Attila

by William Napier

  The slave allowed himself a very slight noncommittal smile.

  ‘Why should I be frightened, though?’

  The slave’s eyes widened. ‘You mean you haven’t heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About Alaric?’

  ‘What about Alaric?’ He could almost have shaken him. ‘Tell me.’

  The slave drew in a deep breath. ‘He’s marching on Rome. At the head of a hundred thousand men.’

  At the news, the strange Hun boy looked anything but frightened. Instead, to the slave’s astonishment, a slow smile spread across his face as he digested the news.

  ‘Like Rhadagastus all over again,’ he murmured.

  ‘Except that Alaric is no Rhadagastus,’ said the slave quietly. ‘By all accounts he is a great leader, who has the absolute loyalty of his men. And besides, who does Rome have to command her own armies, now that . . . you-know-who is gone?’

  Attila nodded. He reached for the jug, took another long draught, and set it back in the slave’s hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Apparently it’s not done to thank a slave. But thank you anyway.’

  Then the strange Hun boy turned to walk back to his chamber, and the slave could have sworn that he actually heard him whistling.

  The rest of Rome cowered in fear. In the palace at Ravenna, there was outright panic. People ran around like the emperor’s own chickens at the scent of a fox. For with General Stilicho so recently murdered, and no fewer than thirty thousand of his men consequently gone over to join Alaric and his grim-faced Goths, who was there now to save Rome? Count Heraclian, they said. But Heraclian was a far lesser man than Stilicho; just as Alaric was a far greater man than Rhadagastus.

  ‘That fool Emperor Honorius,’ they whispered in the shadowy courts of the palace. ‘He has cut off his own right hand with his left.’

  Throughout Rome, and Ravenna, and throughout all of Italy, from the plains of the Po and Cisalpine Gaul to the high hill-towns of Calabria and across to the golden hills of Sicily, there was the hum of fear and imminent panic.

  Except in one small, silent chamber, lit only by cheap and smoky oil lamps. There a boy of some thirteen or fourteen years, but small for his age, his cheeks deeply riven with strange blue scars, knelt and prayed.

  He prayed to the god of the Huns: a bare sword driven into the earth, forming a cross like the cross of the Christians, but of hard steel. He prayed to his father Astur, the Lord of All that Flies, and in the name of the murdered General Stilicho and his wife, Serena. He clenched his teeth and set his jaw and prayed for vengeance upon their murderers, and remembering them he wept again.

  And he prayed that the Goths might come and do the work that the Huns had so far shamefully failed to do. Even though they were the immemorial enemies of his people, let the Goths come, and raze Rome flat in the red wind from the steppes.

  See the Tiber foaming with Roman blood.

  See the buildings fall like broken bones.

  Let it all fall. Let it all be destroyed.

  And when it was razed flat, let the very dust be trampled beneath the barbaric hooves of a hundred thousand horses. Leave not one stone standing. Nothing but seven bare and desolate hills beside a blood-red river where great Rome once stood. Nothing on those hills but a single tomb beneath the wide bare sky. A tomb for a murdered general and his beloved, murdered wife.

  He heard her sigh again, through his ragged tears: ‘My darling . . . ’

  He closed his eyes and prayed to Chäkgha, the horse-god of the plains, and to the kötü ruh, the daemon-spirits of the wind, and to the kurta ruh, the wolf-spirits of the holy Altai Mountains, and to the Father Spirit of the Eternal Blue Sky.

  ‘O Lord, I pray,

  Rain down tonight,

  Drown every light,

  Rain down tonight.’

  PART II

  The Flight and the Fall

  1

  OF THE ARIMASPIANS,OF GRIFFINS, OF THE HUNS, AND OF OTHER WONDERS OF THE VAST AND UNKNOWN LANDS OF SCYTHIA

  As far as China, meanwhile, the tribes were stirring . . .

  They say that the northern boundary of the Empire of China is defended by a great wall, greater by far than the wall that cuts across the north of Britain in defiance of the attacks of the blue-painted men of the Caledonian wastes. But they say many things, and the historian must be judicious in what he believes and records. Does not Herodotus himself record that towards China, in the endless wildernesses of Scythia, there live a tribe of men called the Arimaspians, each of whom has only one eye? And also that in those regions there dwell griffins, which defend great treasure-troves of gold? That there is a tribe there called the Pedasians, among whom, when danger is about to threaten the people, their priestess grows a luxuriant beard?

  We are furthermore told that towards the mountains that divide Scythia in two from east to west, there live the Argippaeans, who subsist on nothing but cherry juice, which they drink from little bowls with lapping tongues, like cats. They know no weapons of war for they are utterly peaceful. They are regarded as sacred by all the other tribes of Scythia, and never harmed. For my part I long to meet such a gentle people, but I fear they are as much a childish fairy-tale as the gold-guarding griffins, and that there is not a tribe in the world, howsoever remote, which knows not war or the sorrowful weapons of war.

  Further north from these mythical peace-lovers, historians tell us, the air is full of feathers; and then north again, and there live a people who sleep six months and wake six months, for that is how their year is made up, half day and half night. But this is plainly absurd. And among a people called the Issedonians, Herodotus tells us, women have absolute equality with men - which is even more absurd than the idea of a people subsisting entirely on cherry juice! No society could survive for long which practised that kind of lunacy.

  I for my part do not believe such myths and fairy-tales, and am astonished that Herodotus, who called himself an historian, should trouble himself even to record such extravagant oddities. Yet it is not only Herodotus, the Father of History (or the Father of Lies, as some wits have called him), who records such things. In that immortal epic The Voyage of the Argo, by Apollonius of Rhodes, do we not read of the strange Mossynoeci, who inhabit the remote region of the Sacred Mountain in Asia Minor? Everything that other people do in public, these people do in private, and everything others do in private, they do in public. But of course Apollonius was a poet and, as Plato said, all poets are liars. Apollonius drew his story from Xenophon’s Anabasis, whose account of the Mossynoeci is even more outlandish. He tells us that they use dolphin fat where the Greeks would use olive oil; and that their pale skins are beautifully tattooed all over with brightly coloured flowers; and that if they laugh in public they are deeply ashamed, and generally go into their own houses to laugh in secret; as they do also to dance, all on their own, like madmen. They will only eat in absolute solitude, for they regard the act of putting food into an orifice in their face as quite disgusting. On the other hand, these topsy-turvy people defecate quite freely in the streets, without embarrassment; and most shamefully of all, they see nothing wrong with enjoying sexual congress with their own wives or, it seems, like the Etruscans of old, with each other’s wives, most lasciviously, in the open. As Apollonius says, ‘like swine in the fields, they lie down on the ground in promiscuous intercourse and are not in the slightest bit troubled by the presence of others watching them.’ One wonders if the poet of Rhodes has not let his imagination run away with him here, and exchanged the inspiration of the Muses for inspiration of a more salacious kind . . .

  Despite all these evident absurdities a deeper truth comes back to me, and a wiser, still older voice. Gamaliel, whom it has been my pleasure also to know, would say that anything whatsoever that men have anywhere believed may yet instruct us. For while tales of gold-hoarding griffins do not in truth tell us anything about the mysterious and uncharted wastes of Central Asia, they do tell us much about the beliefs and the hearts of
men.

  So Gamaliel would say, his eyes twinkling with mischief and delight. Those eyes that have seen so many wonders and horrors, yet still shining with the light of life. Those ancient, glittering eyes. Gamaliel, Fire-bringer, Sun-singer, last of the Hidden Kings - he has travelled so far and lived so long, yet would still express his faith in the mysterious words that he loved: Everything is God.

  But I digress. There will be tales of Gamaliel later. And indeed, in time, I shall introduce into this history my own self, Priscus of Panium - not from vulgar immodesty but rather because, for a short time, I truly did take my place upon the stage of the world, and in the great and terrible drama of history. But that is not for many years yet. Our theme for now remains the boyhood of Attila, and how his turbulent, iron-willed, earth-shaking character was formed; and the dark, tumultuous years of the early fifth century since Christ. Dark years, which some said would pass; and others said would only lead to darker yet. But a few, a very few, wise ones, who could see further than either optimist or pessimist, foretold that the years to come would be both for better and for worse; for in the tangled skein of history, which is the work of the God Who Loves Stories, there is very often no telling the two apart.

  I resume: as far as China, the tribes were stirring.

  Across the vast and measureless grasslands of Central Asia, the rains had started to fail. The deserts of the south had started to creep north, and in the autumn the renewal of the parched grasslands before the coming rains grew later and later with each passing year. And the nomad peoples of those regions, finding only lifeless desert to the south, and the dark and impenetrable forests of Scythia to the north, and to the east only the great Empire of China and its implacable, impassable wall, were forced to turn in the one direction left to them: to the west, and the warm, fruitful and temperate lands of Europe. Towards the Mediterranean: the sea at the centre of the world, with all its ancient, lion-coloured promontories sleeping in the sun.

  So began that great migration of peoples which lasted for centuries, and indeed is not abated yet. And among them came the most feared and savage tribe of all: the Huns.

  They came from the east with dust-parched throats, and wind-parched eyes set on the western horizon. They rode on small, tough ponies with big, ungainly heads, driving before them their flocks of sheep and their herds of lean and starving cattle.

  They carried bows and arrows. Their arrows were no different from those of any other people. An arrow is no more than a feathered stick with a barbed iron tip. But their bows would change the world. Their bows were weapons of a range and terror such as no opposing army had ever faced before.

  They were made of a number of materials rather than a simple length of wood, and at a glance were unimpressive in appearance: a mere three feet in length, and resembling something like a piece of polished animal horn. But to flex one in your hands and bend it against your thigh was to feel its extraordinary latent strength and power. How their bows were made was a closely guarded secret, passed down through the generations. The main elements were horn, wood, sinew, and glue boiled up from the tendons of animals, or from the parts of certain fish. The incomparable Hun bowyers had learnt, over the long generations of their people, that horn resists compression, snapping back into shape if it is bent, while sinews of a certain kind - the Achilles tendons of antelope, most powerfully - resist extension. The Hun bowyers, therefore, learnt to glue horn to the inside of their wooden bows, and lengths of antelope sinew to the outside. Such a task sounds simple, but it took years for a man to perfect his art. When it was done, the bow he had crafted was a thing of astonishing power.

  It is said that every time a Hun warrior draws back his bowstring and lets fly an arrow, he exerts a force equivalent to pulling up one’s entire weight, from a tree-branch, say, by only one arm, and indeed by only three fingers. When you consider that, in battle, a Hun warrior might fire as many as fifteen arrows a minute, while riding at full gallop like a whirlwind past the ranks of the hapless enemy infantry, you will understand what toughness and hardihood these fierce people possessed. A toughness in every way a match for even the most hardened, grim-faced Roman legionary in his iron helmet, but with an additional speed and flamboyance. No wonder that every foreign tribe they encountered feared them as demons out of hell. Even the Goths, the mightiest and most lion-hearted of all the Germanic peoples, had a grudging respect for the Huns.

  The bow used by the Romans could fire an arrow a respectable three hundred and fifty yards or so. A Hun bow could fire an arrow over nine hundred yards - an incredible half a mile. When this was first witnessed in battle, it simply wasn’t believed. Their enemies said the Huns could not be men, but must be the infernal offspring of sorcerers and witches of the desert. But they were men, after all, like any other.

  The arrow flies from a Hun bow with a staggering force, so that at a range of two hundred yards, when many a Roman arrow is already falling from the air and dropping into the grass, the Hun arrow can still punch effortlessly through an inch-thick plank of wood. When riding out against the Huns, there is little point in wearing armour. Even tempered steel is just so much dead weight against those terrible, springing bows and those hurtling arrows.

  The Hun warrior also exhibits a breathtaking skill in horsemanship. He can ride at full gallop while despatching one of those deadly missiles every four or five seconds. His speed makes him almost impossible to hit in return, and the strength and stamina of his sturdy little horse means that it can carry a man at a gallop for up to an hour. The refined Spanish or Cappadocian mounts of the empire, or the beautiful, headstrong horses of the Armenians and the Parthians, would be winded in a quarter of that time.

  When riding close to the enemy, the Hun warrior can slip from his saddlecloth, and down the side of his horse, holding on only with the strength of his thighs, still galloping, still firing. He can even lean down so low as to fire underneath his horse’s neck, using the body of his mount for cover.

  Is it any wonder that, all across Scythia, every tribe feared the Huns? Or that, in time, every empire in Europe and Asia came to fear them too?

  These, then, were the people who came across the great plains in their skin-covered wagons, their women and children at their sides, every bit as tough as their menfolk. The wagons came in file, stretching back as far as the eye could see, spreading out over the waterless steppes, the dust in the reddening light of the setting sun raised by the turning wheels of the creaking wooden wagons. The fording of the great rivers of that country could take weeks: the songs of the nomad drovers rising above the bellowing of the cattle as they were driven deep into the water, the snorting of the horses, the splashing of the great wooden wheels through the fording-places, the shrieks of women and the yells of men and the excited laughter of children.

  As the tribe moved west, so it encountered, and fought with, and generally in its fierceness and desperation displaced, the tribe that went before it. None of those tribes made any distinction between citizen and soldier. When the time came to fight, they simply formed their wagons into a circle, to shelter their women and children within; every man took his bow, and his spear, and mounted his pony; every man fought. Every man a warrior - as it was with the citizen army of Rome, long ago, in the days of its republican greatness.

  But do not think that these tribes occupied any territory in the sense that Rome occupies a territory and an empire. These peoples had no boundaries, and no empires, they were nomads, and worshipped the earth itself as their ancestral home. Although one group of the Huns - the Black Huns, Attila’s people, and the most feared of all the tribes - had been seen encamped upon the northern and eastern banks of the Danube, in Trans-Pannonia, ever since their own King Balamir had led them into Europe, three or four generations before the time of King Uldin, at other times their camps simply vanished from sight. Then even the rich pastures of the Danube floodplain had tired, and the Huns had moved east again, over the Kharvad Mountains, which the Romans call the Carpathia
ns, and beyond, to the plains of Scythia proper. Many of them still looked back towards the east, even when west of the Kharvad Mountains, to where many of their Hun brothers still lived. Although they looked with greed upon the marble and gold of the empires of the Mediterranean, their dreams still tended towards the open steppes of Asia as their true homeland. And as the days lengthened each year, if they were not fighting in wars with their neighbours, many Pannonian Huns would ride east for a summer of hunting in the empty and desolate expanses of Asia which only they understood and loved.

  There they lived a life on horseback for many months, intoxicated by the boundless freedom and lawlessness of those ungoverned lands. Or whose only laws, shall we say, were the laws of the bow, and the noose, and the spear. Over the wide plains they rode, into the valleys and over the mountains, through the narrow passes, down the narrow, sunless gorges beside rivers in full, white spate. They hunted the wild animals, contemptuous of the weak and settled lives that others lived in the world of law and civilisation. They hunted bear and wolf, lynx and leopard and auroch. When winter came, and the fur of the wild animals thickened with the cold, they hunted ermine and beaver and mink. They returned with sleds creaking on their runners of wood and bone, piled high with furs, the rich, glossy pelts sparkling with Scythian frost. These furs they sold to the crafty-eyed fur merchants in the Greek trading cities on the shores of the Euxine Sea, at Tanais, and Chersonesus, and Ophiusa. Or further west, at the markets on the Danube, and at Margus Fair.