Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Long after sunset the wolf-lords’ torches blazed for their dead King, and Aëtius came and held a torch, too. They lamented Theodoric and lauded him.

  ‘Lord and lavisher of rings,

  From his golden hoard, on the funeral road.

  Bravely he bought them, hardily hoarded them,

  Grimly he guarded them, against the eastern kings.

  A Lord among men, high his renown,

  Let pyre take him, fire enfold him,

  Furled in the flames, our king of men!

  Heavy our hearts with the mighty memory of him,

  Silenced our laughter but fluent our tears,

  No torcs will they wear now, our loveliest maidens,

  Silver not shine on them, brooch not bedizen them,

  Oft and repeatedly, in sad paths of exile,

  Deeply will mourn for him, the people’s defender, Bereft they will walk, soft they will talk,

  Bowed under woe, high spirits quenched,

  Many a spear, dawn-cold to the touch,

  Laid down at morning, harp swept in mourning,

  Warriors shall not wake to that sorrowful dawning,

  The raven wings dark over doomed hills,

  Tidings of the eagle, how he rode and made war,

  Numberless his enemies, countless the slain,

  Lord of the wolf-lords, he harrowed the dead!’

  ‘A great pyre is burning,’ said Orestes.

  Attila turned away from the distant orange glow, not wanting to see. ‘It is as the sorceries said. The enemy’s commander is slain. Aëtius is dead.’

  But word soon came that it was Theodoric. Aëtius still lived.

  Attila gripped the messenger’s arm fit to break it. ‘You are sure of this?’

  ‘He was seen at Theodoric’s pyre.’

  Attila’s expression was fathomless. Thus were sorcerers’ prophecies fulfilled.

  Nearby, a little-regarded person sat cross-legged in the corral as if at a Hun feast, rather than the worst killing-field in his people’s history.

  ‘Here is another prophecy for you, my master,’ he said. ‘No man will ever understand a prophecy aright, until it comes to pass. You understand a prophecy only as you understand your own life: looking backwards.’

  Attila said not a word, but walked away from that sing-song, tormenting voice. He climbed up on a wagon, drew his bare sword, and stood for a long time staring south through the night: towards the burning pyre of that much-loved, noble-hearted king, laid out on his hide shield amid the prayers of his Christian priests, surrounded by a forest of lances.

  It was like the pyre of an ancient hero of legend. Flames wrought havoc in the hot bonehouse, the bone-lappings burst, ribs fell like timbers into the fire. The sons watched their father’s body consumed without flinching. Their sister and father were together again.

  As the pyre cracked and fell in a huge blaze of sparks, Torismond looked around for Aëtius. Now that his father was gone, he wanted to be near the master-general. But Aëtius had slipped away.

  He had walked out alone onto the darkened battlefield, nothing but a knife in his hand. Everywhere there came to his ears the groans of the dying. Small groups of surviving Romans soldiers worked tirelessly among them, trying to stretcher them in. But there were many, many more wounded than unscathed. They would be working all night. He would come back soon and work with them. In final exhaustion he might find solace. For the groans burned into him like hot daggers, each one an accusation. Some of the dying called for God, some for their mothers, some for death. Of the three, only death the ever-faithful came to them.

  And for what? It had taken the united forces of all of Rome and the Visigothic nation to stop him, the Scourge of God. And that is all they had done. They had not defeated him. They would never defeat him. You might as well try and defeat the wind. As for what men remained to Rome, Aëtius had silenced an optio who tried to give him the numbers. He knew them already. Half the Gothic wolf-lords lay dead upon the field. Seven or eight thousand had laid down their lives for Rome. Of the twenty-five thousand in his own army, who had borne the brunt of the Huns’ attack, he doubted if five thousand were left standing. The Herculian and Batavian legions were effectively no more. The Palatine Guard had indeed fought to the last man, guarding the army’s left flank on that hill, the Huns pulling back only when all the Guard were dead and they saw their own horde in full retreat. The superventores were wiped out. The Augustan Horse, barely eighty left ... Was it any consolation to know that, however many they had lost, the Huns had lost three times, four times as many?

  He stopped beside one of his dead. No, it was no consolation. Captain Malchus had one arm completely severed; his face was a staring mask of blood. Aëtius covered that face with a corner of his cloak. The Visigothic wolf-lord Jormunreik lay prone, his right hand still gripping his axe. Aëtius reached out and touched his head, just once, wordlessly. He had seen cows touch a dead calf thus, just a gentle nuzzle, and he understood why. And here lay that great hulking brute of a Rhinelander, Knuckles. Aëtius remembered the first time they had met, on the road to Azimuntium. Knuckles, son of the Rhenish whore Volumella. Aëtius knelt by him and ran his hand down over his face, closing his eyes. ‘No son of a whore,’ he murmured. ‘Bravest of the brave.’

  11

  THE MAD KING

  Another man moved across the battlefield, too, carrying a bare sword. He cared not. He muttered to himself, of Rome, and of China, moving among the dead. They were all gone into a world of light. Was it not so? Angelic work, then. He did not smile. Eternity’s work.

  The moon was reflected in pools of horse-blood. As if it had fallen to earth.

  There was a looter rifling through the wallets of the dead, stealing enamelled brooches, fibulae, rings from broken fingers. Maybe a villager or even one of his own, but he killed him anyway. Stepped up silently behind him and drove his sword down into the back of his neck. But immediately in the darkness, there was another. He felt weary. You cannot kill them all.

  There was a warrior dying one-legged. There was a still-kicking horse. He was tired of killing. Tired among the heaps of the dead and dying, among the pools of blood and the broken weapons of war, among the dead rainbows and the fallen moon lying reflected in the pools of blood. He knelt abruptly and planted his sword in the earth. Let it remain there among the cold and dead.

  At dawn, Attila realised that the Romans could attack him no more. They, too, were exhausted, what remained of them. He gave the order to break camp and the bedraggled remnant of his horde rode away east.

  Once they were gone, the Romans and the Visigoths did likewise. Two-thirds of the men were wounded and dying, and the column moved very slowly. A vast silence settled over the Catalaunian Fields, and over the heaps of the innumerable dead.

  That winter, there were many wolfpacks in that country.

  Broken in spirit, the rag-tag army of Attila and his embittered mercenaries wreaked horrible, fitful revenge on the native populations through which they passed on their sullen retreat to their homelands. Some Burgundian captives were roped and dangled from trees and and used for target practice. They made the Burgundian children watch, thinking it amusing they should see their fathers stuck to death with arrows.

  Their amusements left splayed bodies by the roadside, women with child torn open, the unborn whelps harrowed from their wombs and set on pikes. Molten gold was poured into the mouths of captured Jews, whom the mercenaries derided as Christless unbelievers. The last encampments and cave-dwellings of the quiet forest people of the Bohemian Forest, who hunted dormice and foraged for roots and berries, brown-eyed and dreamy and silent, a tribe of children, who even in that age lived on as they had lived in Europe for centuries, perhaps for millennia, speaking a language that no one else understood, as if from Eden before the Fall: they, too, were extinguished by the Harrowing of Attila, a nameless, unknown, preterite people, innocent as air. They were rounded up and put to the sword, going to their deaths mildly as th
ey had lived, their small villages of straw huts left smoking in their sunlit glades. All suffered from the hordes of Attila.

  Europe groaned and bled, and the King himself rode on in silence at the head of his defeated murderous horde, eyes fixed ahead, indifferent to the devastation left in his black and smoking wake. All the world burning and nothing left to save. If he could not be the Master of the World, he would be its Destroyer.

  Only one thing is more terrible than an approaching army, they said in those days: a retreating army. With all hope and all order gone, left to derive only a bleak satisfaction from wreaking on the weak and defenceless the wholesale destruction that they had failed to wreak on their armed enemies, in sour reprisal for their fate. Even dumb nature suffered, punished by their sullen wrath. Whole late-summer forests were put to the torch, laid waste like tindersticks, entire landscapes left ashen and silent and denuded of life.

  Down the roads into Italy and the East, the people came fleeing. See them fleeing, harried by the wind, blown like chaff before the empty wind, puppets dancing to its ancient tragic roar, through the desolate fields. Through the long ages.

  Aëtius was right to believe that Attila had failed yet would not stop. Destruction had become the very air he breathed. Death had become his life.

  Aëtius eventually arrived back in Ravenna to face Valentinian’s harshest accusations and demands to know what had become of his army. Aëtius told him with exaggerated calmness that there was no Roman army left to speak of. Perhaps they should negotiate with the Visigoths, the only remaining armed force of any significance in Western Europe. Valentinian howled and rent his robes, and bit his tongue till he spat out blood on the white marble floors of the palace.

  Then the unbelievable news came to them that Attila was on the march again. He had looped back across Noricum and was riding down towards Aquileia. That he still had the men to fight and, more unbelievably still, the will ...

  It had all been for nothing. There was none left to oppose him. He would ride into Ravenna, and then Rome, and burn them flat. How many men had he still? All of ten thousand: the tattered remnant of his once mighty army, the rest having either been destroyed upon the Catalaunian Field, or else deserted and vanished back into the vastness of Scythia. But still, ten thousand of the most loyal rode with him - and the Romans had none to oppose him. None. The Visigoths could not be expected to fight for Italy as they had fought for Gaul.

  Outside the palace, Aëtius told the last of his close guard, ‘You should go now. Take ship for the east. There is no more for you here.’

  Arapovian stared hard at him with his coal-black eyes, and at last nodded. ‘I would feel like a deserter,’ he said, ‘except that, as at Viminacium, there is nothing left to desert.’

  ‘You have served Rome well, Easterner. As well as any.’

  Arapovian pulled himself up onto his horse.

  ‘Where will you go now?’

  ‘East, as you say. Not to my country - it no longer exists. But east somewhere. Perhaps a long way east. The further the better.’ He kicked his horse into a walk.

  ‘God go with you, Easterner.’

  Arapovian raised his right hand and called back, ‘And with you, Master-General Aëtius.’

  ‘And you, Centurion?’

  Tatullus grimaced. ‘I stay. As ever.’

  Lastly he went to a simple lodging house and asked to speak to two of the lodgers. Moments later, they appeared at the door. Lucius and Cadoc.

  Aëtius told them of Attila’s approach. ‘You should sail home now, for good. Forget about Rome, as Rome forgot about you.’

  Lucius shook his head. ‘Britain will wait for us. Even I cannot exactly explain why, but we, my son and I, are still needed here, with you. We stay until the end.’

  Every night now, Attila suffered visions and broken sleep. He saw his horsemen riding up the steps of the Roman Capitol, gouging out the eyes of emperors’ statues with their spearpoints. In his dreams he ceaselessly called the name of Rome, and of Aëtius.

  Aquileia offered him no resistance. Rounding up its notables, he demanded to have one Nemesianus brought to him. That venerable senator was old and too weak to move, he was told. But his villa was—

  He galloped away, Orestes barely able to keep pace with him.

  He dragged the white-haired old senator out of his bed and out onto the fine terrace looking down upon the great city of Aquileia, and the autumn Adriatic beyond. He waved his drawn dagger over the city.

  ‘All this,’ he rasped, ‘all this will be destroyed first. Because of you.’

  Nemesianus was on all fours, weeping. Orestes halted his horse and dismounted with half a dozen warriors. The senator stared at them - their tattoos, shaven heads, weals, garlands of teeth and jawbones - with sick disbelief. Then he turned back to Attila, almost sobbing, ‘But why me? Why me?’

  Attila squatted down on his haunches and sighed, stropping his dagger on a fine sandstone paving-slab.

  ‘D-d-don’t, don’t do that,’ stammered Nemesianus. ‘D-d-dalmatian stone, the finest ...’

  Attila looked at him with arched eyebrows, and laughed. He continued stropping. ‘Why me?’ he repeated. ‘A question the gods find tiresome.’

  The old man had bitten his lower lip till it bled. The spots of blood stood out against his ashen face like berries in old snow.

  ‘Forty years ago,’ said Attila, ‘on the road to Aquileia, there were three children. They were small, weak, hungry. There was no one to care for them. And then you came along the road.’

  Nemesianus looked hopeful. ‘Forty years ago is a long time. Perhaps it is difficult for you to—’

  ‘There was a boy, a rude barbarian boy, his cheeks scarred with the blue tattoos of his people. A frightful creature.’ Attila drew his hair back over his gold-hooped ears and the man saw and groaned. ‘There was another boy, a blond Greek slaveboy.’ He pointed his dagger at Orestes. Nemesianus stared to and fro. Blood spotted his embroidered robe.

  ‘And there was a little girl. Her name was Pelagia. She was the sister of the Greek slaveboy. He loved her dearly. She was six years old.’

  There was silence but for Nemesianus’ sobs. Then he began to say ‘Please’ over and over again.

  Attila eyed him. ‘Shsh,’ he said softly.

  Nemesianus fell silent.

  ‘The tattooed barbarian boy loved her, too, for she was as innocent as the spring. Perhaps because she was everything he was not.’

  The old man began shaking his head very slowly. ‘No, no, no,’ he murmured under his breath, almost inaudibly.

  ‘You took them in, you cared for them.’ Attila shook his head likewise, as if in sympathetic sorrow. ‘Oh, how you cared for them.’

  He stood up and went over to the old man. ‘So this is the answer to your bleating question, “Why me? O cruel gods, why me?”’ He locked the old man’s head in the crook of his left arm. ‘The gods are not cruel, after all. They are but just, and their punishments are hounds of heaven on the traces of our sins. In time, over long years, sometimes as much as forty years after the sin has been committed and enjoyed and forgotten, those tireless hounds of heaven will find you out. They run all night through the midnight forests, their path ahead lit by the fire in their burning eyes. They will neither slow nor cease, noses to the ground, following to its source and origin the stinking scent of your sins which cry to heaven for vengeance.’ He held the dagger motionless in front of the old man’s left eye. ‘Do you see now? Do you see, why me?’

  With a jab and sideways flick of the daggerpoint, he impaled and dug out Nemesianus’ eye. The aqueous blob flew from the dagger’s end and splatted onto the ground, quivering there slightly like some primeval sea creature dragged untimely from the deep. The old man howled and struggled and tears flowed from the socket where the roots of his eyeball hung out over his lower lid, like the gory roots of some unearthed plant of flesh and blood. Tears and blood flowed down his furrowed old cheeks, and his liverspotted hands tightene
d round Attila’s thick forearm in feeble opposition.

  ‘Do you see now?’ said Attila again. ‘No. I fear you still only half see.’

  Another jab and flick, and there were two sightless eyeballs losing their lustre in the dust. The old man’s twin eyesockets welled with watery blood.

  ‘Now you see,’ said Attila. He released Nemesianus’ head from its lock and wiped his daggerblade clean on the old man’s robe. ‘Now you see.’