The horsemen’s thunderous charge drummed up a fine dust from the sun-baked late-summer plains, and Stilicho and his tribune strained to see. Then something darkened the air between them. At first they could barely comprehend.
‘Is that… Is that what I think it is, sir?’
Stilicho was dumbfounded. It was indeed what it seemed. The very air was dark with them. An unimaginable storm of arrows.
He had heard that these people were good on horseback; and he had heard good things of their unprepossessing little bows. But nothing had prepared him for this.
The arrows fell in an endless rain, like murderous stinging insects, upon Rhadagastus’ outflanked column, and the stricken Germans began to grind to a halt, their path blocked by the piled-up corpses of their own men. Then the horsemen, the fury of their charge undiminished even after covering a mile or more of hard, sunbaked ground – long after a troop of Roman cavalry would have begun to slacken and tire – scythed into the aghast and petrified column.
Both Stilicho and his tribune had their fists bunched up on the pommels of their saddles, pushing themselves up and straining to see.
‘In the Name of Light,’ murmured the general.
‘Have you ever seen anything like it, sir?’ said the tribune.
The horsemen cut through the column in seconds, then, with unbelievable dexterity, wheeled round and cut in again from the other side. Rhadagastus’ warriors, even after their weeks of starvation and sickness under the walls of Florentia, were now trying to establish some kind of formation and repel the attack. These tall, blond spearmen, these fierce and skilful swordsmen, fought back with the ferocity of the doomed. But the ferocity of their attackers was greater. Nearer to where they sat their horses, the two Roman officers could see breakaway groups of mounted auxiliaries wheeling and turning about as if with pure delight, effortlessly slaughtering the helpless, milling Germans. And they also saw the deadly effect of the easterners’ lassos. Any barbarian who tried to mount up and ride was instantly brought down again by the whistle and lash of the cruel noose, cast with terrible, casual accuracy. The victim fell in a tangle of reins and limbs, and was quickly despatched where he lay.
Stilicho watched with amazement as the horsemen, even up close, long after Roman cavalry would have drawn their longswords, continued to use their short bows and arrows. He could now see, as the fighting spread out in disorder below them, why their fighting skill was so renowned. He watched a single horseman notch an arrow to his bow, fire it into the back of a fleeing German, and snatch another arrow from his quiver as he swung round on his horse’s bare back. He notched it, leant down at an incredible angle to take cover alongside the body of his mount, holding on with his thigh muscles alone, then sprang back up and loosed another arrow almost into the face of a German running at him with axe swinging. The arrow punched straight through and came out of the back of the axeman’s head in a spew of blood and brain. The horseman had notched another arrow to his bow and galloped on before the warrior hit the ground.
Galloped! The entire encounter had been executed, before Stilicho’s disbelieving eyes, at full gallop. And there was no sign of its ferocity abating.
‘Name of Light,’ he breathed again.
Within minutes, the plain was strewn with barbarian dead and dying. The eastern horsemen at last slowed their mounts to a walk as they patrolled the bloody field, despatching the last of the fallen with occasional arrows or spearthrusts. None of them dismounted. The dust began to settle. The sun still slanted in low from the east and illuminated the scene in a gentle golden glow. Only minutes had passed since dawn broke.
The general and his tribune at last turned and looked at each other. Neither said a word. Neither could think of a word to say. They spurred their horses forward and rode on down the hill to salute their new auxiliaries.
Under a hastily erected awning at the edge of the battlefield, Stilicho settled his powerful frame awkwardly on a tottering camp-stool and prepared to receive the warlord of the auxiliary horsemen. Uldin, he was called. ‘King Uldin’, he styled himself.
Before long he appeared, as small and unprepossessing as his people’s horses or bows. But within that odd, short, bow-legged frame, the same wiry, inexhaustible strength.
Stilicho did not rise, but nodded courteously. ‘It was good work that you did today.’
‘It is good work that we do every day.’
Stilicho smiled. ‘But you have not brought in Rhadagastus?’
Now Uldin smiled. His curious, slanted eyes glittered, but not with mirth. He clicked his fingers, and one of his men stepped up close behind him.
‘Here,’ said Uldin. ‘Here he is.’
The warrior moved forward and dropped a dark, sodden sack at Stilicho’s feet.
The general grunted and plucked open the sack. He had seen enough of the raw realities of battle in his thirty years of soldiering to be undismayed by the sight of severed heads and limbs. All the same, the dismembered remains of Rhadagastus – his hands trailing purple sinews from their ragged wrists, his blood-spattered face and splayed eyes staring back up at him out of the gloom of the sack – slowed his heart for a moment or two.
So this was the great Germanic warlord who had promised to slaughter two million Roman citizens and hang every senator from the eaves of the Senate House. Who had said he’d leave the senators’ corpses hanging there from the Senate House to be picked clean by the crows, then the bare skeletons would clang together like bone bells in the wind – the man had been a poet.
A little less wordy now, old friend? thought Stilicho.
When he looked up, he said, ‘My orders were for Rhadagastus to be taken alive.’
Uldin remained expressionless. ‘That is not our way.’
‘No, it is the Roman way.’
‘Do you give King Uldin orders, soldier?’
Stilicho hesitated. He knew diplomacy was not his strong point. Soldiers said what they thought. Diplomats said what others wanted to hear. But for now he must try to… Besides, you should always tread warily with a man who refers to himself in the third person.
Uldin took advantage of the general’s hesitancy. ‘Remember,’ he said softly, stroking the thin, grey wisp of beard that barely covered his chin, ‘the Huns are your allies, not your slaves. And alliances, like bread, can be broken.’
Stilicho nodded. He would also remember, for the rest of his life, the way the Huns fought. God help us, he thought, if they should ever
…
‘When we ride into Rome in triumph, later this month,’ he said, ‘you and your warriors will ride with us.’
Uldin relaxed a little. ‘So we will,’ he said.
With that, he turned on his heel and walked out into the sunshine.
2
THE EYE OF THE EMPEROR
Rome, late August 408
The Imperial Palace lay in silence under the starlit summer sky.
The boy was sweating under his thin bedsheet, his brow furrowed with furious concentration and his hand clutching the handle of his squat little knife. Tonight he would creep out of his chamber into the shadows of the palace courtyard, he would slip past the nightguards unseen, and he would gouge out the eyes of the Emperor of Rome.
He heard the nightguards go past his door, talking in low, lugubrious voices. He knew what they were talking about: the recent defeat of the rag-tag barbarian armies of Rhadagastus. The Roman army had defeated them, sure enough, but only with the help of their new allies: that ferocious, despised tribe from the east. Without the help of such allies, the Roman army was too weak and demoralised to take the field against so much as a phalanx of perfumed Greeks.
When the guards had gone, and the tremulous orange flicker of their torches had died away, the boy slipped out from under his sheet, swiped the sweat from his face with a cupped hand, and crept to the door. It opened easily, for he had taken the precaution of dripping olive oil over the hinges during the day. Then he was out into the courtyard. The heat
of the Italian summer night was oppressive. Not a dog barked from the alleyways, not a cat screeched from the rooftops. The distant hubbub of the great city could not be heard tonight.
He heard the footsteps coming closer again. There were two of them: battered old soldiers, retired from the Frontier Guard. The boy pressed himself into the shadows.
The two guards paused for a moment and one stretched back his hunched shoulders. They were only a few feet away from the boy, standing between two columns against the moonlight, silhouettes as black as doors into a tomb. As black and sightless as a blinded emperor’s eyes.
‘And then, Rhadagastus said, he’d fill the Senate House with straw and set a torch to it, and leave it nothing but a field of blackened rubble.’
The other guard, tough old soldier that he was, fell into a pensive silence for a moment or two. Even if the Senate was nowadays only an emasculated shadow of its former self – even if, as everyone knew, the empire was really run by the imperial court and its few plutocratic cronies, regardless of what the Senate might or might not want – nevertheless, the Senate House represented all that was proudest and most venerable in Rome. For a barbarian force to sweep in and destroy it… That would have been a shame unspeakable.
But the barbarians had been defeated. For now. With the help of other barbarians.
In the shadows behind the two old soldiers crouched the boy with his knife.
Every night, he had to pass down that long, lonely corridor in this remote, silent courtyard of the palace on the Palatine Hill, followed by the blood-chilling gaze of the first and greatest emperor. At the far end lay his miserable little chamber – no lavish suite for him – with its single guttering cheap clay lamp, as if he were no more than a slave. Such was his accommodation: a bare wooden bed in a windowless cell at the back of the palace, immediately adjacent to the kitchen quarters. The indignity of it all was not lost on the boy, Rome’s supposedly most valued hostage. In other chambers around the palace lived other young hostages of other barbarian peoples: Sueves and Vandals, Burgundians and Gepids, Saxons and Alemans and Franks; but even they looked down upon him as the lowest of the low, and refused to admit him to their conversations or games. And their contempt kindled further his always fierce heart.
Tonight he would have his revenge on those unforgiving imperial eyes, and on all those months of slaps and sneers and scornful Roman laughter. The Romans were terrified of omens, as riven with superstitious dread as any people he knew. They feared the garbled prophecies of every toothless old hag in the market-place, every misbegotten birth of ewe or mare, every portent that their wide eyes saw in the wind or the stars.
The boy believed in Astur, the god of his people, and in his knife; but the Romans, like all weak people, believed in everything. When they saw that great first emperor of theirs suddenly blinded.. . Then the boy would see what happened to that scornful Roman laughter. It would freeze in their lilywhite throats.
In the tumult of tomorrow’s celebrations and games, he would escape. He would soon be far, far away from this corrupt and festering city, heading north into the mountains. After many weeks’ or months’ hard journeying, he would descend from them again with the sun behind him, and he would be back on the wide and windy plains of his beloved steppe country before the first snows fell. Here, he was nothing but a hostage: a barbarian hostage, caged in a windowless chamber in this decrepit Imperial Palace, in this crabbed, cobwebbed, anxious, doomed old city. But there, among his fierce, free people, he was a prince of the royal blood, the son of Mundzuk, the son of King Uldin himself. Uldin was the son of Torda, the son of Berend, the son of Sulthan, the son of Bulchu, the son of Bolug, the son of Zambour, the son of Rael, the son of Levanghe…
The names of all those ancient generations were graven on his heart; for the Huns, like the Celts, committed nothing of value to paper or stone, for fear that strangers and unbelievers might discover their holiest mysteries. Among which was this secret genealogy, these links in the divine chain of kingship that led back to the great hero Tarkan, the son of Kaer, the son of Nembroth, the son of Cham, the son of Astur, the King of All that Flies: he who wears the Crown of the Mountains upon his head, and tears the clouds asunder with his terrible talons, in his kingdom of the blue sky over the Altai Mountains and the snowbound Tien Shan. He who devours his enemies before him like the storm; who among the Eastern People is also called Schongar, the head of the ancestral tree of all the wide-wandering Hun nation.
What did the Romans know of this? All men beyond the frontier were mere barbarians to them, and Roman curiosity stopped at their own frontier walls.
Here in Rome, this son of the Sons of Astur was deemed little better than a slave or a spoil of war. He thought of the wide plains of Scythia and his heart ached with longing for his homeland, for a sight of the black tents of his people, and for the great herds of horses moving slowly through the thigh-deep feathergrass. Among them was his beloved white pony, Chagelghan – well named, for she was indeed as fast as lightning: chagelghan in the language of the Huns. When he was back on the plains, he would mount her barebacked and unbridled, with only his legs’ strength and his fists in her thick white mane to hold him, and they would ride for unbounded miles over the steppes with the feathergrass whipping past his knees and her haunches, the wind in her mane and his hair. Here, in this bitter and withering empire, everything was stifled and bounded, every parcel of land was owned, every horse branded, every straight, unblinking road paved and named, every field and vineyard fenced off – and these Romans had the stupidity to think themselves free! They no longer knew what freedom was.
But he would have his freedom again. His parting gift to Rome would be the blinded eyes of that great emperor; and then he would escape. They would send out soldiers to search for him, he knew. He knew his own value. They would send out whole armies to prevent his escape. But they would never find him once he was out in the mountains and the wilds, no more to human eyes than a ghost or a shadow.
The boy didn’t breathe. He pressed further back into the darkness and made himself invisible. One of the elders of his tribe, a solitary and often silent elder called Cadicha, had taught him how. Cadicha had travelled for many long years in the endless wildernesses of Central Asia, and seen many strange things, and knew how, so it was said in the tribe, to make himself appear like a gust of sand in the wind, or a single solitary tree. Cadicha taught the boy what to do. He pressed as far back as he could into the shadows of the niche. Against his bare shoulder he could feel the cold marble of the pediment, surmounted by yet another pompous marble statue of some defunct hero of Rome. His fingers were sweaty round the coarse rope handle of his dagger. He could smell the salt-sea smell of the rope, damp with his sweat.
He was small for his age, more like a boy of seven or eight than one on the verge of adolescence; his people had always been scorned for their small stature. But what did they know, those enfeebled Romans with their cold sneers of superiority, or those long-limbed, flaxen-haired Goths? Look at his people’s horses: smaller than any other breed in Europe, but hardier by far. They could carry a man for an hour at full gallop and not tire.
He still didn’t breathe, and he closed his slanted eyes, lest they should glitter like a cat’s from the darkness.
The guards talked on, within a few paces of him.
Some guards they were. Old and tired and half deaf and ready to fall. Very like the city they guarded. They were talking now of his people, and of how Rome had defeated the barbarian army of Rhadagastus only with the aid of barbarians. How Stilicho, master-general of the Roman forces, had joined forces with another barbarian tribe to win his victory: this tribe called the Huns.
One of the guards snorted. ‘Half animal, they are. Eat nothing but raw meat, wear only animal skins, and their victory rites after a battle… You think the arena looks a mess after a triumph, but you don’t want to be one of their war-captives, I can tell you.’
‘No greater power in this world than t
o be so feared,’ said the other guard.
‘Well, aren’t you the philosopher tonight.’
The second guard stared out over the moonlit palace courtyard, and then said softly, ‘Well, we shall see them for ourselves tomorrow, at General Stilicho’s triumph.’
‘Emperor Honorius’ triumph.’
‘I do beg your pardon,’ came the mocking reply. ‘Yes, of course, the emperor’s triumph.’
There was silence for a while, and then one of them said, ‘Do you remember that night on the Rhine?’
‘Of course I do,’ said the other. ‘How could I ever forget it? You saved my poxy life, didn’t you?’
‘Don’t start thanking me for that again.’
‘Wasn’t going to.’
‘Anyway, you’d have done the same for me.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
The two old soldiers grinned at each other, but their grins soon faded.
Yes, they remembered that night on the Rhine. In the last days of December, when the river froze solid, and the barbarian hordes came galloping across the moonlit ice as if they were coming into their kingdom: Vandals and Sueves, Alans, Lombards, Goths, Burgundians. Yes, they remembered that night, and all the nights and the weeks and the months that came after.
The first guard bowed his head at the remembrance. ‘I thought I saw Rome go down in flames that night.’
They brooded.
‘Is the story of Rome finished?’
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