The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  After passing inspection by the guards Flavius and Arturus went along a corridor and through a door into a hall almost as large as a law court, the wide windows letting in sunlight that lit up a row of tables in the centre. Around the walls below the windows were pinned-up charts and maps, one of them a continuous scroll that extended over two walls, and at the tables several dozen men were copying maps and annotating illustrations on large sheets of vellum and papyrus.

  One of the men saw them, waved and quickly made his way over – a white-bearded man in late middle age wearing the insignia of a senior fabri tribune. He slapped Flavius on the shoulder and immediately doubled over in pain, his hand on his back. ‘It doesn’t get any better,’ he exclaimed, letting the two men ease him onto a seat. ‘Too much time hunched over maps, not enough fresh air. It’s far too long since I saw active service.’

  ‘When was that?’ Arturus said.

  ‘Flavius can tell you. No decorations, no glory. But it taught me a thing or two about soldiering, something I tried to pass on in my years teaching the boys in the schola.’

  ‘Go on, Uago,’ Flavius said. ‘Arturus was given his commission as a foederati tribune in the field, so he never had the benefit of the schola and your experience.’

  Uago stared into the middle distance, his brows furrowed. ‘It was during the Berber rebellion in the fifteenth year of Honorius’ reign, nearly forty years ago now. I’d been among the first batch of tribunes to graduate from the schola, set up only the year before in the wake of Alaric’s sack of Rome. My first job with the fabri had been to help clear the rubble created by the Goths on the Capitoline Hill, when they had tried to pull down the ruins of the old temple. After that I volunteered for frontier service, and was posted as second-in-command of a fabri numerus on the edge of the desert in Mauretania Tingitana. The limitanei garrison had been depleted to make up numbers in the Africa comitatenses, and when the rebellion started we were remustered as infantry milites. It was hard campaigning, with many men falling to disease and exhaustion, and there were no battles, only brief violent skirmishes and chasing shadows in the dark. Towards the end we reverted to our role as fabri and were used to make roads, improve fortifications and dig wells, much more to my liking than hunting down rebels and burning villages. I discovered a fascination for survey and mapmaking, and that’s been my calling ever since.’

  ‘Forty years is a long time to be in the army,’ Arturus said.

  ‘Aetius dug me out of retirement when he wanted a detailed new map to be made showing Attila’s conquests. He gave me free rein to call in the best cartographers from Alexandria and Babylon, and I’ve had the copyists in my scriptoria working day and night to get the map ready to dispatch to the comitatenses and limitanei commanders.’

  ‘That’s what we’ve come to see,’ Arturus said. ‘Specifically, Illyrica and the river Danube, and the lands leading east to the Maeotic Lake.’

  Uago got up, took the walking stick that one of the fabri had discreetly handed him, and peered at Arturus intently. ‘An unusual destination for a British foederati commander,’ he said. ‘I am right about your origin, am I not? In my spare time I make a special study of lexicography and etymology, especially barbarian personal names.’

  ‘I am from the tribe of the Brigantes, from the line of Boudica, though my maternal grandmother was the Roman descendant of a legionary,’ Arturus replied. ‘My name is an ancient British patronymic meaning bear-king, from the time when bears roamed the forests of my land.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ Uago said, looking pleased. ‘I’d like to tap into your knowledge of British names. Over the years I’ve done the same with soldiers who have come here to consult my maps from all corners of the empire. Meanwhile, to your request.’ He pointed his stick at the scroll on the wall. ‘This is the Tabula Cursorum, an illustrated representation of the cursus publicus, the official road network of the empire. It was made by the monks of Arles under Honorius. Really it’s not a map at all, but a visual representation of a series of itineraries, and as an image it’s full of distortions, pointless embellishments and anachronisms, the kind of things that monks enjoy but most annoying for a cartographer like me. Here, from the bottom up, you can see southern Italy, the Adriatic Sea and the Dalmatian coast, with the mountains surrounding the river Danube schematically represented further inland. But I believe this will only partly suit your purpose. It will give you the distances and staging posts for the first part of a journey, from Ravenna or Rome along the roads and across the sea to a port such as Spoleto, but there is nothing depicted beyond the official roads. The tabula is designed for official travel and the postal service, not for those intent on covert missions beyond the frontiers.’

  ‘You assume much about our purpose,’ Arturus said.

  Uago looked around, making sure they were out of earshot of the others. ‘I know what it means when one of Aetius’ special tribunes, a man usually with a commission in the foederati, comes looking for maps of regions beyond the frontiers,’ he said quietly. ‘But I will provide all you need with no questions asked. I may be stuck in this room while you and the others are out in the field, but my maps provide the intelligence hub of the empire, and my loyalty to Aetius is unswerving. He was once my star pupil in the schola, and I now am his servant.’

  ‘Show us the new map,’ Flavius said.

  Uago backed away from the wall and pointed up at a mottled vellum sheet above the tabula, at a map depicted on it. ‘That one you’ll be familiar with, Flavius, the representation of the known world based on the Geographia of Ptolemy that I always had in my classroom in the schola. Arturus, you will of course identify your home land of Britannia to the left, with a representation of Wales and the western peninsula containing the tin lands, the place where Aetius tells me that most of the fighting is taking place between the Britons and the Saxons. As a visual representation of the world it is far more satisfactory than the tabula, but it lacks the precise measurements between known points, with their orientations, that would allow it to be used as an accurate tool for navigators and travellers. What we really needed was a marriage between the two, between the Ptolemaic map and the itinerary as represented in the tabula. That’s what my fabri have been trying to perfect over the last months, and I believe we now have it.’

  He led them to the tables, and for the first time Flavius saw the maps that the men had been copying out. In the centre was a large map, close to the Ptolemaic representation but covered with a latticework of triangular shapes; the men around it were making reduced copies using measuring tools, and others were reproducing sections of it in more detail. Uago walked along the line and stopped beside one of the men, who put down his stylus and moved out of the way. ‘Here’s what you want,’ he said. ‘You can see the river Danube running inland parallel to the Dalmatian coast, through the gorge known as the Iron Gates and then east towards the Black Sea. Upstream from the Iron Gates it flows from its source past the great steppe-lands of Scythia, the Hun heartland.’

  ‘The Hun world has always been difficult to define, and that’s one of its strengths, strategically speaking,’ Arturus said. ‘The borders are porous and ill-defined, really just broad swathes of grassland where few, if any, people live, and even to the west the river Danube is as much a crossing point as a boundary. I don’t think Attila cares very much about borders, and that’s a huge difference from the Roman strategy. Attila has a concept of homeland, and has his citadel, but the Hun empire is wherever he decides to do battle, and consequently it can change from one month to the next.’

  Uago nodded. ‘It’s a cartographer’s nightmare. We like our boundaries and provinces. With the Huns, you can only put broad arrows on maps, slashing across all of those fixed points and delimiting lines that we hold so dear.’

  Flavius put his fingers on the map, measuring distances. ‘According to the scale, the distance from the Iron Gates to the beginning of the steppes is about three thousand stades – say one hundred and thirty miles,’ he
said. ‘That would normally be a route march of a week, but we’d have to do it by river, on the Danube.’

  ‘Against the current,’ Uago added. ‘But if you’re lucky you might have a southerly wind and sail against the flow, as boatmen do on the Nile in Egypt.’

  Arturus stared at the map. ‘Can we have a copy of this?’

  ‘You can take this one.’ He unpinned and rolled up the vellum, checking first to make sure that the ink was dry. ‘Show it to nobody else, and return it here in person when you have finished with it. Soon, if Aetius approves it, this new world map will be common currency, but until then it’s gold dust in the hands of a hostile strategist who might have his eyes set on conquest.’

  ‘Understood,’ Arturus said, tucking the map inside his tunic. ‘And now we must go.’

  Uago led them towards the door, and then stopped and stood for a moment in obvious pain, leaning on his stick. ‘If you do get there,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t bring back a Hun or two, could you? My own Goth dialect from my father’s side is close to Scythian, but I’m having the devil of a time making a concordance with the Hun vocabulary. To hear it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, would help, though it really is the most impossible language, you know. I’ve been thinking of creating a universal language to get over these troubles. If everyone spoke in the same tongue then perhaps we’d have fewer wars. Another project, if Aetius ever lets me go.’

  Flavius grinned and held the older man’s shoulder. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

  Arturus gripped Uago’s hand. ‘Before we go, I’m curious. What was it that you told the young tribune candidates based on your field experience?’

  Uago paused. ‘I may not have been in any battles, but I’ve been around long enough to know that the glories of war are transient. I’ve seen generations of young men I’ve taught go off to war, high-spirited young bloods when they set out, too often pale shadows when they return, if they return at all. As soon as one generation passes through the charnel house of battle the next one is raring to go. I told them what I learned in the desert, that war is not about glory but is about hard slog and perseverance, about looking out for your comrades. The memory of that is greater for me than any regret I might have over missed laurels and decorations, mere transient glories.’

  Arturus nodded. ‘Wise advice, tribune. Salve, until next time.’

  He and Flavius began to walk off, but Uago called after them. ‘One last thing.’

  Flavius turned around. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I was meaning to ask. During your jaunt in Carthage, you didn’t happen to pick up any of the leaves that the Berbers call khat, did you? I acquired something of a taste for it when I was in Mauretania. It might help to ease the pain in my back.’

  ‘My centurion Macrobius had some, but that’s long gone. We had to leave Africa in something of a hurry.’

  ‘Pity. Perhaps I’ll have to go there myself.’

  ‘There’d be the small matter of a Vandal army to deal with, and a not entirely sympathetic warlord called Gaiseric.’

  Uago gestured back into the room, a twinkle in his eye. ‘You remember what I said about my men all those years ago in Mauretania? They were soldiers first, fabri second. My men here are of the same stock. I think a numerus of fabri could handle a small barbarian annoyance like Gaiseric.’

  Flavius grinned and waved. ‘Salve, tribune.’

  They made their way out of the building and onto the street below, the column of Trajan rearing up again in front of them. ‘Rome needs more soldiers like Uago,’ Arturus said.

  ‘The fabri officers are a rare breed, my uncle Aetius says,’ Flavius replied. ‘Devoted to their work, meticulous, with a keen eye for detail, and loyally quiet about the failings of their superiors. When he fields a comitatenses army he always has a fabri tribune as his senior staff officer.’

  ‘He’s going to need to recruit the best he can for the war that lies ahead.’

  ‘Where are we going now?’

  ‘We will pay our respects to Valentinian. After that, we’re going to a secret place where you will learn of our plan. By tomorrow evening, all going well, you and Macrobius and I will be heading east, about to embark on the most perilous mission that any of us has ever undertaken.’

  Flavius stared ahead, his mind racing, conscious of passing the old Senate House and beginning to climb the steps towards the imperial palace. It had been almost eight years since he had last been on campaign, time usefully spent instructing at the schola, but he was itching to be in the field again. He began to think of everything he would need to do before leaving, of people to see and equipment to organize, of the old gladius that Arturus had given him after the retreat from Carthage, the blade to be sharpened and oiled. He felt his breathing quicken, and his heart pound.

  He could hardly wait.

  10

  Flavius stood to attention with his back against the wall among a long line of other officers, from the magister of the Rome comitatenses to the left near the imperial throne to the most junior tribunes to the right, men newly commissioned from the schola who had not yet been assigned a unit. The line was mirrored on the opposite wall by officers of the foederati, among them Arturus, inconspicuous alongside Goths, Suebi, Saxons and other foederati who now made up more than half of the Roman officer corps, not counting those in the regular army like Flavius himself, who had barbarian blood in their veins. It was an image of modern Rome and her army that would have seemed inconceivable at the time when Trajan’s Column was made, when the distinction between Roman and barbarian had been cut so clearly into stone; yet it was also an army arrayed more strongly than ever before against another barbarian force from beyond the frontiers, a threat that would have been understood all too well by Trajan and the other Caesars who had first taken Rome into the forests and steppes of the North.

  A pair of trumpets sounded, blaring from the entrance hall, and those in the line who had been rustling and restless became silent. They were all dressed in their finest tunics, resplendent with insignia of rank and service decorations, yet by order of the eunuch Heraclius they were without sword belts or weapons, a reasonable precaution against assassination, yet somehow also deliberately demeaning, as if Heraclius were projecting his own emasculation on men he regarded with almost total contempt. The great velarium that covered the roof flapped in the breeze, and Flavius saw the awning tighten where the sailors who managed it were ratcheting up the retaining ropes from outside. They were within the old private hippodrome of the imperial palace on the Palatine, a space that had once been open to the heavens but was now concealed beneath the awning; at the far end, the imperial box that had once overlooked the Circus Maximus, the place where the Emperor could be seen by almost the entire population of Rome, was now walled over so that it had become yet another inward-looking throne room, a place where the emperor could preside over a world that was almost completely artificial and divorced from the people he was meant to rule. Despite his years in Ravenna and Rome and his proximity to Aetius, Flavius himself had never seen the emperor in the flesh before; realizing this only served to enhance the otherworldliness of this place, as if they were all part of a stage set in which those who were to parade in front of them were mere actors whose personas would fall away as soon as they walked out of sight.

  The first in the procession appeared, the Bishop of Rome, having just been awarded draconian powers by the emperor Valentinian, his decrees now carrying supreme authority as the word of God, with no others allowed. He was a corpulent man, carrying the imperial orb and crozier, his fingers crammed with gold rings and his jewel-encrusted robe held off the ground by a dozen small boys, an image about as far removed from Jesus of Nazareth as Flavius could imagine. Behind him came a cluster of Valentinian’s Egyptian catamites, slim young men naked except for loincloths, their dark skin glistening with oil, and then fifty of his ferocious Suebi bodyguard forming a square around the imperial retinue. Within the square Flavius could see the emperor himse
lf, instantly recognizable from the image on his coins, holding his hands up high, with on either side two elaborately coiffured women whom Flavius knew must be his sister Honoria and his wife Eudoxia.

  Flavius may never have seen Valentinian in the flesh before, but ten years after gazing at the image of the emperor on those gold solidi in front of the walls of Carthage, he knew he had been right to have his doubts. Superficially Valentinian looked the part, his face square-jawed like the soldier-emperors of the past, but Flavius knew that it was no more than a façade, the face of an emperor who had never once led his army into battle or reviewed them on the parade ground; even the legionary armour he appeared to be wearing was a sham, the breastplate made of puffed-out golden cloth and the chainmail from woven strands of shimmering silk. Like the bishop, his eyes and those of the two ladies were looking upwards, not even glancing at the lines of officers, a seemingly devotional act that Flavius knew in truth represented a sense of their own divine status, an emperor and his sycophants as divorced from God as they were from their own people.

  Bringing up the rear, surrounded by boys throwing flower petals, came the eunuch Heraclius, grossly corpulent, taller even than the Goths, the rolling fat of his chin and stomach wobbling as he went forward, skipping and gesticulating as if he were delighting in a garden, gasping and clapping his hands and singing snatches of verse in his high-pitched voice. It was a spectacle beyond farce, repulsive to a soldier’s eyes, and yet this was not a man with eyes that were aloof like the others – his shifted constantly, staring, absorbing what he saw, catching Flavius’ eyes in a split second that unnerved him, the piggy black orbs inscrutable and frightening. In that moment Flavius understood what scared even Aetius about the eunuchs – the ability that their singularity gave them to operate outside normal parameters, with motivations that were unfamiliar and disarming to those trying to undermine their power.