Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Attila announced that this was also a wedding banquet, for he had taken a new wife, a Burgundian girl. Her name was Idilco, and she was but nineteen or twenty years old. The women brought her into the tent. She was very beautiful, and the sons of Attila made lewd comments and catcalls. They joked among themselves that old boars had no business with young sows, and they shouted out that, though the knife gelds quickly and age gelds slowly, they both make geldings in the end.

  Orestes’ hand was on his sword. But Attila only stared ahead, his once-mighty fist clutched round his wooden goblet, not hearing them.

  Idilco smiled.

  That night, Emperor Marcian in Constantinople dreamed of a great broken bow in the sky, like a strange new constellation. The dream puzzled him deeply.

  Among the tents of the Huns, the chill dawn revealed the revellers asleep amid the empty flagons on heaps of animal furs. The fires burned low. But there was no sign of Attila. After some time, his faithful servant Orestes batted on the leather door of his inner tent. There was no answer. Orestes called again and again, but there was only silence. At last he cut the ties and went in.

  At his anguished cry, warriors came running.

  Idilco was crouched in a corner, shivering like a frightened animal. Attila lay on his back on the couch, naked. Blood had gushed in torrents from his mouth, drenching half his body. His eyes stared skywards.

  Orestes moved over to the girl, knife ready.

  She stood and held out her hand, an accusing, shaking finger.

  ‘I will not allow you the time for a dying curse,’ he said, grabbing for her long fair hair.

  She stepped back. ‘Not a curse, a truth. You will hear it.’

  Orestes paused. The atmosphere in the tent was heavy with horror and thick with the metallic odour of blood.

  ‘The Huns fought the Burgundians twenty years ago. I am twenty. Under their King Ruga, that foul drunkard, that hireling, the Huns were paid by the Romans to fight the Burgundians, my people.’ The girl grew in strength as she spoke. ‘My mother was very beautiful. She was raped. My father was slain. Perhaps I am half Hun, I neither know nor care. So all things come around. The Huns destroyed my family.’ She tossed back her hair and smiled. ‘Now I have destroyed their king.’ She looked at the horrible mockery of a marriage bed. ‘Cut his thoat like a hog. I have his blood and his seed on me still. But perhaps it is as the ancient prophecies say. His own shall destroy him. It is right. The Hun people have devoured themselves. Now kill me.’ She seized Orestes’ forearm. ‘Kill me!’

  He looked into her blazing, triumphant eyes. Then he killed her.

  Attila’s body was burned on a flaming pyre, laid out beneath a silk pavilion. Horsemen galloped round it, slashing themselves to bloody ribbons. Many horses were sacrificed, their bodies hefted and impaled on long pikes around the pyre. There were mourning pipes, angry drums and wailing women. Dust obscured the sun as thousands of horsemen galloped wildly over the plain, firing arrows into the reddening sky.

  His calcified bones were laid in a triple coffin of gold, silver and iron, with many ornaments and jewelled weapons, goblets of gold and sacks of jewels. The River Tisza was diverted into a neighbouring channel, the huge coffin buried in the riverbed, and the river’s course restored, to flow over the place of burial again for all time. The captive slaves who buried him were slain and hurled into the river. To this day his burial place remains unknown.

  All night the drums continued to beat, weary warriors shaking their heads, their hair loosed from their topknots and hanging low like the manes of horses in rain, shuffling and dancing round the fire. Their eyes were closed, their scarred cheeks caught the firelight and gleamed. In their deep throats a collective murmur, a low humming song like one voice, old as the earth, tired but implacable, willing to surrender to none but the earth itself.

  Without anything being discussed, with no word from the eldest son, Dengizek, now supposedly King, the people took down their tents the next day and set out for the eastern wilderness from which they had so suddenly erupted to shake the pillars of the earth. The great wagons rolling through a haze of orange dust, their songs fading on the air as they vanished into the darkening steppes. A people in their proud strong noonday more feared than any other on earth, never to be heard of more. Children of witches and demons of the wind, now melting away. ‘Like the wind, like the wind’.

  After the great horde of the people had gone, a single man remained. He had feathers and ribbons in his hair, and wore a goatskin shirt decorated with little black stick men. He sat high on a golden limestone bluff looking away over the great river towards the south and the west, looking out over Europe. A soft evening breeze stirred the grass and the yellow rockroses, and the sunset was beautiful on the water. How beautiful the world was in all its mystery. He understood nothing of it, after all. The world was as it was, unimaginably beautiful, and it broke his heart to leave it.

  Weep not, Little Bird,

  Tribe-lonely, restless,

  Unheeded, nestless,

  Words on your lips that hold

  The People’s history,

  More rare than gold.

  And I salute you, earth-breaker,

  Bridge-builder, fortress-maker,

  Danube-tamer, Roman brother!

  You called us the storm from the east,

  Storm that shall not cease,

  But you are the storm from the west,

  Storm that shall know no rest.

  14

  DEATH OF A TRAITOR

  It was some weeks before the news arrived at Ravenna and Constantinople that Attila, King of the Huns, was dead - at the hands of a girl of twenty.

  Marcian understood his dream.

  Valentinian got drunk.

  Aëtius hung his head.

  Valentinian observed Aëtius, and what looked like his sorrow. Only a few days later he summoned him to the palace.

  The emperor had more guards around him than usual, and also several of his closest courtiers and advisers, including that old orator Quintilianus, the library-expert on Huns.

  The general bowed curtly. There was a prolonged and unsettling silence, but Aëtius was not unsettled. He had experienced many things worse than the ritual intimidation of an imperial audience.

  Standing there in all his sad majesty, alone and silent and unafraid in that vast and echoing hall, its walls covered in gleaming mosaics showing the emperor as Lord of All, its great porphyry pillars disappearing up into the vaulted darkness overhead, the emperor high upon his dais gazed down in divinely-appointed judgement. Everything was designed to dwarf any mortal man who stood before the resplendent gilded throne. But Aëtius was not dwarfed.

  The emperor’s eyes were watery and unfocused, and his voice was soft and sinuous. ‘So,’ he said, ‘he is slain by a cruel fair maid. Your ... alter ego.’

  Aëtius said nothing.

  Valentinian’s mouth began to work. ‘Your boyhood friend, the Scourge of God, is no more. You must feel that a light has gone out of your life, that your sense of purpose, of mission, is over. That your whole career is over, in fact.’

  Still Aëtius said nothing.

  Valentinian leaped to his feet and stood shaking. ‘Answer me, damn you! Standing there in dumb insolence like Christ before Pilate! Who do you think you are?’

  ‘My apologies, Majesty. I was not aware that you had asked a question.’

  The emperor gave a strangulated cry and rushed down the steps towards him. He fought for self-control, grew quieter again, and began to pace around Aëtius, examining him as he might a strange animal in his menagerie. Aëtius remained quite still.

  ‘You make me anxious, Master-General. You are not like other men.’

  Aëtius could almost have smiled at this. Coming from you, Your Majesty ...

  ‘And, you see, this leaves us with a problem. Indeed, my dreams point to many problems, and the word of God which comes to me in the night tells me of only one solution.’

  �
�Majesty, my most ardent wish is to be quit of the court, to relinquish my command, and to go on a pilgrimage. To Jerusalem.’

  ‘To Jerusalem, you say!’ His mouth began to work again, and his words became garbled. ‘And what will you do and say and plot out there in the mysterious shining east, I wonder? Is not the old empress, there too? Old Eudoxia, a great and cunning enemy of the Empress Pulcheria, eh?’

  ‘Majesty, I do not believe—’

  ‘And I do not believe, either!’ cried Valentinian furiously. ‘I do not believe that it is your “most ardent wish” at all to go to Jerusalem, to dirty your knees in prayer all the way up the Via Dolorosa to the Holy Sepulchre, along with all the other low-born pilgrims! You would not so humble yourself, Master-General, great victor of the Catalaunian Fields! No, we must not let you get away, we must monitor you. There is no need for you to visit Jerusalem, to see Calvary with your own eyes. I will show you Calvary right here!’

  The emperor began fumbling beneath his robes. Aëtius’ grey eyes were very still, looking straight ahead. He did not stir to protect himself.

  ‘I will show you Calvary, you, you ...’ Imperial spittle flew in Aëtius’ face. ‘You brazen traitor! Hold his arms out!’

  Four guards seized him, two on each arm. He could not resist, and he did not try. He only glanced left and right to see their faces. Lads of eighteen or nineteen, new appointments, obedient slaves. Even though they hardly knew him, they lowered their faces before his searching gaze. He wanted to say something to them at this last moment, knowing that they were not to blame, but suddenly his body was ablaze with agony and his throat was taut and wordless. For Valentinian had produced a long blade and thrust it up beneath his ribs. Aëtius gasped and his eyelids fluttered and lowered. Through the haze he saw the emperor’s grinning face, his spittle-flecked chin almost touching his own as he twisted the knife.

  The four guards let go of his arms and stepped back, and he staggered. Only then did the other courtiers and counsellors crowd around with their own daggers in hand, and join in killing the man who had saved them from ruin a dozen times. Old Quintilianus alone stood back.

  His eyes filmy with death, glazed and misted, his body twisting and falling, his last breath exhaling, what did he see as he fell? Did he see the Triumphal Way, the City on the Seven Hills, the great Basilica of St Peter, the Capitoline? Did he see his beloved legions, scarlet plumes and pennants fluttering in the breeze? Did he see the grim face of his enemy, the Scourge of God? Or did he see a vision of Jerusalem?

  As they stood staring down at the savaged body, Quintilianus spoke from behind them.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ he said quietly. ‘You have cut off your right hand with your left.’

  For Aëtius there were no songs of praise or lamentation. Reader, it is not I who concoct the ironies of history. I can but tell the truth. Only a handful mourned Aëtius’ passing, a handful in all of Italy. Most of his friends had died on the Catalaunian Plains. If the news ever reached the island of Britain, there would have been mourning. In the Court of the Visigoths at Tolosa, there was deep, deep mourning. But in his homeland ...

  Attila the Destroyer went to his death praised and beloved and glorified by lavish funeral rites, much loved among his fierce people.

  Aëtius the Saviour, the last and noblest Roman of them all, to whom all of Christendom and the West owes an incalculable debt - his savaged body was wrapped in sacking and quietly dropped in a marsh. This much he has in common with his great enemy: none knows where he is buried.

  But surely the believers must be right, and the history of this world is not everything; but there is another story, in which justice will be done. Oh, let it be so. Or else this world is not worth a handful of dung.

  The widow of Emperor Theodosius, Eudoxia, was still in Jerusalem when she heard news of the death of Aëtius. She immediately went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to pray. She prayed for a long time. And for many evenings after, she loved to sit on a moonlit balcony and look out over the Golden City of Zion.

  She never returned to Constantinople.

  Only a few weeks later, the Emperor Valentinian was watching soldiers drilling on the Campus Martius when he was set upon by two of them and slain. The soldiers observed, ‘He dies easily for a God!’ None of the other soldiers fought in his defence. Some say that the emperor’s killers had served with Aëtius himself, and had even fought at the battle of the Catalaunian Fields. Some say that one of them was a centurion with an iron countenance and hard, unblinking eyes.

  Two years later, the Vandals sailed up the Tiber and sacked Rome. They had sailed from Carthage. The sack was savage and merciless, for there was barely a defence force to speak of, and King Genseric had grown no less cruel since his three sons were slain in Gaul. Bishop Leo pleaded with him to spare lives. When the Vandals withdrew, they left behind them crumbling theatres and circuses, dazed and wandering remnants of the populace lost in the immense space and emptiness of their ruined public baths, once-stately libraries and halls of justice. All were ransacked and stripped bare. Yet from the Church of St Peter, hymns of praise still sounded. What were treasures and statuary compared with human lives? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, preached Bishop Leo. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

  The Vandals did not grow rich from their raid. A huge summer storm blew up, and much of Genseric’s fleet was wrecked and sunk. All the treasures of Rome lie on the Mediterranean seabed somewhere between Rome and Carthage. They lie for ever in those silent depths among the weeds, half the treasures of the Ancient World: diadems of Indian pearls, Egyptian emeralds, silver chalices, that priceless chandelier of solid gold, hung with fifty dolphins, that once hung in the Lateran Palace. Perhaps even the Ark of the Covenant, which Titus had looted from Jerusalem four long centuries before ...

  After Valentinian there was a succession of emperors enthroned and then soon murdered, each one feeble and less memorable than the last. In the year 476 the last enervated act was played out.

  The penultimate Emperor of Rome, Julius Nepos, was deposed by an old and treacherous soldier, and the soldier’s son, Romulus Augustulus, installed in his stead. Many said that the boy was in truth the old soldier’s grandson, but he lied to prove his potency. The old soldier must have been in his seventies. He was a Greek by birth, and his name was Orestes, and his son inherited his fair hair. In his younger years he had been Attila’s right-hand man. It was incredible, but it was so. The last emperor was Orestes’ son.

  ‘ Four will fight for the end of the world, One with an Empire, One with a Sword; Two will be saved and one will be heard, One with a Son and One with a Word.’ Aëtius, Attila, Orestes and Cadoc, four boys who had played together on the Scythian plain, long ago. It was as the ancient rhyme had said.

  But the reign of Romulus Augustulus was no more permanent than his predecessors’. Only two months later, Orestes’ own standard-bearer, Odoacer, an Ostrogoth, rose up in his turn and murdered Orestes. Romulus Augustulus was officially deposed on 4 September 476. It was precisely twelve centuries and six lustra since the first Romulus founded the city.

  The Muse of Irony was not done yet.

  Odoacer had previously visited Severinus, the most celebrated saint in Noricum. The huge Gothic warlord, clad in a black bearskin, had to bow low to enter the saint’s cell.

  The saint said, ‘I give you two pieces of advice. First, go to Rome and you will become King of Italy. And second, mind your head on the way out.’

  I write this in the Monastery of St Severinus, where the saint lies buried.

  Odoacer slew the last emperor’s aged father, Orestes, who died as he had lived, speaking never a word in protest or explanation; but Odoacer could not bring himself to kill the boy. He was so small, aged all of six or seven, with blond curls, blue eyes, and looking quite absurdly like a cherub.

  ‘What would you like, boy?’

  The boy stared up at the towering warrior and then whispered, ‘I’d like to grow vegetables in a garde
n.’

  Odoacer despatched him to a monastery near Neapolis, to be cared for by the lay brothers. For himself, meanwhile, he disdained the imperial purple and diadem. He bluntly pronounced the Empire of Rome at an end, severed all ties and allegiances with Constantinople, set his borders at the boundaries of Gaul, Rhaetia and Noricum, and declared himself King Odoacer of Italy.

  EPILOGUE

  THE WORLD THAT WAS LOST AND WON

  And I, the meanest of them all,