Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  It was no joke of Attila’s, as rapid communication with the embarrassed court of Theodosius proved. It was all true.

  In this winter of AD 450, Princess Honoria, still living an enclosed life with the emperor’s sister Pulcheria and her pious ladies’ maids in the palace in Constantinople, was still only in her late twenties. Amid the chaos of these days, she had at last seen her chance for escape, and for revenge upon the family who had humiliated her and stolen her girlhood from her.

  She managed to bribe one of the guards who was escorting the seven thousand pounds of gold to Attila - what manner of bribe it is perhaps best not to enquire but, given her character, it is not difficult to imagine. She persuaded the guard to smuggle out to Attila a gold betrothal ring, and a brief message from her. An offer of marriage, if he came to her rescue and liberation. Quite what sort of freedom Honoria thought she would enjoy as one of the junior wives of the Great Tanjou in the Hun camp, one can only speculate. But Attila accepted the offer, adding that for dowry he’d expect half the empire. She said that he was welcome to it.

  Hence the message sent by Attila to Ravenna. In deadly earnest.

  Thank Christ, thought Aëtius, that Galla Placidia had not lived to see her daughter conspire with Attila himself. Constantinople was all ready to have Honoria strangled for treason on the spot, but further hurried communication dissuaded them. Personally, Aëtius thought the poor girl had suffered long enough. One youthful indiscretion as a girl - and a clumsy attempt to have her brother assassinated ... Well, that was certainly understandable. Why couldn’t she be married off now to some unfussy old dotard, for God’s sake? Pen her up there in the Imperial Palace like a nun, with that old harridan Pulcheria, and it wasn’t surprising she dreamed of marrying what she must have pictured to herself as an exotic Scythian warlord.

  Theodosius gave the command, and at the age of twenty-nine, Honoria was married instead to the fifty-nine-year-old Fabius Cassius Herculeanus. By all accounts it was a very happy marriage - not least, court rumour had it, because the husband turned a blind eye to his wife’s numerous and entirely characteristic indiscretions, his own interests being primarily boys.

  It was a ludicrous and squalid affair. Even more farcically, it gave Attila the paper-thin pretext he needed for an attack on the West, as the punitive expedition had for his attack on the East.

  ‘Helen was the destruction of Troy,’ murmured Aëtius, ‘and Honoria of Rome.’

  He read the message again.

  The last line read, ‘Attila, my Master and yours, bids you prepare a palace for his reception.’

  Aëtius found General Germanus in a makeshift hot bath at the field army’s camp outside Ravenna. Germanus looked red-faced, lightly poached and embarrassed.

  Aëtius flung him a towel. ‘Saddle up,’ he said. ‘Attila’s coming.’

  They rode north-west up the Flaminian Way, the field army visibly delighted to be on the move again, away from that vast, wretched, stagnant campsite - even if they were riding to meet the greatest army Rome had ever faced. Despite rumours of the vast difference in numerical strength, it always felt good to be one man among a solid twenty-five thousand.

  The two thousand men of the Palatine Guard, grudgingly released by Valentinian after much persuasion, marched at the front, black armour gleaming. Then came the central legions: the Herculians, numbering nearly six thousand men, the ancient complement, with their gold-rimmed shields decorated with black eagles; then the Cornuti Seniores, their shields a red icon on white; the Batavians, their shields a solid red with an evil-eye boss, and among them a single century of intensely trained superventores or special forces, their typically Batavian speciality being to swim fully armoured across rivers of any depth, even in full spate, and slip in among the enemy by night, cutting throats by the dozen, loosing horses, setting fires. Used well, they could be massively destructive.

  Then came the Mauri, the light Moorish cavalry, horses’ white manes and riders’ white woollen cloaks of finest camel-hair flowing together in the wind, beautiful to watch. The horses were skittish and high-stepping, manageable only by the very best horsemen, possessing astonishing speed and stamina beneath their pretty white manes and high-tossed tails. You mistook those Berber horses for useless, girlish mounts at your peril, and the Moorish javelin shower at full gallop, javelins tipped with cruel barbed angons, was famous. Next came the equally élite Augustan Horse, positively prancing to be on the road and heading for battle at last. Finally there came the four doggedly surviving frontier legions: the I, II, XII Artillery, and the XIV. Aëtius rode at the front with General Germanus and with his own motley, hand-picked close-guard. He glanced back over the huge column of men. They looked good, on this bright winter morning. Outnumbered, depleted, certainly; but they still looked good.

  ‘Where will we draw up our line?’ Germanus asked.

  ‘Beyond the Padus.’

  ‘You think - with respect, sir - but you think he will lead his men across the Julian Alps in winter?’

  Aëtius nodded. ‘He crossed the Julian Alps in winter once before, when a boy of no more than eleven. He was fleeing from us, with only two companions, another boy and his sister. It will appeal to him: coming back that way again.’

  They skirted the marshlands of the Adriatic shore, and then, traversing the rivers Padus, Athesis and Plavis, in five days they came to the broad, flat plain of the Venetia. A good place to fight. Here, history would be decided. Aëtius sent scouts out as far as Aemona and the head-waters of the Savus, but from the east there was no sign. The Huns would not be here for at least another three weeks, then. That was to be expected. Attila would be in no hurry, preferring to make them fret, wait and stagnate. He had not conquered this far without being a master tactician.

  Aëtius would not let his men stagnate or fret for one moment. Their camp having been built, he had them dig trenches, cut down woods and copses, even engage in competitive games, one regiment against another. And there were more solemn rituals, such as the tubilustrium, the purification of the war-trumpets for the campaign ahead, one of the numberless centuries-old traditions of the legions. It crossed Aëtius’ mind that this might be the last such ceremony ever performed.

  Then, leaving his men under the capable command of Germanus, he rode into Aquileia.

  He went to find an obscenely wealthy senator, one Nemesianus, a man whom he despised but who had influence. A man close to the emperor, it was said. Perhaps some good would come of it, some change of heart ... So far the senatorial classes had been singularly lacking in martial or patriotic spirit.

  From Nemesianus’ vast villa - one of his villas - he was directed to Aquileia’s amphitheatre. Yes, even with the Hunnish hordes riding down upon them, a few tired games were still being held.

  Nemesianus was elderly, but he had the golden glow of the very rich, promising great longevity. Aëtius found him seated in the higher stalls, wearing a beautiful cloak of what looked like pure ermine, and flanked by two of his spintriae, his young boys, one of them working away with his hand beneath Nemesianus’ furs. Nemesianus greeted the general with no interest, only mild irritation.

  The crowds stamped their feet and clapped and hooted as a chain-gang of criminals was whipped into the arena, to be crucified and disembowelled for public edification.

  The Church might have put a stop to gladiatorial combat decades ago, but the torture and execution of law-breakers was still regarded as a necessary lesson in civility. All round the expensive upper tiers, there were many spectators whose skilled spintriae or whores would bring them climax at the very moment of death in the arena; sex-slaves with names like ‘Desire’, ‘Happy’ and ‘Beloved’.

  Aëtius hated the games. The cruel faces of the spectators, brutalised by their own entertainment; the rotten fish sold at the stalls, deep-fried to disguise the stink; the scrawny prostitutes underneath the arches, their lines of customers waiting. That these games today were so shabby and meagre did not help. Two burglars were fo
rced to fight to the death with nets and rusty swords. An aged horse which had trodden on a senator’s foot was roped down and clubbed to death. There was the inevitable re-enactment of the story of Pasiphaë, Queen of Crete, always a crowd-pleaser. An aroused bull in a huge harness was lowered from a crane onto a tethered and shaven-headed female slave, guilty, so they said, of attacking her mistress and clawing the skin from her face. The girl died. The crowd was delighted.

  Later, slaves would come and gather up the various organs and body parts that littered the ground, strew fresh sand, scrub down the seats. A cocktail of blood, semen, urine and faeces - for none liked to leave their seats during the entertainment, and the plebs always urinated or defecated where they sat - would flow away down to the city’s sewers and out to sea.

  Aëtius heard a voice saying, ‘Your empire is tottering. Rome’s all done. You have already lost whatever it was that you fought for. Join us.’

  It was the voice of Attila, the voice of temptation. With it, Aëtius had a vision of a wide and endless steppe-land, a clean wind blowing over the emerald spring grass; vast herds of beautiful horses running, or drinking at crystal streams; a peaceful encampment of free and simple-hearted people, men idly chatting, women busily cooking, children playing and laughing, plumes of woodsmoke rising into the still, clear air. Perhaps a girl there, an ordinary girl with a shy smile and kindly eyes, one hand on her pregnant belly, the other in the hand of a scarred, battered, fugitive man who had once called himself a Roman. And beyond them, great snow-capped mountains, and a golden eagle soaring into that eternal sky ...

  The crowd roared.

  He shook himself free of that impossible dream, closed his eyes and drew breath, then laid out his plan to the bored-looking senator.

  ‘Rebuild the navy, you say?’ drawled Nemesianus. ‘Here at Aquileia?’ He shooed the slave-boys away for a moment.

  Aëtius nodded. ‘And turn the lagoon of the Veneto into a huge harbour. Defence would be easy. From there we could oversee the Adriatic, sail against the Vandals of Africa, recapture the grainfields ...’

  ‘Bold plans!’ Nemesianus was looking at him with amusement - amusement! At this late stage. ‘And all this will cost a great deal of money? My money?’

  ‘Inaction will cost more. If Attila defeats us, what will be left? He will destroy everything. But if we defeat him, we too will be exhausted. We must plan for the future.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Nemesianus, ‘but at times such as these, each man must shift for himself. In the harbour of Aquileia a nice galley awaits me, ready to sail east. I have always fancied one of the Ionian islands. My wealth is secure, much of it now in a Levantine bank in Constantinople. My dear man’ - he made to touch Aëtius’ knee, but thought better of it - ‘my dear, old-fashioned, stern, public-spirited, republican-hearted, patriotic Master-General Aëtius, you were born out of your time.’ He clapped politely at the scene being enacted below, then resumed. ‘Veritably, the Scipio Africanus of our age.’

  The fear of sincerity, the faithlessness, the catch-all ironic twang, the enervated drawl, the emptiness beneath the cleverness, the baseness of vision: Aëtius could have wrung his neck.

  Instead he steeled himself and arose and wished the senator well in his future life, with his private villa on an Ionian island, and his obedient slave-boys. A noble dream.

  As he left the amphitheatre, brushing the clawing prostitutes away, the lines that the exiled Euripides wrote during the ruinous Peloponnesian War returned to him.

  In the theatres, the People laugh at phalluses. On a fair Aegean island, beardless boys are butchered in their name. This is the world from which I take my leave. How far and fast we fell.

  The games had left a foul taste in his mouth. He strode through the narrow streets of the old city, leading his horse, glaring down. For this was not the whole story of Rome. There had been courage and sacrifice and human dignity. There had been Regulus and Horatius, Trajan and Augustus, rulers of decency and vision. But was the good all in the past now, and the glory departed?

  Despite himself he thought again of the bare steppes, and the copper-skinned warriors, their honour and unflinching bravery, their lean self-denials, their magnificent scorn for death, their love of their king.

  On the one hand, cruelty and magnificence. On the other, cruelty and squalor. What a richness of choice.

  Hardly aware of his actions, he tethered his horse and went into a lowly church, a small, chilly, whitewashed building with an arched apse, narrow windows, half a dozen smoking candles. He was greeted by an old deacon, grey beard streaked with lamp-black, his cassock faded to a powdery stale-bread green, a cheap wooden cross on a string of olive-wood beads around his neck. On the west wall was a clumsy, deeply sincere painting of Christ with the loaves and fishes, and the faces of the hungering people crowding round. He sacrificed himself; the people ate. They lived.

  Even here could be heard the intermittent roar of the crowd in the arena. The old deacon crossed himself as he watched the powerfully built old officer on his knees before the cross. Then he went over and began to speak without preamble, as is the way with holy men who live much alone; they lose their taste for small talk.

  ‘We live in the end of times,’ he said, his voice croaky with disuse. ‘But the choice before each human soul is clear. The broad path or the strait? The arena’ - he jerked his head - ‘or the House of God. Quo vadis?’

  ‘Neither,’ said the general. ‘My place is on the battlefield. ’

  The old deacon looked grim.

  ‘But I fight for this,’ said the general, gesturing around the church. ‘Not for that,’ and gestured towards the arena, where another massed roar went up.

  The deacon’s dark eyes bored into the general’s. At last he said, ‘St Michael and all angels ride with you.’

  When Aëtius arrived back at camp, he was told he had a visitor.

  ‘No time,’ he said brusquely.

  ‘He has come a long way, sir. From Britain.’

  ‘Britain? ’

  3

  LUCIUS THE BRITON

  He was an old man now, perhaps sixty-five, or even seventy, his garments travel-stained, and not as tall as Aëtius remembered him. But then when Aëtius had last set eyes on him, he himself had been only a boy. He remembered the grey eyes, the broad shoulders, the determined look. The old Briton had close-cropped white hair now, and sported a long white barbarian beard. Underneath the beard, Aëtius remembered, he had a scar on his chin.

  ‘You’re Lucius,’ he said.

  The old man nodded but didn’t salute. He was no longer a soldier of Rome, after all. ‘I always knew you were a smart lad. Now you rule the Western Empire, I hear.’

  ‘The emperor rules the Western Empire.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  They regarded each other. Not equals in power, but maybe equals in spirit.

  ‘And your friend, the old Jew, Gamaliel,’ said Aëtius. ‘I have met him since.’

  ‘Old Jew?’ Lucius frowned. ‘I have not seen him for years, but he is a true Celt.’ The two stared at each other a moment, then Lucius sighed. ‘In truth, I don’t think we will ever know what he is.’

  ‘He’s old now, and he no longer pretends he used to know Aristotle. But at Constantinople he was a good physician.’ Aëtius grinned, despite himself. ‘Come on in.’

  They sat on stools and Aëtius poured his visitor wine with his own hand. They clunked cups. Once, decades ago, Lucius had come to the Hun camp and taken Aëtius back to Rome, along with his own freed son, the boy Cadoc. And Attila had ridden into the wilderness of exile.

  On the long journey back to the Danube, Lucius, a Roman lieutenant in those days, and the haughty Roman boy Aëtius, solemn beyond his years, had developed a friendship of sorts.

  ‘I remember now,’ said Aëtius. ‘The scar on your chin. You got it from tripping over a dog, when you were drunk, and hitting a stone water trough, in Isca Dumnoniorum.’

  Lucius raised his cup.
‘I salute your memory, Master-General. You’re out of date, though. The city, what’s left of it, is called Esca now.’

  ‘Esca?’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry. As I say, there isn’t much of it left. A couple of broken walls, the remains of a market-place, a ruined church, a few sad kale yards. The old basilica’s a furnace and marl-pit.’ There was bitterness in his low voice. ‘And I am Ciddwmtarth. Lucius was a Roman name. But the Romans abandoned us. I know Britain never contributed much to the empire: in four long centuries, we produced only a heretic, a rotten poet and three traitors. So it’s said.’

  Aëtius smiled faintly and then looked grave again. ‘Is there peace with the Saxons?’

  Lucius snorted. ‘There will never be peace with the Saxons. They already call us the Wealha, foreigners and slaves. In our own country! They crucify one in ten captives to their heathen gods. They are the worst: their drunken barbarism knows no limits, they shall never count among the civilised peoples of the world. My people are few and hard-pressed. I lead them in the fight, but the fight is continual, and they are very weary. They dream only of fleeing into the mountains westward, always westward. Already the Saxons have pressed as far as Corinium, and Viroconium of the White Walls. To think that we invited them in to work for us, and now they want the whole island of Britain for themselves, under their laws and customs. We have destroyed our own world.’