Attila

by William Napier

  How many a Naiad steals up with trembling foot to snatch an unmarked kiss!’

  Many guests chuckled appreciatively at this delightful image. Even the emperor himself giggled into his goblet. Claudian paused generously to allow him to do so, before resuming again.

  For there was yet more.

  ‘Who, though he be more uncivilised than the wild Scythian,

  And more cruel than the beasts, but will,

  On seeing near at hand thy transcendent loveliness,

  Not readily seize the chains of slavery,

  And offer thee a ready servitude?’

  Attila tested the little fruit-knife against his thumb-pad.

  ‘Then shall all the world bow to thee, O most noble Prince!

  E’en now I foresee the sack of distant Babylon,

  Bactria subjected to the Law, the fearful pallor of the Ganges’ banks before thy name!

  For to you all the world shall bend the knee;

  The Red Sea give you precious shells, India her ivory,

  Panchaia perfumes, and China bolts of yellow silk.

  And all the world confess your name, your empery

  That is without limit, without age or boundary!’

  The applause lasted almost as long as the poem.

  A little later on in the banquet, Galla was passing behind the couches, on her way to speak to one of her chamberlains, when she happened to overhear a drunken and indiscreet guest asking his neighbour absent-mindedly if the emperor himself had even been at the Triumph that day?

  ‘Because if he was, I certainly didn’t notice him,’ slurred the guest. ‘Like everyone else, I was all eyes on the divine Stilicho!’

  Galla paused.

  Unaware that they were being listened to, the other guest said sotto voce, ‘Our Sacred Majesty was probably too busy feeding his pet chickens.’

  They chuckled furtively into their goblets of wine. Then one of them glanced up and caught sight of the princess standing right behind them. The warm wine he was swallowing came painfully back up his throat.

  Galla leant forward and plucked a fried lark from the silver dish beside them.

  ‘Pray continue,’ she said, smiling sweetly, as she snapped the little bird’s legbones in two.

  She arranged further business with her head chamberlain, who nodded and departed soon after. Returning to the imperial dais, she noticed that, amid the hubbub of the hostage children, the Hun brat was nowhere to be seen.

  She summoned another attendant, who told her that he had been excused.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Well,’ stammered the attendant, a runnel of sweat coursing down his brow, ‘some while ago now.’

  ‘Go and get him.’

  The attendant searched the lavatories high and low. There was no sign of Attila. He made his way back to his cell in the slave quarters, knowing his time at the palace was ended, and prepared for the worst.

  The Hun boy was by now moving stealthily around the Great Court, in the cool green shadows of the Dolphin Fountain.

  The palace was no easier to break out of than to break into. But Attila had planned his escape with meticulous care, patiently observing every movement of the palace guards over this past year of his captivity, every locking and unlocking of the gates, and picking up every whispered password. Despite his native ferocity, he could be patient when need be. His father, Mundzuk, had always told him that patience was one of the great virtues of all nomad peoples. ‘Nothing can hurry the sun,’ he would say. The wide-wandering Huns were certainly good at waiting, and the boy himself had all the patience and rhythm of the nomad. Useless to struggle against the sandstorm - but the moment the sandstorm ceased you could take your chance. Seize it in your fierce hands for it might not come again. The Romans were like men trying to move the sands of the desert, like the sands of the Takla Makan when the east wind blew - and in the night the wind came and blew the sand back again. Their work would never be done.

  The boy had also worked out the rules governing the frequency with which the palace password was changed, and felt nothing but scorn at how easy it was. From the kalends to the ides of each month, the password was changed at noon; and from the ides back to the next kalends, it was changed at midnight. In other words, eavesdrop on the password used just after midnight in the second half of any month, and it would get you through any gate in the palace until the following midnight.

  He had even worked out the encryption system commonly used around the palace, and, again, was scornful at its laziness and complacency: like a Greek merchant over-confident of the safety of his ships at sea, even in the stormy, dog-star month of October.

  It was based on the encryption system that Julius Caesar himself had devised for his military communications. Perhaps those hours and tedious days at the hands of his wretched pedagogue, Demetrius of Tarsus, during which Attila was instilled with the rudiments of Roman history and culture, and therefore, supposedly, with an appropriate respect and reverence for the empire - perhaps those lessons hadn’t been wasted after all.

  During August, A, U, G, S, and T were used to represent A, B, C, D and E - and then the rest of the alphabet was shifted five letters down against the code alphabet accordingly. In August, ‘Caesar’ was written ‘Gatpao’. The following month, the first seven letters would change to S, E, P, T, M, B and R, and ‘Caesar’ would be written ‘Psmosn’.

  The boy worked all this out in secret, by listening from shadowy corners, by picking up scraps of paper, by brooding in his loneliness and solitude, like a wolf, or a spider. Like the slow-moving Iron River of Scythia for which, some said, he was named.

  And all the while that he was breaking the palace code system in secret, his irascible Greek pedagogue was beating him regularly for being slow-witted over his books.

  As well as these more intellectual preparations for his escape, Attila had amassed practical aids, such as the sharp little fruit-knife from the banquet, a store of low-denomination copper coins, a bag of oatmeal he’d stolen from the kitchens, and some corks.

  Soon after nightfall on that night of victory celebrations over the barbarians, Attila quit his place at the lower tables of the banqueting hall, and made swiftly for his chamber, where he collected his treasures. Then he slunk through the near-deserted courts of the palace, praying to his father Astur to guide and shield him, until he approached the guards in the main gatehouse, trembling so badly with fear that he could barely trust himself to speak.

  ‘Halt! Who goes there?’

  He said nothing, went nearer.

  ‘I said, halt!’

  Attila halted.

  The moonlight shone on the Palatine guard’s black cuirass and his plumed black helmet. He was a tesserarius - a password-officer. He glared down at the boy. ‘Give me your name.’

  Attila hesitated, then said softly, ‘Cicero.’

  The guard reacted with some surprise. ‘Who gave you the password?’ he growled.

  ‘None of your business,’ said the boy. ‘Nor do I have to tell you my name. The correct password is “Cicero”. So let me pass.’

  The guard hesitated a little longer, his meaty fist clenched round his spearhaft. Then reluctantly he lowered it and nodded to the boy to pass. His fellow guardsmen began to draw back the heavy ironbound gates. Already the tesserarius could imagine, with uncomfortable vividness, the feeling of his centurion’s vinewood knout descending on his back. But what could he do? A password was a password.

  The boy slipped past him and vanished into the street. The guard looked out after him, but already he was lost to view.

  5

  THE STREETS OF ROME

  Attila breathed free air for the first time in a year. Although the air was that of a great and populous city rather than the wild air of Scythia, nevertheless it was free. And nothing but a few hundred miles now lay between him and his beloved homeland.

  He turned left out of the palace, and hurried down the street to the corner, with the great extension to
the Palatine complex built by Septimius Severus to his left. He rounded the corner and headed for the shadowy arches of the great Aqueduct of Nero below, and the darkened streets beyond. He had it all mapped out in his mind.

  Down to the foot of the Palatine Hill, another left round the Arch of Constantine, with the great, looming mass of the Colosseum to his right. Then, slipping into the alleyway behind the ancient Temple of Venus and Roma, and then the Temple of Pacis - a very small and insignificant temple, by Roman standards - he hurried onwards, making for the nameless and dangerous backstreets of the Suburra, with the three hills of the Quirinal, the Viminal and the Esquiline rising up behind.

  After the day of triumph and the games, the midnight streets of the poorer parts of the city were filled with drunken, jeering people. They swayed and staggered about arm in arm, emerging from the pervigiles popinae, the city’s numerous keep-awake bars, or else disappearing into one of the many brothels in the district, whose line of trade was signalled by a statue of Herm outside, with his erect and outsized penis painted in eye-catching scarlet.

  The populace chanted songs about the greatness of Rome - or their emperor.

  ‘The Emperor Honorius

  Was sitting in the bath-house,

  His arse was out the window

  But his cock was in the hall!

  His hair, oh! it was glorious,

  All dressed with art laborious,

  But his balls were like a chicken’s

  When his sister came to call!’

  Sometimes, for the sake of variety, they broke into songs about the superiority of their favourite chariot team, the Blues or the Greens. Their tuneless roaring was interrupted only by the need to pause from time to time and vomit forth bellyfuls of sour new wine into the flowing gutters. The moment a mob of Blues supporters ran into some Greens, of course, all pandemonium broke out. But, as history so powerfully tells us, people enjoy fighting each other, and need little excuse to begin. A rival chariot team is certainly sufficient reason for bloodshed.

  Indeed, in that glittering, God-crazed other capital to the east, Constantinople, didn’t the crowds run riot and kill each other over the choice of its priests, as had happened recently with the election of Bishop Eustachius? Or even over changes to the liturgy? But they were a mad, excitable, Asiatic lot over there. At least in Rome the people had the good sense to confine their violence to matters of sport.

  For the most part, Attila deftly avoided these scenes of debauchery and tumult. Only occasionally did he pause to gaze in wordless contempt at the squalor and vice that made up the underbelly of this great city. As always, he could not help but compare the Roman plebeians’ behaviour with that of his own quiet people, back on the great plains, their solemn feasts, their simple dignity, their self-reliance and absolute self-control. Drunkenness they regarded with disgust: an adult trying to make himself like a child again - or even a madman. And as for the idea of the daily dole given out in Rome gratis to this scrounging, unwashed rabble . . .

  For it had been with disbelief that the boy had first learnt that, every day, the Roman state gave out food, for free, to anyone who came to queue for it. Originally it had been a magnanimous gift of bread handed out only to the poor or the terminally idle; but then that free bread had become a right. More recently, in the reign of Emperor Aurelian, the daily dole had grown into a lavish, seductive hand-out not only of bread but also of pork, oil and wine, to hundreds of thousands of the shameless mob. But of course nothing in this world was free. The dole was given to the rabble in exchange for their quiescence. In exchange for their very hearts and minds.

  The boy knew that his people, the nation of the Huns, would never be softly seduced and Romanised like other barbarian peoples. To the Huns, as to the boy himself - a Hun, indefatigably, to his soul - such a surrender of oneself as this daily dole, such a pitiful abdication of one’s own pride and self-reliance, would be a source of dishonour and shame unspeakable. Among the Huns, most proud and warlike of peoples, for a man not to be able to provide meat for his family, with the art and labour of his own hand and eye, would have been a humiliation scarcely endurable.

  The boy slipped into a still narrower, darker alleyway, where the second or third storeys of the houses seemed almost to meet above his head, He blackened his face a little with mud, and messed up his hair, never exactly coiffed at the best of times. Then, looking much like one of the thousands of ordinary urchins in the slums of Rome, he reappeared on the main street. He glanced skywards again, and found that great constellation which the Romans called Ursa Major, the Great Bear, but which to his people was known as the Wings of Astur, King of All that Flies. From there his eye moved up to the North Star. He allowed himself a small smile, and he turned right and followed it, heading north.

  Behind him a drunken old man, sprawled in the gutter and holding a flagon of cheap wine aloft, cried, ‘Vivite! ait Mors. Venio! Live! says Death. I am coming!’

  In the banqueting hall, Galla sensed that all was not right when the attendant did not return. She snapped her fingers from the imperial dais, and gave orders for slaves to be sent immediately to check the troublesome hostage’s cell. She despatched two court clerks to question the guards on the eastern gate. When they returned, she asked them a single brief question, and only halfway through the clerk’s stumbling reply her hand flew out and struck him stingingly across the cheek. Some of the guests saw what happened and snickered.

  Then she turned and ordered an attendant officer to send out a search party at once. She wanted the Hun boy found within the hour. For as a hostage, she knew, Attila was one of Rome’s strongest guarantees that the Huns would not turn against Rome.

  The whey-faced adolescent reclining beside her, in his gold-embroidered robe of Tyrian purple, and with a silver diadem upon his brow, albeit slightly askew, paused in between slurps of wine, and stammered at her with eyes agog, ‘Wh-what is the matter? You look angry with me.’

  Galla forced a pleasant smile. ‘Not with you, dear heart. Just with some of the incompetents whom I have entrusted with some important business.’

  ‘Wh-what business? Is it dangerous?’

  ‘No, not at all. Slave!’ She clicked her fingers and another slave came running. ‘His Sacred Majesty’s cup needs refilling.’

  ‘I, I . . .’ said His Sacred Majesty, holding out his cup. The slave filled it to the brim.

  Galla smiled at him.

  Honorius hiccupped and smiled uncertainly back.

  A hoarse and manic voice reached the boy’s ears, and rounding a corner he saw a preacher standing on the steps of a church, railing against the sins of the people as they swept past in their mocking laughter: men with winestains down their front, linked arm in arm with tripping, painted harlots.

  But not all who passed by laughed. Not the blind and the mute and the lame; not the leprous outcasts of mankind, hauling themselves forward on their knees and their knobbled and fingerless fists; no laughter from the child pickpockets and the bare, ragged orphans, prostituting themselves for a crust of bread. All the friendless and the many nameless and unloved, whose pitiful, lonely cries moved the heart of God Himself, they say, when He walked as a man on earth.

  The preacher was an extraordinary figure, his bare and bony arms reaching out from a cloak which was no more than a tangle of rags, his hair wild and elf-knotted, his lips cracked and dry, his eyes bloodshot, and his nails grown long and filthy as the claws of a bear. His voice croaked harshly and he gestured jerkily, and some who passed by, even in their licentious drunkenness, felt themselves commanded by his voice to halt and listen to his terrible and apocalyptic words. The boy stopped and listened, too.

  ‘Woe unto you, O great Babylon!’ cried the preacher. ‘For you that were proudest among the nations, and mightiest among the empires of the world, how you are laid low! Hearken unto my words, all ye that pass by, steeped as you are in the stink and stew of your own wickedness! For as the Lord said unto the prophet Ezekiel, “I will brin
g the worst of the heathen, and they will possess your houses, and your holy places shall be defiled. For the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence. Destruction cometh, and you shall seek peace, and there shall be none. And you shall hide your faces in the mountains like the doves of the valleys, and your children shall be clothed with desolation, and your princes themselves shall hunger like beggars in the streets.”

  ‘For you have escaped the armies of the Christless barbarians that encompassed you about, O proud Rome - but not for ever shall your impunity endure! No, not for ever, nor for a year, nor even for the waxing and waning of one moon; for I say unto you, that before one moon is waxed and waned the armies of the north shall sweep down upon you, and your infants shall be dashed in pieces at the head of the streets, and ten thousand Roman nights shall be nights of horror!’