Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  ‘Attila’s ambition knows no bounds. And they now have siegecraft. Let me fall on their flanks, here.’ He jabbed the map. ‘We could ride through the mountains. If we met them there we would do great harm. Do you still have your Isaurian auxiliaries?’

  The emperor nodded. ‘At Trajanopolis.’

  The Isaurians were little more than Anatolian bandits, but skilled at mountain warfare.

  ‘The Huns have little understanding of mountains,’ said Aëtius, ‘where all their speed will be useless to them. They are plains nomads only.’

  ‘You still imply that the field army . . . will be defeated by this horde of transient looters, without law or reason. Ridiculous! Never before has this happened.’

  Aëtius spoke one painful word: ‘Adrianople?’

  The emperor compressed his lips.

  ‘Besides,’ added Aëtius, ‘never before have they been commanded by a man like Attila.’

  The steward returned, entering the room backwards until the emperor’s address allowed him to turn, and then falling at his feet. He held something in his hand. Theodosius stared at it in puzzlement. ‘Pytheas,’ he murmured in puzzlement. Then he passed it to Aëtius.

  He examined it cursorily: a small gold ingot, stamped with the legend of Viminacium. Looted Hun gold.

  ‘Attila pays well,’ said Aëtius dryly. ‘Judas only got silver.’

  ‘Pytheas,’ repeated Theodosius softly, shaking his head.

  ‘He won’t be the only one. You need to clean out your Augean Stables.’

  The emperor looked shaken. Aëtius’ heart went out to him. Each day he reigned, this haughty yet gentle scholar must perforce learn more about the cruelty and treachery of men, and how even those he most trusted would betray him for the glamour of gold.

  Theodosius made to walk away.

  ‘Majesty.’

  He stopped.

  ‘Not everything will fall.’

  After a while, Theodosius nodded, his back to the general. ‘Do what you think is needed.’ Then he lifted his robes and walked swiftly from the chamber.

  Aëtius gave orders for the traitor Pytheas to be executed. His head, hands and all the gold of Viminacium found in his room were to be sewn in a sack and delivered to Attila; no other message. At the last minute he changed his mind and called the man back.

  ‘On second thoughts, we keep the gold,’ he said. ‘Why enrich Attila so that he can buy more mercenaries? Put some iron in the sack with the traitor’s head and hands. And on a potsherd, write these words: ‘Yaldizh djostyara, Ütülemek haşimyara.’

  It was I, Priscus, to whom he dictated. I grimaced with distaste. I had heard but little of this foul language before. ‘An ugly tongue, my lord.’

  ‘Matter of opinion. A complex tongue in many ways, utterly unlike the languages of the civilised world. Their compound words, for instance. You know they have a word meaning, “the noise a bear makes when walking through cranberry bushes” ?’

  ‘How ridiculous.’

  ‘I thought you admired Herodotus? Yet you hardly have his candour and curiosity about other peoples and cultures.’

  ‘Hm.’ I trimmed my nib. ‘So. These barbaric words. “Yaldizh djostyara” et cetera. Might I be so bold as to ask what they mean?’

  ‘An ancient Hunnish proverb, which I learned in my boyhood - from the uncrowned King of the World himself.’ He smiled a wintry smile. ‘It means “Gold for my friends, iron for my enemies”.’ He stood up and went to the window, hands clasped behind his back. ‘So that Attila will know clearly who his enemies are.’

  ‘How will we find Attila?’

  ‘At the end of the trail of destruction,’ said Aëtius, still with a smile not entirely comforting.

  ‘And who will run the errand?’

  ‘His own. Flushed from this palace like termites. Now listen to my instructions. The Hun word for fire is “yankhin”.’

  In the silent middle of the night, numerous slaves erupted and ran about the palace, screaming the word at the tops of their voices. Naturally almost everybody, except perhaps those who were in bed with other men’s wives, quickly emerged, bewildered and blinking, into the shadowy courtyards of the great palace complex. But here and there, one or two dashed with buckets to the nearest wells and fountains, or even over towards the Baths of Xeuxippus. They were immediately seized and, to their astonishment, interrogated fluently in their own sacred tongue by this newly arrived western general. Torture was not necessary. They soon confessed all.

  Aëtius’ ruse had smoked out six termites in all: four men and two women, one of them a midwife. She might have secretly poisoned a new-born child of the imperial family, but apparently she had always worked diligently. Perhaps her woman’s tenderness had outweighed even her loyalty to the Lord Attila.

  To these six, Aëtius gave the task of taking back the remains of the traitor Pytheas, and the iron.

  6

  THE CRUCIFIED

  It was in the meadows outside the ruins of a once-great city that the six Huns expelled from the Byzantine Court found Attila’s camp. They looked about them with something approaching horror. The midwife gave a little cry of despair, strange to hear. The city should have been nothing to her. During her time in the Christian emperor’s palace, she had delivered children faithfully. Sometimes, like the others, she had sent back communications to her people about what she had discovered of palace life, defences, fortifications, but she had also begun to feel settled. Then one night her dreams had been disturbed by cries of ‘Fire!’ in her own tongue, and she had been exposed, along with the others, by running to the wells. Until then, her work was all of life new-born. Here, meanwhile, life was being destroyed.

  A pall of black smoke hung over the burning city, and drifted ominously to shadow the camp of her own people. They who had once been her own people, she thought, with a sick lurch at her own treacherous thoughts. Under a black cloud of death, in his plain tent, the Lord Attila. Great Tanjou. She had made mothers in the palace with her strong hands. Meanwhile, her Great Lord had been making widows.

  One of the men dropped the sack before Attila’s throne.

  ‘What have you brought me?’ asked the King, eyes glittering, chin resting in the cup of his hand.

  ‘The remains of the traitor Pytheas, the eunuch,’ the fellow replied.

  ‘Traitor? To whom?’

  ‘To the emperor, Theodosius,’ he stammered. ‘He was found out. As were we.’

  ‘If he was traitor to our enemy, he was our friend. No? He was a hero of the Hun people?’

  The six hung their heads wretchedly. They had no refuge on earth now.

  Attila delved in the sack and pulled out the potsherd. He read out the Hun proverb: ‘“Gold for my friends, iron for my enemies.” I know who sent this,’ he murmured. He looked up. ‘What was your judgement of Master-General Aëtius? Did you meet him?’

  They hesitated, then one said, ‘He is a man of forceful character, my lord.’

  ‘Is he? Is he?’

  He pulled out something else: a putrid, blood-clotted hand.

  A figure hovered near. It was Enkhtuya, the witch. Attila seemed to know, without looking, that she was there and what she wanted. Wordlessly he passed the foul object back to her. She hid it in her cloak and slipped away.

  He looked back at the six. ‘They tried to kill me,’ he said. They were frozen with fear. They did not know what their Lord meant. ‘In my youth.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘The traitor Pytheas,’ he murmured. ‘Well, well.’ He surveyed them with glittering eyes. Then he decreed, ‘Negotiation is tiresome. Revenge is profitable. All shall pay.’ And with that he ordered the six to be taken outside and crucified, men and women both.

  His guards bound the six and led them away.

  As they passed by, a motley little figure in a tattered old buckskin shirt covered in little black stick men crouched beside the doomed procession, and held his arms over his head like a monkey sheltering from the rain, and cried out in a muffled tho
ugh audible voice, ‘This funeral sky grows heavier by the hour!’

  Towards evening an old warrior with fine grey moustaches and long white hair rode out and surveyed the six crude crosses bearing the six dead and dying fugitives. Their faces were blue-white masks of agony, their breathing like a tortured wind in a ravine. He rode back to his tent, found his long spear and returned and killed them all one by one. The last was a round-faced woman. She should have been someone’s wife. The agony left her face as the spear entered her heart, and her eyes closed in something like peace.

  He got off his horse and cleaned his spear in the grass, then drove it into the ground and squatted down and looked away south over the low hills, his back to the bodies hanging like withered fruit on leafless trees.

  After a time another man came and squatted not far off in the gathering dusk. For a long while they said nothing to each other.

  Eventually Chanat murmured, ‘My dreams are becoming as crazed as yours, old shaman.’

  Little Bird hummed and tore grass.

  The old warrior cupped his big bony hands round his ringing skull. His skull was thin as a bird’s now. Old age was wearing him thin all over.

  ‘It is not as it was before,’ he said with quiet disgust. He gestured over his shoulder at the crucified cadavers and the smouldering town beyond. ‘Look at our work.’

  ‘He is Tashur-Astur, the Scourge of God,’ said the shaman in his sing-song voice. ‘A fool may argue with God, but God will not answer.’

  ‘This is God’s judgement on wicked people? Do you believe that, Little Bird?’

  The shaman looked away. He never answered a direct question for, as he said, how could he? He did not exist.

  ‘I did not come here to scalp infants in arms,’ growled Chanat.

  He remembered seeing Candac amid the smoking ruins of Margus, standing silent upon rubble and slaughter, staring, a look unfathomable on his strong round face. Looking about him perhaps in judgement before he chose to vanish.

  Chanat gasped and clutched his side. A week ago, he had cursed the witch Enkhtuya to her face. The cramps in his bowels still hurt. Such pettiness they had come to. He thought he saw nobility itself ebbing away like the last of the sun on a winter’s day. The cold and brazen light across the steps occluded by black cloud from some burning town.

  Little Bird and Chanat both shivered.

  7

  PEACE AT LAST

  Catastrophe followed hard on the heels of the small success of unmasking the spies. A brief and bitter communication came to the Imperial Court from Adrianople.

  The Eastern Field Army under the command of General Aspar, Magister Militum per Thraciam, leaving from Army headquarters at Marcianopolis, engaged the Huns on flat country near the River Utus. Overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers, however, and the speed and ferocity of the enemy, as well as their unexpected mastery of both artillery and the heavy cavalry charge, the six legions and all their auxiliaries were destroyed. General Aspar himself continued to fight with utmost gallantry on foot after his horse was killed under him, but eventually he, too, was slain.

  It is believed that the Hunnish army is continuing to advance south.

  In Constantinople, there was outright terror at the news. Now there was nothing but a few centuries of the Palatine Guard, and scattered auxiliaries down at Trajanople and Heraclea, to stand between them and this demonic army of a million heathen horsemen. Who ate children’s flesh, they said, and drank bat’s blood mixed with wine. Some citizens fled across the Bosphorus to Asia Minor. Others prayed for twenty hours a day to the Holy Mother. All were infected with panic, as contagious as the plague.

  Theodosius begged Aëtius for Western aid, and the general duly wrote again to Ravenna. But he warned that there would be little time and that, now Valentinian knew of the Huns’ power, he might prefer to keep his legions for his own protection: frontier legions as well as field army.

  The reply soon came by sea. There was to be no aid. Theodosius’ curses rained down on his cousin’s head.

  ‘He will fall on us soon now,’ he said. ‘This Attila, God’s punishment upon us. Yet in what have we so sinned? I do not know.’ He gave a deep sigh: the sigh of the foredefeated. ‘First he will devastate all of Moesia and Illyria, Thessaly and Thrace, and then he will fall upon this city. We cannot stand against him with only a few hundred ill-trained auxiliaries and the Guard. We will have to negotiate.’

  ‘We still have the Walls,’ said Aëtius.

  ‘Not all of us are behind the walls.’

  ‘True,’ said Aëtius. ‘In the provinces, the people must shift for themselves. But the city will be saved. And there will be recompense, I promise you. When Attila turns westwards against Rome, he will not meet with such easy victory.’

  ‘You do not understand,’ said the emperor haltingly. ‘Not all the . . . imperial family is behind the walls.’

  Aëtius frowned. ‘The Princess Honoria?’

  Theodosius smiled mirthlessly. ‘No, she is still in my sister Pulcheria’s charge. I mean ... the Empress Eudoxia.’

  The empress. Athenais. He had not allowed himself to think of that name for years.

  ‘She is in Jerusalem?’

  ‘Would that she were. No, she is visiting the convent at Azimuntium.’

  ‘I do not know it.’

  ‘A small hill-town near the Pontine coast, of ancient Thracian origin. Indeed, it is proposed by some of our most eminent mythographologists that the site may in fact be etymologically cognate with that of the Homeric—’

  ‘In the path of Attila?’

  The emperor’s voice dulled again. ‘In the path, as you say, of Attila.’

  ‘Why was I not informed of this before?’

  ‘Your services were needed here - as indeed they still are. The Holy City must needs be defended even more than . . .’

  ‘Even more than the empress.’

  ‘Do not speak with such quick judgement,’ cautioned Theodosius, his voice low but his gaze again fixed on the general. ‘I know you, Gaius Flavius Aëtius. You think yourself a man of very different mettle from mine. But an emperor’s choices are never easy, especially in time of war.’

  Aëtius bowed his head a little.

  ‘We have intelligence that the empress remains safe in the convent of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, Virgins and Martyrs, behind the considerable walls of that venerable hill-town. But the country round about is lawless, and the Huns draw closer daily. She will require an escort. I cannot spare the Imperial Guard, but I thought perhaps your . . . rubicund friends from Gothia?’

  Aëtius smiled at the emperor’s feline words. To a man like Theodosius, the Goths would for ever be the barbarous immigrants who had caused the disaster of Adrianople, seventy years before.

  ‘Very well,’ said Aëtius. ‘I will take my wolf-lords.’

  ‘You will be back in one week.’

  Aëtius bowed.

  He was on the brink of departure when more news came. Two Hun ambassadors had arrived from the camp of Attila.

  The emperor’s eyes lit up. ‘You see, we can negotiate! The empress will be safe. They wish to make peace.’

  ‘They do not wish to make peace. They come only to reconnoitre. This is a trap of Attila’s. Do not trust him. Blindfold the ambassadors, do not let them see the Walls, do not let them near anyone, do not let them speak except in a closed cell.’

  But the emperor was no longer listening, his whole being flooded with relief. Theodosius hated war, with a fierceness more usually found in men who have experienced the crimson foulness of the battlefield themselves. For in truth no man dies well who dies in battle. And hating war, he had already sent out emissaries to find the approaching barbarians and their terrible king, and sue for peace. What could he offer them? Land? Their own kingdom south of the Danube? The whole province of Moesia, even? So far, none of the emissaries had returned, but now he revealed this new twist to the general. Voices were soon raised.

  ‘The emissarie
s have not returned, Eternal Majesty, because their crow-pecked corpses are even now hanging from trees all along the Egnatian Way!’

  Aëtius’ anger was barely controlled. In the West, as a letter from that good general Germanus had informed him, many of the lesser troops were already beginning to desert from the Roman side. News of the destruction of the Eastern Field Army on the Utus had already reached distant ears, and now the Western Field Army was also ebbing away. Terror, as Attila observed, is a powerful weapon; and very cheap. If only the Western legions could be embarked forthwith, Aëtius urged, and sail for the East, the very mission itself might steady them. Galla Placidia had tried to persuade her son of this very policy, but Valentinian and his advisers were set against it. The Western Army must remain for the defence of the West. Germanus wished his commander well, and trusted that the Huns in the East could still be resisted. Aëtius wrote back that for now he would have to trust in walls, not men.