The Hun warrior also exhibits a breathtaking skill in horsemanship. He can ride at full gallop while despatching one of those deadly missiles every four or five seconds. His speed makes him almost impossible to hit in return, and the strength and stamina of his sturdy little horse means that it can carry a man at a gallop for up to an hour. The refined Spanish or Cappadocian mounts of the empire, or the beautiful, headstrong horses of the Armenians and the Parthians, would be winded in a quarter of that time.
When riding close to the enemy, the Hun warrior can slip from his saddlecloth, and down the side of his horse, holding on only with the strength of his thighs, still galloping, still firing. He can even lean down so low as to fire underneath his horse’s neck, using the body of his mount for cover.
Is it any wonder that, all across Scythia, every tribe feared the Huns? Or that, in time, every empire in Europe and Asia came to fear them too?
These, then, were the people who came across the great plains in their skin-covered wagons, their women and children at their sides, every bit as tough as their menfolk. The wagons came in file, stretching back as far as the eye could see, spreading out over the waterless steppes, the dust in the reddening light of the setting sun raised by the turning wheels of the creaking wooden wagons. The fording of the great rivers of that country could take weeks: the songs of the nomad drovers rising above the bellowing of the cattle as they were driven deep into the water, the snorting of the horses, the splashing of the great wooden wheels through the fording-places, the shrieks of women and the yells of men and the excited laughter of children.
As the tribe moved west, so it encountered, and fought with, and generally in its fierceness and desperation displaced, the tribe that went before it. None of those tribes made any distinction between citizen and soldier. When the time came to fight, they simply formed their wagons into a circle, to shelter their women and children within; every man took his bow, and his spear, and mounted his pony; every man fought. Every man a warrior – as it was with the citizen army of Rome, long ago, in the days of its republican greatness.
But do not think that these tribes occupied any territory in the sense that Rome occupies a territory and an empire. These peoples had no boundaries, and no empires, they were nomads, and worshipped the earth itself as their ancestral home. Although one group of the Huns – the Black Huns, Attila’s people, and the most feared of all the tribes – had been seen encamped upon the northern and eastern banks of the Danube, in Trans-Pannonia, ever since their own King Balamir had led them into Europe, three or four generations before the time of King Uldin, at other times their camps simply vanished from sight. Then even the rich pastures of the Danube floodplain had tired, and the Huns had moved east again, over the Kharvad Mountains, which the Romans call the Carpathians, and beyond, to the plains of Scythia proper. Many of them still looked back towards the east, even when west of the Kharvad Mountains, to where many of their Hun brothers still lived. Although they looked with greed upon the marble and gold of the empires of the Mediterranean, their dreams still tended towards the open steppes of Asia as their true homeland. And as the days lengthened each year, if they were not fighting in wars with their neighbours, many Pannonian Huns would ride east for a summer of hunting in the empty and desolate expanses of Asia which only they understood and loved.
There they lived a life on horseback for many months, intoxicated by the boundless freedom and lawlessness of those ungoverned lands. Or whose only laws, shall we say, were the laws of the bow, and the noose, and the spear. Over the wide plains they rode, into the valleys and over the mountains, through the narrow passes, down the narrow, sunless gorges beside rivers in full, white spate. They hunted the wild animals, contemptuous of the weak and settled lives that others lived in the world of law and civilisation. They hunted bear and wolf, lynx and leopard and auroch. When winter came, and the fur of the wild animals thickened with the cold, they hunted ermine and beaver and mink. They returned with sleds creaking on their runners of wood and bone, piled high with furs, the rich, glossy pelts sparkling with Scythian frost. These furs they sold to the crafty-eyed fur merchants in the Greek trading cities on the shores of the Euxine Sea, at Tanais, and Chersonesus, and Ophiusa. Or further west, at the markets on the Danube, and at Margus Fair.
Margus Fair, where in time, it would all begin. Where the end of everything would begin.
2
The boy was awoken roughly in the midst of his dreams by one of the Palatine Guard. The man carried a torch. It was still dark outside.
‘Get yourself up and dressed. We leave at dawn.’
‘Leave? Where for?’
‘Ravenna.’
Only a few minutes later he found himself seated beside Olympian, one of the senior palace eunuchs, riding in a high and over-decorated Liburnian car through the dark and silent streets of Rome.
Olympian was evidently reluctant, even personally insulted, to find himself sitting beside the half-savage Hun boy for the duration of the journey, and had insisted that Attila be submitted to a full body search before he would consent to ride with him. Why, the little barbarian might be carrying a dagger or something. The soldiers had made sly asides to each other, to the effect that a dagger-thrust in Olympian’s mountainous rolls of flesh was hardly likely to prove fatal. The boy had duly been searched, and given the all-clear. Now Olympian sat beside Attila, touching his mouth from time to time with a little white silk cloth impregnated with oil of rosemary so as to ward off the ghastly, disease-bearing fumes that the boy must surely give off, and refusing to speak a word to him. That was fine by Attila. He could think of nothing that he wanted to say to Olympian.
All the same, he wasn’t mad about sharing a carriage with the eunuch. Unlike the lean and hungry Eumolpus, but in common with the great majority of those who had been deprived of their seed-bearing parts in their youth, Olympian was grossly fat. In the absence of other fleshly pleasures, food had become very important to him. The loose swathes of midnight-blue silk that he wore did little to conceal his massive torso. Indeed, they showed a terrace-like effect, like the Emperor Hadrian’s celebrated gardens at Tivoli, each descending terrace being composed of a greater and greater roll of fat. In consequence, the eunuch perspired heavily, and runnels of sweat ran down his puffy cheeks, playing havoc with the white lead powder that he had carefully applied to his face that morning. Never mind whether the barbarian boy was giving off disease-bearing fumes or not. The eunuch himself was soon giving off fumes of quite another sort. The boy held his nose close to the window, and hoped it wasn’t far to Ravenna.
Either side of their carriage rode a mounted guard. The boy’s previous attempts at escape were well known, and no chances were being taken.
The vast and unwieldy column trundled out of the palace gates and northwards through the city along the great Flaminian Way. Carriages were not normally allowed within city precints by day, ever since Julius Caesar himself had passed a law to that effect. But this was a very special occasion.
Immediately behind Attila rode Beric and Genseric in another ornate and impractical carriage. They were both nursing hangovers, and they felt every queasy rocking of the cabin on its broad leather straps. They chewed fennel but it did little good. Near the Flaminian Gate, Beric leant from the carriage window and vomited.
Ahead of the column rode a detachment of the Frontier Guard, some eighty in number. The roads were bad these days, and the forests dangerous, particularly after one had crossed the River Nera on the great Bridge of Augustus and begun the slow ascent into the Montes Martanis. But no troop of bandits, no matter how desperate, would dare to attack a company of trained soldiers.
As they passed out of the Flaminian Gate their numbers were swelled by a further detachment from the Palatine camp: fifty or so black-armoured Guards, who immediately took up the position of honour at the head of the column, relegating the Frontier Guard to the rear. At the head of the column rode Count Heraclian himself. He seemed keen to leave Rome behind, and make for the safety of marsh-bound Ravenna.
Galla Placidia stayed behind in Rome.
Her advisers had pleaded with her. Eumolpus suggested that her regal presence was needed with the column to maintain order.
She laughed dryly, without mirth. ‘I remain here,’ she said. ‘As do you.’
Eumolpus paled visibly. The Goths were not known for their gentleness to captured eunuchs.
