Attila

by William Napier

  The guards bandaged him with fine linen bandages, and made compresses of antiseptic herbs such as garlic and figwort, known to prevent the poisonous miasma that seeps into open wounds from the infected air, and turns the flesh of even the young and the healthy into a stinking pulp like rotting fruit.

  He was strong. On the third day he insisted he could sit up. When he did so, some of his stitches burst apart and he began to bleed again. They bawled at him and told him what a dumb bloody idiot he was, and they laid him down again and undid the bandages and sewed him up and redressed him with fresh compresses of herbs and bandaged him up again.

  He lay on his belly and complained that he was bored.

  They grunted, unimpressed.

  It was another week before he reckoned he was really well enough to stand. He stood there tottering in the dank cell to prove it.

  ‘But not to travel,’ they said.

  ‘Out of my way,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ they said. ‘We’re not seeing all that work going to waste. You’re not well enough. You need another week at least.’

  He challenged the bigger of the two to an arm-wrestle to prove he was well enough. They declined. He argued with them. He argued with them for over half an hour, by which time they felt as if they were beginning to suffer from exhaustion. At last they shook their heads wearily and opened the gates of the cells.

  ‘And my horse,’ he said, ‘Tugha Bàn. Where is she?’

  The two guards looked uncomfortably at each other and then back at him. ‘You serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They shook their heads. ‘You lead a horse into a city dying of starvation, and you expect to lead her out again? You’re old enough to know better than that - with respect, sir.’

  Lucius stared at them. ‘The guards on the gate gave me their word.’

  They shrugged.

  ‘Words, words,’ said one.

  ‘When food is scarce, so is friendship,’ said the other.

  Lucius stared at them a little while longer. Then he turned away, and they watched him walk stiffly up the narrow steps into the darkened street above. There he stopped and called back softly, ‘Thank you both anyway. I owe you everything.’

  ‘Madman,’ they called after him. ‘Now scoot.’

  8

  NOT EVERYTHING IS FALLEN

  It was night. He leant against a wall and tried to still the thumping of the blood in his head by force of will. He gave a low moan and rubbed his forehead against the flaking, ancient wall. The air around him stank, and a huddle of rags nearby emitted a low gurgle, but he did not even look round.

  Hopes may deceive, but none deceives like despair. Despair is the lowest cowardice of all.

  He straightened up against the wall, feeling the tug of the fine flaxen stitches in his skin. He took a lungful of fetid air, pushed himself away from the wall and began to walk.

  In a nearby alley, he stooped, holding his arm across his nose, and pulled at a pile of rags. An emaciated corpse rolled out, eyes staring, the nearly bald skull clunking horribly on the ground as if hollow with hunger. He shook the black rags violently again, and a rat ran free with a squeal. The corpse’s belly had been eaten open.

  He pulled the black, stinking winding-sheet round his shoulders, half covering his face, he tied another strip of rag around his head like a Barbary pirate. Then he walked unsteadily round the eastern gate of the Palatine.

  The guard saw him coming.

  ‘The answer’s no,’ he shouted. ‘Now shove off.’

  Luicus went nearer.

  ‘You come one step closer and I’ll put a blade in your guts!’

  ‘Spare a crust for a poor, starving citizen,’ croaked Lucius. Even in his own ears his voice sounded cracked and terrible.

  ‘You heard. Now shove off.’

  ‘A little bread or some horse-flesh?’

  The guard ignored him.

  The beggar stood a little taller and the guard eyed him warily but curiously.

  ‘How much are you paid, soldier?’

  The soldier looked defensive. ‘You know the answer. We haven’t been paid for six months. But at least we still—’

  ‘And you have a wife and children?’

  ‘One of each. And maybe even that’s an extravagance these days.’

  ‘Are they not hungry, too?’

  ‘Now look, I’ve told you before, I’m not standing here arguing with—’

  ‘How much would you get for a plump grey mare in your stables, sold for horse-flesh? A plump grey mare with her belly fat on rich summer grasses, her satin flanks gleaming in the sunshine?’ The beggar now stood up fully. ‘Answer me, soldier.’

  The guard frowned. ‘You know what I’d get. Anything I bloody well wanted, and more. But how—’

  ‘And how much did you get for my horse?’ The beggar let the filthy sheet fall from his shoulders and tore the rag from his head, and the guard recognised him at last. ‘How much did you get for Tugha Bàn?’

  Lucius was unarmed, but he stepped forward menacingly, and the guard stepped back in reply. He slipped inside the gateway and drew the barred gate across.

  ‘You bastard,’ said Lucius softly. ‘You treacherous bastard. May all the gold you gained bring you nothing but grief.’

  He turned and made his way down the grand street of the Via Palatina, moonlit, deserted, starved, already haunted by the ghosts of its former greatness.

  He had not gone more than a hundred yards when he heard a cry from the gatehouse. He hesitated, wondering whether to turn round. When he did, he saw a figure standing at the top of the street, a grey mare beside him, saddled and bridled, her reins in his hand. The mare tossed her head and whinnied softly. Lucius felt a profound shudder of emotion - several emotions - run through him. Then he walked back up the street and she settled her muzzle in his cupped hand. Her ears flicked with happiness.

  Lucius looked at the guard. ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘You could have got a year’s pay in gold for her.’

  The guard shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ He looked at the ground. ‘A year of gold for a lifetime of bad sleep.’

  Lucius clutched the man’s arm, then let it drop. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with such urgency that the guard flinched. ‘Thank you.’

  Then he stepped up on the stone mounting-block beneath the wall, seized the low pommel and cantle of the military saddle, and hauled himself carefully up onto Tugha Bàn’s broad back. He nodded once more to the guard and then rode on down the street.

  Not everyone is false; not everything is fallen. Though great Rome herself may fall, not everything will fall.

  ‘You look out for yourself, now,’ the guard on the gate called after him. ‘We live in funny old times.’

  So we do, thought Lucius. So we do.

  He rode out of the west gate of the city, and through the encircling camp of the Goths by moonlight, riding and looking so steadily straight ahead that those who challenged him did not pursue their challenge in the face of his silence. Some said that he was a ghost. None would stay his flight with sword or spear.

  He rode along the banks of the widening Tiber and saw the well-fed water bats skimming the surface of the river, hawking at gnats in the darkness, and he wondered that bats should be better fed than men. Surely Rome was being punished by the gods. He rode on down to the port of Ostia. At dawn he stopped to bathe in the river, only to remount and ride on still sweat-stained and travel-weary. How could you wash yourself clean in a river where starved and skeletal bodies floated by?

  The sun rose over the great stone warehouses and mighty wharves of Ostia, but many of them lay in ruins now, stricken and blackened at the hands of the Gothic invaders. In the harbour, the smashed masts and the sunken wrecks of the great African grain-ships still showed above the flat, calm waters where they lay. There were very few people about, and those he encountered looked warily at him and said nothing. Where before, for centuries, sunrise in summer would have seen thousands of workmen arriving
or waking here for their day’s work, now there were only a handful. The shipwrights and chandlers, caulkers, sailmakers and netmenders were gone. And the merchants and traders, too, who had come here from all over the Mediterranean, bringing precious marble and porphyry from the east for the buildings and monuments of Rome, and Egyptian cotton and linen, and all the fruits and spices of the Levant - there were none. Where were the hundred different languages of the known world, haggling over prices, rising into the early morning air in a babel of polyglot voices? Where were the lightermen and stevedores, pushing their wooden hand-barrows, unloading ship after ship of its treasure-store of silks and linen, sacks of grain, ingots of silver and tin? And hefty, roped bundles of furs, and barrels of precious Baltic amber, slaves from Britain, and huge, rangy hunting dogs from Caledonia, straining on their studded leather collars: deer-killers and wolf-slayers, all ivory teeth and eyes like Baltic amber.

  All that great hubbub was gone. Ostia lay under the warm and constant sun, a ghost of her former self. The great quayside cranes with their granite tackle-blocks and their huge oak crossbeams stood silent, blackened with fire, some still smoking gently like mournful, extinguished dragons. Only the occasional cry of a lone yellow-legged gull broke the silence.

  On the far side of one of the smaller harbours, Lucius could see a small, broad-beamed cargo ship, a square-rigger with a red sail faded by salt and sun. He rode round the cobbled harbour wall and found three men lading her with corked amphorae and crates of fruit. Evidently the Goths had no taste for dried apricots. But everything else that had lain in the warehouses they had destroyed or looted, loaded into their great wheeled wagons, and taken away.

  ‘Where are you bound for?’ he called out to the three dogged sailors. They ignored him. He called out again, more strongly.

  One of them set down his amphora in its wooden stall. ‘No place you’d want to go,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Gaul,’ he said. ‘Port of Gessoriacum.’

  ‘Take me. Take me north, to the coast of Britain, and sail me into port at Dubris, or Portus Lemanis. Or Noviomagnus, even better.’

  ‘You got money?’

  ‘Not a fig.’

  The man grinned at one of his fellows: the cheek of it. Then he shook his head. ‘Out of our way. We’ve got a load more lading to do before we sail, and we’ve no desire to cross Biscay in September storms.’

  Lucius dismounted. Before they could stop him, he had lifted a heavy wine amphora onto his right shoulder and was walking across the wooden gangway on board. It cost him more in pain than the sailors ever knew, the still unhealed wounds across his back cracking and oozing afresh over his straining muscles. But he made not a sound, gave not a sign. He set the amphora down in the rack, and went back to get another.

  The sailors eyed each other and shrugged.

  They’d reckoned the lading would take all morning. It was done by the fifth hour, thanks to the stranger’s willingness and heft.

  The captain, the one who had spoken to him, leant against the gunwale of his ship. ‘So you want to go to Gaul?’

  ‘No, you want to go to Gaul. I want to be set down at Noviomagnus.’

  ‘“Set down?” You know what it’s like sailing into British coastal waters these days?’

  Lucius shook his head. ‘No, I’ve no idea. That’s your job. But when you set me down at Noviomagnus—’

  ‘If.’

  ‘When. Then I’ll find you payment of five silver pieces before you sail for Gaul.’

  The captain debated democratically and in muffled tones with his two crew-members for a moment. Then he grunted, ‘You’re on. Only go and get what you can for the horse first. Try the customs office over there. What you get will serve for now as down-payment.’

  Lucius shook his head. ‘Where I go, she goes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look, sunshine, I’m the captain of this ship, and a captain on his ship is a little emperor at sea. What he says is law. No one even farts on this leaky old bucket without my permission, see? And the one thing I won’t have on my ship is horses.’

  ‘Or cats,’ said a crewman.

  ‘Or women in their courses,’ said the second.

  ‘Or anything made of lindenwood,’ said the first.

  ‘Or—’

  ‘All right, all right, you twittering idiots, we all have our funny little superstitions. Yours is cats and bleeding wenches, and mine is horses.’ He looked back at Lucius. ‘And my superstition tells me that ships, weather and horses go together like wine, women and chastity. One hint of a storm, or Jove gets irate and starts hurling bolts at us, and horses start stampeding all over the hold. Nothing but a bloody nuisance, horses is. So if you want to keep your horse, then it stays with you.’

  ‘You don’t know Tugha Bàn,’ said Lucius, patting her on the withers.

  ‘How very true that is. And you know what? I have no wish to make the lovely lady’s acquaintance, neither. Now bugger off and—’

  Lucius stepped up onto the ramp, leading Tugha Bàn behind him.

  ‘If she causes you any trouble on the voyage,’ he said with quiet determination, ‘I will cut her throat and roll her overboard myself. You have my word.’

  The captain scrutinised the strange, grey-eyed horseman. And he saw that he was, indisputably, a man whose word meant something. ‘Ten silver pieces,’ he grunted. ‘You’re aboard.’

  ‘Ten silver pieces,’ agreed Lucius. ‘When you set us down at Noviomagnus.’

  The late summer seas were calm and the voyage was uneventful, but for one incident when they anchored at Gades to take on more fresh water. The two crewmen came back staggering under huge amphorae.

  When they had set them down, and swiped the perspiration from their faces, one said, ‘Rome’s fallen. The gates were opened to the Goths by some bleeding-heart old matron who couldn’t bear seeing all the people starving like that. Like the Goths was going to come trooping in and open a bloody soup kitchen. So in they march and sack the city top to bottom.’

  Neither Lucius nor the captain said a word. It was written.

  ‘Then Alaric their king went off south and died of poisoning, they say. Dirty work, maybe.’

  Lucius looked up.

  ‘His brother rules the Gothic nation now. Athawulf, he’s called. Just as much of a sharp one as his big brother, they reckon. And you know what? You know who he’s gone and married? Or who’s gone and married him, rather?’ The sailor stretched his aching back. ‘Times we live in, I don’t know. He’s only gone and got himself hitched to the emperor’s sister, hasn’t he?’

  Lucius stared open-mouthed. ‘Princess . . . Galla Placidia?’ he said hoarsely.

  The sailor pointed a forefinger at him. ‘That’s the one. Emperor’s sister, and a right handful, they say. And now she’s only gone and given herself in marriage to the King of the Goths!’

  Lucius’s head sank down on his chest and he spoke no more.

  But that evening, as the ship pitched gently through the waves, and the stars came out in the late summer sky and the moon went down, and the golden shores of Hispania retreated behind them into the night, the captain and his two crewmen sat and wondered at the strangeness of their passenger, the grey-eyed British horseman. For Lucius sat alone in the prow of the old cargo-ship, staring up at the stars with his fists raised to heaven, his head thrown back, laughing to himself as if he had just been told the funniest joke in the world.

  The sailors’ garbled, dockside intelligence was broadly accurate.

  On the night of 24 August, 410 years after the birth of Our Saviour, Rome fell. For the first time in nearly eight hundred years, the proud capital of empire heard in its streets the tramp of a barbarian army.

  They came pouring through the Salarian Gates to the sound of triumphal Gothic trumpets. Many of the starving multitude welcomed them as an end to their suffering. Furthermore, Alaric, the Christian king of his people, gave strict orders that, whi
le any loot belonged to his men by jus belli, no churches, chapels or other places of Christian worship were to be touched. And no holy women were to be subjected to the usual jus belli, either. And his Gothic warriors - cross-gartered, long-haired, moustachioed barbarians in outward form - conducted themselves with restraint and even nobility.

  Sacking certainly took place, and many centuries of treasures were lost - which had been sacked in their turn from weaker, colonised peoples, of course. But tales of atrocity and torture, such as one expects to hear at the collapse of a great city, were few, and often disbelieved. The Goths’ reputation for both martial ferocity and a certain proud clemency towards those weaker than themselves was once again confirmed. Indeed, the worst atrocities that took place during those fateful few hours were committed, it was said, not by the fair-haired invaders but by disgruntled slaves taking private revenge on cruel masters and mistresses for years of oppression, under cover of chaos and the night.