Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Attila always admired the brave and bloody-minded. The men of Azimuntium had triumphed.

  After the herds and the flocks had been returned, along with the captured shepherds, filthy but well enough, Aëtius ordered Chanat brought up from the dungeons.

  The old warrior glared at him. ‘A horse.’

  ‘You Huns have horses enough. You can walk back to the camp.’

  Chanat growled, ‘Slaves walk.’

  Aëtius turned to the woman. ‘And what about you? Will you return to your lawful Christian husband, or do you wish to go with this ageing barbarian?’

  The woman gave Chanat a look that said it all. Chanat grinned. ‘I take the woman instead of a horse. She is slow but comfortable.’ The woman bowed her head in shame, but stayed by his side.

  Aëtius sighed and looked away. ‘Open the postern gate.’

  ‘You have no courtesy, Roman, no hospitality for your guests,’ said Chanat as he departed.

  ‘You weren’t a guest, you were a prisoner.’

  ‘But I think we shall meet again. Maybe on some bright, bloody battlefield, and it will be a glorious death for both of us. But you should ride away quickly now. The shadow of Astur follows you over the earth, and we, too, are riding south. The next time we meet, the Lord Attila may not be so accommodating!’

  After the gate had closed on the pair, Aëtius turned to his wolf-lords. ‘Saddle up fast.’

  He insisted that the empress ride in a carriage, but she well knew what threat lay over them, and that time was against them: not just this party, but the entire city of Constantinople. She rode on a horse, clutching her reins, pale and silent. Lord Ariobarzanes came down to bid them farewell, grimly satisfied with the return of the sheep and cattle, and swearing that if ever the Huns appeared in his domains again, the men of Azimuntium would destroy them. Finally, the old Jewish healer or whatever he was came and spoke to him. Aëtius asked him to ride with them, but he said that his path was by another way. His arms were full of ancient scrolls which he had taken from the synagogue, fearing that they would fall to the Huns, to be used for lighting campfires. As if one man could gather all the scrolls of the ancient world and save them from the fire to come.

  Aëtius had other things to think about, such as checking their provisions, exchanging a half-lame horse for a better one, and deciding what route they should take before the path of the oncoming whirlwind. But still Gamaliel followed him, shambling around the courtyard of Azimuntium before the gates as the wolf-lords and the empress’s retinue assembled, tripping over the tattered hem of his old grey robe, talking of the Sibylline Leaves, which were destroyed but not yet silent. He told the general to remember the prophecy recorded by Livy, that Rome would stand twelve centuries plus six lustra, which period was soon coming. And the king who destroyed two kingdoms. All is not all that it seems. The story is not yet finished. Is it ever? Which is the real, time or eternity? In dreams there is no time.

  Aëtius peered into a pannier, checking grain, finding the old man very distracting.

  ‘Last night,’ said Gamaliel, ‘perhaps you dreamed of your boyhood again. You were back at school under the stern eye of the magister.’

  ‘Dreams play us false,’ snapped Aëtius.

  ‘Did the dreams of Pharaoh play him false? Or Nebuchadnezzar? God speaks in dreams. The wise man listens and attends. Have hope, Aëtius. Have precious hope.’

  Aetius mounted, called for the gates to be opened, and turned back to look over the column. So feeble, so few in number. The wolf-lords with their banners floating in the breeze . . . the empress with her dark, pained eyes. Then he muttered to Prince Theodoric at his side, ‘Time to go. Attila will be hunting us. The game has begun.’

  ‘He thinks war a game?’

  ‘He thinks all of life and death a game. Forward!’

  16

  THE SOLITARY CITY

  Elsewhere, all over the Eastern Empire in those days, the armies of the Huns roved unchecked, destroying all in their path. The shadow of Astur was indeed over the earth. The clumsy attempt on Attila’s life would be paid for with the lives of thousands.

  At the seaports of the Adriatic, refugees took ship and fled west, spilling out of ramshackle boats and making landfall along the Italian coast. Stories of devastation soon reached the horrified ears of the Court of Ravenna, and Valentinian, rather than leading the Army of the West to face Attila in a last, desperate attempt to halt him, as a man of a different stamp might have done, ordered his finest legions to huddle uselessly about him, camped on the debilitating summer marshes, while his Eastern brothers burned.

  Attila and his horde left Moesia, Macedonia, Illyricum and Thrace nothing but scorched earth. They razed to the ground the cities of Nicopolis and Marcianopolis and the great regional capital of Sardica. Their fury and their appetite for destruction knew no bounds, and they slew all they found. They destroyed Philippopolis, and Adrianople, and Edessa in Macedonia, and on the Euxine coast the lovely cities of Salmydessus, and Apollonia, and Tomi where Ovid in exile once wept. On the Aegean coast they destroyed Amphipolis, and the great port of Thessalonika, taking all that city’s rich stores of silver and lead away in their huge covered wagons. Some of their war parties rode on further, as if unable to rein in, and laid waste to Thessaly and even ancient Hellas itself. They found Corinth and Athens deserted, but destroyed many of the finest monuments of those revered cities in vengeance. Their victims numbered in the thousands, tens of thousands. The stench of rotting bodies was always on the wind.

  Constantinople, the sweetest dish, the Red Apple as they called it, was left till last. The walled city of Constantine, the New Rome, was all that stood between the Huns and the treasures of Asia: the teeming millions of Syria and Egypt, the cities of Nicomedia and Ephesus and Antioch, the ancient centres of Christianity, far greater and more populous than any the Huns had yet devastated. As the terror of the coming storm increased, so, too, did the slow and horrified realisation that this was a storm which would not cease. Constantinople once taken, the Huns would cross the straits of the Bosphorus, and the rest of the world would be at their feet.

  The Byzantines had visions of the Huns riding their rough ponies into the very Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, or the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, laying waste the site of Calvary and man’s redemption itself. Huns traversing the desert east and besieging far Damascus; crossing the Sinai and trampling the rich cornlands of Egypt, burning and flattening Alexandria, barbarous steppe horsemen amid the immemorial pagan temples and palaces of that ancient kingdom. Huns riding across North Africa, via the burning shells of Cyrene and Leptis Magna, and on to Carthage, meeting up with their Vandal allies under Genseric. There was no limit to the destruction they might wreak.

  Constantinople must stand; even though her sister Rome would not stand with her.

  I, Priscus of Panium, have seen the Hunnic destruction with my own eyes, and I have also read other chroniclers. Callinicus tells us that ‘More than a hundred cities were captured. There were so many murders and blood-lettings that the dead could not be numbered. For they took captive the churches and monasteries and slew the monks and maidens in great quantities.’ It was amid this impious slaughter that the mythic terror of the Huns was born. As Attila observed, terror is a fine weapon, and very cheap; and panic travels faster even than galloping horses.

  That other noble chronicler, Count Marcellinus, wrote simply of that year of catastrophe, ‘Attila ground almost the whole of Europe into dust.’

  There was one small town in those days, however, which did not fall. Tragedy did not visit it, History passed it by. It remained humble and unremarked, a common, ordinary, unheroic little town. I mean the town of Panium, standing there on the green hillside, valerian and stonecrop growing in the cracks of its ancient golden limestone walls, and the bell tower of the church peeping above. It had stood thus for many centuries, and it will stand for many centuries more, its people placid and unknown, goat bells sounding in the olive g
roves, cicadas chirruping in the sun-dried grass. In the evenings the old men still gather in the courtyard by the well to gossip and to drink the thin red wine. Just a simple green hillside, a little town of shepherds and farmers, a single half-literate priest. No, History never visited Panium, and it remains there still. It has no stories, for it has no scars.

  Aëtius took a gamble and rode directly back to the capital down the open road. The Huns did not snap at his heels. Indeed, there was no sign of them. They were waiting, looting, slaughtering through all the surrounding land, leaving Constantinople alone in mournful isolation, her provinces cut from her like limbs and destroyed in the fire. ‘How doth the city sit solitary . . .’ Aëtius rode at the head of the column, face set, expressionless, never so alone. Athenaïs ached to see him.

  This waiting, this torment, was also directed at him, as he well knew. Attila’s games, his complex furies and hatreds. He is isolating me, saving me till last too, he thought. As if I have somehow betrayed him, and my betrayal is the worst, and must be punished the most.

  As they came across the flat plains past the last outlying and deserted farmsteads, and saw the great brick-banded Theodosian Walls ahead of them, and the domes and spires of the city within, it seemed as if they were arrived at a dreadful judgement and reckoning, entering upon some vast stage-set directed by History herself, and they were only actors, their speeches and destinies already written. Through late orchards they came, fruit falling from the trees ungathered, abandoned monastic houses, past Maltepe Hill and the shallow valley of the Lycus and, all defenceless, the forlorn and foredoomed Church of Theotokos, its precious furnishings and icons already taken by the priests and hurried within the safety of the Walls.

  There was a brief and bitter meeting between the emperor and his general. Theodosius was aghast that the assassination attempt had failed. Vigilas? Dead from exhaustion. Aëtius told him of Attila’s little joke with the fifty pounds of gold. And Chrysaphius? Aëtius did not spare the details. It was time this stupid but well-intentioned man began to understand his enemy.

  ‘Attila cut his throat in front of us. Before that he tortured him a while. Broke his nose, smashed his anklebone underfoot and so forth.’

  Theodosius held his hand to his mouth, looking at Aëtius indignantly for having exposed him to such truths.

  There was worse. Aëtius produced the note Attila had given him.

  To the Emperor of the Eastern Romans, slave, liar, coward and traitor. It is a wicked slave who conspires against the life of his master. You have forfeited your position and the Will of Heaven has henceforth placed you in my hands. We are coming to collect the debt you owe us. Attila, Tashur-Astur.

  Theodosius looked on the verge of hysteria, but gradually calmed himself again. ‘We must buy him off. It is our only choice.’

  ‘You cannot buy him off. He will take the gold and then attack you anyway.’

  He paced and fretted for long minutes. Finally he said, his voice quailing a little, ‘Can this city truly withstand the might of the Huns? With our own armies destroyed, and the help of the Western ships and legions . . . withheld?’

  ‘Yes. I believe it can.’

  Thedosius looked sorrowful. ‘All my best generals are slain: Aspar cut down at the River Utus, Solimarius hunted to death like a dog by a Hun war-party in the Chersonesus, Zenobius - his earthly remains - perhaps somewhere in the ashes of Thessalonika, which he died trying to defend with a handful of mercenaries. And so you see . . .’ He opened his hands helplessly. ‘The city is yours to defend. I commit it into your hands. Do what you must.’ He hesitated a moment longer, looking at Aëtius as if not seeing him, and then retired to his private chambers.

  Outside the audience chamber, Athenaïs joined Aëtius.

  ‘Your Majesty is in better health again?’

  She smiled and did not answer. Instead she said, ‘The emperor is a good man.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Aëtius. ‘No Valentinian.’

  ‘That is treason!’ Her tone was not entirely serious.

  He grimaced. ‘Theodosius is all sweet reasonableness and gentle light, I know. But he has poor night vision. His wide eyes do not penetrate into the dark places either of the world or of men’s hearts.’

  ‘Whereas you have good night vision.’

  ‘Plenty of practice.’

  The empress sighed. ‘He believes that all men are essentially like himself. A great folly, perhaps.’

  ‘A great folly for certain. Reason is weak, and unreason has unimaginable power against it: the power of ancient and irrational forces.’

  ‘Those powers burn strong in Attila.’

  ‘Strong as the sun.’ Aëtius laughed harshly. ‘And the emperor, God save his Imperial Majesty, believes that he can negotiate with him. Can you negotiate with the sun?’

  There was a silence, then she touched his arm and said his name.

  He pulled away. ‘Excuse me, Majesty. I have work to do.’

  There was still no news of the approaching Hun whirlwind, but the air was thick with heaviness and dread. It would not be long now. And so, amid signs and portents and the panicked babbling of crowds and self-appointed doomsayers in the choked streets of the capital, Aëtius set about preparing for the coming onslaught.

  He surveyed the city’s walls from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn, wondering again at their colossal strength: squared stone facings of tertiary limestone, founded in bedrock, with mortared rubble for infill. The towers were built as separate structures, a masterstroke of that great overseer of the work, the Praetorian Prefect Anthemius, back in 413. An assault on the walls or settling of their foundations would do no harm to the towers themselves. And they were so massively built that even the largest artillery machines could safely be operated from their rooftops without damage to the structure below them. He inspected the artillery as he went, approving the low-slung onagers and the multiple arrow-machines with grim satisfaction. He even approved a couple of new-fangled machines supposed to hurl detonating fire-pots. None of the men operating the machines looked much good at hand-to-hand fighting; they were city guards and technicians only, but they would do. He inspected them all and gave praise or censure where due. Each artillery battery that he inspected, and spoke to of the coming attack, he left more sombre and more resolute than before.

  The two Gothic princes in his party were awe-struck by the Walls: that feat of engineering which they had often heard of but had dismissed as exaggeration. Torismond leaned out from Military Gate V, overlooking the Lycus Valley, taking in the multiple defences of the city before any attacker could even begin to scale the primary walls, starting with the outer ditch sixty feet wide and thirty feet deep. He paused and turned to Aëtius, looking puzzled.

  ‘Sir, I can hear something.’

  Aëtius nodded. ‘Keep watching.’

  A light wind arose from the bare stone below, then as if from underground, there came a low, rushing sound. There was a trickle of water across the dusty facing of the ditch below, then a sudden, mighty onrush of waters, foaming in from the sea, where the sluice-gates had been opened on Aëtius’ orders. The princes whooped with glee. Within minutes the great moat was flooded to a siege-depth of twenty-five feet. The seawater settled and stilled, glinting and opaque.

  ‘The Huns don’t like water,’ murmured Theodoric.

  ‘You see that the moat is divided into segments,’ said Aëtius, ‘rather than being a continuous ditch. Why?’

  Torismond frowned. ‘I’d have thought that weakened us. Those dividing walls - the Huns can come across them on foot.’

  Aëtius snorted. ‘One at a time, single file. We can pick ’em off easily enough. No, those dividing walls are Prefect Anthemius’ most brilliant device of all. What will the Huns do when they first encounter the aqueducts outside the city?’

  ‘It had crossed my mind,’ murmured Theodoric. ‘They’ll destroy them.’

  ‘Poison them, block them up, break them down, whatever. Quite so. Bu
t, firstly, every one of our cisterns will be filled to the brim before then. Secondly, those dividing walls below you conceal further underground aqueducts. The Huns will never realise. Our water supplies will continue, if severely reduced, even with our great arched aqueducts destroyed.’

  The princes gaped at such ingenuity.

  Having crossed this first obstacle, by swimming or boat, pontoon or cumbersome infill of timber and brushwood lashed together, the attackers would have to scale a low crenellated wall and then face an exposed terrace thirty feet wide. This was the first killing-ground, bare under the sun before another, higher crenellated wall, seven feet thick, thirty feet high and with ninety-six towers along its length. Even the most skilled artillery attackers, utilising the most minutely calculated trajectories for their missiles, would find it virtually impossible to hit this second wall at its foundations and effect any serious damage. Should the attackers succeed in scaling the second wall, they would face another broad, cruelly exposed terrace, wider still than the last, and then the final obstacle: the Walls themselves, beyond compare, no walls in the world higher. Sixteen feet thick, a sheer forty feet high, and with a further massive ninety-six defensive towers. Not even Babylon’s walls at her apogee could rival the walls of Constantinople; walls whose broad tops, Herodotus tells us, the young men of ancient Assyria used to race around at evening-time, in chariots drawn by four horses abreast. A thousand years ago.