passers-by and worshippers, in honour of their mysterious goddess of love, and some men even took a lewd pleasure in seeing their womenfolk thus made harlots. All night they sang, and drank, and danced, accompanied by the sound of barbarous drums and flutes. Baalbek was never a place with a naturally Christian soul.
It was a place of sacrificial blood as well as sacred love. Can one exist without the other? There was no gentleness in the ancient religion. Blood was riotously shed upon these stones. ‘Anath, the sister of Baal, waded up to her knees, up to her neck in human blood,’ say the ancient texts. ‘Human hands lay at her feet, they flew about her like locusts. She tied human heads around her neck, and hands upon her belt. She washed her hands in the streams of human blood that flowed about her knees…’
At Baalbek, it seems, gods are mortal. They are born, and worshipped; they flourish, and have mighty temples built to them. Later, when men and women cease to believe in them, they wither and die, and a new generation of mortal gods takes their place. In time, too, even Christ will die for ever from the earth.
None of the imperial party spoke their secret thoughts at Baalbek. But they lingered there a long time.
Finally Jerusalem, the Holy City of Zion. This place, too, Athenais greatly loved, and she lingered here for longer that might seem appropriate. For her husband awaited her in Constantinople, and it was high time she was back in his bed. Her highest duty now was to give him sons. An empress had no other reason to live than this.
It was the last night in Jerusalem, before they were due to descend from that holy mountain to the coast, to Caesarea, and take ship for home. The empress was walking on the lonely terrace of the modest palace where they were residing, overlooking the valley of Gehenna, the valley of Sheol, where the ancient Hebrews had tumbled the bodies of their dead into the smoking abyss below and burned them. From beyond the place of Hell came the gentle breezes from the garden of Gethsemane upon the Mount of Olives.
Another figure stepped out from the shadows of the palace onto the terrace to take the night air before retiring. The two of them almost collided. They stepped back and stared with the same wide-eyed astonishment as when they had first set eyes upon each other, three long months before. Their eyes were wide and bright and innocent under the eastern moon. And then like sleepwalkers they moved towards each other again in the soft velvet night. From the olivegroves across the valley came the harsh warning call of a bird, and the moon was golden in the late summer sky over the Valley of Sheol, where the air was hazed with the chaff beaten from the late summer wheat in the surrounding country, and misty with smoke from the chaff heaped up for the burning.
They said nothing. And with consummate awkwardness, like two adolescents-
It is impossible to say who kissed whom. Their lips met. They both fought not to give in to this desire, or rather this need, to touch the other. Both were proud. But both were defeated.
After they had kissed they drew back and looked at each other for a long time. They said nothing. Minutes passed. Neither of them moved. Neither of them could move.
The next day at dawn they left the city for the long journey down to the coast. They rode far apart, heads bowed and silent, like two people recently bereaved.
Galla knew. Galla saw it, with her gimlet eyes, the moment they returned.
Marriage and hardship had perhaps softened Galla’s heart. Motherhood certainly had. She responded to others’ weakness with pity more than with scorn as heretofore. She saw this living agony before her eyes: Athenais and Aetius unwillingly yet so willingly, so longingly, in each other’s company, constrained by the cruelty of circumstance and the stiff rituals and formalities of the court. Her reaction was that of a woman who is herself a little in love with a man who loves another: a sad smile, and silence.
Perhaps also she recognised already that she and Aetius had something in common, that would endure all their lives: they each loved another, and neither of them would ever in this world possess that other.
Between Galla and Athenais, where you might have expected rancour, cattiness, or worse, there was none. Between Pulcheria and Galla, there was as much warmth as that life-sworn virgin, the emperor’s thin-lipped sister could ever muster for a fellow creature of flesh and blood. Pulcheria’s feelings toward Athenais were, inevitably, seething jealousy and resentment, disguised as pious reserve. (Prudes are driven by jealousy, not morality. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, preach.) But as for cool, green-eyed Galla, perhaps she saw that Athenais’ feelings for Aetius mirrored her own. Perhaps she saw also that the poor girl, married so young and with so much love in her to give, to one whom she was fond of but would never come truly to love, would find only unhappiness in her life. Perhaps. Whatever the reason, she never treated the young empress, so different from herself in temperament, with anything but kindness.
And then on the twenty-sixth day of August 423, a messenger came with shocking news from Rome. Emperor Honorius had died of dropsy, and a usurper, Johannes, had raised legions in Illyria and declared himself the new Emperor of the West.
Aetius seemed relieved to be getting away at last. ‘The enemies of Rome are not growing any fewer,’ he observed dryly. ‘There is fighting to be done.’
11
The shops of Constantinople were shut for seven days, in a demonstration of public grief for Honorius. The new emperor, Theodosius, even ordered the horse-races to be cancelled, which nearly caused a riot.
Thus at last Galla returned to Rome, together with Aetius, and her son was made emperor at the age of four.
From an early age, Valentinian displayed every sign of taking after his uncle rather than his father: a lamentable inheritance. He was slothful, greedy, childish, petulant and cruel. Galla herself, it was poisonously gossiped, had deliberately made her son stupid with feeble education and enervating superstition. Though Christian in name, Valentinian was obsessed with the darkest arts of magic and divination.
To blame these failings on the teachings of his mother was sheer ill-informed malice: Galla’s faith in the Christian God was real, and sober. Not for her the hoarse gabblings of haruspices amid the splashes and flecks of a dying pigeon’s blood, and all the other tawdry trappings of a moribund paganism. In an age when loud professions of religious zeal were everywhere, and true, divinely inspired loving-kindness almost nowhere – that is to say, an age much like any other – Galla, for all her ruthlessness and pride, devoted herself all her life to the officially sanctioned religion of the empire.
Besides, those sly gossips were ignoring one salient fact: Valentinian was quite stupid and corrupt enough to discover the joys of witchcraft for himself.
Nevertheless, as the only obvious heir to the western throne, the crafty-eyed little boy was solemnly crowned with the diadem and the imperial purple; and his mother became effectively ruler in the West.
For some years after that, the Empire knew an uneasy, unaccustomed peace, except for one stunning loss, which seemed to happen overnight, and to resist every attempt at recapture: the grainfields of North Africa were taken by the Vandals.
Suddenly, in the blazing June of 429, the Barbary Coast was in flames. The Vandal raiders were a Germanic horse-people of the steppes, lately settled in southern Spain but with an appetite for conquest and destruction unabated. In a single generation, so it seemed, they had mastered the arts of both shipbuilding and sailing from their native Spanish subjects. From their kingdom of Vandalusia, or ‘Andalusia’, as the Berbers called it, they had crossed the narrow straits, overrun the province of Mauretania, and fallen upon the precious grainfields of Numidia and Libya with fire and sword.
Rome was taken utterly by surprise. None but Aetius seemed aware of how disastrous this was. It is said that when he heard the news he sat down, ashen-faced, gripping his left wrist in his right hand, and did not speak for half a day.
The imperial court, the wealthy senatorial classes and the chattering crowds of Rome carried blithely on, as if unaware of the vast, blood-dark cloud slowly seeping across their sky from the far horizon.
The following year the Vandal armies set out eastwards across the Mahgreb, bent on ‘conquest to the gates of the rising sun’. City after city fell to their fury. On clear nights, it was said, you could see the African shore lit up as if with mighty beacon fires all along the coast from Tingis to Leptis Magna.
The summer of 432 saw them besieging the city of Hippo Regius. In the third month of that terrible siege,
