Attila stopped in front of him, his eyes flashing furiously. ‘Let me out.’
Genseric shook his head sadly. ‘Not allowed. By order of the Princess Galla herself.’
‘Princess Galla didn’t order that,’ spat the boy, gesturing towards the darkened chamber.
The Vandal prince raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Is that a fact?’ And he began to laugh out loud again. ‘Is that a fucking fact?’
Behind him, he could hear the laughter of Lollia as well.
‘I have always thought,’ said Genseric, resuming his languid tone, ‘that the princess’s greatest strength is that she understands human nature so very well. Don’t you think, my darling?’
Lollia had reappeared by Genseric’s side, and he put his arm round her. They began to kiss again, in full view of Attila, each of them watching him out of the corners of their eyes, and smiling through their kisses.
‘You’re disgusting,’ said Attila quietly. ‘You’re just slaves of the Romans. You’re just monkeys in a cage.’
Genseric pulled back from Lollia and grinned. ‘Yeah, whatever – but look what they’ve given us in return. What a cage! What playmates! And this one, in particular – my beloved Livia-’
‘Lollia,’ said Lollia.
‘Lollia, sorry,’ drawled Genseric, pulling her towards him again, his hand sliding up under the back of her tunic and caressing her bare buttocks. ‘This one really is the most delectably filthy-minded little whore you could ever wish to meet. I tell you, she could really teach you some things – things you’d never dream of.’
Slowly and languidly they began to kiss again.
But they stopped abruptly when Attila put his head down and ran full tilt into Genseric’s stomach. The air whooshed audibly from his lungs, and he fell to one side, gasping. Lollia gave a little scream. Then she reached out and tried to grab the boy by his hair, but he was too quick and too sober for her. He ducked under her snatching fist, hauled open the heavy oak doors of the apartment and ran out into the courtyard. The last things he heard as he fled, towards his small, silent, oil-lit chamber, were Lollia swearing foully and Genseric vomiting onto the marble floor.
He stopped by a water-fountain where a slave was rinsing out a jug. The long summer day was now almost dusk. It was about the sixteenth hour since dawn.
‘Cup,’ gasped Attila.
The slave shook his head.
So he grabbed the jug from him and drank deeply. It was no cool mountain stream, but at least it was water, and it calmed him. He thrust the jug back into the slave’s hands and wiped his mouth.
‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ whispered the slave.
In ordinary circumstances, a slave was strictly forbidden to address anyone unless first addressed himself. But circumstances were far from ordinary.
Attila frowned. ‘I’m not frightened,’ he said haughtily. ‘Just disgusted.’
It was the slave’s turn to frown.
Attila waved towards the princes’ chambers. ‘Some of the other hostages I’m supposed to mix with,’ he said. ‘Scum.’
The slave allowed himself a very slight noncommittal smile.
‘Why should I be frightened, though?’
The slave’s eyes widened. ‘You mean you haven’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘About Alaric?’
‘What about Alaric?’ He could almost have shaken him. ‘Tell me.’
The slave drew in a deep breath. ‘He’s marching on Rome. At the head of a hundred thousand men.’
At the news, the strange Hun boy looked anything but frightened. Instead, to the slave’s astonishment, a slow smile spread across his face as he digested the news.
‘Like Rhadagastus all over again,’ he murmured.
‘Except that Alaric is no Rhadagastus,’ said the slave quietly. ‘By all accounts he is a great leader, who has the absolute loyalty of his men. And besides, who does Rome have to command her own armies, now that… you- know-who is gone?’
Attila nodded. He reached for the jug, took another long draught, and set it back in the slave’s hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Apparently it’s not done to thank a slave. But thank you anyway.’
Then the strange Hun boy turned to walk back to his chamber, and the slave could have sworn that he actually heard him whistling.
The rest of Rome cowered in fear. In the palace at Ravenna, there was outright panic. People ran around like the emperor’s own chickens at the scent of a fox. For with General Stilicho so recently murdered, and no fewer than thirty thousand of his men consequently gone over to join Alaric and his grim-faced Goths, who was there now to save Rome? Count Heraclian, they said. But Heraclian was a far lesser man than Stilicho; just as Alaric was a far greater man than Rhadagastus.
‘That fool Emperor Honorius,’ they whispered in the shadowy courts of the palace. ‘He has cut off his own right hand with his left.’
Throughout Rome, and Ravenna, and throughout all of Italy, from the plains of the Po and Cisalpine Gaul to the high hill-towns of Calabria and across to the golden hills of Sicily, there was the hum of fear and imminent panic.
Except in one small, silent chamber, lit only by cheap and smoky oil lamps. There a boy of some thirteen or fourteen years, but small for his age, his cheeks deeply riven with strange blue scars, knelt and prayed.
He prayed to the god of the Huns: a bare sword driven into the earth, forming a cross like the cross of the Christians, but of hard steel. He prayed to his father Astur, the Lord of All that Flies, and in the name of the murdered General Stilicho and his wife, Serena. He clenched his teeth and set his jaw and prayed for vengeance upon their murderers, and remembering them he wept again.
And he prayed that the Goths might come and do the work that the Huns had so far shamefully failed to do. Even though they were the immemorial enemies of his people, let the Goths come, and raze Rome flat in the red wind from the steppes.
See the Tiber foaming with Roman blood.
See the buildings fall like broken bones.
Let it all fall. Let it all be destroyed.
And when it was razed flat, let the very dust be trampled beneath the barbaric hooves of a hundred thousand horses. Leave not one stone standing. Nothing but seven bare and desolate hills beside a blood-red river where great Rome once stood. Nothing on those hills but a single tomb beneath the wide bare sky. A tomb for a murdered general and his beloved, murdered wife.
He heard her sigh again, through his ragged tears: ‘ My darling. .. ’
He closed his eyes and prayed to Chakgha, the horse-god of the plains, and to the kotu ruh, the daemon- spirits of the wind, and to the kurta ruh, the wolf-spirits of the holy Altai Mountains, and to the Father Spirit of the Eternal Blue Sky.
‘O Lord, I pray,
Rain down tonight,
Drown every light,
Rain down tonight.’
PART II
The Flight and the Fall
1
