Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Valentinian continued to insist that, though the western legions languished, the Eastern Field Army would soon deal with Attila.

  ‘Besides,’ he said with a peculiar smile, ‘there are other operations afoot.’

  For the Vice-Regent of God in the West, Defender of the Church, Shield of the Faithful, had given himelf up to degrading superstitions and the practices of witchcraft, which appeal only to those who are simultaneously corrupt and stupid.

  Galla Placidia herself came to Aëtius one evening, shaking and white. He insisted she sit. She refused wine.

  ‘My son,’ she gasped, and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders trembled, and Aëtius realised that he was seeing her cry for the first time in his life. Men dying he could cope with. But women crying . . . At last he summoned the resolve to reach out and lay his broad right hand on her shoulder. Immediately she came round, like someone waking abruptly from a dream. She wiped her eyes with a small white cloth, then stood and walked slowly round the room.

  ‘My son . . . is mad,’ she said.

  Aëtius waited.

  As conscious as Aëtius that time was running out, and perturbed by what secrets lay in Valentinian’s private chambers beneath the palace, Galla’s patience - and perhaps, she admitted now, her wilful self-delusion - had at last evaporated. She had demanded entrance. A eunuch had been so insolently adamant that she was not permitted entry that she had grown enraged, given him a mighty cuff for a woman of her years, and entered the chambers in a fine rage.

  She was met by a horrible sight, but one she had known in her heart she would find - she bit her lip almost to bleeding. There stood her son, clutching a ridiculous willow wand, naked but for a purple silk cape around his upper body, and wearing a primitive animal mask. The small chamber was in gloom except for flickering candles in grubby candelabra. In the impenetrable dark, a slave sat in a corner beating a drum. Foul concoctions steamed in pots, necromantic brews of curdled milk and bitter herbs. There were skulls around the floor, and in the centre, around the emperor, a chalk circle inscribed with the names of JHWH and Hermes Trismegistus.

  The great magician turned.

  ‘Have you brought her?’ he mumbled behind the mask. His eyes flared wide in the chiselled holes, and he snatched the mask off. ‘Mother!’

  He wore kohl round his eyes like a harlot. She went closer. His naked belly was a sagging little white pouch like an old man’s, though he was only in his early twenties, and, shame upon shame, his lower parts were smeared with fat, probably mixed with opium and henbane, wolfsbane and hemp. She prayed it was only animal fat. His pupils were black and dilated.

  She could not speak. Almost unconsciously she held her arms out to him, her eyes blurring. Her son . . .

  He regained composure of a sort; even smiled. ‘Who is this coming to the sacrifice?’ he slurred. ‘For Abraham, it was his son. For me, apparently it is my mother.’

  She stood trembling, still speechless.

  ‘But you are no virgin, are you, mother?’

  Finally she regained control of herself, and called to the eunuch at the door. ‘Bring more light!’ To the unseen slave in the darkness, she snapped, ‘And stop beating that wretched drum if you want to sleep tonight with the skin on your back.’

  At that Valentinian went berserk.

  ‘I am God’s anointed, not her! Drum, slave! No light, no light, this act of darkness shall transpire in darkness! Snuff the candles, senators! “Render unto Caesar”, did not Christ say? Then render unto me, mother! Down on your knees!’ He tore off the flimsy silk cape. His nipples, too, were rimmed with kohl. ‘Render unto me, to me!’ His voice was a bestial shriek. He arched his skinny white chest towards her. Suddenly he was staring intently at her breasts, his lips curled back like a rabid dog’s, teeth bared, his gaze darting to her stricken face and back again, without embarrassment, his eyes glittering with maniac light. He leaned closer, almost touching her, teeth showing in a silent snarl, and Galla knew in that terrible moment what he wanted. His sick desire was to bite off the breasts that fed him, to lunge at the mother who still overshadowed him, and mutilate her into powerlessness.

  She stepped back. She called him by the nickname he had as a little boy.

  Slowly he came out of the nightmare, though his eyes still glittered and stared.

  Then he twirled naked on the spot, apparently oblivious of his nakedness before her, and waved his willow thyrsus.

  ‘I do but jest, mother,’ he said gaily. He tossed his wand away and rubbed his hands together briskly, as if to free them from dirt. He looked down. ‘Call me Adam, for I am naked, yet not ashamed.’

  Galla felt differently. ‘Bring his Majesty a robe,’ she snapped to the eunuch as she swept from the room.

  The eunuch obeyed and went.

  Galla lingered unseen in the shadows of the antechamber.

  The eunuch returned with a clean linen robe. Following the emperor’s orders, he also brought a platter bearing a fieldmouse drowned in spring water, two moon beetles, fat from a virgin nanny goat, two ibis eggs, two drams of myrrh, four drams of Italian galingale and an onion. The slave recommenced drumming. Valentinian masturbated into a clay dish, pounded his semen together with these ingredients, poured in oil, and then sculpted a raw figurine with quivering fingers. Then he placed the figurine, a foul anthropic caricature stuck with eggshell and mouse-fur, before one of the grimy candelabra and raised his eyes ceilingwards.

  ‘I come announcing the blasphemy before heaven of Galla Placidia, that defiled and unholy woman. Take away her sleep, put a frenzied passion in her thoughts, and a burning heat in her soul. Make her mad before you destroy her, O gods.’

  ‘Having heard that,’ said Galla, ‘I departed.’

  Aëtius poured a small goblet of wine. Still she refused.

  ‘A general is not accustomed to having his orders refused,’ he murmured.

  A risky strategy. She looked up. But then she smiled the faintest smile and took the goblet.

  ‘And no moon beetles drowned in it, either, I assure you.’

  She drank and set the goblet down again. ‘My son is mad,’ she repeated. ‘He is emperor and he is mad. I do not understand the will of God.’

  How tragic it had been, this flinty, green-eyed woman’s life. At least one, perhaps both, of her husbands murdered. Her daughter a slut, pregnant by her own chamberlain when still a girl, and even now still in confinement in the Palace of Hormisdas in the East. Galla never saw her. Instead she saw, daily, her son, who was an idiot, and a malevolent idiot at that.

  Aëtius said nothing. He would not lie, so there was nothing to say. The murder of any ruler was wrong. But there was this thin, world-weary care-worn woman sitting before him, whom in a way he did love. He had to remind himself that she was only a few years older than he was. They had grown old together, but she far faster than he. Life on the battlefield might be hard, but it was nothing like so hard as life at court. That friendless and airless world into which she had been born, a fetid world of backstabbings and complots, at whose heart she had remained out of sheer duty. No, he could not rebel against his emperor. And he could not kill this woman’s only son.

  They drank more wine, toasting each other.

  ‘To wine!’

  ‘The peasant’s solution to all ills!’

  They stepped outside.

  Galla said, ‘I still do not understand why Theodosius is angry with us.’

  ‘It was Valentinian’s decision to attack the Huns, remember. The VIIth Legion carried it out. Attila attacked the VIIth Legion in return, and has destroyed it, if reports are correct. So of course Theodosius feels he is paying a terrible price for carrying out his cousin’s wishes. It was a brilliant stroke. The Huns have people working among us. As you have noted, Attila has attacked right at the border between the two empires. He is also playing havoc with communications - I do not yet understand how. I fear his grasp of intelligence is phenomenal.’

  They stood in companionab
le silence and anxiety. The stars glimmered over the palace roofs. There was the sound of the trickling dolphin fountain in the courtyard, and the mesmeric hum of mosquitoes coming in from the marshes for the evening feed. Aëtius slapped his forearm.

  There were many things they could have said but sometimes it is better to say nothing. They stood together, looking out into the darkness with their thoughts: thoughts of decline and fall, of empires’ collapse; of how the manifest destiny of Rome seemed to have grown obscured almost to vanishing point in these latter days and years. Behind them they felt centuries of history, a weight both pleasant and unpleasant, comforting and burdensome; the gaze of many steadfast emperors upon them, Augustus, and Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius; Constantine the Great, of the House of the Flavians, direct forefather of Flavius Aëtius; and Vespasian, too, that old soldier, who had his bust sculpted to show his laughter lines and his bald pate, and who liked to joke, ‘If you want to know whether the emperor is truly divine, ask the man who empties his chamber pot.’ He had even joked on his deathbed, saying sarcastically, ‘Good grief, I think I’m turning into a god!’ Not all Rome’s emperors had been mad with power.

  Further off still, through distant mists of time, the stern, unflinching grey eyes of the old republic, which looked on the world and saw it clear, as it was, and were not dismayed. No Scipio or Cato had ever sought refuge in spells and charms. Now he and Galla and Theodosius were the last heirs of Rome. How would they be judged? What would their legacy be?

  Down below, in his occult chamber, was the latest ruler of Rome, mad as the mist and snow. What swamps the Imperial Palace of Ravenna stood on, or was sinking into; swamps which no mere engineer could drain. What empire could find firm foundation in such base ooze, the sewage of dark centuries? In troubled times, end-times, people turn to strange cults and practices. Conscious of their ebbing power in the real world, they turn to fantasy power, and to beliefs and false enchantments that would shame a stronger man. Normality itself falls victim, and everywhere there is the triumph of pained uncertainty and panicked delusion.

  And we sit and fester, brooded Aëtius: Africa uncaptured, the empire slowly starving to death, and our offer of aid turned down by Theodosius, the scholar-emperor. Perhaps he was riding to war against the Huns even now, his head full of Homer’s hexameters. O Christ, our Saviour . . . Aëtius thought of the Hun horses, their heads like bullock-heads, battering down men and walls in a ceaseless charge, men flying apart, lines of lightly armed Greek peltasts fleeing before their furious onslaught. In his dreams sometimes he saw those horses of the Asiatic steppes galloping down on him, screaming, their faceless riders lashing them forwards without mercy, their mouths curled back against the cruel bit, tongues lolling, the very teeth of those brute-headed horses smeared with blood . . . But one rider was not faceless. One rider’s face he knew of old.

  3

  TO THE HOLY CITY OF BYZANTIUM

  Aëtius could wait no longer for news of the great confrontation between Attila and the Eastern Field Army. It might be days yet, even weeks, and the thought of it made him horribly uneasy, with a prophetic unease.

  ‘I am very displeased,’ said Valentinian. His eyes were narrow and darting and dull with broken sleep and haunted dreams.

  ‘Neverthless, Majesty, I beg you will release me to sail east.’

  ‘And I am very mistrustful.’

  Aëtius said nothing.

  ‘You will take no legions, nor ships from Sicily.’

  Aëtius bowed.

  ‘And what of those oafish Visigoth friends of yours? I said I would not have them on the soil of Italy.’

  Aëtius could have reminded Valentinian that his mother, Galla Placidia, had once been married to a certain Athaulf the Goth. But he thought better of it.

  He said, ‘The Princes Theodoric and Torismond and their one thousand wolf-lords are stationed at Massilia, with their father’s blessing. They would not have sailed with me against their Germanic kinsmen the Vandals, of course. But they would willingly sail with me east to fight their ancient enemy the Huns.’

  ‘You’re welcome to them. Perhaps they will not return. ’

  ‘I still believe, Majesty, that the Visigoths might yet prove our greatest allies.’

  Valentinian took a sudden, close interest in a loose thread in the hem of his robe.

  Eventually, Aëtius said, ‘Majesty?’

  He looked up testily. ‘Yes, yes, go, then. But I may not want you back.’

  Aetius almost smiled. Oh yes you will, he thought.

  ‘Take this,’ said Galla. She pressed a small, leather-bound book into his hands. It was a rich psaltery, most delicately illustrated.

  He refused it. ‘Salt water,’ he said, ‘would ruin it.’

  ‘Then keep it well protected.’

  ‘And if we go to the bottom?’

  There was a lost look in her eyes. Then she leaned up and kissed him. ‘Take it,’ she said.

  He rode fast westwards to Mediolanum and on to Massilia, cursing Valentinian at every milepost. He took only his boy optio, Rufus, who chattered excitedly much of the way. How large is Constantinople? What is the food like? Do they still have gladiatorial combats there? Aëtius told him Constantinople was much like Rome, except it didn’t smell so bad.

  On the edge of the great port of Massilia he found the Visigothic princes in a fine villa, their wolf-lords’ tents spread across parklands, vineyards, half a hillside. The villa was half-wrecked, the adolescents dishevelled, red-faced and hung over from last night’s debauch. He gave them a talking-to. They hung their heads. He said he would be sailing on the evening tide and if they weren’t ready, prepared and sober, he would sail without them.

  ‘Sailing?’ said Torismond, looking anxious.

  These steppe horsemen. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never been on a ship before?’

  They hadn’t. They thought they would be riding east, a thousand of them in gorgeous panoply, to fight the Huns on the Pannonian plain.

  ‘Nope. You’re sailing east to Constantinople, under my command. Just fifty of you and your horses. The rest of your wolf-lords can head back to Tolosa. There’ll be no more room aboard. Ship’s only small.’

  Torismond swallowed.

  ‘Be ready.’

  Aëtius commandeered two naval ships, a fast Liburnian, the Cygnus, and a round-bellied cargo ship which would do for a horse-transporter.

  The two princes, the sons of Thunder, were there with their fifty as ordered.

  ‘Some in Massilia said we’ll never get through. They said the Vandals were the masters of your Mare Nostrum now,’ said Torismond.

  Aëtius eyed him. ‘By “some in Massilia”, I assume you mean a bunch of Cretan sailors, drunk in a whorehouse?’

  Torismond said nothing.

  ‘We’ll get through,’ said Aëtius.

  The wind was steady but not strong enough to whip up too big a swell. Torismond and Theodoric both looked sea-green at times on that first day, but managed not to vomit. The horses were calm in the following transport ship.

  How good it was to sail. To be moving towards some appointed destination at last. Aëtius stood at the prow of the Cygnus, heart racing, thinking of all the glorious works and days of man. The lethal underwater ram surged forward through the low swell, the sea arching back over it in slow curls. Slaves strained at the oars down below the fly deck, great firwood oars kept white and smooth with pumice and the scouring salt-waves. Aëtius could hear their leathery creak in the thole-pins, between the beats of the hortator’s hammer on the drum. Just below him hung the iron anchor, dripping, still trailing weed from Massilia. The immense red-and-white-striped sail hung from the topspar, catching a strong north-westerly and bellying out in the wind. Salt spray dashed in his face, dried and crusted on his cheek. He inhaled deeply. Now that he had decided upon a course of action, there was no stopping him.

  The princes came to him.

  ‘Sir,’ said the quietly spoken Theodoric respectfully, ‘we a
re only fifty. The Huns number many thousands.’

  Aëtius nodded. ‘Half a million, rumours say. When rumours give you numbers, always divide by ten.’

  ‘So they still outnumber us a thousand to one.’

  ‘You’re a Visigothic Pythagoras.’ Aëtius grinned. ‘I’m not expecting you to defeat Attila on your own, boy.’ He cursed himself inwardly for calling the prince a boy, and vowed not to do it again. Theodoric was no boy. ‘Our first task is to . . . liaise with Emperor Theodosius, make our peace, offer him our services. We’ll wait for news of the Eastern Field Army, and be ready to move fast.’

  ‘You mean you expect their field army to be destroyed? ’