shoulder he could feel the cold marble of the pediment, surmounted by yet another pompous marble statue of some defunct hero of Rome. His fingers were sweaty round the coarse rope handle of his dagger. He could smell the salt-sea smell of the rope, damp with his sweat.
He was small for his age, more like a boy of seven or eight than one on the verge of adolescence; his people had always been scorned for their small stature. But what did they know, those enfeebled Romans with their cold sneers of superiority, or those long-limbed, flaxen-haired Goths? Look at his people’s horses: smaller than any other breed in Europe, but hardier by far. They could carry a man for an hour at full gallop and not tire.
He still didn’t breathe, and he closed his slanted eyes, lest they should glitter like a cat’s from the darkness.
The guards talked on, within a few paces of him.
Some guards they were. Old and tired and half deaf and ready to fall. Very like the city they guarded. They were talking now of his people, and of how Rome had defeated the barbarian army of Rhadagastus only with the aid of barbarians. How Stilicho, master-general of the Roman forces, had joined forces with another barbarian tribe to win his victory: this tribe called the Huns.
One of the guards snorted. ‘Half animal, they are. Eat nothing but raw meat, wear only animal skins, and their victory rites after a battle… You think the arena looks a mess after a triumph, but you don’t want to be one of their war-captives, I can tell you.’
‘No greater power in this world than to be so feared,’ said the other guard.
‘Well, aren’t you the philosopher tonight.’
The second guard stared out over the moonlit palace courtyard, and then said softly, ‘Well, we shall see them for ourselves tomorrow, at General Stilicho’s triumph.’
‘Emperor Honorius’ triumph.’
‘I do beg your pardon,’ came the mocking reply. ‘Yes, of course, the emperor’s triumph.’
There was silence for a while, and then one of them said, ‘Do you remember that night on the Rhine?’
‘Of course I do,’ said the other. ‘How could I ever forget it? You saved my poxy life, didn’t you?’
‘Don’t start thanking me for that again.’
‘Wasn’t going to.’
‘Anyway, you’d have done the same for me.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
The two old soldiers grinned at each other, but their grins soon faded.
Yes, they remembered that night on the Rhine. In the last days of December, when the river froze solid, and the barbarian hordes came galloping across the moonlit ice as if they were coming into their kingdom: Vandals and Sueves, Alans, Lombards, Goths, Burgundians. Yes, they remembered that night, and all the nights and the weeks and the months that came after.
The first guard bowed his head at the remembrance. ‘I thought I saw Rome go down in flames that night.’
They brooded.
‘Is the story of Rome finished?’
The other shrugged. ‘It’s been a long story,’ he said. ‘And it could yet have one almighty firestorm of a final chapter. The fall of Rome would outshine the fall of Troy as the sun outshines a candle.’
‘We’ll have a place there, too,’ said the other, ‘and die deaths as glorious and heroic as the death of Hector himself!’
They snorted with derisive, self-mocking laughter.
Then one said, ‘Come on then, old Trojan.’ And wearily the two comrades-at-arms, now relegated to the status of lowly palace guards, with their stiff old joints and their scars that still ached on frosty nights, moved slowly on down the corridor, their sandals slapping softly on the marble tiles.
The boy relaxed, eased himself away from the cold marble and breathed again. The moment the guards had turned the corner out of sight, he crept out of the niche and scuttled along in the shadows towards the other end of the corridor.
There in the pale, washed light of the moon stood an imposing bronze statue of Caesar Augustus himself, a great brawny arm commandingly outstretched, wearing the plate-armour uniform of a general of four hundred years ago. His eyes shone in the moonlight, his painted black eyes with their unearthly gleaming whites. Round the base of the statue were carved the words ‘ PIUS AENEAS ’. For were not the Caesars direct descendants of the legendary Founder of Rome himself?
By dawn tomorrow, Augustus would look very different: with his knife the boy would turn that cold gaze blind.
He scrambled swiftly onto the pediment, and then, feeling as if he was in some strange dream, began to climb up the bronze figure. He clenched the knife between his teeth and, reaching up, managed to grab hold of one of Augustus’ larger-than-life-sized hands. He braced his bare feet against the statue’s legs and hauled, stretched up again and hooked his left arm round the emperor’s neck.
He froze. The guards were coming past again.
They couldn’t be. They had done their dozen circuits of the courtyard, as regular as the wheeling stars, in true Roman fashion, and now they should be moving on to another of the palace’s countless courtyards. In his urgency he must have miscounted.
He kept as still as the statue itself while the guards passed beneath him, both looking sombrely down. They didn’t see him, hunched there on the imperial giant like a malignant incubus. And then they were gone.
He leant back and, gripping the statue with both thighs and one arm, took the dagger in his right hand and eased the blade under Augustus’ alabaster right eyeball. A little scraping and levering, and it popped out cleanly. He caught it deftly with his knife-hand as it fell, the size of a duck egg, and dropped it inside his tunic. Then he turned his attention to the left eyeball, again slipping the thin blade in and easing it ‘And what do you think you are doing?’
The voice was colder than any statue of marble or bronze.
He looked down. At the foot of the statue stood a young woman of twenty years or so, in an emerald-green stola, belted at the waist, her hair worn in a severe style, tightly plaited and bound round her head. It had an almost reddish tinge, and her skin was very pale. She was tall and bony, with a fine nose, a thin and sharply defined mouth, and cool green, unblinking, catlike eyes. Her physical presence was one of both brittleness and sinewy tenacity. Now she arched a cool eyebrow enquiringly, as if merely curious, or even amused at what the boy might be doing. But there was no amusement or mere curiosity in her eyes. Her eyes made the boy think of fire seen burning through a wall of ice.
‘Princess Galla Placidia,’ he whispered. ‘I-’
She wasn’t interested in explanations. ‘Get down,’ she snapped.
He got down.
She looked up at the mutilated face of Caesar Augustus. ‘He found Rome brick and left it marble,’ she said softly. ‘But you, you found him bronze, and left him… mutilated. How very characteristic.’ She looked sourly down at the boy again. ‘It is so important to know one’s enemies, don’t you think?’
The boy looked smaller than ever.
She held out her hand. ‘The other eye,’ she said.
He could feel it, still nestling there in the folds of his tunic.
‘I…’ He swallowed. ‘When I came by, one eye was already gone. I was just trying to make sure the other one wouldn’t fall out as well.’
He didn’t understand what had happened when he slammed against the wall behind him. Only when he groggily pulled himself to his feet again did he feel the side of his face stinging with pain. The livid welts of the blue tattooed scars that stood out from his cheek, the mark of his people, cut into his flesh by his mother when he was still in his cradle, tingled with increasing intensity. He touched his fingertips to his mouth, and found that the odd tickling sensation over his numbed lips was the trickle of blood.
He clutched the knife hard in his right hand and took a step forward. His teeth were furiously clenched.
Galla didn’t flinch. ‘Put it away.’
The boy stopped. He continued to clutch the knife, but he couldn’t take another step.
The princess’s eyes, both cool and burning, ice on fire, never left him. ‘You have been nothing but a plague
