The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  Flavius had first met Macrobius only three weeks before when he had disembarked at Carthage with the other new tribunes and been put in charge of the reconnaissance numerus of the city garrison, his first field command. Half of the officer candidates who had gone through the schola militarum in Rome with him had been veterans like Macrobius, men who had risen from the ranks and been recommended by the comes of their frontier force or the dux of their field army. The military council of the emperor had deliberately sited the schola in the old city not just to remind the cadets of the past glories of the empire, but to keep them away from the imperial courts at Ravenna and Milan where the privileged younger cadets like Flavius might draw on patronage to ease their way through the training programme and gain favours. Macrobius himself would have scorned the schola and been wasted in it. He was a born centurion, superb at making a fighting unit out of the eighty-odd men of a frontier numerus but preferring to leave the life-and-death decisions to a tribune he respected. He relished his ancient rank – one derived from the fact that his parent unit was the famous Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix, once the pride of the Roman garrison in Britannia, but with the withdrawal from that province thirty years before, now reduced to a unit of the African frontier army. His soldiers joked that he was the last centurion of ancient Rome. Given the likely outcome of today’s events, they might well be proved right.

  In the weeks before Flavius had arrived, Macrobius had been given the task of scratching together the reconnaissance unit from among the frontier troops of the desert who had come streaming into Carthage with the threat from the west, their forts abandoned and the frontier contracted to the defensive perimeter they were now occupying within sight of the walls of Carthage itself. The numbers in the city garrison were desperate: fewer than a thousand men of the depleted Twentieth Legion along with the equivalent of three numeri of frontier limitanei, a little under three hundred additional men all told. Even within the city the garrison was stretched hopelessly thin, with large sectors of the city wall manned only by sentries, scarcely enough to alert the garrison commander of an approaching enemy let alone mount any kind of serious response. With no hope of further reinforcements, the defence of Carthage was now a matter of upholding Roman prestige and honour, of fighting to the death, and of suicidal bravery and doing enough against the odds to ensure that history did not remember the end of Roman North Africa as an ignominious rout and a massacre.

  Flavius put these thoughts from his mind and focused on his men. Unlike the volunteer legionaries of the past, they were almost all conscripts, with the exception of the Illyrians from the Danube, who represented the nearest that Rome still had to a professional cadre motivated by a martial tradition. Yet Macrobius had shown him that even the least promising no-hoper could be knocked into some kind of shape, that there was always some strength to be found somewhere. The greatest strength of this army of Christian Rome lay in the compact size of its units, for they were less complex to manage than the old legions and better suited to dispersed deployment and small engagements. Flavius had paid the soldiers a bonus in gold solidi out of his own pocket, always a good start for a new commander, and with Macrobius to guide him, he had tried to build up their esprit de corps, telling them of the old generals and wars, of Scipio Africanus and the Roman capture of Carthage; he had told them that there was no reason why they should not be as good as the soldiers of the Caesars, and that even then it had been the frontier auxiliaries, like the modern limitanei, who had done the brunt of the soldiering.

  In the three weeks before their forward deployment to this ridge Flavius had joined with the men as a common soldier while Macrobius had trained them, relentlessly marching them in the African sun, leading them on practice reconnaissance missions miles into the wasteland to the south of Carthage; they had used Numidian guides to teach them how to find water and a semblance of warmth at night, something Flavius himself had signally failed to do over the past few hours. He remembered all the training, all of the exercises, and slapped his hands together again for warmth, looking along the crest of the ridge where they were dug in. Beyond the dip it was cut through by the road to Carthage, the route an attacker would have to take from the west. Half of his men were dug in on one side and half on the other, and behind them he could just make out the shallow ravine with the water hole and the cooking fire, the wispy smoke from breakfast preparations curling above the rise. The smaller the unit the easier it was to keep an eye on the men, he thought wryly to himself, and the easier they were to feed; there was something to be said for the size of his command.

  He watched as Macrobius worked his way towards him beside the trench, running his finger along the men’s sword blades, licking his finger when it drew blood, leaving the blade unsheathed to be sharpened when it did not. Despite Flavius’ inexperience, he knew that Macrobius respected him for volunteering for the forward unit when none of the other officers in the garrison would do so, and in turn Flavius respected Macrobius for seeming to care nothing that Flavius’ uncle Aetius was magister militum of the western Roman empire, second in power only to the emperor Valentinian himself. Out here, on the front line, old-fashioned patronage and family connections were of no consequence, and all that mattered was whether a soldier had the courage to stand his ground and fight to the death for the man beside him. Flavius had begun to understand that nurturing this quality among his men was more important than all of the tactics and strategy he had learned in the schola militarum in Rome, and that his success as the leader of a small unit like this in the little time he had would depend on listening to Macrobius and heeding his advice.

  Macrobius returned to him, wiping his hand on his jerkin and blowing his nose into the dirt with his fingers. ‘If this was a training exercise, I’d crucify them,’ he grumbled. ‘More than half of their swords had spots of rust on the blades. If the edge is dull, they may as well use the flat of the blade for all the good it will do them.’

  ‘All of the remaining oil had to be used for cooking last night, and without a good oiling the blades rust in hours,’ Flavius said. ‘Where’s the farrier?’

  ‘With the optio at the fire. He’s setting up the grinding stone now. I’ll see that the men sharpen their blades when they go for breakfast.’

  Flavius jerked his head towards the southern end of the parapet, where he could see the messenger returning. ‘Have you heard the news?’

  Macrobius nodded grimly. ‘A straggler first brought it in about an hour ago, while you were asleep. They’ve been coming in from the west over the past few hours, mostly Numidian slaves who can barely string two words of Latin together and are too shocked and exhausted to tell us much. We need to find someone with authority who can give us good intelligence.’

  Flavius put on his helmet, stepped up to the highest point of the parapet and stared over the ridge. Refugees had been trickling in from the west ever since the numerus had deployed to this place, survivors of the towns and cities that had fallen to the Vandal army all the way from the Pillars of Hercules. Macrobius came up beside him, his grey stubble glinting in the dawn light and his Pannonian felt cap compressed in the shape of his helmet, solidified from years of wearing it beneath. Together they scanned the horizon to the west, the folds and valleys still obscured by the early-morning shadows. Macrobius squinted and pointed. ‘Over there, about two miles away, to the south-west. Coming from that direction marks them out from the other refugees, as anyone wanting to evade capture would have swung south from the western cities and made their way east towards us along the edge of the desert – harsh terrain where they’d be less likely to be pursued. They might be escaped citizens rather than spared slaves like those Numidians. Three, maybe four people, and two animals.’

  Flavius followed his gaze, seeing nothing. ‘Your eyesight is better than mine, centurion.’

  ‘I’ve served for twenty-two years in the limitanei frontier army, ten of them out here in Africa on the edge of the great desert. You get good at spotting dista
nt smudges in the dust.’

  A half-asleep-sounding voice grumbled from among the recumbent forms lying behind them in the trench, most of them now awake, ‘Join the limitanei, they said. See the frontiers of the empire, they said. Eat boar and venison every day, take your choice of local women and select a hundred iugera of prime land as a retirement present. Never have to raise your spear in anger. Meet fascinating barbarian tribesmen.’

  ‘Too right,’ another growled. ‘Fascinating, that is, in the few moments you get to see them in a blur of warpaint and screaming as they hurtle out of the forest towards you. Then, if you’re lucky enough to survive, you get shipped to the other side of the empire to this place and told to dig a trench and wait for the same thing to happen again.’

  ‘And meanwhile, the comitatenses field army are skulking in the towns and around the emperor, growing fat and rich at our expense.’

  Macrobius cocked an eye at Flavius. ‘Have you heard that one before?’

  ‘About the comitatenses? It’s all I ever hear,’ Flavius said.

  ‘The comitatenses say the same thing about the limitanei. Each one thinks the other is second-rate. If it isn’t a grumble about that, it’d be something else. It’s the same with soldiers the world over. Gripe, gripe, gripe.’ He turned to the men, speaking more loudly. ‘And looking at you lot, I might just agree with the comitatenses.’

  ‘And we never get paid,’ the first man added, blearily getting up.

  ‘We haven’t been paid since my father’s day,’ the other one complained. ‘If it wasn’t for the bounties given by the emperors or the odd generous-minded commander wanting us actually to fight for them, we’d be no better off than slaves.’

  ‘You’ll get yours, Maximus Cunobelinus,’ Flavius said. ‘I was true to my word and gave you each a bonus of five solidi when you passed inspection as a unit, and you or your families will get five more when this is over. That’s equal to two years’ pay. I sent instructions to the chief accountant of my uncle Aetius in Milan to receive entreaties from any woman or child whose name accords with the list that I sent him two weeks ago from Carthage. Your families will be well looked after.’

  ‘What about yours, tribune? Who gets your bounty?’

  Flavius cleared his throat. They knew perfectly well that he received no pay, that his income came from the wealth of his family. ‘A tenth of my gold goes to the Basilica of St Peter in Rome, for the glory of God.’

  The soldier blew his nose messily on the ground. ‘The Church has too much money, in my opinion. Jesus was a poor man like us, and he had no need of priests with fancy vestments or towering marble basilicas. We’re the true soldiers of Christ, not the priests.’

  The other man, a Sarmatian archer named Apsachos, grunted and got up. ‘Anyway, gold solidi are of no use out here. I don’t see a market anywhere in this godforsaken desert to buy food. And I’m starving.’

  Macrobius dropped down into the trench and stood in front of the two soldiers. ‘Well, then you’re in luck. The cooking fire smells ready to me. As you’re the first to get up, I’m detailing you and the rest of your section for first call at breakfast. There’s a haunch of venison and a bowl of broth for each of you. Take your swords and get them sharpened. When you’re done, come back here and I’ll detail off the next section. And remember, if I see any of you pissing or shitting anywhere except in the latrine trench you know what your next job will be.’

  The two soldiers jumped out of the trench followed by the dozen or so other men who had been slumbering nearby, all wide awake at the mention of food. Macrobius made his way up the trench to the optio of the next section. The waft of boiled and roasted meat had made Flavius salivate; he suddenly realized how famished he was. One advantage of being in a forward reconnaissance unit was that his command included a detachment of sagittarii like the Sarmatian Apsachos – archers were as useful for foraging as they were in battle. The previous evening in a wooded oasis they had cornered and shot three of the European deer that had been stocked there centuries before when the Romans had first taken over those lands after the Punic Wars, making them into a vast hunting preserve. Flavius had thrilled to the chase, forgetting the coming onslaught, his exuberance taking him back to his boyhood years when he learnt to hunt with his father and uncles in the forests of central Gaul. The deer would provide a hearty breakfast for all sixty of the men ranged along the hilltop, and the cook had made a hot drink from the broth.

  Flavius tried to ignore the rumbling in his stomach and the knowledge that hot food would help against the cold. Primus inter pares or not, one thing he would not do was to go ahead of his men to the cooking fire. Despite their griping and ribald humour, these were some of the toughest men left in the African garrison, and they all knew that this meal was likely to be their last. If he were to lead them to their deaths in battle, he would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that he had fulfilled his responsibility as a commander and provided for their families and their stomachs.

  He swallowed hard and looked ahead. The men not yet at breakfast were already standing to along the parapet, silent, swords loosened in their scabbards and spears ready, the archers holding their bows unslung, all of them staring at the horizon as Flavius was, looking for the first hints of what was to come. He saw one man make the sign of Christ, and he glanced back at the huge wooden cross that had been erected outside the walls of Carthage, standing there like the cross of the crucifixion that was still said to tower over the rock of Calvary in Jerusalem. The Carthage cross had been made from charred timbers found outside the walls from buildings destroyed when Scipio took the city, and it seemed to stand there now as a symbol of past glory, as a talisman against the coming evil. And yet the cross was behind them, invisible when they turned to face the enemy, as if Christ himself were fearful of straying too far forward into the jaws of hell, as if the thin line of soldiers had been thrust into a hinterland where even the power of the Lord would be swept aside by the violence of war.

  He thought of what the soldier had said about the wealth of the Church and the poverty of Jesus. It had been over a hundred years since the emperor Constantine had thrown away the mantle of the old gods and embraced the cross – years that some in secret were no longer calculating ab urbe condita, meaning since the foundation of the city, but anno domini nostri iesu – in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Flavius himself had been taught Greek by the monk Dionysius from Scythia, and it was he who in secret had come up with the new dating system, the little monk whose books he used to carry while he had scurried to and fro between the Greek and Latin libraries on either side of Trajan’s Column in Rome, selecting works of Christian virtue to be copied in the scriptoria and others to be discarded as amoral and corrupt. On hearing of his appointment to Carthage, Flavius had revisited the Greek library in order to consult the military historians, and he had been shocked by the gaps on the shelves; he had taken away Polybius’ work on Carthage in order to preserve it from the monks, on the ostensible grounds that it would be needed in the field as a training manual for the fighting to come.

  It was a changing world, and not just in the libraries. The old patrician families were still there, the senators and equestrians, the ancient gens like his mother’s family, but their power was in name only; the new aristocracy consisted of the priests and the bishops. Christians for generations now had been able to worship openly, free at last from centuries of persecution; the old temples had been converted into churches, and new basilicas had been completed. Yet many eschewed those places and continued to worship privately in their houses or in secret underground rooms, in caves and catacombs. For them, the promise of Christianity had been of a religion without priests, a religion of the common people, and the Church of Rome and of Constantinople was nothing more than the old religion in a new guise, with arcane rituals and fear of divine retribution and obligatory paths to salvation that enslaved the congregation to the priesthood. And for the emperors and the generals, the peace-loving prophet of th
e Gospels was no longer sufficient to gird the Church for its role in the war of all wars, for the coming darkness; Christ needed now to be armoured, to be recreated in the image of Mars Ultor – the Avenger – to be placed in front of the soldiers on the battlefield to dissuade them from dropping their arms and following the path of Augustine to the City of God where the priests could hold no sway and the only emperor was the true divinity.

  Flavius turned and saw the distant cloud of dust that Macrobius had spotted to the south-west, and took a deep breath. There were no priests here today, and there was no flaming cross for the soldiers to follow. What mattered now was not the smiting power of the Lord or the mercy of Christ but the small superstitions and rituals that had kept soldiers’ courage up since time immemorial: snatched prayers, a lucky charm, a statuette of a loved one tucked into a pouch on a belt. He pulled out the little silver cross he wore around his neck, held it tight for a few moments and then folded it back under his chainmail. The time had passed even for that. All that mattered now was to keep his nerve, to keep fear at bay, to focus on cold steel and battle lust and the desire to kill.

  2

  Flavius pulled the last tendrils of meat off the leg of venison with his teeth and tossed the bone away, wiping the grease from his stubble with the back of his sleeve. He already felt better, and could sense the beginning of something like warmth spreading through his body. He turned away the offer of wine, fearful of becoming drowsy, and instead took the drink that Macrobius had passed him – catha, an infusion of leaves from the eastern desert that the frontier soldiers had learnt from the nomads to drink to keep themselves awake. He drained the wooden bowl and passed it back to Macrobius, who took a wad of the leaves and shoved them in his cheek, chewing them and spitting out the pieces of stem. He eyed Flavius, speaking with his cheek full. ‘Once you’ve developed a taste for this stuff, the infusion isn’t enough,’ he said. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like spending months in a desert outpost trying to keep awake.’