Attila

by William Napier

  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?’

  ‘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 smell 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 p
atricians 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 . . .