Attila ath-1

by William Napier

  ‘Send me home?’ he mumbled.

  She shook her head, not unkindly. ‘It is the way of the world,’ she said. ‘At your grandfather’s camp there is a Roman boy your age, who longs to be home likewise.’

  ‘Idiot,’ said the boy. ‘He can ride the best horses in the world there. And he doesn’t have to eat fish.’

  ‘No one makes you eat fish.’

  He pulled a face. ‘Galla Placidia-’ he began.

  ‘Now, now,’ she said. She tapped him on the arm, and changed the subject. She touched his bandaged face with a featherlight finger. ‘And what are you going to look like on the steps of the palace, for the emperor’s triumph?’ She pursed her lips. ‘You’ll just have to stand well back. Don’t, for once, attract attention to yourself.’

  He nodded, jumped down from the stool, knocking the delicate little table violently as he did so, and sending all Serena’s priceless pots and phials flying. He muttered his apologies, knelt clumsily down to try and help her pick them up again, and then got to his feet and sheepishly slunk from the room at Serena’s exasperated bidding.

  She began to pick up the wreckage herself. She shook her head, trying not to smile. That little barbarian. It was true, she had to admit: he did not belong in a palace, that little whirlwind, that fierce force of nature in the making.

  The boy paused outside, and touched the bandage over his eye. Sometimes he liked to pretend that she was really his mother: his mother, whom he hardly remembered, who on the night of a full moon had carved those ritual deep blue scars into his cheeks with a curved bronze knife, only a week after he was born, proud of her infant son when he cried so little at the pain. But his mother was dead long since. He could no longer recall what she looked like. When he thought of his mother, he thought of a woman with dark, lustrous eyes and a gentle smile.

  Eunuchs went to Galla again and told her Attila had been seen emerging from Serena’s private chambers, wearing a bandage of sorts over his face.

  Galla clenched her teeth.

  It was the day of the emperor’s triumph.

  Outside the cool and formal courtyards of the palace, the teeming city of Rome was in uproar. It was one vast expression of gratitude, one collective sigh of relief. And perhaps, mixed with that relief, there was some perturbation. For the Huns were marching into Rome.

  Trumpets blared, banners fluttered and crowds roared all the way from the Porta Triumphalis to the Campus Martius. White oxen were led through the streets, festooned with garlands of late summer flowers, their great heads nodding sleepily as they walked all unawares to their sacrificial doom. Everywhere there were promiscuous swarms of people, drinking and cheering and singing. Among them an experienced eye could pick out the hucksters and fraudsters, the blind beggars huddled against the walls, no more than rag-bound frames of brittle bone, twitching and muttering at passers-by, and the pretend-blind beggars, their hands outstretched, revealing forearms just a little too plump. Here was the veteran soldier with his wooden leg, and there the pretend-soldier hopping along with the aid of a battered crutch, his other (perfectly good) leg strapped up to his buttocks beneath his ragged cloak. And over there the harlots in their high-laced sandals, their soles studded with carefully patterned little hobnails that spelt out ‘ Follow Me ’ in the dust behind them as they sashayed along. They were all doing excellent business on this day of rejoicing and animal spirits. Their large, seductive eyes were lined with black kohl and shadowed with green malachite, and they were startlingly blonde in their elaborate flaxen wigs imported from Germany. Some of them even took off their wigs and twirled them gaily in the air.

  For although it was a solemn as well as a festive occasion, celebrating no less than the salvation of Rome itself, the usual cheating and thieving and whoring went on this day as on any other day in the great city. Little had changed in the four hundred years since Juvenal’s time, or in the century since Constantine the Great had declared the empire a Christian empire; since little ever changes in human nature.

  Here was the fishmonger selling his ‘spicy fishballs’ – hotly spicy indeed, to disguise the fact that the fish had been netted at Ostia at least two weeks ago. Caveat emptor. Here were the fruit-sellers, with their apricots, figs and pomegranates. Here were the fraudsters and the soothsayers, the ‘Chaldean astrologers’ from the backstreets of Rome, wearing ludicrous cloaks embroidered with moon and stars. Here was the sly-eyed young Syrian with his deft hands and his smile and his loaded dice; and here was another, older man, rheumy-eyed and crooked with age, Greek, so he said, and an unconvincing advert for his own ‘miracle panacea’, an unctuous green liquid sold in grubby glass bottles, which he offered to passers-by – for a fee, of course.

  In Rome, anything could be bought for the right amount of money: health, happiness, love, length of days, the favour of God or the gods, according to your taste.

  Money could even buy, so it was sometimes scandalously whispered, the imperial purple itself.

  On the steps of the Imperial Palace were gathered as many of the royal household as could be accommodated. From every doorway and every upper window, people cheered and shouted and waved banners and cloths, as they did from the meanest houses in the city, leaning precariously from their fifth- or sixth-floor apartments in high-rising insulae.

  First in the triumphal procession came the aged senators, as always preceding the emperor on foot as a mark of their subservience. The crowd’s applause was distinctly lacklustre for this superfluous millionaires’ club in old-fashioned togas edged with purple. Then, to thunderous acclaim, the long march-past of Stilicho’s finest troops, his First Legion, the venerable Legio I ‘Italica’, originally raised under Nero and stationed at Bononia. Like other legions, it no longer numbered the full complement of five thousand men, more like two thousand; and they were spending more and more time attached to Stilicho’s mobile field army, fighting to defend the Rhine and Danube frontiers. But at Florentia they had shown they were still the world’s finest troops. Other legionaries had to stand five feet ten inches, but to join the Legio I ‘Italica’, you had to be a six-footer.

  They marched proudly by in immaculate order under raised standards fluttering with eagles, or embroidered dragons or writhing serpents, roused to angry life by the wind that ruffled them. They carried only wooden staves rather than swords, as was the custom during a triumph, but they looked hard, fierce men nevertheless. At the back marched their centurions, thick vine-sticks in their fists, grim-faced as ever. Then came Count Heraclian, Stilicho’s second-in-command, his eyes darting and uncertain, always jealous, so it was said, of his brilliant commander. And then, on a dignified white stallion, Stilicho himself. The striking, long, and rather lugubrious face; the intelligent eyes; the manner at once mild and disciplined.

  With him was an extraordinary figure. And immediately behind him a further fifty or so extraordinary figures. Indeed, so extraordinary that, as they passed, the crowd that lined the street fell silent and seemed almost to lose its voice.

  For beside Stilicho, on a small and skittish bay pony, its fierce eyes rolling to the whites, rode a man such as the Romans had never seen before. He was in his fifties, perhaps, but looked as tough as bullhide. He had curious slanting eyes, and a thin, wispy grey beard which barely covered his chin. His helmet was pointed, and he wore a rough and battered leather jerkin, and over that a broad, dusty cloak of beaten horse-skin. He bristled with weapons: a sword at one side, a dagger at the other; a beautifully crafted bow slung one way across his back, and the other way a quiver packed with arrows. His dark, impenetrable gaze was fixed straight ahead, and although he was of small build he radiated strength.

  His name was Uldin, and he called himself King of the Huns.

  Close behind him rode more of his kind, his personal bodyguard; they, too, were clad in dusty and unkempt animal furs, bristled with weaponry, and rode small, fierce-eyed ponies. The neat, prancing hooves kicked up plumes of dust as they rode, and the open-mouthed bystanders could sm
ell leather and horses and sweat as they passed: something alien and animal, something vast and untamed, from far beyond the orderly frontiers of Rome.

  Some of Uldin’s horsemen looked to left and right as they rode past, meeting the challenge of the Roman citizens’ gaze with equal curiosity. Uldin himself kept his gaze steadfastly ahead, but his men could not help but stare around, and upward, at the monumental buildings of the city; buildings of a size and grandeur their imaginations could barely grasp. Even the humblest buildings, the blocks of flats inhabited by the poorest in Rome, towered higher than anything the horsemen had ever seen built by the hand of man before. Then there were the palaces of patricians and emperors, the grand and triumphal basilicas, their windows filled with stuff called glass, which let in the light and heat but not the cold. Opaque sheets of blue or green ice which didn’t melt in the sun, utterly mysterious to them.

  The fantastical, overwrought Baths of Diocletian and of Caracalla, decorated with marble of every conceivable colour and shade: yellow and orange from Libya, pink from Euboea, blood-red and brilliant green from Egypt, along with the precious onyx and porphyry of the east. Then the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Forum of Trajan and the Arch of Titus, and the great temples to the Roman gods, whose treasuries contained, so it was rumoured, the gold of half the world…

  Nevertheless, the people of Rome resumed their cheering readily enough as the barbarian horsemen passed on, acknowledging, however uneasily, that it was only thanks to the alliance with these strangers that Rome had been saved.

  Only the most dandyish of the aristocrats turned their delicate noses up, and covered their mouths in little white cloths impregnated with oil of lavender. Some of them carried silk parasols seamed with golden thread, to protect their fair skins from the sun, and, pointing towards the Hun horsemen, joked that, after all, one didn’t want to look as sunburnt as that. Such dandies wore light silken robes embroidered with extravagant scenes of hunting or wild animals; or, if they wanted to display their piety, perhaps the martyrdom of a favourite saint. What the stern old Roman heroes would have said, how Cato the Censor would have raged, one could only speculate. These epigones, these degenerates…

  What the Huns themselves must have judged of them, and of Rome herself therefore, one can only imagine.

  Many a member of the patrician classes, it was said, had not remained in Rome to see the triumph. With an airy and languid gesture, they had drawled that the city would be too hot and too crowded with plebs and, still worse, barbarian horsemen, to be bearable. The smell would be simply ghastly. And they had taken their leave and gone down with their friends to the Lucrine Lake, on the Gulf of Puteoli, to lie exhausted in their painted galleys and sip their goblets of Falernian wine chilled with handfuls of snow brought down in jars by slaves from the heights of Vesuvius. And reclining in their galleys, with other slaves softly playing stringed instruments, perhaps, they would trail their delicate hands in the cooling waters and gaze towards the island of Ischia and sigh for the days of their youth. Or of Rome’s youth. Or of any days but these, and anywhere but here. Anything but these hard days and these demanding times.

  From the steps of the palace, the imperial household looked on. At their head stood the poised, expressionless figure of Princess Galla, her robe today a brilliant saffron yellow. The rest of the household seemed to stretch away from her on either side; and in the far corner, near Serena, stood a small, hunched and fiercely scowling boy.

  ‘Hey, short-arse! Oi!’

  The boy looked left and his scowl deepened further. It was a couple of the other hostages, the Frankish children, calling across to him through the throng.

  ‘You want to push through to the front! You won’t see anything but people’s ankles where you are!’ And the tall, fair children laughed.

  He was about to advance towards them, teeth clenched, when he felt Serena’s hand on his shoulder, turning him gently but firmly back towards the spectacle parading before them.

  As General Stilicho passed by, grave on his fine white horse, he turned and bowed to Princess Galla, and managed also to catch the eye of his wife: the slightest smile passed between them.

  Stilicho was interrupted by Uldin’s voice at his side, asking in jagged and broken Latin who was the boy on the steps with the bandaged eye. Stilicho glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of him, just as he vanished from view. He turned back and smiled broadly.

  ‘That is Attila, son of Mundzuk, son of-’

  ‘The son of my son. I knew him.’ Uldin, too, grinned broadly. Then he asked, ‘What hostages do we have in return?’

  ‘A lad called Aetius – the same age as Attila, and the oldest son of one Gaudentius, master-general of the cavalry.’

  The King of the Huns glanced sideways at Stilicho. ‘The same Gaudentius who…?’

  ‘So rumour has it,’ said Stilicho. ‘But you know about rumour.’

  Uldin nodded. ‘Why is his eye bandaged? The son of Mundzuk?’

  Stilicho didn’t know. ‘He is always getting himself into scrapes,’ he shrugged. ‘My young wolf-cub,’ he added softly, more to himself than Uldin. Then he wiped the affectionate smile from his face, and reassumed the expression of soldierly gravity that befitted the dignity of a general at a Roman triumph.

  Somewhere among the triumph rode the emperor himself, on an immaculate, plumed white mare: young Honorius in his robes of purple and gold. But few people noticed. He made little impression.

  From the Palatine steps, Princess Galla gazed out over the triumph.

  After the procession, and the interminable speeches and eulogies, and the solemn service of thanksgiving to God in the Church of St Peter, there were triumphal games in the Colosseum.

  As with the closing of the pagan temples by Emperor Theodosius a generation or two earlier, and the banning of blood sacrifices, the Christians had on many occasions tried to bring the games to an end. This was not on account of the cruelty so much as because the crowd derived too much base pleasure from the spectacle; and also because, on the days when the games were held, so many rouged and painted whores congregated beneath the arches of the Colosseum, pouting their lips and baring their wanton breasts and thighs at passers-by, that a Christian man hardly knew where to look. And as for a Christian lady. ..

  Only four years before, in the year of Our Lord 404, a certain eastern monk called Telemachus, with all the glittering-eyed fanaticism of his kind, had thrown himself into the arena from the steps above, in protest at the disgusting spectacle taking place. The rabble, true to form, promptly stoned him to death where he knelt. For they did love their sports and games, the common people. But later, with that fickleness of mind and heart which is typical of the unwashed and unlettered multitude, they cried out their sorrow and repentance for what they had done. And the youthful and impressionable Emperor Honorius promptly issued a decree that all games were henceforth abolished.

  Unfortunately, like so many of his decrees, this one was widely ignored. Soon enough the games had crept back into the arena, and the crowd’s appetite for blood and spectacle was renewed. And on this day in August, only four years later, it was Emperor Honorius himself who declared the triumphal games open.

  Some criminals were made to dress up as peasants, and kill each other with pitchforks. A man who had raped his young daughter was tied to a stake and Caledonian hunting dogs were set on him, to devour his genitals while he was still alive – the crowd especially appreciated that one. There was a long and bloody fight between a huge forest bison and a Spanish bear. The bison was killed eventually, but the bear had to be dragged from the arena on a travois and was no doubt despatched in the cells below. There were no longer gladiatorial combats, however, since they had been abolished for good, as unbefitting to a Christian empire. Nor were there elephants to be slaughtered, for Africa had been ransacked over four long centuries by Rome, and the vast herds that had once roamed Libya and Mauritania could be found no more. It was said that if you wanted elephants now, you ha
d to travel south many thousands of miles over the Great Desert, and into the unknown heart of Africa; but everyone knew that that was impossible. And there were no fierce tigers left in the mountains of Armenia, no lions or leopards in the mountains of Greece, where Alexander the Great had hunted them as a boy, seven centuries before. They, too, had been trapped, caged and shipped to Rome for the games; and all were gone.

  4

  CICERO AND FREEDOM

  That night, after the Huns had departed to their temporary camp beyond the walls of the city, a great feast was held for Emperor Honorius and his glorious victory over the armies of Rhadagastus.

  The vast colonnaded dining hall of the palace was filled with couches arranged round a long central spread of tables, with as many as three hundred guests in proud and self-congratulatory attendance.

  The hostage children were all commanded to attend: Hegemond and Beremond, the two plump Burgundian boys; the tall, fair, quick-witted, laughing Franks; the two slothful Vandal princes, Beric and Genseric; and all the rest. Attila sat scowling in their midst, none of them daring to come too near him. Even the fierce way he handled a fruit-knife frightened them.

  Nearby, to the boy’s solace, were Serena and Stilicho. But it was Count Heraclian – flatterer, charmer, true-born Roman of ancient descent, and outstanding military incompetent – who found the highest favour with the emperor, sitting much nearer to the head of the room than Stilicho. At the end of the hall, on a raised dais of rich green Egyptian marble, were two huge couches of dazzling white and gold, upholstered in purple; and on them reclined the imperial brother and sister, Galla and Honorius. Honorius ate a great deal, his sister little. Their drinking patterns exhibited much the same difference in temperament.

  The food and wine were magnificent. There were oysters brought all the way from fog-bound Britain, kept cool in iced sea-water during transit, and now laid out in little osier panniers still fronded with glossy green seaweed. There were the finest garum sauces imported from Bithynia and Gades; and exquisite offerings such as honey-roast peacock, boiled thrush, camels’ trotters, and a ragout of nightingales’ brains. Many of the guests cooed with delight over these fabulous delicacies, as did the other hostage children, feeling greatly privileged to be sampling such fare. The Hun boy however, ill-mannered to the core, took one taste of the Spanish flamingoes’ brain pate on a little sliver of soft wheaten bread, and spat it out again in disgust. Even Stilicho heard the noise of his revolted hawking from where he sat, and, turning round, saw what had happened. He turned back quickly, stifling a grin.