. No priest had explained to his satisfaction why he was here, and no prophet had dared suggest he could fail. He was a primeval force, sent to cleanse the world.
Huns were different from other men, he believed—so different that perhaps they weren’t men at all but gods. Or perhaps there were no fellow men but rather that his people preyed on a world inhabited by odd forms of lower beings, mud men. He didn’t know. Certainly the deaths of these Romans had no meaning to him. Their lives were too foreign, their habits inexplicable. He understood that life was struggle, and the joy that some found in simple existence utterly baffled him. One was either a killer or a meal. This belief that life was pitiless colored everything he did. Attila would lead his Huns to glory but he trusted no one. He loved no one. He relied on no one. He knew there would never be any rest, for to rest was to die. Wasn’t it when he’d slept that the Roman bitch had almost set fire to him? What a lesson that had been. He slept only in snatches now, his features aging, his dreams troubled. Yet this was how it should be. Killing was the essence of life. Destruction held the only promise of safety.
Attila was no strategist. He couldn’t envision the lands he planned to conquer. Their desirability, or lack of it, was almost immaterial. Attila understood fear, and he was concocting a catastrophe, but a catastrophe that was to fall on Aetius. For every Roman he killed, two or three went running to his target in Gaul. Each had to be fed. Each carried panic like a plague. In every story his horsemen grew uglier, their aim more deadly, their stench more rank, their greed more insatiable. This use of terror was necessary. His horde, vast though it was, was small compared to the millions upon millions in the Roman world. Its strength was its seeming invincibility. Huns were never defeated because no one believed they could be defeated.
He didn’t know that Aetius began to intercept tens of thousands of fugitives like a net, drafting the men into his forces and sending the women and children to help farm.
Attila had no intention of fighting Aetius if he didn’t have to; the man was too good a soldier. But if he did fight him it would be when Aetius was nearly alone, his allies fragmented and quarreling, his cities burning, his food supplies stripped by the homeless, his legionaries sick and demoralized, his emperor wavering, his lieutenants betraying. Attila had never lost a fight because he never fought fairly. Surprise, deception, treachery, superior numbers, terror, and stealth had let him win every contest, from the murder of his brother to the destruction of the eastern provinces. Only the loss of the old sword secretly troubled him. He knew it was only a talisman, shrewdly invented by himself, but his followers believed in its magic. Leadership was all about belief. Its disappearance was never spoken of, but it planted a seed of fear.
Victories would make up for the loss of symbol. The barbarian led his entourage of warlords and messengers up a grassy slope to look back down the Danube valley at the long winding columns making up his attack force, stretching back to a hazy horizon, the hard men resting on tough ponies that cropped the grass. Attila never lost because if he did lose, he knew, these jackals would turn against him. His warlords could be kept in harness only with the booty that was corrupting them. The more they took the more they craved, and the more they craved, the more like Romans they became. Attila saw no way out of this dilemma except to destroy everything. In desolation, he believed, was the salvation of the Hun.
He looked forward to the wasteland.
And to what he would finally do to Ilana when his sword was recovered.
It was the way of the world, a cycle that could never end.
Ilana had become an exhibit in Attila’s bizarre zoo.
Like Attila’s wives and slave girls, she had been brought for the invasion. But instead of a comfortable rolling wagon with felt canopy and carpets, her home was a trundling cage of wooden poles, its grid roof open to sun and rain. It was one of a dozen wagons in a train that included some captured bears; a lion liberated from a Roman villa; a pacing wolf; three captured Roman generals squeezed into a single iron enclosure; and squalling badgers, Attila’s favorite animal. The wagons were normally used for transporting slaves and prisoners, but any Roman slaves were pressed into Attila’s great army and any liberated criminals were simply executed. So Attila had decided to load the transports with curiosities—among them the woman who had tried to burn him alive and who, for purposes not yet fully explained, had been allowed to remain living.
His temporary mercy was torment. Ilana’s life had been reduced to animal-like squalor as she sat dully in the lurching wagon amid a great, dusty, fly-plagued army: her clothing filthy, her privacy gone, her station abased. At noon she was hot and at night she was cold. She got barely enough water to drink, let alone bathe. Her keeper was Guernna, who enjoyed mocking her from a safe distance.
“I’m sure he’ll come to your rescue at any moment,” the German girl cooed to the Roman when she brought her scraps of food. “He’ll cut his way through a half million men with that sword he stole.”
“He’s waiting for both of us, Guernna,” she replied with more spunk than she really
felt. “Your liberation, too. When battle is joined we’ll both have a chance to escape to the Romans.”
“Do you think there’ll be any Romans left, Ilana? Edeco says this is the biggest army the world has ever seen.”
Ilana believed it. The wagon had bogged down once in a rut at the crest of a hill. While a dozen Gepid infantry heaved to clear it, she’d had a chance to gaze backward in wonder at the great host stretching to the horizon. Fields of spears rocked like wheat in a breeze; herds of horses churned up dust like thunderheads; and wagons heaped with tents and booty crawled across meadows like elephants, grinding the grass to stubble.
“Aetius and Jonas will have a great army, too.”
Guernna smiled. “We are all wondering what Attila will eventually do to you, Ilana. Most of the women suggest fire, since that is what you nearly did to him. Some think crucifixion, and some think a rape by Ostrogoths or perhaps by animals. Some think you will be flayed; and some think Attila will wait until he has enough Roman gold to melt and pour down your throat, burning you from inside out and making a cast of your body.”
“How amusing all this speculation must be. And what do you think, Guernna?”
“I think he is devising an execution so clever that none of us has thought of it yet!” Her eyes danced at the thought. Guernna had little imagination and admired it in others. “And you will help him.”
Guernna looked reproachful. “Ilana! I am the only one feeding you. You were wrong to attack our master, yet still I bring you water and throw a bucket to wash out your filth. Don’t you expect the best from me?”
“The best, as you know, would be a spear between my ribs. I think I could expect that from you, given your betrayal when we tried to escape that night.”
Guernna smiled. “Yes, killing you would consummate our relationship. But I must think of the other women, too, sweet Ilana. It is always exciting to watch torture. We have all discussed it, and what we really want to do is hear you scream.”
Aetius had planned to burn the Rhine bridges, but Hun cavalry arrived three days before defenders thought it possible. They swept across at midnight, arrows plucking away the engineers, and so crossed the Rhine as if the great barrier of the river hardly existed. Attila himself crossed two days later, watching with interest the bodies from upstream floating by on the current, bloated and bearing Hun arrows. His soldiers were doing their work. Aetius had established his own army at Argentorate, a hundred miles to the south, and the Hun plan was to outflank him through the forested highlands of northeastern Gaul and break out east of Luttia. The cavalry could then sweep southward over the fertile flat-lands, take the strategic crossroads of Aurelia, and hold the strategic center of the West.
Attila rode toward horizons of smoke, with more smoke behind—a ring of smoke that marked the devastation of his armies in all directions. No cohesive resistance had formed. The Franks had retreated, and the other tribes were hesitating. If the Huns struck hard enough and quickly enough, they would annihilate Aetius before he could gather a credible force. Cities were emptied, armories were captured, aqueducts were deliberately broken, and granaries were looted. Crows were so bloated from feasting on the dead that they staggered on Roman roads like drunken men.
Thousands of opportunists, traitors, and the fearful were joining Attila’s invasion: craven chieftains, escaped slaves, greedy mercenaries. Some were fleeing a bad marriage, broken heart, or debt. There were not as many as the Hun king had hoped, but those who did enlist joined the slaughter with a kind of hysteria. All rules had ended. Hell had triumphed over Heaven. Anarchy and pillage provided opportunities to settle old scores, act on resentment against the rich, or take by force a maiden who had spurned earnest advances. As each law was broken, the next seemed easier to shatter. The indiscipline carried into the Hun army itself, where quarrels quickly turned murderous. The warlords had to separate feuding soldiers like snarling dogs, and maintained some semblance of order only by whip, chain, and execution. So huge was the army, and so far-flung were its wings and columns, that it was barely controllable.
Attila knew he was riding a whirlwind, but he was the god of storms.
It was at a clearing in a wood in Gaul that he encountered the Roman holy man who would give him a different title. A patrol of Huns had roped a Christian hermit who was apparently so stupid that he’d been making a pilgrimage right into the path of Attila’s army. The cavalry laughed as they trotted the pilgrim first one way and then another, jerking on the lines. The hermit was screaming, perhaps trying to egg on his own martyrdom. “Enjoy your triumph because your days are numbered, Satan’s spawn!” the old man cried in Hunnish as he staggered. “Prophecy foretells your doom!”
This interested Attila, who believed in destiny and had bones thrown and entrails read. After killing a few prognosticators in blinding rages, his prophets had learned to tell him what he wanted to hear: so much so, that they bored him. Now this hermit had a different view. So he ordered the Hun soldiers to back up their horses until the ropes were taut and the man was trapped in place. “You speak our tongue, old man.”
“God gives me the gift to warn the damned.” He was ragged, filthy, and barefoot.
“What prophecy?”
“That your own sword will smite you!That the darkest night heralds dawn!”
Some warlords murmured uneasily at this mention of a sword, and Attila scowled. “We are the People of the Dawn, hermit.”
The man looked at Attila quizzically, as if scarcely able to believe such nonsense. “No. You come in dust and leave in smoke, and blot out the sun. You are night creatures, sprung from the earth.”
“We are restoring the earth. We don’t cut it. We don’t chop it.”
“But you feed off men who do, old warrior! What nonsense Huns spout! If Attila was here, he’d laugh at your foolishness!”
The Huns did laugh, enjoying this little joke.
“And where do you think Attila is, old man?” the king asked mildly.
“How should I know? Sleeping with his thousand wives, I suspect, or tormenting a holy pilgrim instead of daring to face the great Flavius Aetius. Aye, easier to pick on the pious than fight an armed foe!”
Attila’s face lost its amusement. “I will face Aetius soon enough.”
The hermit squinted at the rider more closely. “You’re Attila? You?”
“I am.”
“You wear no riches.”
“I need none.”
“You bear no sign of rank.”
“All men but you know who I am.”
The holy man nodded. “I wear none, either. God Almighty knows who I am.”
“And who are you?”
“His messenger.”
Attila laughed. “Trussed and helpless? What kind of God is that?”
“What god do you have, barbarian?”
“Attila the Hun believes in himself.”
His captive pointed to the haze of smoke. “You ordered that?”
“I order the world.”
“The innocents you have slaughtered! The babes you have made orphans!”
“I make no apology for war. I’m here to rescue the emperor’s sister.”
The hermit barked a laugh, and his eyes lit with recognition. He waved his finger at Attila. “Yes, now I know who you are. I recognize you, monster! A plague! A whip, sent out of the East to punish us for our sins! You are the Scourge of God!”
The king looked puzzled. “The Scourge of God?”
“It is the only explanation. You are a tool of the divine, a wicked punishment as dire as the Great Flood or Plagues of Egypt! You are Baal and Beelzebub, Ashron and Pluto, sent to lash us as divine punishment!”
His men waited for Attila to kill the crazy man, but instead he looked thoughtful. “The Scourge of God. This is a new title, is it not, Edeco?”
“To add to a thousand others. Shall we kill him, kagan?” Attila slowly smiled. “No . . . the Scourge of God. He has explained me, has he not? He has justified me to
every Christian we meet. No, I like this hermit. Let him go—yes, let him go and give him a donkey and gold piece. I want him sent ahead, sent to the city of Aurelia. Do you know where that is, old man?”
The hermit squirmed against the ropes. “I was born there.”
“Good. I like your insult, and will adopt it as my title. Go to your native Aurelia, hermit, and tell them Attila is coming. Tell them I come to cleanse their sins with blood, like the Scourge of God. Ha! It is I who am His messenger, not you!” And he laughed, again. “I, Attila! A tool of the divine!”
XXII
THEODORIC’S
DAUGHTER
Tolosa had been a Celtic city, then Roman, and now Visigothic; and the new rulers had done little more than occupy the decaying buildings of the old. Their famed prowess in battle was not matched by any expertise in architecture. The strategic city on a ford of the Garumna had long dominated southwestern Gaul, and when the Visigoth king Athaulf agreed to give up Iberia and send the Roman princess Galla Placidia back to Rome in return for new lands in Aquitania, Tolosa became the natural capital. The barbarians did front the old Roman walls with a ditch and dike, but inside the city it was as if a poor family had moved into a fine house and added tawdry touches of their own. The stone and brickwork was old and patched, the streets were pot-holed and poorly repaired, paint was older than the inhabitants, and dwellings of stucco and marble had additions of timber, daub, and thatch.
Yet under the great barbarian king Theodoric—who had reigned so long, thirty-six years, that most of his subjects had known no other king—Tolosa throbbed with activity. As Roman culture had been layered upon Celtic, so now was German tribal culture layered upon Roman; and the result was a fusion of pagan artisan, imperial bureaucrat, and barbarian warrior that had given the city an energy it hadn’t seen for a hundred years. Traders and farmwives bawled in half a dozen tongues from the crowded marketplaces, Arian priests ministered to thick crowds of illiterate tribesmen, and children chased each other through the streets in numbers not seen in living memory.
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