The general stood and resumed his usual aloof demeanour. ‘You have to believe in something. So believe what is right.’
He stepped towards the door of the boy’s chamber, and threw a last glance back. He nodded at the package on the bed. ‘You can open it now,’ he said.
The door closed behind him.
The boy unwrapped the package and found inside the wrappings of fine oiled linen a most beautiful sword, as long as his arm, with gold scrollwork in the handle and a honed double blade that was sharp even to the lightest touch. It was of finest carburised steel, and rather old-fashioned type, the gladius hispaniensis or Spanish sword, a beautifully sinuous and dangerous shape with a swelling then tapering blade and an exceptionally long point. No shield or armour known to man could withstand a straight under-arm thrust from a sword such as this. He wrapped it in its protective oiled cloth again and laid it under his pillow, and daydreamed.
When he finally arose and went out into the courts of the palace, he found that the other hostage children had heard of his escape. They were fascinated. Hegemond, the fat Burgundian boy with the sleepy eyes, waddled up to him in the palace gardens, where they were playing beneath the mulberry trees, and asked if it was true.
Attila was wary. He had heard enough questions from these lumbering, slow-witted German children before. Is it true that the Huns coat themselves in animal fat and never take baths? Is it true that the Huns eat only meat and drink only fermented mare’s milk? Is it true that the Huns are the offspring of witches, who were driven out of Christian lands and coupled with the demons of the wind and the desert? ‘Yes,’ he used to nod solemnly. ‘It’s all true.’
Hegemond made it clear to Attila that he was invited now to join their gang. ‘Even if you are a Hun.’
But the boy kept his distance and his proud aloofness, as he always did. He watched the German children shout and play at soldiers for a while, amid the Paestum roses in the hot Italian sun. Then he turned away.
That evening, he had a visitor very different from the morning’s. He was drifting off to sleep when there came a knock on his door. The knock was clearly a formality, however, as the door then promptly opened and a tall, lean figure stepped inside. It was Eumolpus, one of the head palace eunuchs.
He stood at the end of the boy’s bed. ‘A message from Serena,’ he said coldly. ‘You are to have no more converse with her. Neither with General Stilicho, should you ever meet again.’
Attila stared at the eunuch. ‘What do you mean?’
Eumolpus smiled thinly. ‘I am so sorry, perhaps your Latin is still not good enough for you to understand even so simple a command as that. I repeat: you are to have no more converse with Serena. Ever again.’
‘By whose order?’ said the boy, pushing himself up on his elbow.
‘By the order of Serena herself,’ shrugged Eumolpus. He added, for his own personal amusement, ‘She says she finds your company… distasteful.’
He had gone too far.
There was a split second of deafening silence in the little room, and then Attila, screaming ‘You lie!’ sprang from his low bed and hurled himself at the startled eunuch with his teeth bared and his fists flying.
The guard heard the eunuch’s screams and rushed in, tore the raging boy away from the wailing Eumolpus and knocked him smartly to the floor. Then he turned back to the eunuch, who was lying speechless across the bed, and gave a low whistle.
‘Jupiter’s brazen balls,’ he gasped.
The eunuch looked as if he’d been savaged by a Caledonian hunting dog.
‘Well, don’t just stand there swearing,’ blubbered Eumolpus through the blood that spilt from his battered mouth, and with a shaky hand held to his throat where the boy had bitten deeply into it. ‘Get a physician.’
That night, for the first time, Attila was locked and bolted inside his chamber, and a guard of three was posted on his door.
He couldn’t sleep anyway. His heart thumped with a black rage that would keep him awake for years.
Stilicho was abruptly summoned the following morning to the Chamber of the Imperial Audience before his departure for Pavia.
When he got there he found not the emperor seated upon the throne, but Princess Galla Placidia. Honorius had already departed for the safety of his palace amid the marshlands of Ravenna.
Galla sat resplendent in robes of gold and – most shockingly of all – imperial purple. Flanking her over-decorated marble throne of purest Carrara marble were two of her most trusted palace eunuchs, Eumolpus himself and Olympian. Stilicho tried not to stare but he could see, even from the lowly and distant place where he stood, a humble suppliant at the bottom of the steps up to the dais, that Eumolpus had several stitches across his cheek, and an unusual kind of linen swaddling round his throat. In addition, both he and Olympian were wearing… make-up. Their eyes were rimmed with kohl like those of whores from the backstreets of the Suburra, or of Oriental despots, or Egyptian pharaohs of old, whose downtrodden people believed their ruler to be a god.
As we hold our emperors to be now, thought Stilicho.
When the men in power start wearing make-up, it’s time to start worrying. And Galla’s eunuchs were very much in power. He bowed and waited.
At last, Galla addressed him. ‘You have been to the temple building and destroyed the last of the Books?’
‘I have, Your Majesty.’
‘Pagan superstitions such as that can have no place in a Christian empire such as ours. Do you not agree?’
Stilicho gave a tilt of his head.
‘We will have an audience with the Bishop of Rome and all his principal deacons,’ Galla continued. ‘We will make it clear to them that they must preach an end to such pessimistic superstitions of the past. Rome is a Christian empire now, and under the protection of God. Those ancient scrolls are nothing but the raving of a harridan in a cave.’
There followed an awkward silence. Galla enjoyed awkward silences. They affirmed her power. In the Chamber of the Imperial Audience, no one could speak until they were addressed by the Imperial Throne.
What would Cicero have said? thought Stilicho sourly. That great orator. For all his pomposity and his self-regard, the last great voice of Free Rome. Who died for his oratorical pains, his severed head and hands delivered in a sack to Mark Antony, that sozzled lecher and braggard. His wife, Fulvia – now on her third marriage – had snatched Cicero’s head from the sack, spat on it, then yanked out its tongue and stabbed it with one of her hairpins. A fine example of Roman womanhood all round.
Stilicho waited, nursing his thoughts.
At last Galla said, ‘Remind me, Stilicho, what was the name of the barbarian chieftain who destroyed Publius Quintilius Varus’ three legions in the Teutoburg Forest, in the otherwise glorious reign of the Emperor Augustus?’
‘Glorious indeed,’ replied the general, ‘for in the reign of Augustus Christ was born.’
Galla closed her eyes slowly and then opened them again.
Stilicho regarded her warily. ‘He was called Arminius, Your Majesty, which is the Latin version of his real name, Herman, meaning “Man of War”. “Herman the German”, the troops called him.’
‘Arminius,’ Galla nodded. Of course, she knew it already. ‘As many as twenty thousand soldiers, along with their families and attendants, cut down in the dark forests of Germany, over the course of two or three days. It must have been terrible. The worst disaster ever to befall Roman arms.’
Stilicho hesitated, still trying to work out what she was up to. But it was impossible: you might as well try to guess the next strike of a snake. ‘The worst,’ he admitted, ‘at least since Hannibal and Cannae. When sixty thousand men were lost in a single-’
Galla was not interested in Stilicho’s military-historical musings. ‘And Arminius was raised – raised and educated – in Rome itself, was he not?’
‘He was, Your Majesty.’
‘As was that other great enemy of Rome, King Jugurtha of Numidia?’<
br />
‘I believe so, Your Majesty.’
‘And do you think it possible that, like Jugurtha, Arminius’ early years in Rome, watching the exercises of the troops on the Campus Martius, might have given him a keen sense of his future enemy, and how they operated? So that when he came to turn upon them in that dreadful, sunless forest in the dark heart of Germany, he was very well advantaged? Thanks to what he had learnt in the heart of his enemies’ capital as a boy?’
Now Stilicho understood her game, and he feared in his heart for the wolf-cub.
He spoke slowly. ‘I think that is unlikely, Your Majesty. After all-’
Galla held her hand up. Her point had been made. ‘You may go.’
Stilicho held Galla’s hard gaze without blinking, and for far longer than was polite. And then, contrary to all Palatine protocol, he turned his back on the Imperial presence and departed without a bow.
Galla’s hands clutched the arms of her throne, tense with fury, and as cold and white as purest Carrara marble.
7
CONVERSATIONS WITH A BRITISH LIEUTENANT
That evening, General Stilicho sat brooding in his white canvas tent on the edge of the army encampment outside the town of Falerii, beside the River Tiber. A long day’s march from Rome, but he always drove his men hard.
He was listing the priorities that faced him. First and foremost, he must face Alaric’s army in the field and defeat it. As palace whisperers said he should have done more thoroughly to the armies of Rhadagastus.
Alaric would not be easy. The barbarians no longer fought like barbarians. They fought like Romans. In the good old days, barbarian tactics on the battlefield, whether Gothic, Vandal, Pictish, Frankish, or Marcomman, had been pretty much the same wherever you went. They were as follows: 1. Group together on the battlefield any old how. Put the wives and kids in the chariots behind you to watch the show. 2. Bang your weapons and shields together, and shout insults at the enemy. Especially insult the size of his genitals. 3. And then… Chaaaaarge!
The barbarian horde of twenty or thirty thousand vainglorious individuals would rush in on the tight-packed ranks of the bristling Roman legion, numbering six thousand at the most but working together as a single ruthless unit, and the horde would be cut to pieces. All males captured or wounded were beheaded on the battlefield. Wives and kids were sold into slavery. End of story.
But now… now they fought on command, in rank and file. They turned and wheeled and switched fronts with the ease of a drilled Roman legion. And they were bloody good horsemen, too. It would not be easy. But that was what must be done first, nevertheless. Alaric’s power must be destroyed. If Uldin and his Huns could be called upon again, all well and good. If not, the Romans would have to stand alone.
Then he must return to Rome, to that nest of vipers, and, and.. . And what? In his mind, he could hear the soft, pleading voices of his closest friends urging him to seize the throne for himself. ‘For Rome,’ they said, ‘and for the sake of good government. Raise your legions and come down to Rome. The people will acclaim you.’
And then there was the heavy burden of the slim scroll that he still carried in his pouch. The knowledge that if it fell into the wrong hands…
He glanced up. It was a lieutenant of the Palatine Guard who attended him now, a high-born palace soldier in his shiny black leather breastplates. The only blood on his blade the blood of those he’d executed down in the palace cells, after a good few hours of torture. Stilicho looked sourly at him.
‘Sir?’ said the lieutenant ingratiatingly.
‘You’re dismissed,’ said the general. ‘Send me a lieutenant from one of the Frontier detachments.’
The lieutenant blanched. ‘With respect, sir, I hardly think a Frontier soldier will have the necessary manners or the knowledge of court etiquette to satisf-’
The Palatine officer felt the general’s wrath blast him full in the chest like a blow from a ballista. He staggered backwards out of the tent and hurried off to fulfil his orders, the general’s parade-ground language ringing vividly in his ears.
A few minutes later there came a rapping at the bar over the door of the tent, and the general ordered him on in. He continued to read a while. Despatches from Gaul. They did not make good reading.
When he finally looked up, he saw a tall, grey-eyed lieutenant standing in front of him, with a ragged scar across his chin.
He gave him his fiercest glare. ‘How d’you get the scar, soldier?’
The lieutenant didn’t flinch. ‘Tripped over a dog, sir.’
Stilicho looked down and then up again, his eyebrows quizzically raised. ‘Repeat.’
‘Tripped over a dog, sir. In a backstreet in Isca Dumnoniorum. Drunk as a skunk on British mead, sir. Bashed my bonce on a stone watertrough as I went down.’
Stilicho suppressed the urge to smile. He pushed back his camp stool and stood and walked over to the lieutenant. The lieutenant continued to stare straight ahead without a flicker of the eyes. Stilicho stood as tall as him, and he adopted that most unnerving of positions, to the side of his man, but just out of his field of vision. Every drill decurion’s favourite bullying point.
‘A little clumsy, eh, soldier?’
‘Damnably clumsy, sir.’
The general leant close so that he needed only whisper in the soldier’s ear. ‘Some soldiers might have had the wit to make up something a bit more… soldierly? Such as, it was an axe-stroke from a giant Rhinelander that nearly took your head off? Or a bloody great two-handed Frankish sword – but you ducked out of the way just in time, so it only nicked you on the chin? Have you no imagination, soldier?’
‘None whatsoever, sir.’ He raised his scarred chin even higher. ‘Useless memory, too, sir. Which is why I always have to tell the truth.’
Stilicho stood back and grinned. He liked what he saw and heard. He returned to his desk and waved at the canvas stool before it.
‘Sit down, soldier.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Cup of wine?’
‘No, thank you, sir. Keeps me awake at my age.’
‘What is your age?’
‘Twenty-five, sir.’
‘Hm. Wish I was twenty-five again. At my age, wine only puts me to sleep.’ The general poured himself a glass of watery wine anyhow, and sat down likewise. ‘So, how many men in your command?’
‘Just eighty, sir.’
‘A lieutenant, commanding eighty? Where’s your centurion?’
The lieutenant grinned as he thought of his centurion. ‘Still alive, sir. More scars on him than a butcher’s chopping board, but still very much alive. But I know, sir, it’s fucked-up. Pardon my language, but there’s just not… not enough… ’ He trailed off, feeling that what he was about to say was tantamount to treachery.
But Stilicho was ahead of him. ‘I know, I know,’ he said wearily. ‘Not enough men to go round. I’ve heard it all before.’ He leant forward and ran his hands over his face and brooded. Then he resumed. ‘And you’re a Brit?’
‘Sir.’
‘Married?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So when you marched out of – where were you stationed?’
‘Isca, sir. Dumnonia.’
Stilicho nodded gravely. ‘I know it. Pretty, dark-eyed girls, they say.’
‘Dead right, sir. I married one of ’em.’
‘And so when you marched out of Isca, on imperial orders to return to Italy, to defend Rome at all costs, you left a wife behind?’
‘Yes, sir. And two children.’
‘And two children,’ Stilicho repeated. ‘Tough order. Miss them?’
‘Like hell, sir. I… ’ He hesitated. ‘I hope one day to go back there, sir. When all this is done.’
‘Britain is now beyond the frontier, soldier. You do understand that?’
‘I do, sir. But it’s not yet finished.’
‘Hm.’ Stilicho stroked the thinning grey stubble on the top of his head. ‘But your lot had plenty
of desertions?’
The lieutenant looked shamefaced. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Hm. So you joined at – eighteen?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you’ve got another thirteen years to serve before you get pensioned off. That’s a long time to go without seeing your wife and kids. And a long time for a wife to go without seeing her husband. If you know what I mean.’
‘I’m not complacent, sir.’
‘Remember Emperor Claudius. He only had to go down to the port of Ostia for a few days, and his wife went and married Gaius Silvus.’
‘My wife is no Messalina, sir.’
‘No, no,’ said the general with some haste. ‘And you’re no Claudius, I’m sure, but only a mere mortal like the rest of us.’ He grinned. ‘You know what the Divine Claudius’ last words were, according to Seneca?’
The lieutenant shook his head.
‘ “Oh dear, I think I’ve shat myself!”
The lieutenant smiled. Then Stilicho resumed more seriously, ‘And when you get pensioned off, you won’t get a farm in Britain for your service, not any more. You’ll maybe get something in Gaul. And maybe not.’
The lieutenant said nothing.
The general sighed and felt a great weight on his shoulders. It was the weight of responsibility, plus the weight of this good lieutenant’s tragic loyalty. And there were thousands more like him, who would not desert their last post.
‘OK, soldier. Now give me a game of draughts before you go. You play draughts?’
‘Badly, sir.’
‘Me too. Excellent. Means the game won’t last long and we can soon go to bed.’
The game lasted, as the general had predicted, only a few minutes. The lieutenant won.
‘Badly indeed,’ said Stilicho grudgingly. He sat back and stretched. ‘OK, soldier, you can go. Reveille at first light.’
‘Sir.’
Stilicho sat for a long time on his own, gazing at the scattered draughts before him by the light of the guttering candle. He heard the howl of the wolves at the river’s edge, eerily nearby, come down from the hills above to drink, or to lie in wait for their prey, when they came to drink likewise. And he heard the answering howl of the camp dogs calling to their cousins beyond, in the wilderness. Like men, penned in the safety of their cities, longing for the ungoverned wilderness in their turn. Bored with civilisation and its heavy demands, its frustrating interdictions, and longing for the old forest ways, and the new dark age.
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