twitching and muttering at passers-by, and the pretend-blind beggars, their hands outstretched, revealing forearms just a little too plump. Here was the veteran soldier with his wooden leg, and there the pretend-soldier hopping along with the aid of a battered crutch, his other (perfectly good) leg strapped up to his buttocks beneath his ragged cloak. And over there the harlots in their high-laced sandals, their soles studded with carefully patterned little hobnails that spelt out ‘ Follow Me ’ in the dust behind them as they sashayed along. They were all doing excellent business on this day of rejoicing and animal spirits. Their large, seductive eyes were lined with black kohl and shadowed with green malachite, and they were startlingly blonde in their elaborate flaxen wigs imported from Germany. Some of them even took off their wigs and twirled them gaily in the air.
For although it was a solemn as well as a festive occasion, celebrating no less than the salvation of Rome itself, the usual cheating and thieving and whoring went on this day as on any other day in the great city. Little had changed in the four hundred years since Juvenal’s time, or in the century since Constantine the Great had declared the empire a Christian empire; since little ever changes in human nature.
Here was the fishmonger selling his ‘spicy fishballs’ – hotly spicy indeed, to disguise the fact that the fish had been netted at Ostia at least two weeks ago. Caveat emptor. Here were the fruit-sellers, with their apricots, figs and pomegranates. Here were the fraudsters and the soothsayers, the ‘Chaldean astrologers’ from the backstreets of Rome, wearing ludicrous cloaks embroidered with moon and stars. Here was the sly-eyed young Syrian with his deft hands and his smile and his loaded dice; and here was another, older man, rheumy-eyed and crooked with age, Greek, so he said, and an unconvincing advert for his own ‘miracle panacea’, an unctuous green liquid sold in grubby glass bottles, which he offered to passers-by – for a fee, of course.
In Rome, anything could be bought for the right amount of money: health, happiness, love, length of days, the favour of God or the gods, according to your taste.
Money could even buy, so it was sometimes scandalously whispered, the imperial purple itself.
On the steps of the Imperial Palace were gathered as many of the royal household as could be accommodated. From every doorway and every upper window, people cheered and shouted and waved banners and cloths, as they did from the meanest houses in the city, leaning precariously from their fifth- or sixth-floor apartments in high-rising insulae.
First in the triumphal procession came the aged senators, as always preceding the emperor on foot as a mark of their subservience. The crowd’s applause was distinctly lacklustre for this superfluous millionaires’ club in old- fashioned togas edged with purple. Then, to thunderous acclaim, the long march-past of Stilicho’s finest troops, his First Legion, the venerable Legio I ‘Italica’, originally raised under Nero and stationed at Bononia. Like other legions, it no longer numbered the full complement of five thousand men, more like two thousand; and they were spending more and more time attached to Stilicho’s mobile field army, fighting to defend the Rhine and Danube frontiers. But at Florentia they had shown they were still the world’s finest troops. Other legionaries had to stand five feet ten inches, but to join the Legio I ‘Italica’, you had to be a six-footer.
They marched proudly by in immaculate order under raised standards fluttering with eagles, or embroidered dragons or writhing serpents, roused to angry life by the wind that ruffled them. They carried only wooden staves rather than swords, as was the custom during a triumph, but they looked hard, fierce men nevertheless. At the back marched their centurions, thick vine-sticks in their fists, grim-faced as ever. Then came Count Heraclian, Stilicho’s second-in-command, his eyes darting and uncertain, always jealous, so it was said, of his brilliant commander. And then, on a dignified white stallion, Stilicho himself. The striking, long, and rather lugubrious face; the intelligent eyes; the manner at once mild and disciplined.
With him was an extraordinary figure. And immediately behind him a further fifty or so extraordinary figures. Indeed, so extraordinary that, as they passed, the crowd that lined the street fell silent and seemed almost to lose its voice.
For beside Stilicho, on a small and skittish bay pony, its fierce eyes rolling to the whites, rode a man such as the Romans had never seen before. He was in his fifties, perhaps, but looked as tough as bullhide. He had curious slanting eyes, and a thin, wispy grey beard which barely covered his chin. His helmet was pointed, and he wore a rough and battered leather jerkin, and over that a broad, dusty cloak of beaten horse-skin. He bristled with weapons: a sword at one side, a dagger at the other; a beautifully crafted bow slung one way across his back, and the other way a quiver packed with arrows. His dark, impenetrable gaze was fixed straight ahead, and although he was of small build he radiated strength.
His name was Uldin, and he called himself King of the Huns.
Close behind him rode more of his kind, his personal bodyguard; they, too, were clad in dusty and unkempt animal furs, bristled with weaponry, and rode small, fierce-eyed ponies. The neat, prancing hooves kicked up plumes of dust as they rode, and the open-mouthed bystanders could smell leather and horses and sweat as they passed: something alien and animal, something vast and untamed, from far beyond the orderly frontiers of Rome.
Some of Uldin’s horsemen looked to left and right as they rode past, meeting the challenge of the Roman citizens’ gaze with equal curiosity. Uldin himself kept his gaze steadfastly ahead, but his men could not help but stare around, and upward, at the monumental buildings of the city; buildings of a size and grandeur their imaginations could barely grasp. Even the humblest buildings, the blocks of flats inhabited by the poorest in Rome, towered higher than anything the horsemen had ever seen built by the hand of man before. Then there were the palaces of patricians and emperors, the grand and triumphal basilicas, their windows filled with stuff called glass, which let in the light and heat but not the cold. Opaque sheets of blue or green ice which didn’t melt in the sun, utterly mysterious to them.
The fantastical, overwrought Baths of Diocletian and of Caracalla, decorated with marble of every conceivable colour and shade: yellow and orange from Libya, pink from Euboea, blood-red and brilliant green from Egypt, along with the precious onyx and porphyry of the east. Then the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Forum of Trajan and the Arch of Titus, and the great temples to the Roman gods, whose treasuries contained, so it was rumoured, the gold of half the world…
Nevertheless, the people of Rome resumed their cheering readily enough as the barbarian horsemen passed on, acknowledging, however uneasily, that it was only thanks to the alliance with these strangers that Rome had been saved.
Only the most dandyish of the aristocrats turned their delicate noses up, and covered their mouths in little white cloths impregnated with oil of lavender. Some of them carried silk parasols seamed with golden thread, to protect their fair skins from the sun, and, pointing towards the Hun horsemen, joked that, after all, one didn’t want to look as sunburnt as that. Such dandies wore light silken robes embroidered with extravagant scenes of hunting or wild animals; or, if they wanted to display their piety, perhaps the martyrdom of a favourite saint. What the stern old Roman heroes would have said, how Cato the Censor would have raged, one could only speculate. These epigones, these degenerates…
What the Huns themselves must have judged of them, and of Rome herself therefore, one can only imagine.
Many a member of the patrician classes, it was said, had not remained in Rome to see the triumph. With an airy and languid gesture, they had drawled that the city would be too hot and too crowded with plebs and, still worse, barbarian horsemen, to be bearable. The smell would be simply ghastly. And they had taken their leave and gone down with their friends to the Lucrine Lake, on the Gulf of Puteoli, to lie exhausted in their painted galleys and sip their goblets of Falernian wine chilled with handfuls of snow brought down in jars by slaves from the heights of Vesuvius. And reclining in their galleys, with other slaves softly playing stringed instruments, perhaps, they would trail their delicate hands in the cooling waters and gaze towards the island of Ischia and sigh for the days of their youth. Or of Rome’s youth. Or of any days but these, and anywhere but here. Anything but these hard days and these demanding times.
From the steps of the palace, the imperial household looked on. At their head stood the poised, expressionless figure of Princess Galla, her robe today a brilliant saffron yellow. The rest of the household seemed to stretch away from her on either side; and in the far corner, near Serena, stood a small, hunched and fiercely scowling boy.
‘Hey, short-arse! Oi!’
The boy looked left and his scowl deepened further. It was a couple of the other hostages, the Frankish children, calling across to him through the throng.
‘You want to push through to the front! You won’t see anything but people’s ankles where you are!’ And the
