princess standing right behind them. The warm wine he was swallowing came painfully back up his throat.
Galla leant forward and plucked a fried lark from the silver dish beside them.
‘Pray continue,’ she said, smiling sweetly, as she snapped the little bird’s legbones in two.
She arranged further business with her head chamberlain, who nodded and departed soon after. Returning to the imperial dais, she noticed that, amid the hubbub of the hostage children, the Hun brat was nowhere to be seen.
She summoned another attendant, who told her that he had been excused.
‘How long ago?’
‘Well,’ stammered the attendant, a runnel of sweat coursing down his brow, ‘some while ago now.’
‘Go and get him.’
The attendant searched the lavatories high and low. There was no sign of Attila. He made his way back to his cell in the slave quarters, knowing his time at the palace was ended, and prepared for the worst.
The Hun boy was by now moving stealthily around the Great Court, in the cool green shadows of the Dolphin Fountain.
The palace was no easier to break out of than to break into. But Attila had planned his escape with meticulous care, patiently observing every movement of the palace guards over this past year of his captivity, every locking and unlocking of the gates, and picking up every whispered password. Despite his native ferocity, he could be patient when need be. His father, Mundzuk, had always told him that patience was one of the great virtues of all nomad peoples. ‘Nothing can hurry the sun,’ he would say. The wide-wandering Huns were certainly good at waiting, and the boy himself had all the patience and rhythm of the nomad. Useless to struggle against the sandstorm – but the moment the sandstorm ceased you could take your chance. Seize it in your fierce hands for it might not come again. The Romans were like men trying to move the sands of the desert, like the sands of the Takla Makan when the east wind blew – and in the night the wind came and blew the sand back again. Their work would never be done.
The boy had also worked out the rules governing the frequency with which the palace password was changed, and felt nothing but scorn at how easy it was. From the kalends to the ides of each month, the password was changed at noon; and from the ides back to the next kalends, it was changed at midnight. In other words, eavesdrop on the password used just after midnight in the second half of any month, and it would get you through any gate in the palace until the following midnight.
He had even worked out the encryption system commonly used around the palace, and, again, was scornful at its laziness and complacency: like a Greek merchant over-confident of the safety of his ships at sea, even in the stormy, dog-star month of October.
It was based on the encryption system that Julius Caesar himself had devised for his military communications. Perhaps those hours and tedious days at the hands of his wretched pedagogue, Demetrius of Tarsus, during which Attila was instilled with the rudiments of Roman history and culture, and therefore, supposedly, with an appropriate respect and reverence for the empire – perhaps those lessons hadn’t been wasted after all.
During August, A, U, G, S, and T were used to represent A, B, C, D and E – and then the rest of the alphabet was shifted five letters down against the code alphabet accordingly. In August, ‘Caesar’ was written ‘Gatpao’. The following month, the first seven letters would change to S, E, P, T, M, B and R, and ‘Caesar’ would be written ‘Psmosn’.
The boy worked all this out in secret, by listening from shadowy corners, by picking up scraps of paper, by brooding in his loneliness and solitude, like a wolf, or a spider. Like the slow-moving Iron River of Scythia for which, some said, he was named.
And all the while that he was breaking the palace code system in secret, his irascible Greek pedagogue was beating him regularly for being slow-witted over his books.
As well as these more intellectual preparations for his escape, Attila had amassed practical aids, such as the sharp little fruit-knife from the banquet, a store of low-denomination copper coins, a bag of oatmeal he’d stolen from the kitchens, and some corks.
Soon after nightfall on that night of victory celebrations over the barbarians, Attila quit his place at the lower tables of the banqueting hall, and made swiftly for his chamber, where he collected his treasures. Then he slunk through the near-deserted courts of the palace, praying to his father Astur to guide and shield him, until he approached the guards in the main gatehouse, trembling so badly with fear that he could barely trust himself to speak.
‘Halt! Who goes there?’
He said nothing, went nearer.
‘I said, halt!’
Attila halted.
The moonlight shone on the Palatine guard’s black cuirass and his plumed black helmet. He was a tesserarius – a password-officer. He glared down at the boy. ‘Give me your name.’
Attila hesitated, then said softly, ‘Cicero.’
The guard reacted with some surprise. ‘Who gave you the password?’ he growled.
‘None of your business,’ said the boy. ‘Nor do I have to tell you my name. The correct password is “Cicero”. So let me pass.’
The guard hesitated a little longer, his meaty fist clenched round his spearhaft. Then reluctantly he lowered it and nodded to the boy to pass. His fellow guardsmen began to draw back the heavy ironbound gates. Already the tesserarius could imagine, with uncomfortable vividness, the feeling of his centurion’s vinewood knout descending on his back. But what could he do? A password was a password.
The boy slipped past him and vanished into the street. The guard looked out after him, but already he was lost to view.
5
Attila breathed free air for the first time in a year. Although the air was that of a great and populous city rather than the wild air of Scythia, nevertheless it was free. And nothing but a few hundred miles now lay between him and his beloved homeland.
He turned left out of the palace, and hurried down the street to the corner, with the great extension to the Palatine complex built by Septimius Severus to his left. He rounded the corner and headed for the shadowy arches of the great Aqueduct of Nero below, and the darkened streets beyond. He had it all mapped out in his mind.
Down to the foot of the Palatine Hill, another left round the Arch of Constantine, with the great, looming mass of the Colosseum to his right. Then, slipping into the alleyway behind the ancient Temple of Venus and Roma, and then the Temple of Pacis – a very small and insignificant temple, by Roman standards – he hurried onwards, making for the nameless and dangerous backstreets of the Suburra, with the three hills of the Quirinal, the Viminal and the Esquiline rising up behind.
After the day of triumph and the games, the midnight streets of the poorer parts of the city were filled with drunken, jeering people. They swayed and staggered about arm in arm, emerging from the pervigiles popinae, the city’s numerous keep-awake bars, or else disappearing into one of the many brothels in the district, whose line of trade was signalled by a statue of Herm outside, with his erect and outsized penis painted in eye-catching scarlet.
The populace chanted songs about the greatness of Rome – or their emperor.
‘The Emperor Honorius
Was sitting in the bath-house,
His arse was out the window
But his cock was in the hall!
His hair, oh! it was glorious,
