Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Aëtius said nothing.

  ‘And their generals with it? So you’re going to have to take command?’

  ‘What, no fighting?’ cried Torismond.

  Now he was still a boy. For him, fighting meant fun.

  ‘Oh, there’ll be fighting,’ said Aëtius. ‘Never you worry.’

  At twilight, the rowers stood down to eat and sleep, curled up like dogs beneath the benches, and the second batch took their place on the blistering oars. The hortator’s relentless beat continued, his hourglass running. Master-General Aëtius himself had given the order to make all speed for the east.

  The second day the wind came on stronger, the light ship bucking and rearing. Cat’s claws raked over the surface of the sea, and spray flew back from bow-waves half the length of the ship. The huge sail, much repaired, snapped back and forth as the wind grew unsteady and they altered course to meet it. Behind them the sky was darkening over Gaul.

  Aëtius knelt down beside Torismond, who was sprawled on the deck beside the mainmast, clutching it in both arms, vomit staining a shirt-front finely embroidered by his beloved mother.

  ‘Storm coming,’ said Aëtius cheerfully. ‘Summer storms are always the worst.’

  A little cruel, but the plain truth. The lad would get inured to the sea either fast or not at all. His elder brother, meanwhile, Prince Theodoric, had donned his royal gold fillet, despite the sailors’ looks and muffled jeers, wearing it as if to remind the insolent sea of his royal blood and his direct descent from the divine Odin and Nerthus, the Earth Mother. He paced the length of the ship ceaselessly, jaw clenched, hands behind his back, a rigid regal bearing, saying nothing. As terrifed as his younger brother, clearly, but determined to master it. He was quite a fellow. One day he would be a great king.

  Torismond looked ghastly.

  Aëtius said, ‘You really would rather face a whole army of screaming Huns, wouldn’t you?’

  The prince nodded, still embracing the mainmast like his first love. ‘Christ, yes.’

  The ship lurched sideways. He bowed his head.

  ‘Head up. Watch the horizon. Slow, deep breaths.’

  Torismond struggled to comply.

  ‘You’ll have to let go of that, too. Sail coming in - look.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘Whoever. But I never saw any god come to rescue drowning sailors yet.’

  They reefed the mainsail into the standing yard and tightened it. The wind still gusted hard into the reduced sail, the long, lean dromond lightening in the water, raised up, the rowers’ efforts almost superfluous, the ship doing eight, ten knots, a breathtaking speed. Aëtius prayed for still more speed. Attila would not be slacking; that barbarian tide sweeping down across the East, to break upon the walls of the New Rome.

  The big rudder swung across its breach, the master steadied it, the ship surged forward again, almost planing up the smooth obisidian back of one driven wave before crashing into the next, trying to outrace the approaching storm - hopeless, of course. The timbers creaked, and two rowers below were released for emergency caulking. The horse transporter lagged behind them, almost out of sight. Broader-beamed and heavier, she wallowed through the swell, making slower, steadier progress. The horses would survive.

  A lonely black-backed gull passed overhead, heading inland for Italy, shelter from the storm. Aëtius grimaced and threw his red woollen cloak about his shoulders. The wind began to whistle in the halyards and clewlines, and a fine rain slanted in from the west.

  The ship’s master approached. ‘We could take shelter soon enough at Olbia. Going through the straits of Bonifacium in this wind will be dangerous.’

  ‘We go on through the straits, and never mind Olbia. We keep going. No shelter till we reach Syracuse.’

  Attila would not be seeking shelter from any storms, nor slowing in his advance on Constantinople. Nor could they.

  The master gave orders for the sail to be reefed in further, the rowers to row their hardest. The bosun bellowed, ‘Blister your butts and bust your guts if you want to escape a whipping and eat salt-meat tonight!’

  Visibility was declining all the time. It was no more than two hundred yards when the lookout in his tiny crow’s-nest swaying from the mainmast said he could see land ahead to port. It was the dark and jagged outline of Corsica. Somewhere through the mist and mizzle to starboard, lay the gentler shape of Sardinia. Between them were the straits of Bonifacium.

  The hortator doubled his beat and they rowed through the straits at the double, swift as an arrow cutting through the water. It was the only way to avoid being swept off course and onto the lethal submerged rocks around the islands. Eventually they came through, pulled round to the south-east, and felt the storm blowing up over the islands behind them. It wasn’t getting any better. The master looked once more enquiringly at Aëtius, to see if he would allow them to take shelter. But he did not respond. He had given his last word. They would push on, through storm and surge, whatever.

  The lookout was called down from the fighting-top: any worse and he’d be thrown clear into the sea and lost. He scrambled gratefully down. The sails were reefed right up into double swags from the yard, the bull’s-hide stormshields were shipped over the oarports, and the slaves down there, already soaked and salted like herrings in brine, rowed like furies before the storm. It was going to be a bad business, this one. The heavy pewter clouds seemed to suck in the sunlight. ‘Mare Nostrum’ indeed, thought Aëtius sourly. Everything is against us now: the Huns, the Vandals, the sea . . .

  Even Rufus, a good sailor, looked sea-green, hanging on the taffrail like a rag. From back in the mist there came a muffled crack. The boy stared in that direction, rolling on the balls of his feet with the ship, drool still hanging from his lips. Theodoric and Torismond were collapsed on their pallets below, filling buckets.

  ‘What is it, lad?’ said Aëtius. He could see nothing.

  The boy stared a while longer. ‘I thought I saw white horses,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t mean breaking waves, I mean . . . real white horses, swimming. Drowning.’

  Aëtius looked grim. Had they lost the horse-transporter? It was possible.

  He sent an order to the master to kill the oars. The Cygnus slowed, then wallowed terribly in the heavy sea, groans arising from below. Aëtius himself held onto a rail-post. The deck was rolling through ninety degrees, water sluicing back and forth across the boards. He strained to see or hear: nothing. They had to go back. Not for the horses - they could not save the horses even if they found them - but for the men.

  They ploughed back a weary league against the sea, but found nothing. No sighting of the broad transporter, not a horse, not a single waving man.

  They pulled round and went on. Rufus returned to hanging sickly from the taffrail.

  ‘Don’t tell the princes,’ Aëtius instructed.

  He himself returned to his station in the bucking prow, right arm tight round the jibmast. Standing face into the rain, praying to his god, gaunt on the poop deck: sleepless, grimfaced, hatless, windblown, Rome’s last believer.

  At last the storm died away and visibility returned. No sign of the horse-transporter.

  The princes came shakily up on deck and understood it was lost.

  ‘We’ll get more horses,’ Aëtius promised, ‘fine Cappadocian horses.’

  ‘I hate the sea,’ murmured Torismond.

  ‘You might as well hate the Power that made it,’ said Aëtius. ‘It is ignoble to hate a thing as great and implacable as nature.’

  Torismond looked away.

  They anchored at Syracuse, took on fresh water, sluiced out the lower decks, sold a couple of slaves who were as good as done for and bought a couple more. The princes tottered unsteadily down the gangplank for a walk round the harbour. Aëtius forbade them to drink, saying they were under his command now. They didn’t look like they wanted a drink anyway.

  The master brought him a squat, bearded fellow who was asking for passage east.
r />   Aëtius eyed him. ‘What for?’

  ‘I make for Alexandria, but I need to visit Constantinople first. I have two chests of . . . materials which I need to bring with me. With them, I will protect you against attacks by pirates.’

  Aëtius grinned broadly. ‘I have a retinue of fifty Gothic spearmen. I think we can look after ourselves.’

  ‘You do not know the Vandals.’

  ‘On the contrary, I know them well.’ He looked him up and down. ‘Name?’

  ‘Nicias.’

  ‘Greek?’

  ‘Cretan.’

  ‘Even worse. All Cretans are liars, beasts and gluttons, as Saint Paul himself has told us.’

  Nicias snorted. ‘We Cretans have been living with that calumny for four centuries now.’

  ‘You’ll be living with it for centuries to come, too. Is it not the word of God?’

  Nicias kept a stubborn silence. This general was too clever by half.

  ‘Very well. And what is in your magical chests?’

  ‘Materials - alchemical materials.’

  ‘God help us.’ Aëtius saw the two princes returning.

  ‘You may take passage with us, but we neither want nor need your protection against pirates. Understood?’

  The princes joined them, looking a little improved.

  ‘You will not get through, I tell you,’ said Nicias. ‘Vandal pirates infest the eastern seas.’

  Prince Theodoric interrupted. ‘We Visigoths are no enemies of the Vandals. Our father is to marry our sister Amalasuntha to Genseric’s son himself.’

  Nicias looked sardonic. ‘Pirates are no great respecters of treaties, son.’

  ‘We’re finished talking,’ Aëtius snapped. ‘Now, bugger off.’

  Nicias stumped away.

  Aëtius looked at Theodoric sharply. ‘Your sister? That pretty slip of a girl? To marry Genseric’s son?’

  Theodoric nodded.

  ‘Then your father is a fool.’

  The young man’s eyes blazed. ‘How dare you speak of my father like that!’

  Prince Torismond took a step nearer Aëtius. The general held his hands up. He had indeed overstepped the bounds of politeness. He apologised profusely. They relaxed.

  ‘But I will have to beg of your father—’

  ‘That is his policy. An alliance between the Visigoths and the Vandals, a Germanic empire in the West, neither friend nor enemy to Rome.’

  Aëtius shook his head. ‘The Vandals are already in alliance with the Huns. I know it in my bones. I will bring your father proof. That embittered, half-lame Genseric is playing him false.’

  ‘So you want to believe.’

  ‘So I do believe.’

  ‘The Vandals are your fellow Christians.’

  ‘Even the Devil himself believes in God,’ muttered Aëtius.

  They sailed on the small evening tide again. The storm had blown out, the sea was subsiding. It was peaceful. And too damn slow.

  Aëtius sent for Nicias. ‘Bring up your chest,’ he said. ‘Entertain us.’

  The Cretan needed no second bidding. In a trice he scuttled down to the hold and got one of the sailors to help him up with his chest. He raised the lid and knelt down reverently, like a holy man before an altar.

  The princes and the Gothic wolf-lords crowded along the rail to watch the show. The master and bosun craned from the wheelhouse to watch this great wonder-worker about his miracles, and the sun-bronzed sailors sat along the yard above, swinging bare feet, grinning, gold earrings winking in the sunset. Only the slaves below worked on unregarded.

  Nicias rummaged, giving a running commentary. ‘My recipe combines essence of nitre, phosphorus, and refined black oil from Mesopotamia.’

  ‘Must make a right stench,’ grunted the master.

  ‘The odour is distinctive.’

  ‘And you better not set fire to my fuckin’ ship.’

  The alchemist ignored this uncouth remark.

  He drew out of his chest some wooden spars and an iron frame, and quickly assembled them into something like a miniature ballista. He set the machine on the deck beside the chest, and rapidly wound back a little brass winch. His audience was interested now, despite themselves. Even Aëtius kept his grey eyes fixed steadily on the proceedings.

  Nicias produced a small ball from his chest, holding it between forefinger and thumb, and showed it around like a huckster in the market-place trying to sell off a rare egg. It was a perfect iron sphere, studded all round with sharp spikes, rather like a caltrop thrown out to stop cavalry. Nicias set the sphere down at the end of his little ballista, turned a brass knob at the side one half-turn, and was ready to fire.

  ‘Hold,’ said Aëtius. ‘There are dolphins out there. Look.’

  Breaking the surface of the burnished sea, between them and the falling sun, there were dark, glossy shapes arcing and curvetting through the water in the wake of the ship, some fifty yards off.

  ‘All the better!’ said the little alchemist excitedly, turning his machine aft. The onlookers stepped back warily. ‘I will use them as my targets. I will show you what becomes of mortal flesh when one of my devices . . .’

  Aëtius turned his head very slowly and regarded him. Nicias quailed and his voice trailed away.

  ‘Dolphins were sacred to Apollo once,’ said Aëtius, ‘in the old days, under the old religion.’

  ‘But good to eat?’

  ‘Indeed they are. But not for us to slaughter for mere amusement, like foxes in a hencoop.’

  There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Nicias said, speaking very quickly, ‘Very well, then, let us assume . . . let us imagine that out there is a ship, straight to port, an imaginary ship, a boat, upon the sea, an enemy vessel, which we needs must destroy, we must—’

  ‘Enough talking,’ said Aëtius. ‘Just show us.’

  Nicias aimed his machine out across the water and loosed a lever. The tiny machine gave a crack of astonishing power, and the spiked ball whirred out on a flat trajectory straight over the waves, bouncing and cutting into the water as it went. It travelled for over two hundred yards.

  Nicias looked around excitedly. ‘Do you see? This whirling caltrop of my own device, even in miniature, skims across the surface of the sea like a stone thown by a boy. But imagine what it would do in a bigger machine, built to scale, cutting across the canvas of an enemy sail. Tear it to shreds! Or to the deckboards over the heads of enemy rowers. It could tear up the planks, if it were big enough. Imagine the rowers below, thinking themselves safe from missiles beneath their awnings of hardened leather, suddenly blinking and terrified, exposed like helpless animals in their burrows. What power! We could destroy them utterly, from afar, without ever having even to engage. We could slaughter them at will.’

  Prince Torismond glanced round at Aëtius. He said nothing.

  ‘Now,’ continued Nicias, ‘this is not all.’ Taking another iron sphere he grasped it carefully and unscrewed it into two perfect halves. He took a thick glass flask from the chest and poured some greyish powder into one half. He laid a thin circular wafer of leather over the powder, and then poured over it a dark treacle. ‘The ingenuity of the chemists of Alexandria and Antioch truly knows no bounds,’ he commented excitedly. ‘Prepare to be amazed. For I give you a fire that continues to burn in water, a sticky fire which can gum itself to a boat’s wooden hull and burn perpetually, and which no number of water-buckets can extinguish.’ Near the wheelhouse, the master stirred uneasily. ‘Imagine if such a fire stuck to your arm. You cannot imagine the screams if you have not heard them. Men leap into the water, burning alive.’

  Some wondered how Nicias knew this, and feared for the fate of any condemned prisoners in Alexandria who might have been passed his way for experimentation. He quickly screwed the iron ball back together again and set it into the shoot on his ballista. They noticed that his expression had grown markedly more nervous, and stepped back.

  ‘Now,’ he said, eyes gleaming, mouth working,
‘consider this!’

  It was unclear quite what happened next, but there was a tremendous explosion of flame and noise, a sparking cloud of smoke, and bellowing from Nicias in the heart of it. When the smoke cleared, the alchemist was still kneeling beside his charred chest, the skin on his face and one arm burned hairless and red, and the little ballista had vanished.

  The deck was on fire, but, miraculously, no one else was hurt.

  ‘Hm,’ said Aëtius, coming forward. ‘Needs working on, I think.’

  The master was roaring for buckets to be lowered and the fire to be put out, but the sailors were already letting out ropes.