Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  All through it and for hours afterwards, the autumn rain fell ceaselessly. Whereas the city had been in a state of silent, pent-up hysteria, now all chaos was let loose. In the drenched midnight the bells of the churches of St Irene, and the Apostles, and the Chora Monastery, and the great basilica of St Sophia Augusteion rang out, as if to summon the people to judgement. The bells of the Apostles suddenly went silent, and then there was a terrible clanging crash. The quake had weakend the bell-tower, and it had collapsed. Four bell-ringers were laid out dead.

  The streets turned to mud, the animals were maddened, wailing people ran to and fro with blazing torches. Some made to escape from the city altogether. Even in the pitch-black night, in the driving rain, they fled down to the half-ruined harbours, pushed past the few guards there, and piled into little boats. Some even tried to swim across the Bosphorus. But the currents were strong, the waves were wild and clashing after the shaking of the earth, and the next day the sun rose on the sight of many hundreds of bodies washed up along the silent golden shores of Asia like strange seaweed. The first offerings.

  From the depths of his despair, somehow the master-general stirred himelf and found the strength and resolution to go on. He gave orders that no more were to pass. All remaining boats down to the smallest dinghies and rafts were to be smashed, and even the smallest harbours of Julian and Constantius and St Mary Hodegetria were to be blocked up. The general was ubiquitous on his white horse, one moment down at the Hippodrome, clearing out the many refugees there and billeting them on existing households, the next inspecting the cisterns of Aëlius and Mocius, thanking God that neither had been ruptured in the quake. For good measure he took time to excoriate their overseers and insist the great tanks should be at their highest levels - especially in this damned rain.

  He hectored the city watch at the end of every street, struggling to contain and appease the hysterical people. He addressed the populace at times, sitting his white horse, and they grew familiar with the sight of him. He told them to return to their homes and keep calm. This was their best hope now, in a city unmanned and soaked and half ruined by earthquake. Outside the walls their fate would be far worse. Then he was riding north and overlooking the Golden Horn, his horse picking its way through the rubble of collapsed shacks and stalls and even whole stone houses. He nodded with approval that at least one order had been correctly carried out. The normally placid waters were still ruffled from the aftershocks, and drummed into a dark mist by the rain, and spiked with the masts and timbers of half-sunk boats, an impassable obstacle course. Even more importantly, the Great Chain had been laid across the mouth of the Golden Horn, from the tower just below the Acropolis - mercifully still standing - to the oppposite side, locked onto the sea walls of Galata. No ship could break through that chain.

  Let the Vandal ships come, he thought grimly, through quake and storm. They’ll get nowhere. All our attention will be on the Walls. Then he reflected a moment, and sent an order for one, just one, artillery machine to be released from the walls of Theodosius, whichever was furthest from Military Gate V, and brought down here to be stationed on top of the towers of the St Barbara Gate, overlooking the chain. If the Vandal ships do cluster here like the amateurs they are, he thought, at least we can take a few vengeful potshots at them. Good for morale.

  Then . . . the Walls. He turned with a heavy heart and rode west. As he came round to the Charisius Gate, he saw the worst. The Walls were half ruined. In places, the sections between the towers were no more than head height. The rain slowed and stopped and the sun came out abruptly, mist steaming off the piles of broken masonry.

  He climbed one of the towers and saw that the great Inner Walls had suffered most. Accursed luck. But one small consolation: the moat didn’t seem to have been ruptured. It still held twenty or thirty feet of water, now covered with a fine spray of limestone dust from the shivered and shaken walls.

  He rode the three miles south with the Visigothic Princes, and Tatullus, and Captain Malchus. The Isaurian chieftain, Zeno, came down to say that the walls of the Blachernae Palace had barely been touched. But beyond that things were terrible. Tower after tower had shivered to rubble, jumbled piles of brick and stone, the bright marble of the proud gateways grubby red with brickdust. Broken statues lay face down along with broken people. What the most skilled and powerful besiegers could not have achieved in a month, nature had achieved in a minute. All rode on silently, thinking the same thoughts. God has turned against us. We have been judged.

  ‘Check with the outriders,’ was the only order Aëtius could give.

  By the time they reached the southern end of the Walls, they had counted fifty-seven of the ninety-seven towers damaged or fallen, and almost half the Walls likewise.

  ‘Find me the Easterner,’ he ordered.

  They sat their horses. The September sun shone down. Flies buzzed over puddles in the humid air. Not a word was spoken. Then Arapovian came. He saluted.

  ‘So, Easterner,’ said Aëtius. ‘With your intimate knowledge of earthquakes, tell me: if the Huns are fifty miles off, will they have felt it?’

  ‘I do not know, sir. If they are more than two hundred miles off still, then perhaps not.’

  Aëtius brooded. The aqueducts still flowed, had not been destroyed. There might just be a chance.

  He spoke more thoughts aloud. ‘The moment they feel it, for them it will be Astur shaking His enemies to the ground. It will be our righteous punishment. And they will be here at the gallop. But it is just possible - just - that they are still unaware of our calamities.’

  ‘Then what do we do?’ asked Tatullus. ‘Other than fight to the death?’

  ‘Other than fight to the death,’ said Aëtius, ‘a destiny which most certainly awaits us, we rebuild the Walls.’

  The men stared at him long and hard.

  ‘There are a million people at hand, doing little at present but wailing and praying. We put them to work. Any fool can learn to build a wall.’

  His eyes roved over a section still standing, and settled on an old tombstone which had been used to baulk a weak point. ‘To the memory of Crescens,’ read the crude lettering, ‘oil-dealer from the Portico of Pallas, born at the mouth of the Danube, lifelong Blues fan.’ Nearby on the wall itself was a scrawled graffito. ‘Up the Greens! ’ it read. ‘The Blues be crushed!’

  Aëtius’ face settled again into its old, deep-graven resolution. ‘Get me two teams,’ he said. ‘Everyone in this city is almost as mad about chariot-racing as they are about the Holy Mother. Everyone supports either the Greens or the Blues. Order all the Greens to assemble at the Marble Tower. Order all Blues northwards to the Chora Monastery. Order every mason in the city to oversee them. Let us have a competition.’ He surveyed their dumbstruck expressions. ‘You are thinking this is no time for games. On the contrary, this is exactly the time for games. The spirit of competition between Greens and Blues is a wonderful thing!’ He added wryly, ‘When they’re not slaughtering each other in the streets.’

  His men continued to stare.

  ‘Move! ’ he bellowed.

  From the outriders came news that no enemy had yet been sighted. Water still flowed into the cisterns from the great aqueducts. It was a miracle. The earthquake had been a calamity, but now, it seemed, God had changed his mind. The God who blasts and blesses in one breath.

  As He had stayed the sun in the sky for Joshua, so He seemed to be staying the advance of the Huns. Had they attacked now - had they known - the city would have been theirs in hours.

  And so the citizens of the Holy City of Byzantium, men, women and children of every station, turned stonemasons and builders. The children carried buckets of water and small pouches of clay and sand. Older men and women mixed the mortar. The stongest men, overseen by experienced masons, retrieved what solid stones they could find and began to re-lay them. Crude cranes were improvised from fallen timbers, from collapsed houses, or from bundles of wooden scaffolding tied with rope. Mules were yok
ed and worked hard, but none was worked to death: their strength was too valuable to squander. On the remaining towers, the Guard and the Auxiliaries, the wolf-lords and the artillery scanned the horizon ceaselessly. Nothing came. The aqueducts still flowed. It was a miracle.

  Aëtius ordered water for the workers, but no food. ‘We eat at nightfall, not before. You can work all day on an empty belly. Just keep the water coming.’ Yet when nightfall came, after snatched mouthfuls of bread and meat, many continued to work by torchlight. Sweating, begrimed faces were lit a fiery red, like those of workers in hell.

  ‘These Byzantines,’ growled Tatullus, grudgingly impressed, ‘I thought all they ever did was pray and argue theology.’

  After a little snatched sleep that night, Aëtius received a message towards dawn from the overseer at the Cistern of Mocius. He went to inspect. Citizens were filling their pails from the opened spouts at the base. The overseer greeted the general respectfully, shooed the people back, shut off the spouts, and then asked him to climb the steps and look into the cistern. Aëtius did so. There was no more inflow. He looked down questioningly.

  ‘The Aqueduct of Valens,’ said the overseer, ‘supplies this cistern.’

  ‘But it’s been shut off ?’

  ‘It’s been shut off,’ said the overseer.

  So. They were not far away now.

  He went to look at the Walls, and could have wept. People lay open-mouthed in the dirt, beyond exhaustion. And the walls . . .

  Unlike the people, the walls were far from finished.

  It was then that the men of the Church showed their mettle, their faith in the protection of Christ and his Holy Mother never wavering. They brought the most Holy Icon of the Hodegetria, She Who Leads the Way, painted by St Luke himself, out into the streets from the Church of St Saviour in Chora near the city walls, mounted the icon on a wooden pallet, and processed through the narrow streets, swinging censers, chanting penitential psalms. Black-robed priests and cantors and barefoot laity alike sang the haunting quartertones of the ancient hymns, walking beneath the swaying icon, gilded and jewelled and decorated with fragments of the True Cross. Elsewhere in the city, bishops in brocade vestments raised their croziers in blessing, and deacons sprinkled the faithful with holy water from bunches of dried basil.

  They raised the mummified figure of St Euphemia from her open casket and paraded her around the streets in blessing, her head like a dried melon. Bands of Syrian monks emerged from their monasteries, chanting their long litanies to the crucified Christ and calling the faithful to labour again, proclaiming that ‘Laborare est orare,’ and telling them that the Lord of Hosts was with them. Swelling music came from the interior of every church in the city that morning, the doors thrown open so that the magnificent chants and liturgies of the Roman Church should be heard, surging forth like a tide out of those vast basilicas covered in glimmering mosaic, hung with silk embroidered tapestries and thousands of oil lamps in massive silver candelabra.

  True faith moves mountains. The people roused themselves and worked on all that day. It was a Sunday, but today, of all days, God would pardon them for breaking the Sabbath.

  A work-gang of Greens, dust-caked youths, came to Military Gate V and asked how the badly damaged Porta Aurea, the magnificent Golden Gate built by Theodosius the Great, should be repaired. Aëtius said, ‘A soldier fights best whose armour is so highly polished that it gleams like silver in the sun.’

  So, even with the hordes of Attila riding down on them, these untrained youths reconstructed that gleaming wonder of white marble and gold, just as it had been. The four vast bronze elephants were raised up again, one of them repaired in a nearby forge, and set atop the gateway. Even more inspiringly, the two winged victories were set up again in their proper place, a little battered but facing boldly out over the surrounding plains, wings outstretched. Hundreds of people took it in turns to work at a furious rate and then to rest, and by nightfall the gate was more or less as it had been before the earthquake struck. There was huge rejoicing among the Greens at their feat, their spirits soared, and they danced and sang hymns and psalms of praise spontaneously in the streets below. Rumour of the achievement reached the ears of the Blues, whose work-rate redoubled in envious emulation.

  It was Prince Theodoric who first made the observation to Aëtius, regarding God and his mysterious ways. Aëtius nodded, at last almost allowing himself a smile. When the Huns attacked, the Walls would not be as they had been. But they might just be enough. Aside from that, the achievement of the people of the city had put more spirit into them than they ever had before. Action makes men brave, inaction makes them timid. The earthquake might have damaged the walls, but perhaps it had been a blessing in disguise: a very heavy disguise. It had fired the citizens with a peculiar new ardour. Now they waited for the fight to begin with the eagerness of that hot-blooded Captain Andronicus. Aëtius felt for the first time that he and his few troops did not stand alone. They had a million people behind them. It was a good feeling.

  At last, at the end of that Sunday night, the Blues and the Greens came together at the St Romanus Gate, and there was no enmity left between them. They had achieved wonders together; besides, they were too exhausted for enmity. They embraced like brothers, and then sat in the dust, sweat-stained, coughing and aching, plastered ochre with stone and brickdust, and with barely the energy remaining to eat and drink. Then their beloved Patriarch Epiphanius came out to them, and preached to them from the Book of Ezekiel, having instructed that the same text be preached in every church and in every public place throughout the city.

  He preached upon Gog and Magog, the demons in Ezekiel’s vision, who came from the north, and he said this time was come, and Gog and Magog were upon them. But the Lord of Hosts would not forsake his people Israel. ‘“And thou, Gog and Magog, shalt come from thy place in the North, thou and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army; And thou shalt come up against my people Israel as a cloud to cover the land; and it shall be in the Latter Days, and I will bring thee against my land, that the heathen may know me, when I shall be sanctified in thee, O Gog, before their eyes. And against my people, thou shalt not prevail.

  ‘“Though the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground; yet I will call for a sword against the Prince of the North throughout all my mountains, saith the Lord God. Every man’s sword shall be against him, and I shall plead against him with pestilence and with blood, and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that are with him.

  ““For behold I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee. And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and thine arrows from thy right. Thou shalt fall upon the open field, saith the Lord God: for I have spoken it.”’

  At these words a great shout went up from people: ‘The Lord of Hosts is with us! ’ and Prince Torismond said he felt as if he was living in the time of Joshua and Gideon and David and the mighty men of old.

  18

  A HOLY MAN

  Aëtius moved swiftly with his new and unexpected civilian army. He divided them into citizen companies, and immediately an ésprit de corps seemed to spring up within each of them. He appointed half of them to man the Walls, and the rest as reservists at four stations behind, ready to fill any gaps at short notice. Their missiles were stones and rubble, their weapons any iron tool they could lay their hands on - spade, hoe or pruning hook - but their expressions were soldierly and grim.

  ‘This will be a crude fight,’ Aëtius told them. ‘But that’s fine, since you will be crude fighters.’ They gave a great, self-laudatory cheer. ‘You will be up on the Inner Wall. The two lower walls before you will be undefended, and the savages will come pouring over them like a tide. How will you react? I’ll tell you how you’ll react: you will empty your bowels at the sight.

  ‘T
hen there will be a man climbing up the wall to reach you and kill you. He will have a shield on his back, a spear, a sword and a dagger, and he will have killed many, many men before you. He will have their flensed skulls decorating his horse, and he will mean to have yours likewise. There will be constant arrow-fire coming in from his comrades beyond, and they are perhaps the finest archers in the world. But you will be standing above him, behind strong stone battlements, some of which you have built with your own bare hands.’ Another cheer, a little more sober than before. ‘You are protected by the wall. He is not. You must kill him. Strike once and once only. Beat him back, dash him down, brain him with your first, measured blow. Then duck back for cover. The Palatine Guard will be among you, and you will obey their every order. You need no more training. Now go to your stations and do your duty.’

  Then suddenly this least martial of cities, this religiose New Rome with its ceaseless liturgies and tangled theological debates about the true nature of the Tri-une Christ, was an excited hubbub of brazen trumpets and marching hobnailed boots. Theodoric said the Byzantines were turning into Spartans. It was an extraordinary feat, and no one seemed to know who was responsible.