Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Theodosius remained cold in the face of Aëtius’ temper, and spoke of how all men in their hearts love reason.

  Aëtius paced, and clenched his fists unreasonably.

  ‘Is a man rational when in love?’ he cried. ‘A woman when she is defending her child against some wild beast, armed only with her own rage, fighting off a ravening lion with her bare hands, or a puny knife she has snatched from the table? And she will triumph, too, for she fights for everything that she loves, whereas the lion fights only for his dinner, and will soon slink cowardly away.’

  ‘You have seen this?’ asked Theodosius, wide-eyed.

  Aëtius suppressed a spasm of irritation. At times the learned emperor could be the stupidest of men. ‘I speak in a figure, Your Majesty. Reason does not reign supreme.’

  He tried to explain - rationally - what he knew and understood of Attila, and his idea of himself and his demonic destiny.

  The emperor listened, brow furrowed. ‘But this is madness!’ he said incredulously. ‘It is almost as if you are suggesting that Attila has no aim but to avenge the insults he suffered as a child - with vengeance in the form of purest destruction!’

  ‘To destroy his enemies is the sweetest thing to him, and his enemies are all those he feels have insulted him and his people. The more he destroys, the stronger he becomes. If you buy him off with gold, that makes him stronger too. It will not buy peace. Attila scorns peace, and loves power. Gold will only buy him more weapons, more armour, more warhorses, the service of freebooters and shiftless mercenaries.’

  Still the emperor looked perplexed and angry.

  Aëtius approached him as closely as he dared, and fixed his eye urgently. ‘Majesty, you must imagine that Attila has sent you a message saying simply, “We do not want anything from you. We want to destroy you.”’

  ‘But it was on the orders of the Western Empire that the original attack on the Huns was mounted.’

  ‘And the Western Empire’s turn will come. But it was an Eastern legion that executed that order, a legion itself now destroyed. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. The Lord God punished them all.’

  ‘You are comparing Attila to God ?’

  ‘Not my comparison, Attila’s own. Attila Tashur-Astur - “Flagellum Dei”.’

  Theodosius pondered a moment, and then another party entered. It was Pulcheria, the emperor’s absurdly pious and misleadingly christened elder sister, a sour-faced woman in her sixth decade. With her came one of her closest counsellors, the lean, saturnine Chrysaphius, and a small, wiry man called Vigilas. She spoke quietly to the emperor, and a moment later Theodosius asked Aëtius to leave them. Matters had already progressed from the military to the diplomatic, he said smoothly, despite the master-general’s ‘pessimism’ and ‘negativity’; further advice from him was now redundant.

  The two Hun ambassadors were Geukchu, an intelligent-looking fellow in a fine silk robe, not in animal furs and skins as they had expected; and a quiet, very polite, bald-pated companion, Greek by birth, who introduced himself as Orestes. Within minutes, Theodosius felt he had mastered them. They brought the emperor some wonderful treasures, including a Cimmerian leopard in a cage; they paid him great respect, kissing the purple hem of his robe, and they said that yes, they would be happy to receive a Byzantine embassy in return. They were sure an accommodation could be reached in this unfortunate matter.

  Behind them, Theodosius’ eyes met the gaze of Chrysaphius, and the counsellor, almost imperceptibly, nodded.

  That night, Geukchu and Orestes dined and drank late into the night with Chrysaphius and Vigilas, and in the morning they took their leave of one another like brothers.

  The emperor insisted that Aëtius lead the Byzantine embassy to the Huns, despite the general’s lack of enthusiasm. He could combine the mission with escorting the empress home afterwards. Chrysaphius and Vigilas would go, too, the counsellor handling the actual negotiations; and he also sent his trusted Clerk-in-Consistory, modest Priscus, to record the historic meeting, along with a small retinue of guards. Aëtius wished to take the two Visigothic princes and their fifty wolf-lords on the long and perilous journey, fully armed. The emperor grudgingly agreed. Those wolf-lords ate like oxen in winter. It would be good to be rid of them for a while.

  A note came to Aëtius from the Princess Honoria, smuggled out via a bribed slave, bribed in God knew what manner. The disgraced and dishonoured daughter of Galla Placidia and sister of Valentinian, long held in virtual captivity in the women’s quarters, she wrote mockingly that she too would like to ride out and meet this Attila. She thought he sounded interesting. Aëtius grunted with grim amusement, sniffed the delicate little note and found it was indeed perfumed, then screwed it up and tossed it into the nearest brazier.

  And so it was that I, Priscus, rode out that day with the man I still thought of as my beloved pupil, upon the most perilous journey of my life. Sailing back and forth from Italy to Constantinople was bad enough, but this was virtually into the wilds of Scythia! I took a flask of very strong red wine, heavily sweetened, to keep me warm; and an extra woollen blanket.

  Thus prepared, I took my brief place upon the stage of History, tentative, blinking, and for what I hoped would be but a short scene. The public theatre is sufficiently unpleasant, what with the rotten fruit and the catcalls, but the stage of History is far worse, and for those who take their place upon it, the play often closes early.

  I also took with me many scrolls to record this historic venture. In the night I dreamed that I was reading them over, and that I had called my account ‘A Journey Through the Thirteen Cities of the Ruined Lands.’

  We rode out that morning through the Golden Gate, heading westwards along the shores of the Sea of Marmara on the ancient Via Egnatia, which people had travelled for six hundred years towards Thessalonika, and then over the Dinaric Alps to the Adriatic coast at Dyrrachium. But before Thessalonika we would turn north away from the coast and up into the hills. The wolf-lords and their two princes rode the finest white Cappadocian horses from the imperial stables. That favour, at least, the emperor had allowed his allies, though they still mourned their own drowned chargers, lying deep beneath the waves and far away.

  Under a late summer sky heavy with stormclouds, Aëtius was trying to keep other ghastly images at bay. The battle of the River Utus: is that how history would remember it - if at all? The Beginning of the End, far more surely than Adrianople, seventy years before. Six legions gone. Another at Viminacium, another at Ratiaria. Other cities destroyed since then, he was sure. He was glad he had not seen it, but he could imagine the scenes of carnage all too well.

  They had mastered artillery and the heavy cavalry charge already. A bludgeoning bullock-headed charge: no lightly dancing, lethal arrow-storms now, but a heavy cavalry, gleaming and newly armoured from the armouries of Ratiaria, thumping into the aghast Byzantine line and shivering it to splinters. Shards of shieldwood and flying teeth, lost limbs, open mouths screaming silently, flailing, falling, trampled into the reddening mud. The Huns must have learned fast, clad in the laminar plate of their slaughtered foes, clutching long lances resting in slings and couched tightly under bulging biceps. Their squat muscled horses galloping in fast, a pummelling gallop with huge heads stretched forward and low, juddering into the Byzantine line like battering-rams, men flung aside, horses’ eyes rolling to the whites like those of horses gored by bulls, Roman horses rising up under the punch, staggering, toppling their own riders back into the mêlée, legs flailing, hooves turned upwards, kicking, horses screaming, their lips curled back over long yellow teeth and terrible horse cries, the foul stench of blood and ruptured bowels, the earth slippery with loosed innards and gore, the horror . . .

  ‘Deep in thought, Master-General?’

  It was Prince Theodoric at his side, his voice light and young and jaunty. Aëtius said nothing.

  ‘Worried about the Huns?’ asked Torismond, equally brightly. ‘Never fear, the mighty Visigothic nation
will vanquish them by Christmas.’

  ‘Mind your tongue, little brother,’ cautioned the more sensible Theodoric, glancing round. The Hun ambassadors Geukchu and Orestes with their small party of Hun warriors rode at the back of the column. ‘This is just us. Our father’s people are not at war with the Huns.’

  Aëtius said softly, ‘They will be.’

  ‘Attila’s aim is Rome,’ said Theodoric, ‘and Constantinople.’

  ‘His aim is the world.’

  ‘Well, I pray that this embassy fails,’ said Torismond.

  Aëtius glanced sideways at his rubicund friend from Gothia. ‘It’ll fail.’

  ‘And then I pray that we meet some of ’em out there!’ he added eagerly. ‘A war party!’ He even leaned forward in his saddle as he spoke.

  ‘Pray that you don’t,’ said Aëtius.

  The threatened storm passed and we rode on west across the burning Thracian plains. Already many of the farms and homesteads were deserted. The people had fled, refugees stumbling back to the already overcrowded city of Constantinople, in dread of the approaching wrath. ‘The Huns are coming’ was the whisper throughout all that country. ‘Flee for your lives. The Huns are coming.’ The people, too, had no faith in embassies.

  One solitary man stood at the side of the road watching us pass, clutching his hoe like a spear. Then he called out sardonically at our band of sixty or so, ‘You’re going to need a bigger army!’

  We said nothing and rode on.

  One night, as we camped, a snake appeared beside where Chrysaphius was standing. The counsellor froze in horror, a townsman to his marrow, but in a trice the little fellow Vigilas had drawn a gleaming dagger from his cloak and skewered the snake through the head.

  Aëtius regarded him curiously.

  Later he addressed him casually in simple Gothic, and then Aramaic, but the fellow looked blank. He spoke only Latin and Greek, the former somewhat stiffly. A poor linguist for a diplomat.

  ‘He is my personal bodyguard,’ said Chrysaphius defensively. ‘Let us concentrate on the task in hand, Master-General.’

  Aëtius assured him that he was all concentration.

  Sleeping out at night was bad, although, as it turned out, far from the worst horror that we would face. How I longed night after night for the hot baths and cool chambers of the Palace of the Emperors, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, silvered by the moon. Instead I went along, and saw things that I have never forgotten and would never have dreamed.

  For the first time I saw with my own eyes the horrors of war. I, Priscus of Panium, obedient son, studious pupil, humble scribe in the Imperial Court of Theodosius II, and lately raised to the post of Chief Clerk-in-Consistory. How tearfully proud my parents would have been, had they lived to see! I was never meant for the battlefield, and was a little fearful even of that more playful battlefield which lies between the opposing armies called Men and Women. I was happier, generally speaking - but for an occasional scampering visit to the local bawdyhouse on the Street of the Golden Cock just behind the Hippodrome - to keep myself to myself, and to stay peacefully and diligently among the scrolls and texts of the ancients, reading and writing and dreaming of other ages than this.

  But now I was riding out to see the world as it is. I do not think that I have known the same peace of mind since seeing the world as it is. My dreams have been more vivid, and more troubled. In the old days I barely remembered my dreams at all, but now they come to me in the silence of the night, messengers and harbingers unsought. I have less of my old equanimity now. But perhaps I will be a better chronicler for it. There is no reason to think that Tacitus and Thucydides were happy men.

  Of the things I witnessed, I asked myself, did the armies of Rome not commit similar atrocities? Yes, they did. Perhaps not on such a scale; perhaps not with such malevolent randomness or glee, perhaps with rather a dutiful grimness. But if you are the victim, does it matter whether your killer is grinning or grimfaced when he cuts your throat? I tried to discern that the violence of Rome was a means to an end, committed to secure peace, stability and the rule of law, but the violence of the barbarians was committed for its own sake, for the pleasure of terror, and as such would never cease or find satiety.

  But I do not know any more. I do not enjoy the ordered comfort of such thoughts. I know little with certainty, and I can only record what I saw. At my age I no longer have opinions, only memories.

  I had hope

  When violence was ceas’d, and War on Earth, All would have then gone well, peace would have crowned

  With length of happy days the race of man;

  But I was far deceived . . .

  And one battle looks much like another when you survey the corpses after.

  Our journey was long and arduous, and I often slept in the saddle. I remember a violent storm, and fires of blazing reeds, detonated by the lightning and burning up even in rain. I remember weariness and disorientation, tiredness beyond measure, and the sun appearing to rise in the West one morning. A bad omen.

  When we came to the ruins of what had once been a city, the omen was fulfilled: the first of numberless settlements, villages, towns and cities we were to encounter, destroyed and utterly laid waste by the hand of Attila. The rich and golden cities of the Eastern Empire that would never again recover from his wrath. Through all the destruction, our two Hun ambassadors, our guides through this wasteland which their own people had created, seemed not a bit contrite. Guilt they doubtless regarded as a form of cowardice, like most barbarians. Only at a certain rest stop did the one called Orestes, Greek by birth - shame on him! - wave his hand over the void before us, and say softly, ‘You see now why it would be in your interests to negotiate.’ He almost smiled. Aëtius’ face was dark with fury and he did not speak. Not for days.

  The city was a blackened skeleton of its former self, a skeleton of wood and stone, flattened walls, arches and buttresses broken off and hanging in space. Like Philippopolis and Marcianopolis, it had been a bishopric, and the Huns had knifed and stripped its bishop and hung him from the walls.

  ‘They would have spat in the face of Christ if they could,’ I muttered.

  ‘As did the Romans once,’ said Prince Theodoric beside me.

  I could think of nothing more to say.

  A few had survived the firestorm and the arrow-storm, and them we pitied most, for they must have envied the dead. Sick people sheltered beneath the broken walls of the churches. Rachitic or tubercular children, riven with coughing, held out their clawed hands to us for food, but we could not help. A small girl cradling an infant in her lap sheltered beneath a smashed stone altar table, dark eyes peering up at me through filthy hair. In a demolished side-street, a mere pattern of rubble now, there was another huddle of children, lips withered with hunger, worm-filled bellies like sails before the wind. Near them, though they appeared mercifully oblivious, lay two adult corpses, scalped, their temples stained as if with some dark chrism. Here I tired and could no longer look at the sights of the city.

  I rode over paving-stones grouted with dried blood, my horse trampling over a tattered prayer book, an illuminated euchologion, torn pages turning to no purpose. My ears rang with sad litanies of mortal flesh and blood. My old pupil said, remounting and pulling his horse away, ‘And the emperor believes he can negotiate with this.’

  A little further on he stopped again. His head was bowed and his big, scarred hands gripped the front of his saddle. I saw to my astonishment that, although his shadowed face was set as hard and grim as ever, tears ran down his furrowed cheeks and fell in dark splotches on the saddle leather. Yet why should I be astonished? That was Aëtius to the core: the deepest passions, under iron control.

  He turned in the saddle and looked back. The column of wolf-lords in their scarlet cloaks was riding out after us, and the Byzantine ambassadors, and the two wordless, expressionless Huns. We were leaving the sick people and the starving children behind. Aëtius said, his voice trembling, ‘All we can do now, to
help them, is defeat Attila.’

  I understood. He was almost asking me to forgive him for riding on and not helping, here and now. I nodded. It was agony, but there was nothing to be done here. We had no food, no medicines, no resources. The people were too sickly to move, let alone make it all the way back to the safety of Constantinople. In a few days they would simply . . . vanish. Their souls would be gathered in. I nodded again, I hoped consolingly. We must do the emperor’s bidding and speak with Attila. Then we must ride back to the city. There were a million or more people there whom we could save. And beyond that . . . the rest of the empire.