tall, fair children laughed.
He was about to advance towards them, teeth clenched, when he felt Serena’s hand on his shoulder, turning him gently but firmly back towards the spectacle parading before them.
As General Stilicho passed by, grave on his fine white horse, he turned and bowed to Princess Galla, and managed also to catch the eye of his wife: the slightest smile passed between them.
Stilicho was interrupted by Uldin’s voice at his side, asking in jagged and broken Latin who was the boy on the steps with the bandaged eye. Stilicho glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of him, just as he vanished from view. He turned back and smiled broadly.
‘That is Attila, son of Mundzuk, son of-’
‘The son of my son. I knew him.’ Uldin, too, grinned broadly. Then he asked, ‘What hostages do we have in return?’
‘A lad called Aetius – the same age as Attila, and the oldest son of one Gaudentius, master-general of the cavalry.’
The King of the Huns glanced sideways at Stilicho. ‘The same Gaudentius who…?’
‘So rumour has it,’ said Stilicho. ‘But you know about rumour.’
Uldin nodded. ‘Why is his eye bandaged? The son of Mundzuk?’
Stilicho didn’t know. ‘He is always getting himself into scrapes,’ he shrugged. ‘My young wolf-cub,’ he added softly, more to himself than Uldin. Then he wiped the affectionate smile from his face, and reassumed the expression of soldierly gravity that befitted the dignity of a general at a Roman triumph.
Somewhere among the triumph rode the emperor himself, on an immaculate, plumed white mare: young Honorius in his robes of purple and gold. But few people noticed. He made little impression.
From the Palatine steps, Princess Galla gazed out over the triumph.
After the procession, and the interminable speeches and eulogies, and the solemn service of thanksgiving to God in the Church of St Peter, there were triumphal games in the Colosseum.
As with the closing of the pagan temples by Emperor Theodosius a generation or two earlier, and the banning of blood sacrifices, the Christians had on many occasions tried to bring the games to an end. This was not on account of the cruelty so much as because the crowd derived too much base pleasure from the spectacle; and also because, on the days when the games were held, so many rouged and painted whores congregated beneath the arches of the Colosseum, pouting their lips and baring their wanton breasts and thighs at passers-by, that a Christian man hardly knew where to look. And as for a Christian lady. ..
Only four years before, in the year of Our Lord 404, a certain eastern monk called Telemachus, with all the glittering-eyed fanaticism of his kind, had thrown himself into the arena from the steps above, in protest at the disgusting spectacle taking place. The rabble, true to form, promptly stoned him to death where he knelt. For they did love their sports and games, the common people. But later, with that fickleness of mind and heart which is typical of the unwashed and unlettered multitude, they cried out their sorrow and repentance for what they had done. And the youthful and impressionable Emperor Honorius promptly issued a decree that all games were henceforth abolished.
Unfortunately, like so many of his decrees, this one was widely ignored. Soon enough the games had crept back into the arena, and the crowd’s appetite for blood and spectacle was renewed. And on this day in August, only four years later, it was Emperor Honorius himself who declared the triumphal games open.
Some criminals were made to dress up as peasants, and kill each other with pitchforks. A man who had raped his young daughter was tied to a stake and Caledonian hunting dogs were set on him, to devour his genitals while he was still alive – the crowd especially appreciated that one. There was a long and bloody fight between a huge forest bison and a Spanish bear. The bison was killed eventually, but the bear had to be dragged from the arena on a travois and was no doubt despatched in the cells below. There were no longer gladiatorial combats, however, since they had been abolished for good, as unbefitting to a Christian empire. Nor were there elephants to be slaughtered, for Africa had been ransacked over four long centuries by Rome, and the vast herds that had once roamed Libya and Mauritania could be found no more. It was said that if you wanted elephants now, you had to travel south many thousands of miles over the Great Desert, and into the unknown heart of Africa; but everyone knew that that was impossible. And there were no fierce tigers left in the mountains of Armenia, no lions or leopards in the mountains of Greece, where Alexander the Great had hunted them as a boy, seven centuries before. They, too, had been trapped, caged and shipped to Rome for the games; and all were gone.
4
That night, after the Huns had departed to their temporary camp beyond the walls of the city, a great feast was held for Emperor Honorius and his glorious victory over the armies of Rhadagastus.
The vast colonnaded dining hall of the palace was filled with couches arranged round a long central spread of tables, with as many as three hundred guests in proud and self-congratulatory attendance.
The hostage children were all commanded to attend: Hegemond and Beremond, the two plump Burgundian boys; the tall, fair, quick-witted, laughing Franks; the two slothful Vandal princes, Beric and Genseric; and all the rest. Attila sat scowling in their midst, none of them daring to come too near him. Even the fierce way he handled a fruit-knife frightened them.
Nearby, to the boy’s solace, were Serena and Stilicho. But it was Count Heraclian – flatterer, charmer, true- born Roman of ancient descent, and outstanding military incompetent – who found the highest favour with the emperor, sitting much nearer to the head of the room than Stilicho. At the end of the hall, on a raised dais of rich green Egyptian marble, were two huge couches of dazzling white and gold, upholstered in purple; and on them reclined the imperial brother and sister, Galla and Honorius. Honorius ate a great deal, his sister little. Their drinking patterns exhibited much the same difference in temperament.
The food and wine were magnificent. There were oysters brought all the way from fog-bound Britain, kept cool in iced sea-water during transit, and now laid out in little osier panniers still fronded with glossy green seaweed. There were the finest garum sauces imported from Bithynia and Gades; and exquisite offerings such as honey-roast peacock, boiled thrush, camels’ trotters, and a ragout of nightingales’ brains. Many of the guests cooed with delight over these fabulous delicacies, as did the other hostage children, feeling greatly privileged to be sampling such fare. The Hun boy however, ill-mannered to the core, took one taste of the Spanish flamingoes’ brain pate on a little sliver of soft wheaten bread, and spat it out again in disgust. Even Stilicho heard the noise of his revolted hawking from where he sat, and, turning round, saw what had happened. He turned back quickly, stifling a grin.
There were dolphin fishballs, boar boiled in sea-water, squid sausages, and those greatest of culinary rarities, deer’s-milk cheese, hare’s-milk cheese, and even rabbit’s-milk cheese; which, no doubt in the interest of several guests later that night, was said to be beneficial in counteracting diarrhoea.
There were red-mullet roes on beds of nasturtium leaves, and rams’ testicles, and moray eels in fermented anchovy sauce; there was ewe’s-placenta-and-simnel cake, jellyfish omelettes, and slivers of smoked crane, from birds which had been blinded early in life so that they would grow all the fatter. There were sows’ nipples in tuna brine, and auroch’s penis in a pepper and mulberry sauce. There were roast geese that had been force-fed figs for the last three months of their lives, and there was a rich pate made from the liver of a pig that had been drowned in red wine. And the wines themselves! There was Pucinum, from the Tergestine Gulf, and sweet Marino, from the Alban Hills. There was a rich ruby Chian (dangerously heady), a twelve-year-old Numentian, and even a Falernian, of the world-renowned Opimian vintage, as the label on the neck testified: almost one hundred years old, and, to everyone’s agreement, only now reaching its best.
‘Sir?’ asked a slave, extending a bottle towards Stilicho.
The general shook his head. ‘Water.’
The imperial cooks, all one thousand of them, had excelled themselves in hard work and ingenuity. True to the Roman fashion, they had taken immense pains to disguise one kind of food amusingly as another. How the guests’ laughter tinkled to the gilt-and-painted ceiling, when they realised that what they had taken to be a pigeon,
