All dressed with art laborious,
But his balls were like a chicken’s
When his sister came to call!’
Sometimes, for the sake of variety, they broke into songs about the superiority of their favourite chariot team, the Blues or the Greens. Their tuneless roaring was interrupted only by the need to pause from time to time and vomit forth bellyfuls of sour new wine into the flowing gutters. The moment a mob of Blues supporters ran into some Greens, of course, all pandemonium broke out. But, as history so powerfully tells us, people enjoy fighting each other, and need little excuse to begin. A rival chariot team is certainly sufficient reason for bloodshed.
Indeed, in that glittering, God-crazed other capital to the east, Constantinople, didn’t the crowds run riot and kill each other over the choice of its priests, as had happened recently with the election of Bishop Eustachius? Or even over changes to the liturgy? But they were a mad, excitable, Asiatic lot over there. At least in Rome the people had the good sense to confine their violence to matters of sport.
For the most part, Attila deftly avoided these scenes of debauchery and tumult. Only occasionally did he pause to gaze in wordless contempt at the squalor and vice that made up the underbelly of this great city. As always, he could not help but compare the Roman plebeians’ behaviour with that of his own quiet people, back on the great plains, their solemn feasts, their simple dignity, their self-reliance and absolute self-control. Drunkenness they regarded with disgust: an adult trying to make himself like a child again – or even a madman. And as for the idea of the daily dole given out in Rome gratis to this scrounging, unwashed rabble…
For it had been with disbelief that the boy had first learnt that, every day, the Roman state gave out food, for free, to anyone who came to queue for it. Originally it had been a magnanimous gift of bread handed out only to the poor or the terminally idle; but then that free bread had become a right. More recently, in the reign of Emperor Aurelian, the daily dole had grown into a lavish, seductive hand-out not only of bread but also of pork, oil and wine, to hundreds of thousands of the shameless mob. But of course nothing in this world was free. The dole was given to the rabble in exchange for their quiescence. In exchange for their very hearts and minds.
The boy knew that his people, the nation of the Huns, would never be softly seduced and Romanised like other barbarian peoples. To the Huns, as to the boy himself – a Hun, indefatigably, to his soul – such a surrender of oneself as this daily dole, such a pitiful abdication of one’s own pride and self-reliance, would be a source of dishonour and shame unspeakable. Among the Huns, most proud and warlike of peoples, for a man not to be able to provide meat for his family, with the art and labour of his own hand and eye, would have been a humiliation scarcely endurable.
The boy slipped into a still narrower, darker alleyway, where the second or third storeys of the houses seemed almost to meet above his head, He blackened his face a little with mud, and messed up his hair, never exactly coiffed at the best of times. Then, looking much like one of the thousands of ordinary urchins in the slums of Rome, he reappeared on the main street. He glanced skywards again, and found that great constellation which the Romans called Ursa Major, the Great Bear, but which to his people was known as the Wings of Astur, King of All that Flies. From there his eye moved up to the North Star. He allowed himself a small smile, and he turned right and followed it, heading north.
Behind him a drunken old man, sprawled in the gutter and holding a flagon of cheap wine aloft, cried, ‘Vivite! ait Mors. Venio! Live! says Death. I am coming!’
In the banqueting hall, Galla sensed that all was not right when the attendant did not return. She snapped her fingers from the imperial dais, and gave orders for slaves to be sent immediately to check the troublesome hostage’s cell. She despatched two court clerks to question the guards on the eastern gate. When they returned, she asked them a single brief question, and only halfway through the clerk’s stumbling reply her hand flew out and struck him stingingly across the cheek. Some of the guests saw what happened and snickered.
Then she turned and ordered an attendant officer to send out a search party at once. She wanted the Hun boy found within the hour. For as a hostage, she knew, Attila was one of Rome’s strongest guarantees that the Huns would not turn against Rome.
The whey-faced adolescent reclining beside her, in his gold-embroidered robe of Tyrian purple, and with a silver diadem upon his brow, albeit slightly askew, paused in between slurps of wine, and stammered at her with eyes agog, ‘Wh-what is the matter? You look angry with me.’
Galla forced a pleasant smile. ‘Not with you, dear heart. Just with some of the incompetents whom I have entrusted with some important business.’
‘Wh-what business? Is it dangerous?’
‘No, not at all. Slave!’ She clicked her fingers and another slave came running. ‘His Sacred Majesty’s cup needs refilling.’
‘I, I…’ said His Sacred Majesty, holding out his cup. The slave filled it to the brim.
Galla smiled at him.
Honorius hiccupped and smiled uncertainly back.
A hoarse and manic voice reached the boy’s ears, and rounding a corner he saw a preacher standing on the steps of a church, railing against the sins of the people as they swept past in their mocking laughter: men with winestains down their front, linked arm in arm with tripping, painted harlots.
But not all who passed by laughed. Not the blind and the mute and the lame; not the leprous outcasts of mankind, hauling themselves forward on their knees and their knobbled and fingerless fists; no laughter from the child pickpockets and the bare, ragged orphans, prostituting themselves for a crust of bread. All the friendless and the many nameless and unloved, whose pitiful, lonely cries moved the heart of God Himself, they say, when He walked as a man on earth.
The preacher was an extraordinary figure, his bare and bony arms reaching out from a cloak which was no more than a tangle of rags, his hair wild and elf-knotted, his lips cracked and dry, his eyes bloodshot, and his nails grown long and filthy as the claws of a bear. His voice croaked harshly and he gestured jerkily, and some who passed by, even in their licentious drunkenness, felt themselves commanded by his voice to halt and listen to his terrible and apocalyptic words. The boy stopped and listened, too.
‘Woe unto you, O great Babylon!’ cried the preacher. ‘For you that were proudest among the nations, and mightiest among the empires of the world, how you are laid low! Hearken unto my words, all ye that pass by, steeped as you are in the stink and stew of your own wickedness! For as the Lord said unto the prophet Ezekiel, “I will bring the worst of the heathen, and they will possess your houses, and your holy places shall be defiled. For the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence. Destruction cometh, and you shall seek peace, and there shall be none. And you shall hide your faces in the mountains like the doves of the valleys, and your children shall be clothed with desolation, and your princes themselves shall hunger like beggars in the streets.”
‘For you have escaped the armies of the Christless barbarians that encompassed you about, O proud Rome – but not for ever shall your impunity endure! No, not for ever, nor for a year, nor even for the waxing and waning of one moon; for I say unto you, that before one moon is waxed and waned the armies of the north shall sweep down upon you, and your infants shall be dashed in pieces at the head of the streets, and ten thousand Roman nights shall be nights of horror!’
‘Tell us something we don’t know!’ cried a wag from the crowd, hooting with laughter.
The blazing, irresistible eyes of the scarecrow preacher turned upon the wag, and he said softly, ‘Aye, and Rome went laughing to her death.’
Such was the power and mystery of the preacher’s eyes and voice that the wag was silenced and the laughter froze upon his lips.
The scarecrow preacher said, ‘In after years, and in the last years of Rome and in the last age of the world, when God shall raze all clean and Christ shall come again in His glory, in those latter days, which shall come to pass before one of you here has passed away, so that you shall see it all with your own eyes – then a prince of terror shall come from the east, and he shall be called the Scourge of God. And his armies shall raze your proud temples and your palaces to the earth, and his horsemen shall trample your children into the dust, and everywhere your pride shall be laid low, and your haughtiness be made a laughing stock.
‘For mighty princes there have been before you on the earth, and proudly stood Sidon and Babylon, Nineveh, and Tyre. And now all, all are gone and have left not a wrack behind. They are blown away like grains of sand on the wind by the wrath of the Lord God of Israel, and their proud palaces, and their cloud-capped towers, and their demoniac temples with their altars of Moloch, stained red with innocent blood – they are all laid low.
‘For nothing that is of man alone endureth, but only that which is of God. And the blood of the innocent, and
