The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  ‘You determined to return to Britain.’

  ‘That was my mission when you first saw me. The advance of the Vandals and the fall of Hippo Regius had released me from my obligation to Augustine, and coming to Carthage was the first leg on my trip home. I will fulfil my oath to Augustine. I will protect his work and take it to Italy, but not to Rome or Ravenna. I will take it to the monastery of Monte Cassino south of Neapolis, where I will entrust it to a monk of my own order among the brethren who will tell nobody and will keep it locked away in that mountain fastness.’

  ‘Where it will gather dust, and not be read.’

  ‘Where it will await a more contemplative age, an age when men can reflect on God and the path to Heaven without letting it interfere with the battle for a kingdom of men on earth.’

  ‘And your order?’

  Arturus paused. ‘I cannot speak its name. We are outlawed in Rome. It is an order that comes from my own people and believes that men can shape their own destiny. Battles are won by soldiers, not by priests. And it is kings who conduct the affairs of men on earth, not God.’

  Macrobius came up from where he had been helping the Greek doctor and sat down heavily beside Arturus, ‘I saw you slay two of the Alans and take on the first wave of Vandals. A fighting monk,’ he said grudgingly. ‘I grant you that, though whether or not your story holds any water I cannot judge.’

  Arturus reached under his cassock and drew out his sword. Macrobius stiffened, and Arturus put his other hand on the centurion’s shoulder, smiling. ‘Fear not, my friend. It is just that I have noticed that your tribune Flavius Aetius is missing his sword. He dropped it trying to save a man, an action that in days past would have won him the corona civilis. Before that I saw him confront an Alan with that sword, struggling with its length. Mine will be better for him. It’s shorter, designed for thrusting. May it serve you well, Flavius, as it did my legionary ancestors in Britain.’

  He handed Flavius the gladius, its blade dull red with dried blood, the tip showing fresh dings and dents from the fight. Flavius turned it over in his hands, weighing it. ‘And you?’ he asked Arturus. ‘Can a heretic British monk fight with his bare hands?’

  Arturus folded back his cassock. ‘I have fulfilled my vow of wergild for the murder of my cousin by Gaiseric. I have taken blood from his army, and the score is settled. A new sword will be forged for me in Britain, a sword for a new era, a new kingdom. But your kingdom remains the empire of Rome, and for you the sword of the legionaries still holds power. There will be war ahead.’

  ‘Gaiseric will cross the Mediterranean.’

  Arturus nodded. ‘When he goes north from here and takes Sicily, the last breadbasket of Rome will be gone. With no handouts of grain, the people of Rome will run riot and the slaves will rise in revolt, just as they did when the Goths ravaged the city a generation ago. The navy of Rome must be prepared to take on this new threat. But there is worse to come, something we have spoken of before. All warriors of Rome must gird themselves against a new darkness on the horizon, a darkness sweeping in from the steppe-lands beyond the Danube, a new leader who has arisen from among the Huns. I clashed with him once, when the Gothic master I served took his bodyguard with him to their wooden citadel in a fold in the steppes to the east of the Danube. We fought in their duelling arena, and I won. But he was a youth then, the birth scars on his cheeks barely calloused over. He is now a man, toughened by war, ruthless and driven by ambition, his eye set on the western empire of Rome.’

  ‘You speak of a son of Mundiuk,’ Macrobius growled. ‘They say he is named after the ancient sword of the Hun kings. They call him Attila.’

  The galley slid silently under the city walls, the momentum from the last oar sweep still driving it forward, and then they were out in the blinding sunlight on the open ocean, the waves slapping against the bows and the full force of the north-easterly wind bearing down on them. The captain bellowed, the rowers extended their oars and the kettle drum in the stern began to resonate, the giant black-skinned drummer giving a beat each time the oars struck the water. The pace increased as they rounded the promontory and the captain heaved the steering oar to set course for Rome. A sheet of spray came over the bows and drenched them, a welcome cleansing after the dust of the city. Flavius used the water to wipe clean the blade of the gladius, sliding it into the empty scabbard beneath his cloak. As soon as he could he would take some olive oil from the ship’s cook, to keep it from rusting.

  He saw Arturus watching him, nodded and then braced himself as the galley began to rise and fall with the heave of the sea. He remembered the old coin he had found on the quayside and took it out of his pouch, holding it up to the sunlight. It was silver, but it had lost its glint, the metal covered by the patina of the ages. On the other side from the goddess he could just make out two horsemen and a small dog, and beneath them the single word ROMA. He remembered the freshly minted gold coins that he had distributed to the men of the numerus before the battle, the head of the emperor Valentinian on one side, stolid, thick-necked, and on the other side the emperor in armour with his foot on the snake holding the orb and the cross. He knew that the silver coin dated from ancient times, from the time of great victories and conquests, of generals like Scipio and Caesar whom they believed they could never emulate. Yet at this moment, with the adrenalin of battle still in his veins, the coin seemed spectral, like the walls they had just passed through, the colour sucked out of it, a thing of the past. He thought about what Arturus had said. If Rome were to survive as more than just a relic, she needed to plan ahead. Those coins of Valentinian seemed to say that, resplendent in gold, the images drawing on the strength of tradition but looking forward; here was an emperor in the venerated armour of the legionaries yet holding down a new enemy and raising the symbols of a new religion, of a new world order that could shape Rome for the future. He only hoped that the image of the emperor would not be belied by reality, something few could judge who had not been allowed into the emperor’s increasingly remote inner court in the palaces of Ravenna and Milan.

  The bishop was already being seasick over the stern of the galley, and the girl with the curly hair was watching him, her attention rapt, waiting to see what he would do with the coin. He thought for a moment, and then tossed the old silver coin far out to sea, back to join the detritus of history where it belonged. Now was the time for the soldiers of Rome to grasp their sword hilts and face a new enemy, not to wallow in the lost glories of the past. He stared at the girl, and then looked back at his men. His wound throbbed and he ached in every bone in his body, but the spray had invigorated him. He would take his place among the rowers as soon as the first man tired. It was going to be a long haul home.

  PART TWO

  ROME, ITALY

  AD 449

  5

  Flavius looked on with bemused fascination as the Goth infantry advanced in blocks, forming a stationary line on the high ground while the cavalry ranged up on either side of them. It was a classic manoeuvre, straight out of the textbooks, something that commanders had been taught to do since the wars against Hannibal. It was also wrong, so badly wrong that Flavius began to despair that he would ever get this particular set of future generals to desist from nocturnal distractions and do their homework. He sighed, and watched the Roman forces deploy slightly more accurately on the opposing hill, the seven legions occupying the crest, the lanciarii and the mattiarii, the mace-armed infantry, in the centre, the scutarii shielded cavalry in reserve, the sagittarii dispersed along the front. He would give them a few more minutes to puzzle out how this evenly matched deployment could possibly end in anything other than a battle of attrition and then, not for the first time, he would attempt to fill the yawning gaps in knowledge that had clearly not been helped by time spent in the taverns and brothels around the forum the night before.

  He stroked the four parallel white ridges on his right forearm, feeling the throb that came when the weather was hot or when he exercised, when the vein
s and arteries of his arm pulsed with blood and pressed against the hardened scar tissue. It had been nearly ten years since Carthage – two years of campaigning against the Ostrogoths in the north, two years of administration and training at the comitatenses headquarters outside Ravanna, and nearly six years now in Rome – but even so, the attack of the Alaunt war dogs that morning outside Carthage seemed as vivid as if it were yesterday, something he had relived for years afterwards in dreams that would leave him sitting stock upright in his bed, clutching his arm and bathed in sweat, unable to breathe or to scream. The nightmares were fewer now, but hearing a baying dog in the distance would still set him on edge, would send a trickle of sweat down his back. He looked again at the opposing armies. What he had experienced then could never be taught; it was something that those here today could only understand first-hand themselves when they too faced death in battle and when those who survived learned to live with the aftershock.

  ‘Flavius Aetius.’ Someone was shaking his arm. ‘What do we do next?’

  Flavius started, and stared at his cousin Quintus in the eyes. He suddenly remembered where he was, and turned back to the model on the table. ‘I’m sorry. I was about fifteen hundred miles away, thinking of my own experience of battle.’

  ‘Tell us about it,’ one of the boys piped up. ‘Were the Alans really as bad as all that? The only ones I’ve seen are farmers in Aquitaine, and they seem pretty tame to me.’

  ‘Another time,’ Flavius said, straightening himself up. ‘We have twenty minutes until the lesson is over. Thorismud will talk you through the battle.’

  The tall Goth nodded to him and took a wooden pointer from one of the boys. Thorismud had been Flavius’ sparring partner in the days when they themselves had been students in the schola twelve years before. He was the eldest son and heir of the Visigoth king Theodoric, once an ally but for several years now an enemy of Rome, and he had come under a flag of truce from the Visigoth stronghold of Tolosa in Gaul to discuss terms with Flavius’ uncle, the magister militum Aetius, seeking further grants of agricultural land and vineyards that Aetius had flatly turned down. Although the mission had been a failure, the terms of the truce allowed Thorismud and his retinue to stay a further day in Rome, and he had agreed to spend an hour sitting in on Flavius’ class in the schola that afternoon.

  ‘The Battle of Adrianople, near Constantinople, five days before the Ides of August, Anno Domini 376,’ he began, his voice deep and his Latin only slightly accented. ‘Who can tell me something about the conditions that day?’

  His request was met by silence, and Flavius looked at the sixteen officer candidates ranged around the table. Half of them were direct-entry cadets, teenagers like Quintus who had passed the entrance examinations, and the other half were men of optio and centurion rank who had been recommended for a commission by their limitanei and comitatenses commanders, the oldest of them in their mid-thirties. The younger cadets were overawed by Thorismud, and some of the older ones were visibly apprehensive, men who may have faced the Visigoths in battle and be nursing memories as vivid and terrifying as those that Flavius had endured from fighting the Vandals and Alans before Carthage.

  Flavius tapped his hand on the table. ‘Well?’

  Quintus cleared his throat. ‘It was hot.’

  ‘Good.’ Thorismud slapped his pointer into his hand. ‘Anything else?’

  Quintus answered again, his voice quavering. ‘And there was no water.’

  ‘Very good.’ Thorismud brought his pointer down hard on the table, cracking the end and shaking the blocks. ‘That’s what you don’t learn in these games of war. Standing in this cool room, nursing your hangovers and wondering what pox you picked up from the whores along the Tiber last night, you can’t be thinking like soldiers in battle, can you? Anyone with an aching head and bleary eyes can push blocks around a model and pretend they’re generals. But being a good commander is not just about tactics. It’s also about knowing what it’s like to be a soldier: what it’s like to feel exhausted, to feel hungry and thirsty, to feel disorientated, to feel let down by false expectations, to feel humiliated. If you don’t understand that, you can push around those blocks until Jupiter comes back to rule in Rome, but you still won’t win battles.’

  Quintus pointed at the model, his hand shaking slightly. ‘Before the battle, the Goths burnt the grass and crops, increasing the heat and reducing the visibility. It was already roastingly hot, sickeningly so. The emperor Valens marched his men for almost seven hours from the town of Adrianople towards the Goth encampment, arriving in early afternoon in the worst of the heat. At that time of year there were no streams and there was no other source of water. Men collapsed from dehydration even before the battle began, and others could barely move in their armour. That’s as far as I got in Ammianus Marcellinus’ account before the library shut,’ he said, looking ruefully around.

  ‘You mean before the taverns opened,’ Thorismud said, glaring at him.

  Another of the younger cadets suddenly pushed back his chair, lurched to a corner and threw up noisily, the smell filling the room. Flavius gritted his teeth, picked up his own pointer and pushed the line of red blocks around into a circle. ‘It was like this,’ he said. ‘The Goths had formed a wagon laager, in effect a fortification protecting their women and children and possessions, with rings of infantry encircling it and their cavalry positioned nearby. The Romans arrived exhausted and dehydrated, as Quintus said, but believing that theirs was the stronger force. It seems possible that Valens lost control of his men; we’ll never know, because he never made it out alive. My grandfather Gaudentius, who was at the battle on the Goth side, says that the Romans let passion rule, that on seeing the Goth army for the first time they remembered the devastation caused by the Goths to their land over the preceding years, and that they became enraged and charged without Valens’ order. Others say that dehydration and exhaustion made them delirious, unable to think straight and make rational decisions. To me that’s a good explanation of what happened next.’

  He pushed the blue Roman blocks down the valley and up to the wagon laager. ‘Leaving their vantage point on the adjacent hill, the Romans charged down the valley and up the slope towards the Goths, exhausting themselves even further in the process. Once there, they discovered that the laager was impregnable, and they were rebuffed every time they tried to attack it.’ He pushed the blue blocks back into the valley, and then pulled the thin red blocks representing Goth cavalry down towards them, leaving the circle of red blocks unaltered. ‘The Romans retreated in disarray, and as they did so the Goth cavalry charged down on them, followed by the infantry who by then knew they could safely leave the laager. Encumbered by their heavy chain armour and shields, the Romans were destroyed and the valley became a bloodbath. One estimate puts the number of Roman dead at twenty thousand, almost three-quarters of those who went into action that day.’

  ‘The greatest battle of modern times,’ Thorismud said. ‘The worst-ever defeat for Roman arms. A humiliation for all who call themselves soldiers – and I speak as a Goth, like Flavius on his paternal barbarian side a grandson of one of the victors.’

  ‘The Huns use wagon laagers,’ one of the older men said, his face stony as he stared at Thorismud. ‘I’ve seen it myself, in the far distance when the Huns advanced into Thrace. Instead of deploying their cavalry outside the laager like the Goths at Adrianople, they keep their mounted archers within the circle, launching them on the enemy lines when the time is right. It’s said that the tactic was developed by Attila himself.’

  At the mention of that name the atmosphere in the room changed, becoming tense, more focused, the pale faces of the younger cadets peering at Thorismud. ‘What do you think our chances are against him?’ Quintus said.

  ‘In open battle? Nil, unless you learn the lessons of Adrianople.’

  He glanced at Flavius, who turned to the class. ‘You are fortunate to have had Prince Thorismud instruct you. Now you will write me a ten-point su
mmary of the main lessons to be learned from Adrianople. Those who pass will go straight to the exercise yard for this week’s weapons demonstration with Macrobius, then they will go for a thorough cleansing in the Baths of Caracalla, entry fee courtesy of me, and then they will return here to prepare kit ready for infantry training on the Field of Mars. Those who fail will spend the entire evening with the monks in the Greek Library helping to rearrange the military history section. Wax tablets and pens are in the box under the table.’

  Quintus quickly pulled out the box and distributed the contents, and everyone hunched over their task. Flavius got up and accompanied Thorismud to the rear door of the chamber, and spoke quietly, out of earshot of the table. ‘I apologize for their state, my cousin Quintus especially. I could smell last night on his breath. He has the makings of a decent tribune, but if he fails his exam through carousing and drinking he brings dishonour on me, not just on himself.’

  Thorismud coughed. ‘He reminds me of someone I once knew.’

  Flavius looked exaggeratedly serious. ‘Who could you possibly mean?’

  ‘Do you remember that drinking contest by the Tiber? A cup of each vintage from Falernian to Campanian, until one of us dropped.’

  ‘I won.’

  ‘Those fancy Roman drinks didn’t suit my gut.’

  Flavius put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Until we meet again, Thorismud.’

  ‘Fighting against each other, or as allies.’

  ‘Do you think that’s possible? That Rome and the Visigoths could be allies again?’