The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  Aetius cracked a smile. ‘Well then, Britain could be for you. And Arturus has the makings of a king. You could do worse.’

  ‘He needs all the help he can get if he is to succeed against the Saxons.’

  ‘Does he still have that Hun woman with him? Erecan?’

  ‘She left with him for Britain after we made our escape from the Hun capital across the Danube. I have heard little of them since.’

  Aetius shook his head. ‘A granddaughter of Mundiuk. A daughter of Attila. That would give any enemy pause for thought.’

  ‘Do you remember when you used to teach me archery when I was a boy on the Field of Mars? I never believed your stories of Hun archers being able to pin together two enemies through the head with a single arrow, until I saw her do it with my own eyes.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ Aetius said. ‘That sword. What will you do with it?’

  ‘The sword of Attila? Its day is over. It is time for new kings, and new swords. But by rights it should go to the next in line, to the Hun warrior who will perpetuate the blood line of Attila.’

  ‘This also is why you go to Britain?’

  ‘Until then the story will be unfinished. It is my last duty to Rome, begun when you sent me east to find Attila and the sword beyond the Danube.’

  They watched as Thorismud and his brother swept sand over the ground of their father’s grave and then picked up the torches and hurled them into the river, extinguishing the last of the flames and plunging the bank into darkness. A horse whinnied and then a dog howled, a thin, piercing noise from the direction of the battlefield that echoed across the river banks. Flavius stepped back and raised his right arm. ‘Ave atque vale, Flavius Aetius Gaudentius, magister militum. I salute you.’

  Aetius raised his hand in return. ‘Godspeed, Flavius Aetius Secundus, last true tribune of Rome.’

  EPILOGUE

  Britannia, Winter, AD 455

  Flavius cupped his hands and blew into them, feeling the warmth of his breath against his palms and watching the condensation swirl away above him. The snow was falling harder now, but he could still make out the craggy peaks that rose around them like a great amphitheatre, opening only where they had come up the rocky trail the evening before from the valley to the east. They had passed lake after lake, each one higher than the next and joined by rushing torrents of white water, the edges frozen in cascades of ice that lapped the trail and made the going treacherous for horses and men alike. Finally they had reached the highest one of all, the pool that Arturus called Glaslyn, its dark waters just visible below him through the swirl of snow and morning mist.

  Like most of the others, Flavius had spent a fitful night curled up under his cloak inside the entrance to one of the copper mines that peppered the slopes, as protection against the mountain more than against any Saxon foolish enough to have followed them up to this place. Climbing in the howling wind the night before, he had been astonished to see chunks of rock come flying off the peaks, and had cowered with the others behind a jagged slab as an avalanche of scree came tumbling down around them. The Britons told him that a giant stalked these crags, a monster called Rhitta Gawr, trapped up there since the time when sheets of ice had covered the mountains and shattered the rock, leaving jagged chunks for him to hurtle down when the storm winds stoked his rage and he crashed and bellowed around the peaks.

  Macrobius, though, had told a different story, passed down from soldiers of the legion who had once occupied the ruined fort at the head of the valley, built there in the time of the early Caesars to provide protection for the miners. They said that when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity the war god Mars had stormed off in disgust to this place, and it was he who paced the peaks and clashed the rocks together, tossing them down into the valley below. Since Constantine had spurned him, no Roman soldier who came this way was safe from his rage. The men in the fort had refused to come up from the valley any longer, and the mines were abandoned. When Flavius had heard the story, he was bowed down against the wind as they all trudged up the path, the crags looming forbiddingly above, and he had pulled his heavy woollen cloak around him, concealing the last vestiges of his past allegiance, the heavy cibanius sword belt that his uncle Aetius had given him in Rome a lifetime ago. He felt distant from Christ out here, and he was willing to give the story the benefit of the doubt. For once, he had felt pleased no longer to be fighting for Rome.

  Now Macrobius made his way up the slope from the cooking fires, carrying a full skin in one hand and a leg of cooked meat in the other. He clambered over the rock in front of the mineshaft and sat down heavily on the loose slate beside Flavius, handing him the skin. ‘Weak beer and mutton. It’s all they’ve got.’

  Flavius unstoppered the skin and took a deep draught, raising the skin high. It was ice cold, but refreshing. He set the skin down and eyed the mutton. ‘Do you remember the venison we ate before Carthage? Close your eyes and imagine it’s that.’

  Macrobius took the skin and drank noisily, gulping the beer down and spilling it over his beard. He stoppered the skin and wiped his mouth. ‘If we’re lucky, we’ll be having venison again before too long. The last of the warrior bands of the Britons came in a few hours ago, and Arturus is conferring with them now. Rumour is that we’ll be going back down to the borderlands and the valley of the river Dee, to the old hunting forest of the Twentieth Legion. We’ll feast like kings.’

  Flavius pursed his lips. ‘If we’re going there, it won’t be deer that we’re hunting.’

  Macrobius looked dejectedly at the meat. ‘Only barbarians eat sheep.’

  Flavius squinted at him. ‘Barbarians? Have you looked at yourself recently? That pigtail is long enough to tether a wagon, and your beard would do any German warlord proud.’

  ‘It was your uncle Aetius’ advice, remember? Blend in with the natives, or someone will single you out. Anyway, you can hardly talk.’

  Flavius cracked a grin. ‘Well then, if we’re barbarians after all, we can eat sheep. I’m starving.’

  Macrobius took the leg of mutton in both hands and ripped it in half, handing one part to Flavius and noisily eating his own, the fat spurting into his beard to join the beer. A horse whinnied loudly, the sound echoing around the mountainsides, and he got up, still eating. ‘Time to tend the animals,’ he said, his mouth full. He lurched forward, his scabbard tip clattering on the rocks, and headed down to the jumble of boulders by the lakeshore where they had corralled the horses for the night; the horses had been terrified in the storm and had refused to come into the tunnels, and Macrobius had stayed with them behind what little shelter the boulders could afford. Flavius could just make out Arturus and the dozen or so British chieftains further along the lakeshore, gathered around the circular slab of rock that was the ancient conferring place for those who rallied here. Flavius was not among them by choice. He was Arturus’ battle companion, not his adviser, and Macrobius was Arturus’ horse master, and nothing more. Flavius’ role as a strategist and war tactician had ended on the Catalaunian Plains, the moment when he had handed his badges of rank to Aetius and walked away from the Roman army for ever. Out here, he was a mere soldier, and another man was king.

  He tore the last bit of gristle off the bone with his teeth and let the fat drip on the blade of his sword that was lying across his knees where he had been burnishing it when Macrobius had come up. He rubbed the grease into the blade and then turned it over, making sure to get it into the gap at the hilt where the damp air had caused the steel to rust. He wiped off the excess with the hem of his cloak and then ran his finger along the dents that had been too deep for the grinding stone to remove. He stared down at their route from the valley, marked now in white where the snow had stuck on the unbroken ground of the trail between the tumble of rocks. The four years since the Catalaunian Plains had been a time of almost unbroken fighting, and they had been continuously on the move. Of those men from the original numerus who had chosen to follow him and Macrobius ac
ross the sea to Britannia, only a handful now remained. They were no longer Roman limitanei, but were knights of a new liege, battle-hardened, Arturus’ chosen guard, each man the equal of any champion the Saxons could throw against them. It had been a war of duels, of skirmishes, of bloody ambushes as they and the other warrior bands of the Britons had fallen back before the relentless advance of the invaders, the survivors joining together under Arturus’ leadership as word spread that he had been accepted by the chieftains as their overlord, their king.

  And now in this desolate mountain stronghold they had reached the end of the trail. Further west lay Mona, the ancient island of the Druids, flat and indefensible, and then Hibernia; beyond that was only open ocean, the edge of the world. They had reached the last place where the Britons who had resisted Rome four hundred years earlier had holed up, and now Arturus and his men faced the same fateful decision as their forebears: whether to stay in these mountains, in this place that no invader could subdue, to see a future for their children only under the baleful eye of the god of these crags, or to turn and sally forth, to use the few hundred men of their bands to try what had never been tried before – to confront the Saxons in pitched battle using tactics of the Romans that the enemy had not yet experienced. The decision was being made now by those gathered at the lakeside around the circular slab. But Flavius knew which course Arturus would take. He would not disappear into history like the last of the British warriors four hundred years ago, living like trolls in the mountains, forever on the move, always hunted. Those were Arturus’ ancestors, but so were the Roman soldiers who had come to Britain and married British women, and Flavius knew it was Arturus’ Roman blood that would win the day. If they were to go down it would be as soldiers on the field of battle, holding their ground alongside the shadows of their Roman ancestors, the legionaries and milites of a thousand years of warfare, a history that could not end with the last of them turning away from their rightful place as warriors sworn to fight to the death to protect their honour and that of their comrades.

  He stared out into the swirl of snow. Four years since the Catalaunian Plains. The affairs of Rome seemed like ancient history now, as remote as the great events of the Punic Wars that he had read about as a boy in the books of Polybius and Livy. For a long time after arriving in Britannia they had heard little news, and nothing first hand, only rumours from captured Gothic mercenaries who had crossed the sea to Britain to fight alongside the Saxons. And then his cousin Quintus, his former student in the schola in Rome, had joined them after a perilous journey from Italy, and had been killed only a week ago while single-handedly holding off a Saxon charge in the bloody skirmish near Viroconium that had finally pushed Arturus west through the mountains to this place. Quintus’ news had shown that Flavius had been well advised to leave Rome when he did. The hated eunuch Heraclius had persuaded Valentinian that Aetius coveted the imperial purple, and together the two men had caught Aetius unawares and stabbed and bludgeoned him to death. Flavius had known that Aetius would one day fall foul of court intrigue, but to die in such a way at the hands of men who had never once seen an enemy in battle was an ignominious end for a Roman soldier, for the finest general Rome had produced for generations and the last hope for the western empire.

  Flavius had bowed his head when he heard the news. What had happened after Aetius’ death had seemed as inevitable as the cycle of the stars. Aetius’ Hun bodyguards Optila and Thrastilla, Erecan’s former guards who had become fiercely loyal to their new master, had wreaked bloody vengeance, murdering Valentinian as he was practising archery on the Field of Mars outside Rome. They had been acting out of loyalty to Aetius, not Attila, but it had seemed preordained that Hun warriors should bring down the last Roman emperor in the West who mattered; after Valentinian they could only be weaklings and puppets. Fearing for her own life after his murder, the empress Eudoxia had offered herself and her two daughters to the Vandal king Gaiseric. In an incredible twist of fate, the barbarian whose army had given Flavius his first taste of battle more than a quarter of a century before outside Carthage had now been invited to the gates of Rome itself. It was as if the goddess Roma, expelled by the priests and bishops of Christ, had risen one last time from her place of banishment and beckoned Rome towards self-destruction, refusing to allow her city to diminish further but opening a crack in the underworld for her to be swallowed up and for her thousand-year ascendancy over the affairs of men to end.

  And Quintus had also brought news of Attila. The man who had yearned to die by the sword, whom Flavius had heard with his own ears bellowing for it on the Catalaunian Plains, had also met an ignominious end, drowning in his own blood after a haemorrhage brought on by too much drink while celebrating yet another marriage. After retreating from the battle he had regrouped his Hun survivors and marched on Rome, sacking the towns of northern Italy on the way, but his army had been a spent force and the warriors had turned back to their steppe fastness beyond the Danube. Attila may have failed to conquer the western empire by force of arms, but he had won in the end. Spies who had watched his strava, his funeral celebrations, had said that he was buried with a vast treasure of Roman gold coins, all of the tribute that he had exacted from the emperors, sucking the coffers of Rome dry. The loss of that gold had impoverished the empire, making it impossible for the emperors in Ravenna to pay the army. After that, Flavius knew that it could only be a matter of time before the Goths, Attila’s strongest remaining vassals, swept into Italy and deposed the last of the rulers who had succeeded Valentinian, the puppet emperors who were overseeing the final disintegration of the Roman army in the West.

  Flavius wrapped his cloak around him, remembering how he had done the same all those years ago on that last frigid morning outside Carthage before the Vandals had swept in. He remembered Arturus that morning too, how he had seen him for the first time walking out of a dust cloud in the desert, and then how they had predicted the future together as they had waited for the ships to evacuate them from the burning city. History had proved them right in one crucial respect. From being marauding forest raiders, the Vandals in their new port city had become skilled navigators and warriors of the sea. Just as Rome had once learned from the barbarians, adapting their weapons and tactics, so the barbarians had learned from Rome, taking the one strength that everyone had thought was unassailable and making it their own. For the first time since Pompey the Great had quashed piracy half a millennium before, Rome had lost control of the Mediterranean. Within a few decades of his first encounter with the sea, crossing from Spain to Africa in his march on Carthage, Gaiseric had become the strongman of the oceans, adapting the tactics of forest raiding to the sea, avoiding fleet actions with the remnant Roman navy but using his fast liburnians to harass and deplete the Roman ships in hit-and-run encounters in which the Vandals more often than not came off victorious.

  With Attila dead and the Vandal war fleet poised off the Tiber, it would be Gaiseric, and not Attila, who would march through the gates of Rome, but it was a finale made inevitable when Attila had blown the horn of war and led his horsemen over the Danube a decade before, taking Rome’s eyes off the threat from the sea and setting in train the collapse of the western empire. For all Flavius knew, it could have happened already; the eternal city and all the symbolism that had driven him as a young man might now be burnt and in ruin.

  He remembered something else that Arturus had said at Carthage. What goes around, comes around. The loss of the rich agricultural hinterland of Africa to the Vandals had fatally weakened Rome, just as six hundred years before the loss of Africa to the Romans had doomed Punic Carthage. He remembered a volume he had seen as a boy in the library in Rome, a collection of Sibylline utterances that predicted the fall of Carthage once again, and that Rome would pay a price for her devastation of the city by Scipio and his army all those centuries ago. Flavius had learned not to believe in pagan prophecies; it was men, and not gods, who decided the fate of cities, and the game of war was not some divin
e whimsy but a matter of hard strategy and tactics, involving the balance of power and decisions, right or wrong, made by men. With Gaiseric now on the doorstep of Rome, one thing seemed certain. War with Carthage all those centuries ago had made Rome great; now, with Carthage as the headquarters for the final barbarian assault on Rome, the final act in that conflict had broken her.

  Flavius sheathed his sword and stood up. He ducked inside the tunnel entrance and retrieved his saddlebag, slinging it over his shoulder and going back outside to stand on the rim of rocks thrown out by the miners. Through the snow he could see movement by the lakeside. The chieftains who had been sitting around the circular slab had left, some of them heading up the slopes to their men and others going over to the horses. Around him, Flavius could see men stirring at the other mineshaft entrances, and closer to the lakeside he saw men who had been huddled around the cooking fires for warmth beginning to gather their weapons and belongings. Macrobius was leading a mottled grey horse along the path towards the slab, and the other dozen or so horses that were all they had left were kicking and stomping on the pathway, each one held by a boy and awaiting its rider. Beyond the slab Flavius could make out Arturus and another figure standing by the shore, looking out over the lake. He knew that they were waiting for him. It was time.