The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  Mundiuk touched the freshly whetted blade, drawing blood from his finger, and stared at the two Romans. One would live, and one would die. It had been the way of the ceremony for as long as his bloodline had ruled on the great plain. Bleda knew that it was his right to choose. The older Roman scowled at the boy, straining at his chains. Bleda stared back, and then raised his arm, pointing. Mundiuk needed to test the man’s mettle, just to be sure he was the right one. He took the club from his saddle that he used to dispatch game, cantered forward and swung it hard against the man’s mouth, hearing the crack of broken bone. The man staggered back, but then came upright, his lower jaw shattered. He spat out a mouthful of blood and broken teeth, and glared defiantly at the king. ‘Futuere, barbarian,’ he snarled.

  Mundiuk stared back at him. He knew what that curse meant. But it was good. These were not like the snivelling eunuch emissaries from Constantinople who had been the only captives they could find for Bleda’s birth ceremony, men who had made the mistake of travelling to Mundiuk without gold, who had begged for mercy in their high-pitched voices and who had soiled themselves in front of his queen. When he had seen them face death like that, as cowards, he had known that the signs would not be right, that the gods would not will Bleda to be the next king. But this time it was different. These two were soldiers. They had been captured three weeks before in a raid on a fort on the great river, the river the Romans called Danubius; they had fought like lions but had been lassoed and shackled in their own chains, those they had used to enslave others. Mundiuk’s brothers Octr and Rau, who had led the raid, had taunted them about the legendary marching ability of the Romans, but still they had marched on. Mundiuk had seen the scars on the older man’s arm, the mark of the legion. Only the toughest would do that to themselves. Octr and Rau had done well. His blood would bring Mundiuk’s son into the souls and minds of the greatest enemy his people had ever faced. The other would serve the future king as a slave, and teach him all the tricks of their warriors, their swordsmanship and tactics – he would teach him how to fight like them and how to think like their generals.

  He nodded, and the men who formed his bodyguard kicked the two prisoners forward onto their knees. The blood welled up in the older man’s mouth, but still he stayed upright, staring ahead. He growled to the other in the language of the Romans, words that Mundiuk understood: ‘Remember our comrades, brother. Remember those who have gone before. They wait for us on the other side.’

  The young soldier was shaking, his face ashen and his eyes bloodshot, the look of a youth who had begun to realize the unimaginable; he was not to know that he might be spared. In his shackled hands he held something, grasping it so tight that his knuckles had gone white. He raised his arms up towards the fire, working the object up between his fingers until it was visible, a crude wooden cross that looked as if he had made it himself. He held it silhouetted against the flames and began mouthing incantations, the words of the brown-robed priests who had once long ago made the journey to the people of the plain to show them the bleeding god of the cross, a god who seemed to them to be one of weakness and capitulation, a god whom they despised.

  Mundiuk saw the cross and became enraged. He changed his mind; the other would be spared. He bellowed, held up the great sword and leapt off his horse, pushing Bleda aside and striding towards the young soldier. In one sweep he cut off both of his hands, sending the cross cartwheeling into the fire. He threw the sword up into the air, grasped the hilt as it came down blade-first and drove it straight through the man’s neck and torso into the ground, pinning it there. The soldier belched blood, his open eyes glazed, and then he slumped over, his wrists spurting red and his head lolling forward. Mundiuk bellowed again, pounding his fists on his chest, and his men bellowed back. He put his foot on the man’s shoulder and pulled out the sword, wiping the blood from it on his cheeks, licking the flat of the blade. He picked up the Roman by the hair and decapitated him, hurling the head into the fire, and then thrust his blade into the centre of the torso, ripped out the heart and holding it high, squeezing it until all of the blood had gushed down his arm and over his tunic, letting the final drops trickle into his mouth before throwing it back down on the body.

  He had remembered the words of the shaman. To kill the victims once was not enough. For the sacrifice to work you must kill them many times over, again and again, until the gods were satisfied, banging down their tankards in the heavens with each blow, their spilled beer mingling with the gore of the victims.

  Behind him men threw more bundles of wood on the fire and the firewalker placed the bull’s scapula in the embers. Mundiuk held the sword high, its blade shining with blood, and turned towards the cart. The men roared in anticipation and the women began to chant. One of the women in the cart turned and held up the baby, a boy, and the noise increased to a crescendo. Mundiuk scooped him up in his left hand and held him aloft. He stared into the eyes, slits of darkness that seemed to bore through him, reflecting the fire. The omen was good. The baby had not yet cried. He must bleed before he cries.

  He raised the sword until the tip brushed one cheek, streaking the baby with the soldier’s blood. Mundiuk remembered the words he had been taught. The blood of the enemy will mingle with the blood of the king. Only then will you know your enemy, and know how to defeat him. You will become one with him. He pressed the blade in, cutting through the boy’s cheek to the jawbone, and did the same on the other side, watching the droplets of blood cascade off the blade into the air, hearing the chants turn to ululations, seeing the flames rise up above the pyre. The baby still had not uttered a sound.

  He looked to the sky. The cries of the eagles had increased to a crescendo, shrieking and rasping, drowning out the crackling of the fire. The smell and heat of the entrails had excited them. Far above he could see the ripples of cloud streaming to the west, like an unstoppable river torrent. One of the eagles, the largest, had separated itself from the rest and was swooping down in ever-decreasing circles, the rush of its wings sounding louder each time it swept over the meadow. Mundiuk quickly stepped back, and his men pressed against the people to make space. Suddenly the bird tucked its wings and dropped down into the circle, aiming straight for the bloody torso and the Roman’s heart. With its prize in its talons it flapped its huge wings again, lifting the heart from the body, dragging a ribbon of entrails along with it as it rose and flew off to the east, to the distant eyrie in the mountains where it would gorge on its share of the feast.

  Mundiuk breathed in deeply, savouring the coppery smell of fresh blood. The omens had been good. The sword had spoken. He handed the baby back to the woman below. He himself had seen the carvings of eagles in the cliff above the Iron Gates, near the ruined bridge and the fort on the river where they had captured the Romans. The eagles had once been sacred to the Romans, their image carried aloft on standards above the soldiers in the carvings; but it was said that after the Romans had failed to take the lands beyond the Danube the eagles had flown away in disgust, returning east to their ancestral eyries, seething with dishonour and betrayal. The soldiers in the forts on the river now followed the god of the cross, a god not of war but of peace, a god whom Mundiuk could only regard with contempt. And now the eagles had found new masters, horsemen who would one day sweep all before them in their drive to bring the eagles their revenge, led by a king who would tear the heart out of Rome itself.

  There was a commotion by the fire, and Mundiuk turned to watch the shaman and the firewalker use a stick to pull the scapula out of the embers. They doused it with a bucket of water, making it hiss and crackle. The shaman knelt down beside it, muttering to himself, and the other man guided his hand to the flat of the shoulder blade, its surface scorched and covered with fine cracks. For a few minutes the shaman traced his fingers over the bone, reading it as only he knew how, muttering, occasionally raising his sightless eyes towards the heat of the fire, then looking down again. After a final pause he struggled to his feet, helped by the firewalker
. He took his staff and hobbled towards Mundiuk, the whites of his eyes flickering red with the fire. Mundiuk laid the flat of the sword across his shoulder, feeling the wet slick of blood against his neck. ‘Well, old man?’

  The shaman raised his hand. ‘You must take the sword and bury it in the pastureland above the great lake, below the eyries of the eagles. If when the boy has come of age a shepherd brings a bull before him with a bleeding leg, then the boy will know that the sword has risen and is awaiting him where the bull was injured. If when he finds it the blade is burnished and shiny, the edges sharp as if freshly whetted, then the sword is yearning for blood, and he will know his destiny.’

  Another eagle swooped down from on high, crying raucously, taking a morsel held up for it by the shaman and flapping heavily off to the west, bringing in its wake a gust of cold air that drew the flames flickering towards the king. Soon the rest would be following, swooping down to rip away morsels. Mundiuk went to his horse, grasped its mane with his free hand and leapt on, still holding the sword. One of the women passed the baby back to him, swaddled now, its face cleaned of blood. He held the sword behind him with one hand and the baby in the air with the other, so that all could see. Every muscle in his body was tensed, and he felt the battle lust surge through him. He stared again into the eyes of his son, and at the raw wounds on his cheeks. ‘You will learn the ways of our people,’ he said. ‘You will learn the way of the bow, of the sword and the lasso, of the horse. You will learn the language and ways of our enemy, not to converse with him but to learn his tactics and his ways in war, to know how to destroy him. Your army will travel faster than the news of its coming. Only when the rivers run red with the blood of Hun warriors and their lifeblood is extinguished will your conquests cease.’

  The shaman limped up to the horse, his arms stretched out in front of him; then, finding the reins, he held them and raised his sightless eyes towards the rider. ‘What will you name him?’

  Mundiuk stared at the sword, the sword that bore an ancient name in their language, a name that few had ever dared speak, and then stared at the boy again.

  You will bear the name of the one who scarred you. You will become one with him.

  You will not just be a leader in war.

  You will be the god of war.

  He raised the boy high, and bellowed out the name.

  ‘Attila.’

  PART ONE

  CARTHAGE,

  NORTH AFRICA

  AD 439

  1

  A dog howled, a strange, unearthly sound that pierced the still air of the morning and echoed down the barren valley between the desert and the sea. The man on the parapet stood up, his cloak wrapped around him against the cold, thankful for his sheepskin boots and the woollen trousers and tunic that he wore under his chainmail, and listened hard. Sound travelled far across the treeless African hills, but this was close, no more than an hour’s march away. He glanced at the men trying to sleep in the trench behind him, restless, uneasy, as if the dog were entering their dreams, and for a moment he wondered whether he too were in a kind of netherworld, his senses numbed by cold and lack of sleep. But then the howling began again, not just one dog but several, an eerie crescendo that rose and wavered like a gust of wind, and then died away again. This time he knew it was real. He felt a sudden chill down his spine, not of cold but of something else, and quickly clapped his hands together and stamped his feet. He knew that many of the men would be awake now, their bleary eyes watching him, the night sentries spaced down the line looking to him for orders. He must keep his nerve. He must not show his fear.

  ‘Pass the word along. The cities of Africa Proconsularis to the west have fallen. Bishop Augustine is dead. The army of the Vandals is coming.’

  The soldier who had brought the message paused to catch his breath, his face pinched with cold and his eyes bloodshot and exhausted beneath the rim of his helmet. Flavius stopped clapping his hands and stared at him, his mind struggling to take the news in, and then nodded, watching as the man stumbled over the forms of men still sleeping in the trench towards the next sentry, repeating his message in a hoarse whisper. The western cities have fallen. Flavius clapped his hands again, trying to control his shivering. The daylight hours were tolerably warm, but the African night in early spring was still bitterly cold, keeping him awake for the brief time he had allowed himself to lie down and try to get some sleep. He climbed the rough earthen side of the parapet they had piled up the evening before and stared out to the west. Hippo Regius had been the last bastion on the African shore before Carthage, the ancient city whose western walls loomed out of the mist less than a mile behind him. For almost six hundred years Carthage had been in Roman hands, the centre of the wealthiest province in the western empire. And now even Bishop Augustine had forsaken them. Eight years ago, when the Vandals had taken his bishopric of Hippo Regius and made it their stronghold, there had been rumours that he had starved to death during the siege, but his fate had never been confirmed; now they knew it was true, that he had finally abandoned his earthly city for the City of God, the only place where he could find protection against the coming onslaught.

  Above him the sky was reddening, streaked with the sunlight that was just appearing over the horny-tipped mountain to the east of Carthage. The air still smelled like the night, damp, humic, on one side suffused with the tang of the sea, on the other side with the gritty reek of the desert. Polybius more than five hundred years before had written of the taste in the air before Carthage, a taste like blood, and Flavius thought he could sense it now, an acrid coppery odour that seemed to rise with the dust above the hills. They were wedged between the two worlds, between the sea and the desert, defending a narrow corridor in which would soon flow a torrent of death, as if the floodwaters of a great river were building up in the hills and ravines to the west, about to come rushing down upon them, unassailable, impossible to resist.

  He picked up his sword, buckled it on under his cloak and then raised his helmet, seeing where the gold leaf of a tribune’s rank that he had ordered in the workshop in Milan had already become dislodged and soiled, even before he had seen any action. He stooped over, spat on it and began rubbing it with a corner of his cloak, and then looked around as someone came up from the direction of the cooking fire behind the ridge. ‘You don’t want to do that, Flavius Aetius,’ the man said, speaking Latin with the rough accent of the Danube frontier. ‘Unless, that is, you want to make yourself conspicuous for the first barbarian spear-thrust.’

  ‘The men should see my rank and know who to follow,’ Flavius replied, trying to sound stern.

  The other man snorted. ‘In this man’s army, everyone leads from the front,’ he said. ‘It’s not like the army of your revered ancestors of the time of Scipio and Caesar, full of feathered helmets and polished breastplates like those you see in the sculptures in the forum of Rome. In this man’s army, if a tribune wants the respect of his men, he leads primus inter pares – first among many. That way, if he gets killed his unit doesn’t falter, as those around him fill the gap and another takes his place. And if you want to show your men who to respect, you should smear that gold leaf with dirt and sweat from digging the trenches and then with sticky gore from the bowels of your enemies. I bet they didn’t teach you that in the schola militarum in Rome. Think about it, and then get some food. I’m going to inspect the men’s weapons.’

  Flavius looked thoughtfully at his helmet, and then at the other man as he left. Macrobius Vipsanius was heavily muscled, shorter than the usual Illyrian, the almond shape of his eyes betraying some distant lineage from beyond the Scythian steppes. As a centurion he seemed as Roman as they came, yet in his blood he was a barbarian. Flavius himself was hardly much different, being descended on his mother’s side from the ancient gens Julia, but on his father’s side from a Goth warlord. Many of the soldiers were like that now, a result of integration and intermarriage, of appeasement and land settlement inside the frontiers, of the need to re
cruit more and more barbarian warriors to keep the Roman army up to strength. Barbarian chieftains such as Flavius’ grandfather had admired the Roman martial tradition and sent their sons to military school in Milan and Rome, but there was always something that set those men apart, some kind of edge, something that Flavius had seen in his father and uncle and hoped he had himself. It was a restlessness that had driven other barbarians who had not sent their sons to Rome, who had not admired her ways, to burn and ravage their way across the empire, to do what some thought impossible and make the sea voyage across the Pillars of Hercules from Spain to Africa, transforming and adapting like some great shape-shifting beast, to begin their relentless march along the African shore towards Carthage. And everyone knew that the march of the Vandals was merely a portent of things to come, that for every tribe that Rome appeased, for every warrior band integrated, there was another more belligerent force lurking behind in the forests and on the steppes; and that behind them was a power like nothing ever seen before, a warrior army bent solely on destruction that threatened to eclipse Rome not by settlement and treaty, but by fire and the sword.