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 love-making 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 Chalons, 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 Chalons, 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 Chalons.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Few subjects are more deserving of the label “historical fiction” than a novel about Attila the Hun. The most unbelievable 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 wo
uld 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 testament 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 devillike 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 Chalons (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 Gibbon 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, Chalons 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 Chalons-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 Chalons. 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 Chalons 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.
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