Attila ath-1

by William Napier

The other shrugged. ‘It’s been a long story,’ he said. ‘And it could yet have one almighty firestorm of a final chapter. The fall of Rome would outshine the fall of Troy as the sun outshines a candle.’

  ‘We’ll have a place there, too,’ said the other, ‘and die deaths as glorious and heroic as the death of Hector himself!’

  They snorted with derisive, self-mocking laughter.

  Then one said, ‘Come on then, old Trojan.’ And wearily the two comrades-at-arms, now relegated to the status of lowly palace guards, with their stiff old joints and their scars that still ached on frosty nights, moved slowly on down the corridor, their sandals slapping softly on the marble tiles.

  The boy relaxed, eased himself away from the cold marble and breathed again. The moment the guards had turned the corner out of sight, he crept out of the niche and scuttled along in the shadows towards the other end of the corridor.

  There in the pale, washed light of the moon stood an imposing bronze statue of Caesar Augustus himself, a great brawny arm commandingly outstretched, wearing the plate-armour uniform of a general of four hundred years ago. His eyes shone in the moonlight, his painted black eyes with their unearthly gleaming whites. Round the base of the statue were carved the words ‘ PIUS AENEAS ’. For were not the Caesars direct descendants of the legendary Founder of Rome himself?

  By dawn tomorrow, Augustus would look very different: with his knife the boy would turn that cold gaze blind.

  He scrambled swiftly onto the pediment, and then, feeling as if he was in some strange dream, began to climb up the bronze figure. He clenched the knife between his teeth and, reaching up, managed to grab hold of one of Augustus’ larger-than-life-sized hands. He braced his bare feet against the statue’s legs and hauled, stretched up again and hooked his left arm round the emperor’s neck.

  He froze. The guards were coming past again.

  They couldn’t be. They had done their dozen circuits of the courtyard, as regular as the wheeling stars, in true Roman fashion, and now they should be moving on to another of the palace’s countless courtyards. In his urgency he must have miscounted.

  He kept as still as the statue itself while the guards passed beneath him, both looking sombrely down. They didn’t see him, hunched there on the imperial giant like a malignant incubus. And then they were gone.

  He leant back and, gripping the statue with both thighs and one arm, took the dagger in his right hand and eased the blade under Augustus’ alabaster right eyeball. A little scraping and levering, and it popped out cleanly. He caught it deftly with his knife-hand as it fell, the size of a duck egg, and dropped it inside his tunic. Then he turned his attention to the left eyeball, again slipping the thin blade in and easing it ‘And what do you think you are doing?’

  The voice was colder than any statue of marble or bronze.

  He looked down. At the foot of the statue stood a young woman of twenty years or so, in an emerald-green stola, belted at the waist, her hair worn in a severe style, tightly plaited and bound round her head. It had an almost reddish tinge, and her skin was very pale. She was tall and bony, with a fine nose, a thin and sharply defined mouth, and cool green, unblinking, catlike eyes. Her physical presence was one of both brittleness and sinewy tenacity. Now she arched a cool eyebrow enquiringly, as if merely curious, or even amused at what the boy might be doing. But there was no amusement or mere curiosity in her eyes. Her eyes made the boy think of fire seen burning through a wall of ice.

  ‘Princess Galla Placidia,’ he whispered. ‘I-’

  She wasn’t interested in explanations. ‘Get down,’ she snapped.

  He got down.

  She looked up at the mutilated face of Caesar Augustus. ‘He found Rome brick and left it marble,’ she said softly. ‘But you, you found him bronze, and left him… mutilated. How very characteristic.’ She looked sourly down at the boy again. ‘It is so important to know one’s enemies, don’t you think?’

  The boy looked smaller than ever.

  She held out her hand. ‘The other eye,’ she said.

  He could feel it, still nestling there in the folds of his tunic.

  ‘I…’ He swallowed. ‘When I came by, one eye was already gone. I was just trying to make sure the other one wouldn’t fall out as well.’

  He didn’t understand what had happened when he slammed against the wall behind him. Only when he groggily pulled himself to his feet again did he feel the side of his face stinging with pain. The livid welts of the blue tattooed scars that stood out from his cheek, the mark of his people, cut into his flesh by his mother when he was still in his cradle, tingled with increasing intensity. He touched his fingertips to his mouth, and found that the odd tickling sensation over his numbed lips was the trickle of blood.

  He clutched the knife hard in his right hand and took a step forward. His teeth were furiously clenched.

  Galla didn’t flinch. ‘Put it away.’

  The boy stopped. He continued to clutch the knife, but he couldn’t take another step.

  The princess’s eyes, both cool and burning, ice on fire, never left him. ‘You have been nothing but a plague since the day you arrived here,’ she said, her voice as cutting as Toletum steel. ‘You have had the finest Gallic tutors in Rome, to teach you rhetoric, logic, grammar, mathematics and astronomy… They have even tried to teach you Greek!’ She laughed. ‘What touching optimism! You have, of course, learnt nothing. Your table manners are a continuing disgrace, you do nothing but scowl and sneer at the other hostages, your barbarian… equals. And now you are growing destructive as well.’

  ‘Rhadagastus would have done much worse,’ blurted the boy.

  For a fleeting instant, Galla hesitated. ‘Rhadagastus is finished,’ she said. ‘As the triumphal Arch of Honorius will demonstrate when it is unveiled at the ceremony next week. Which you will attend.’

  He looked up at her wide-eyed. ‘Strange it’s not called the Arch of Stilicho, really, isn’t it? In my country, when a battle is fought and won-’

  ‘I am not interested in what goes on in your country. Just so long as it does not go on here.’

  ‘But we’re allies now, aren’t we? If it hadn’t been for the help of my people, Rome would probably be overrun with barbarians by now.’

  ‘Hold your tongue.’

  ‘And they’d do far more damage than this.’ He waved at the mutilated statue that towered over them. ‘If Rhadagastus and his warriors had got into the city, apparently they were going stuff the Senate House full of straw and set fire-’

  ‘I order you to hold your tongue!’ said Galla furiously, advancing towards him again.

  ‘-to it, and leave it and all of Rome nothing but a field of blackened rubble. As the Goths might next, they say, now that Alaric is their leader, and a just brilliant general, who-’

  The princess’s cold and bony hand was raised to strike the little wretch a second time, and his slanted, malevolent Asiatic eyes glittered as he taunted her, when another voice rang out from the far corner of the courtyard.

  ‘Galla!’

  They heard the swish of a stola over the paved floor, and there was Serena, the wife of Master-General Stilicho, advancing towards them.

  Galla turned to her, hand still raised. ‘Serena?’ she said.

  Serena contrived a curtsey to the princess as she hurried forward, but the look in her eyes was anything but humble or obedient. ‘Lower your hand.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘And you, boy, go to your room.’

  He backed up against the wall and waited.

  ‘Do you presume to order me?’

  Serena faced Galla Placidia and her eyes did not flinch. She was shorter than the princess, and perhaps twice her age, but there was no denying her beauty. Her hair was simply coiffed, and her stola of white silk left her neck and shoulders bare but for a slim necklace of Indian pearls. Her eyes, edged with fine laughter lines, were dark and lustrous, and few men in the court were strong enough to refuse her wishes
when she expressed them in her low and gentle voice, turning her gaze and her wide smile full upon them. But when angered, those beautiful eyes could flash fire. They flashed fire now.

  ‘Do you think it wise, Princess Galla, to maltreat the grandson of our most valued ally?’

  ‘Maltreat, Serena? And what would you have me do when I catch him outraging one of the most precious statues in the palace?’ Galla moved almost imperceptibly nearer to her. ‘Sometimes, I wonder if you really mind about such things. One would sometimes think your sympathies were as much barbarian as Roman! Ridiculous, I know. But of course, I understand that your husband-’

  ‘That’s enough!’ flared Serena.

  ‘On the contrary, it is not nearly enough. Since your husband was of unbaptised and barbarian birth himself, I – and indeed many others in court circles, though you may be comfortably unaware of it – many of us have begun to suspect that you have difficulty in distinguishing between what is truly Roman and what is not.’

  Serena smiled scornfully. ‘It has been a long time since even the emperors themselves were Roman born and bred. Hadrian was Spanish, as was Trajan. Septimius Severus was Libyan. P-’

  ‘I know my history, thank you,’ cut in the princess. ‘What is your point?’

  ‘My point is that you seem to be suggesting that my husband is not truly Roman on account of his birth. Romanitas no longer has anything to do with birth.’

  ‘You wilfully misunderstand me. I am rather suggesting that you and your husband’s party-’

  ‘We have no “party”.’

  ‘-are in grave danger of forgetting the very principles of Roman civilisation.’

  ‘When I see a grown woman striking a small boy, I do not see civilisation, Princess,’ Serena said acidly. ‘Nor do I see subtle diplomacy in evidence, when that boy is the grandson of our most valuable ally.’

  ‘Of course, some would argue that, since you are merely the wife of a soldier, however peculiarly… elevated that soldier may have become, your views are of no consequence. But I would not like to be so uncharitable. Or so’ – Galla Placidia smiled – ‘complacent.’

  ‘You see ghosts, Princess,’ said Serena. ‘You see things that are not.’ She turned aside and laid her hand on the waiting boy’s shoulder. ‘Away to your room,’ she murmured. ‘Come now.’

  Together they went down to the corridor to the boy’s chamber.

  Galla Placidia stood clenching and unclenching her white, bony fists for some time. Eventually she turned on her heel and strode away, sightless with fury, her silk stola sweeping the ground before her as she went. In her darting mind’s eye she saw suspicions, plots and jealousies scuttling away like malign and chattering sprites into the dark shadows of the imperial courtyards; her haunted green eyes cast restlessly from left to right as she walked, and found nothing worth their constancy.

  Serena halted at the door to the boy’s chamber and turned him gently but firmly to face her.

  ‘The knife,’ she said.

  ‘I – I dropped it somewhere.’

  ‘Look at me. Look at me.’

  He glanced up into those penetrating dark eyes and then looked down again. ‘I need it,’ he said miserably.

  ‘No you don’t. Give it to me.’

  With great reluctance, he handed it over.

  ‘And promise me you will do no more damage in the palace.’

  He thought about it and said nothing.

  She continued to fix him with her dark eyes. ‘Swear it.’

  Very slowly, he swore it.

  ‘I am trusting you,’ said Serena. ‘Remember that. Now go to bed.’ She pushed him gently into his chamber, pulled the door shut behind him, and turned away. ‘Little wolf-cub,’ she murmured to herself with the trace of a smile as she went.

  One of the palace eunuchs came to Galla’s door and knocked. She nodded for him to be admitted.

  It was the sharp-witted, sardonic Eutropius. His vital intelligence was that Serena and Attila had been seen outside the boy’s chamber, making what appeared to be a mutual promise or pact.

  When he was gone, the princess rose and strode restlessly around the room, imagining conspiracies and secret conversations everywhere. She pictured the Huns in secret negotiation with Stilicho, of the boy somehow passing messages from Stilicho and Serena to his own murderous people encamped far out on the wild Scythian plains. Or even to his grandfather, Uldin, who, mistakenly in her opinion, would take part in the imperial triumph tomorrow, alongside Stilicho – as if the equal of a Roman general!

  She saw too her brother, Emperor Honorius, ruler of the Western Empire, back in his palace in Mediolanum, or hiding away in his new palace at Ravenna, safe behind the mosquito-ridden marshes, giggling to himself as he fed grains of the finest wheat to his pet poultry. Honorius, her idiot brother, two years her junior: the eighteen-year-old Ruler of the World. ‘The Emperor of Chickens’, malicious tongues at court had christened him. Galla Placidia knew it all, both from her network of informants and from her own piercing green eyes, which saw through everything and everyone.

  Let Honorius stay in his new palace: it was better, perhaps, that he was kept out of the way. Ravenna, that strange dream-city, connected symbolically to the rest of Italy only by a narrow stone causeway across the marshes. Ravenna, with its night air filled with the croaking of frogs; where, they said, wine was more plentiful than drinking water. Let the emperor stay there. He would be safe and quiet, alone with his chickens.

  She stood late into the night looking out onto the Great Courtyard, listening to the peaceful splashing of the Dolphin Fountain, and knew that sleep would not come. If she laid down her humming head now, she would only dream of ten thousand thunderous hooves, of painted barbarian faces, blue and scarred with the scars and burns that those terrible people gave their children in infancy. She would dream of a black, unending rain of arrows, of fleeing multitudes weeping and stumbling over a parched and desolate country, or running to hide, in the mountains, from the wrath and the judgement to come. She would cry out in her tormented sleep, and dream of churches and forts and palaces aflame in the fallen night, like the burning towers of tragic Ilium. Her thin, bony shoulders sagged with the weight of the empire of a hundred million souls. She clutched the heavy silver cross round her neck and prayed to Christ and all His saints, and knew that sleep would not come.

  She would have been even more troubled if she had seen the strange ritual that took place in the boy’s bare cell before he at last crawled into bed and slept.

  He squatted on the floor, retrieved the alabaster eye from the folds of his tunic, and set it carefully down in the intersection of four floor-tiles, so that it wouldn’t roll. After a few moments’ consideration, during which he and the unsocketed eye stared grimly at each other, he reached under his bed and pulled out a rough stone. He lifted it above his head, then slammed it down as hard as he could on the eye, flattening it instantly into powder.

  He set down the stone, reached out, took a pinch of the alabaster powder between forefinger and thumb, and raised it to his mouth.

  And he ate it.

  3

  THE HUNS RIDE INTO ROME

  He awoke from whimpering dreams of childish vengeance.

  The little cell was in darkness, but when he opened the shutters onto the courtyard the Italian summer sun blazed down and his spirits lifted. Slaves were bustling about, carrying pitchers of water, and wooden boards bearing cheeses in damp muslin, salted meat and fresh loaves of bread.

  He skipped out of the cell and grabbed one of the loaves as it passed.

  ‘Here, you little… ’

  But he knew it was all right. The slave was one of his favourites, Bucco, a fat and jolly Sicilian who heaped the most terrible curses on his head and didn’t mean any of them.

  ‘May you choke to death on it, you damned thief!’ Bucco growled. ‘May you choke to death, and then your liver be devoured by a hundred scrofulous pigeons!’

  The boy laughed and was
gone.

  Bucco looked after him and grinned.

  The little barbarian. The rest of the palace might regard him with haughty disdain, but among the slaves, at least, he had friends. Only one Roman couple in court circles treated him with anything like kindness.

  Some mornings he went over to the water butt in the courtyard to splash his face, and some mornings he didn’t. This morning he didn’t.

  Which was why, when later that morning Serena saw him by daylight, she was aghast. ‘What on earth have you done to your face?’ she cried.

  The boy stopped and looked puzzled and uncertain. He tried to smile but it hurt too much.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ she sighed, and taking his hand she led him off to another corner of the palace. There she took him into one of the antechambers of her own suite, and sat him at a delicate little table covered in bristle-brushes and bone combs, pots of unguent and phials of perfume, and she showed him his reflection in a polished brass mirror.

  He did not, he had to admit, look good. His lip was more deeply cut from Galla Placidia’s blow than he had realised; perhaps she had caught him with one of her heavy gold signet rings. In the night the cut must have opened and bled again, then dried and crusted over, so that half his chin was an unsightly reddish-brown smear. The whole of his right cheek had a smooth, swollen purple sheen to it, rendering his blue tribal scars almost invisible; while his right eye, which he had sensed might be not quite right, was almost closed with swelling, ringed with myriad shades of blue and black.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  The boy shrugged. ‘I think I must have hit my head in the night. ..’

  She held his gaze for a moment. ‘Did Galla Placidia slap you – before I arrived?’

  ‘No,’ he said sullenly.

  She turned away and reached for a little pot among the many on the table. She removed the lid, and took up a pad of linen cloth. ‘Now, this is going to hurt,’ she said.

  Afterwards, she insisted that he should wear a linen bandage soaked in vinegar over his bruised and swollen eye. ‘At least for the rest of the day.’ She looked at him and sighed again. Maybe the faintest smile was on her lips. ‘What are we going to do with you?’