At that, even the optio could not bring himself to look directly at her. Eyes to the ground, he said, ‘He sleeps with his father.’
Serena fell against the wall, struggling for breath.
The boy stretched his sword out towards the guards. His hand trembled a little but he was unafraid. He fixed his unwavering gaze on them.
Normally the optio would simply have walked up to a boy like that, smacked him round the head, and taken his weapon off him sharpish. But there was something in this one’s eyes…
He signalled to his men. Almost casually, two of them walked forward with a length of chain, one each side of the boy, and slung it across his chest. Before he realised what had happened, they had walked round behind him, crossed over, and returned, and his arms were pinioned tightly by his sides. He stood as helpless as a trussed fowl in the marketplace.
‘Now,’ said the optio, ‘drop the blade like a good little girl.’
Attila told him to do something obscene to his mother.
‘Please,’ said Serena softly from the end of the hall.
The optio nodded to the two soldiers holding the chain. They leant back against it, as if in a tug of war, with the boy no more than a knot in the middle. The chain tightened sharply and he gasped in pain. The sword was squeezed from his hand and fell with a clang to the floor. The soldiers wrapped the rest of the chain round him and hauled him away.
Serena was marched along at swordpoint behind him.
He glanced back once, and she said something to him. It was too soft for him to hear her words but he knew what they were. And then she was gone.
They pushed him into a cell as black as a moonless night, as damp as an underground cave. He managed to get his teeth into a brawny forearm and tear out a small chunk of flesh as they shoved him in. He spat it back at the guard. There was a roar of pain and fury, and he was slammed against the wall, his head reeling with red stars. He fell in a bundle of chains into a fetid corner of the cell, his head dropped onto his chest, and he lost consciousness.
When he came round, he could see nothing. From a far dungeon he heard a woman’s voice, almost deranged with terror, crying, ‘No, no, no!’ But he knew it was not her. They were both dead. His only friends, his beloved… His head throbbed abominably, enough to make him weep with pain. Worse still, the constriction of the chain round his arms was a perpetual agony.
But his anger outweighed his pain. He saw them clearly in the blackness of his cell. Stilicho with his long, lugubrious face. His gravelly voice calling him ‘my young wolf-cub’. And her: her large dark eyes, her gentle smile. His last sight of her.
‘ My darling… ’
‘But my people will come,’ he said quietly to himself, despite his pain. ‘They will not tolerate this insult.’ And then, more loudly, so that even the gaoler down at the end of the row heard his words and frowned, he said, ‘The Huns will come.’
9
RAIN DOWN TONIGHT, DROWN EVERY LIGHT
Such was the night on which General Stilicho and his entire circle were savagely destroyed.
An official version was put out by the imperial court, saying that he had been secretly plotting with the barbarian tribes, perhaps with the Huns themselves, to overthrow Honorius and all his family, and to install his own son, Eucharius, on the throne instead. But few believed this, for they knew that Stilicho was an honourable man. And for my part, I do not think he had a traitor’s heart. I think that Honorius, encouraged by his sister Galla Placidia and unscrupulous and self-seeking courtiers such as Eumolpus, Olympian and the rest, came to see Stilicho as a rival in the affections of the people.
In his encampment outside Pavia, the great general, so many times the saviour of Rome on distant battlefields, could have taken up arms against the small troop of soldiers, under the command of the pusillanimous Count Heraclian, who came to arrest him that night; for the great majority of the army would certainly have fought and died for him. Their loyalty was to Stilicho, not to the emperor. But Stilicho could not find it in himself to take up arms against his beloved fatherland, even when his fatherland sought to kill him. Instead he rode from Pavia to Ravenna, and sought sanctuary in a church there. Count Heraclian stationed his troops around the church, lured Stilicho out with false promises of safe passage, and then, as soon as he was in his clutches, shamefully had him beheaded on the spot, according to the strict but secret orders of the emperor himself.
Rome always kills its finest servants, its bravest sons; or so it sometimes seems.
Along with them, the emperor also had killed Stilicho’s young son, Eucharius; the Praetorian Prefects of both Italy and Gaul; two masters-general of the army who were devoted to Stilicho; the quaestor Bonaventura; the imperial treasurer; and many others, their names now forgotten to history, though not to the hearts that loved them.
Following the massacre, every fawning courtier who had previously sung Stilicho’s praises suddenly saw the light, admitted that they had always mistrusted him from the start, and fervently agreed that he had indeed been the most heinous and malicious of traitors.
The many friends of Stilicho were horribly tortured, to make them confess to treachery. Without exception they went to their graves in silence, nobly justifying by their deaths Stilicho’s friendship with them in life.
Stilicho’s wife, Serena, was also killed, strangled in a dungeon with a ligature of silk. They say that she went calmly to her end, praying to Christ for the souls of those who killed her. They say that she died with a strange serenity, as befitted her name. As if she could already see her beloved husband waiting for her there, on the shores of that eternally sunlit country, beyond the cold dark river she must cross.
But Stilicho’s troops, at least, refused to believe that their commander had been a traitor. And the only immediate result of the massacre was that thirty thousand of them, in their furious indignation at the behaviour of the imperial court of Rome, promptly went over to join Alaric and the army of the Goths. Whereupon Alaric, sensing that the empire was once more coming apart, turned his eyes again on the prize of Rome.
A mood of festering hatred settled over the courts of the city. A mood of sullen coercion, abject flattery, and naked fear showing through the ghastly smiles.
Attila did not smile. Still a prisoner, his life spared, still the best guarantee that the Huns would not turn against Rome.
Honorius spent more and more time in Ravenna with his chickens.
Galla Placidia spent more and more time in Rome giving orders.
And the Hun boy spent more and more time alone in his dim-lit cell, his fists bunched up and pressed against his ears, or into the red stars of his eyeballs. Torn apart by the promises he had made to Stilicho, by what he knew Stilicho would have wanted of him, and yet also by the knowledge of what had become of Stilicho himself. That most loyal servant. ‘Do what is right, Attila.’
But another year passed, and the Huns did not come.
Although at all times the boy remained under strict guard, his lessons were resumed, his regime was relaxed, and he was even given a slightly larger chamber.
Other hostage children came and went, depending on what diplomacy had achieved with the various Germanic peoples who threatened the empire’s borders. But Attila would mix with none of them. He despised them all.
He especially depised the two Vandal princes, Beric and Genseric, the most willingly and thoroughly Romanised of the hostages. They had been released before back to their people, and now returned to Rome quite eagerly, under some new diplomatic deal.
They were a few years his senior, perhaps sixteen and eighteen respectively, and very much convinced of their own superiority and their urbane and raffish wit. On one occasion, Attila heard them making a cynical joke about the deaths of Stilicho and Serena. He turned to them and, fixing them with those eyes of his, which even at this age were beginning to take on a terrible aspect beneath his lowering brows, said that if he ever heard them saying such things again he would see to it
that they were both dead before nightfall. The brothers looked at each other and laughed at this outrageous threat. But their eyes betrayed more than a little anxiety; and they never mentioned the murdered general or his wife in front of the boy again.
Nevertheless, the Vandal princes, perhaps under pressure from more highly placed palace courtiers, continually tried to persuade the boy to relax and enjoy the soft delights that Rome had to offer. For it is well known that the Vandals are the most slothful of people.
‘Do you have hot baths, and fine wines, and robes of silk, and such foods as we eat here, back among the black tents of your people?’ Genseric asked him mockingly.
Beric added, ‘I have never yet seen a Hun in a robe of silk, have you, Genseric?’
‘Indeed not,’ murmured Genseric, stroking his own silken robe as he spoke. ‘In a motley of dusty leather leggings and, I think, rabbit fur, perhaps, but in silk? No.’
And they smiled mockingly at the bristling boy.
Attila rejected their approaches with contempt. Indeed the brothers, like all the other hostage children, seemed to him as blissfully foolish and unaware of the truth about their world as sleek and fattened cattle in rich pasture, feeding and lolling complacently in the warm summer sun, oblivious of the fact that when winter set in their keepers would in a trice become their killers.
He kept himself even more isolated than before, and one rolling glare of his eyes was usually enough to make even the stoutest adversary back off.
The other children plumed themselves on their ability to speak Latin and Greek, seduced by what they saw as the superior culture of their hosts. They would quote Horace or Virgil to each other, or the exquisite couplets of Sappho; and they would half close their eyes, and sigh, for all the world like the most enervated aesthetes of Baiae or Pompeii. Attila continued to learn Latin doggedly, and with grim determination, just as he continued to learn his Roman history, while regarding his Greek pedagogue, poor, put-upon Demetrius of Tarsus, with scorn.
He learnt of the great victories of Scipio Africanus, of Caesar in Gaul, of Fabius Cunctator, Fabius the Delayer, who defeated the Carthaginians by refusing to engage, but by harrying them with constant guerrilla warfare.
‘That is how my people would fight Rome,’ said Attila. ‘With patience and guile.’
Demetrius snapped, ‘You will desist from-’
‘All these great heroes of Rome defeated other peoples and extended Rome’s boundaries so gloriously,’ queried the boy. ‘Does that mean that warfare and conquest are always glorious?’
The pedagogue was wrong-footed, as usual. ‘Only if the victor is also the party of superior laws and culture,’ he said carefully. ‘As is Rome, compared to the uncouth tribes beyond its borders. Indeed, if Rome were not a superior culture, Providence would never have permitted her to win such an empire in the first place.’
The boy considered briefly, then smiled. ‘In philosophy,’ he said, ‘that is what would be termed a circular argument. And logically it is quite worthless.’
Demetrius was rendered momentarily speechless. The boy laughed.
Once, Rome had been great. That much the boy perceived, and grudgingly admired. When he read of Regulus, or Horatius, or Mucius Scaevola, those strong, grim-faced, relentless heroes of ancient Rome, his blood thrilled in his veins. And when he gazed up at the lofty buildings of the city, he admitted greatness when he saw it. But that was long ago and from another world. Now it was all decadence: a rotten fruit, a hollow shell. The Romans had lost their way, and did not even know it.
As for the barbarian peoples whom Rome continued to cultivate and disarm, they forfeited their barbarian virtues without gaining any of the countervailing old Roman strengths: fortitude, stoicism, self-discipline, warrior hardihood; a pride in self and nation and race; and that humility before the gods which is the mark of true wisdom: a proud and even joyful acceptance of whatever fate the gods have decreed for you, no matter how terrible that fate might be.
Instead, the princes of the Vandals or the Sueves or the Burgundians were wretchedly seduced, passing their wasted days in listless self-indulgence, like Beric and Genseric. And when they were released back to their people, they took with them chefs and court dancers and masseurs, tailors and musicians and poets, and established them in their barbarian homes in a clumsy and ludicrous aping of Roman ways. They even took back with them their own personal hairdressers.
The only time a court hairdresser ever tried to get close to Attila’s shaggy mop, he ended up regretting it.
The Goths at least, it was said, were made of sterner stuff. And in the fitful skirmishes between the Huns and those tall Germanic horsemen, with their mighty ashen spears and their tawny plumes nodding in the wind, it seemed that their reputation was deserved. But many too many of the barbarian tribes were being destroyed: not by weapons of war, but by baths, and wine, and silk.
Attila gagged on the perfumed courts of Rome, even as he saw that those courts were tottering. Within, amid the vast colonnaded staterooms of marble and gold, malachite and porphyry, the emperor and empress and their fawning courtiers might dress in brocades heavy with rubies and emeralds, their white arms wreathed in gold bracelets, their hair piled high with pearl diadems, as they glided in sinister silence beneath their vast, self-laudatory mosaics gleaming through clouds of incense. But close up the barbarian boy, the little wolf-cub in their midst, saw with his unblinking yellow eyes the fissures in the great buildings and abandoned temples of the city, and he observed the many draughty and untenanted rooms of the palace. He saw the people beginning to starve, while still the Roman rich wore silk. Attila scorned silk robes as unfit even for women – was it not Heliogabalus, the monstrous boy-emperor Heliogabalus himself, who had been the first in Rome to wear robes of pure silk? After three terrible years, sickened by his insane cruelties, the people had risen up and killed him. But now they aped him – and not only in his dress: in his greed and his depravity, too. So it seemed to the boy. Aesthetes even told tales of Heliogabalus’ exquisite jests, and reminisced with a fond nostalgia about how he had murdered his guests at a banquet by suffocating them in falling clouds of rose-petals. The guests had gasped and expired beneath deep drifts of flowers, crying out for mercy. The emperor had looked on and laughed. The aesthetes, too, now laughed.
The boy longed instead for the banks of the wide brown Danube, and the Kharvad Mountains, and the plains beyond. He longed for simple mare’s milk and meat, loathing the rich novelties, the ridiculous, contrived delicacies that the Romans ate. He longed for the sound of the wolves in the high mountain passes, and the sight of the black felt tents of his people, and the great royal pavilion of his grandfather, Uldin, hung with animal skins and decorated with carved and painted horses’ heads.
He watched and waited. Patience was always the supreme virtue of his people. ‘Patience is a nomad,’ they said.
In time, the Huns would come.
One evening he was making his way to the kitchens for dinner when he was accosted by one of the palace chamberlains.
‘Tonight you will be dining in the private chambers of Prince Beric and Prince Genseric,’ he purred.
The boy scowled. ‘No I will not,’ he said.
‘By orders of Princess Galla Placidia,’ said the chamberlain icily, not even looking at him.
The boy considered for a moment, then his proud shoulders slumped a little, and he turned and allowed himself to be led to the private chambers of the Vandal brothers. The chamberlain knocked, and a languid voice called, ‘Enter.’
The chamberlain opened the door and pushed Attila inside.
So, thought Attila, staring around, this is what you get if you behave yourself. This is how Rome seduces its enemies.
The door slammed shut behind him.
Before him was a large chamber with a colonnade of pillars running round three sides. Although it was still broad daylight outside, the long summer evening not yet run, in here the drapes were already drawn and the only
light was artificial. It also felt as if the underfloor heating was on, even at this time of year. He was suffocating already. Especially as the overheated air was perfumed with attar of roses.
The floor was elaborately decorated with mosaics and black marble, and the chamber was dimly lit with multiple candelabra – not smoky clay oil lamps such as he had in his own chamber, but the finest, most expensive, creamy-coloured beeswax candles, set in silver candelabra that towered over his head. At the back of the chamber, in the dim light, further rooms opened off, and there came the sounds of laughter, high-pitched shrieks and giggles.
In the centre of the room were three couches set round a low rectangular table piled high with elaborate dishes of the rarest fish and meat, fine wines and exotic eastern fruits. They were privileged indeed, the two Vandal princes. Such exquisite dishes must have come from the imperial kitchens themselves.
There was no sign of Genseric, but Beric sat, or rather sprawled, on one of the couches, a sozzled-looking blonde with high-piled hair leaning against him. The Vandal prince wore a white silk robe belted with a golden sash, his eyes were rimmed with kohl that had begun to blur and run, and he had gold bangles on both wrists. He rolled over on the couch and smiled blearily up at the boy, raising his goblet and burping softly at him.
‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘drinking partner, wenching fellow, I salute you.’
Through the darkened door of the further chamber came more squeals and giggles. Beric turned in the direction of the noise. Then he turned back again and beamed at the boy. He patted the couch next to him. ‘Come along, then. Tonight is your special night.’
Attila went and sat down. His throat felt parched and dry but he wanted to drink nothing. He imagined cool mountain streams that caught the sunlight in droplets as they fell. And the slow-moving rivers of the steppes, the herons in the reeds, waiting with their endless ancestral patience for their prey…
A plump slave-girl appeared with downcast eyes, carrying a big jug of wine. Beric held his goblet out towards her. She stopped and poured the wine, but her hand was shaking so much that she spilt a little over his hand.
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