nameless smile.
The boy passed on, down endless deserted corridors and through great hallways, desperate to reach Serena’s chambers before someone else did. In one of the great halls of the palace, he found that the vast mosaic of the god Bacchus that decorated the floor had been smashed as if by a lunatic, the face of the god almost obliterated in shards of shattered tesserae. As if some frenzied madman had taken a heavy brass lampstand to it, and attacked it like a living being. Nothing made sense. Always in the air the acrid stench of spilt blood, distant screams, the aftertang of oilsmoke from lit torches where soldiers had passed by on their murderous task, torches in one hand, drawn swords in the other. Some of them would be well rewarded for this night’s work.
Other footsteps were coming closer, and there were more cries in the night.
The boy ran on, and at last he reached the doors to Serena’s chambers. He hammered on them. She heard his voice and opened the doors and he ran in to her. He clasped her round the waist and buried his face in the folds of her white stola.
‘My darling… ’ she said.
‘What is it? What is happening?’
‘You must go. You must go now. In the confusion and the darkness, you must try to… ’
He looked up at her. Her eyes were bright with tears. All distance and formality were gone.
‘I promised General Stilicho that I’d never try to escape again.’
‘Oh, my darling, my darling, it is an oath you need no longer keep.’ She cradled his head. ‘You need not keep an oath to a man who is dead.’
The boy cried out and the sound nearly broke her heart.
A bottle or a vase smashed somewhere nearby. There was the sound of sandalled feet being dragged over stone.
‘He can’t be!’ cried the boy.
She shook her head. It was the end. They clung together and wept.
‘They say my husband is a traitor – he and all his circle.’
Who were ‘they’? But he knew. The Emperor of Chickens, and his cold-eyed sister.
‘My darling, you must go.’
But he had already turned and drawn his sword when the soldiers came into the room. He walked towards them.
‘Attila,’ said her voice behind him.
He looked back. Two more soldiers had stepped from the doorway and were already flanking her with swords drawn.
He turned away. Ahead came a line of six or eight more soldiers of the Palatine Guard, resplendent in their black helmets and cuirasses. They smiled broadly.
‘Where’s Stilicho?’ he demanded.
The soldiers stopped. Their optio furrowed his brow. ‘That traitor? And what’s that to you, you little urchin?’ He considered. ‘Well, his head will by now be on top of a pikestaff on the walls of Pavia, I hope.’
‘And my son?’ Serena asked from behind him. ‘Eucharius?’
At that, even the optio could not bring himself to look directly at her. Eyes to the ground, he said, ‘He sleeps with his father.’
Serena fell against the wall, struggling for breath.
The boy stretched his sword out towards the guards. His hand trembled a little but he was unafraid. He fixed his unwavering gaze on them.
Normally the optio would simply have walked up to a boy like that, smacked him round the head, and taken his weapon off him sharpish. But there was something in this one’s eyes…
He signalled to his men. Almost casually, two of them walked forward with a length of chain, one each side of the boy, and slung it across his chest. Before he realised what had happened, they had walked round behind him, crossed over, and returned, and his arms were pinioned tightly by his sides. He stood as helpless as a trussed fowl in the marketplace.
‘Now,’ said the optio, ‘drop the blade like a good little girl.’
Attila told him to do something obscene to his mother.
‘Please,’ said Serena softly from the end of the hall.
The optio nodded to the two soldiers holding the chain. They leant back against it, as if in a tug of war, with the boy no more than a knot in the middle. The chain tightened sharply and he gasped in pain. The sword was squeezed from his hand and fell with a clang to the floor. The soldiers wrapped the rest of the chain round him and hauled him away.
Serena was marched along at swordpoint behind him.
He glanced back once, and she said something to him. It was too soft for him to hear her words but he knew what they were. And then she was gone.
They pushed him into a cell as black as a moonless night, as damp as an underground cave. He managed to get his teeth into a brawny forearm and tear out a small chunk of flesh as they shoved him in. He spat it back at the guard. There was a roar of pain and fury, and he was slammed against the wall, his head reeling with red stars. He fell in a bundle of chains into a fetid corner of the cell, his head dropped onto his chest, and he lost consciousness.
When he came round, he could see nothing. From a far dungeon he heard a woman’s voice, almost deranged with terror, crying, ‘No, no, no!’ But he knew it was not her. They were both dead. His only friends, his beloved… His head throbbed abominably, enough to make him weep with pain. Worse still, the constriction of the chain round his arms was a perpetual agony.
But his anger outweighed his pain. He saw them clearly in the blackness of his cell. Stilicho with his long, lugubrious face. His gravelly voice calling him ‘my young wolf-cub’. And her: her large dark eyes, her gentle smile. His last sight of her.
‘ My darling… ’
‘But my people will come,’ he said quietly to himself, despite his pain. ‘They will not tolerate this insult.’ And then, more loudly, so that even the gaoler down at the end of the row heard his words and frowned, he said, ‘The Huns will come.’
9
Such was the night on which General Stilicho and his entire circle were savagely destroyed.
An official version was put out by the imperial court, saying that he had been secretly plotting with the barbarian tribes, perhaps with the Huns themselves, to overthrow Honorius and all his family, and to install his own son, Eucharius, on the throne instead. But few believed this, for they knew that Stilicho was an honourable man. And for my part, I do not think he had a traitor’s heart. I think that Honorius, encouraged by his sister Galla Placidia and unscrupulous and self-seeking courtiers such as Eumolpus, Olympian and the rest, came to see Stilicho as a rival in the affections of the people.
In his encampment outside Pavia, the great general, so many times the saviour of Rome on distant battlefields, could have taken up arms against the small troop of soldiers, under the command of the pusillanimous Count Heraclian, who came to arrest him that night; for the great majority of the army would certainly have fought and died for him. Their loyalty was to Stilicho, not to the emperor. But Stilicho could not find it in himself to take up arms against his beloved fatherland, even when his fatherland sought to kill him. Instead he rode from Pavia to Ravenna, and sought sanctuary in a church there. Count Heraclian stationed his troops around the church, lured Stilicho out with false promises of safe passage, and then, as soon as he was in his clutches, shamefully had him beheaded on the spot, according to the strict but secret orders of the emperor himself.
Rome always kills its finest servants, its bravest sons; or so it sometimes seems.
Along with them, the emperor also had killed Stilicho’s young son, Eucharius; the Praetorian Prefects of both
