numbers. He knew them already. Half the Gothic wolf-lords lay dead upon the field. Seven or eight thousand had laid down their lives for Rome. Of the twenty-five thousand in his own army, who had borne the brunt of the Huns’ attack, he doubted if five thousand were left standing. The Herculian and Batavian legions were effectively no more. The Palatine Guard had indeed fought to the last man, guarding the army’s left flank on that hill, the Huns pulling back only when all the Guard were dead and they saw their own horde in full retreat. The superventores were wiped out. The Augustan Horse, barely eighty left… Was it any consolation to know that, however many they had lost, the Huns had lost three times, four times as many?
He stopped beside one of his dead. No, it was no consolation. Captain Malchus had one arm completely severed; his face was a staring mask of blood. Aetius covered that face with a corner of his cloak. The Visigothic wolf-lord Jormunreik lay prone, his right hand still gripping his axe. Aetius reached out and touched his head, just once, wordlessly. He had seen cows touch a dead calf thus, just a gentle nuzzle, and he understood why. And here lay that great hulking brute of a Rhinelander, Knuckles. Aetius remembered the first time they had met, on the road to Azimuntium. Knuckles, son of the Rhenish whore Volumella. Aetius knelt by him and ran his hand down over his face, closing his eyes. ‘No son of a whore,’ he murmured. ‘Bravest of the brave.’
11
Another man moved across the battlefield, too, carrying a bare sword. He cared not. He muttered to himself, of Rome, and of China, moving among the dead. They were all gone into a world of light. Was it not so? Angelic work, then. He did not smile. Eternity’s work.
The moon was reflected in pools of horse-blood. As if it had fallen to earth.
There was a looter rifling through the wallets of the dead, stealing enamelled brooches, fibulae, rings from broken fingers. Maybe a villager or even one of his own, but he killed him anyway. Stepped up silently behind him and drove his sword down into the back of his neck. But immediately in the darkness, there was another. He felt weary. You cannot kill them all.
There was a warrior dying one-legged. There was a still-kicking horse. He was tired of killing. Tired among the heaps of the dead and dying, among the pools of blood and the broken weapons of war, among the dead rainbows and the fallen moon lying reflected in the pools of blood. He knelt abruptly and planted his sword in the earth. Let it remain there among the cold and dead.
At dawn, Attila realised that the Romans could attack him no more. They, too, were exhausted, what remained of them. He gave the order to break camp and the bedraggled remnant of his horde rode away east.
Once they were gone, the Romans and the Visigoths did likewise. Two-thirds of the men were wounded and dying, and the column moved very slowly. A vast silence settled over the Catalaunian Fields, and over the heaps of the innumerable dead.
That winter, there were many wolfpacks in that country.
Broken in spirit, the rag-tag army of Attila and his embittered mercenaries wreaked horrible, fitful revenge on the native populations through which they passed on their sullen retreat to their homelands. Some Burgundian captives were roped and dangled from trees and and used for target practice. They made the Burgundian children watch, thinking it amusing they should see their fathers stuck to death with arrows.
Their amusements left splayed bodies by the roadside, women with child torn open, the unborn whelps harrowed from their wombs and set on pikes. Molten gold was poured into the mouths of captured Jews, whom the mercenaries derided as Christless unbelievers. The last encampments and cave-dwellings of the quiet forest people of the Bohemian Forest, who hunted dormice and foraged for roots and berries, brown-eyed and dreamy and silent, a tribe of children, who even in that age lived on as they had lived in Europe for centuries, perhaps for millennia, speaking a language that no one else understood, as if from Eden before the Fall: they, too, were extinguished by the Harrowing of Attila, a nameless, unknown, preterite people, innocent as air. They were rounded up and put to the sword, going to their deaths mildly as they had lived, their small villages of straw huts left smoking in their sunlit glades. All suffered from the hordes of Attila.
Europe groaned and bled, and the King himself rode on in silence at the head of his defeated murderous horde, eyes fixed ahead, indifferent to the devastation left in his black and smoking wake. All the world burning and nothing left to save. If he could not be the Master of the World, he would be its Destroyer.
Only one thing is more terrible than an approaching army, they said in those days: a retreating army. With all hope and all order gone, left to derive only a bleak satisfaction from wreaking on the weak and defenceless the wholesale destruction that they had failed to wreak on their armed enemies, in sour reprisal for their fate. Even dumb nature suffered, punished by their sullen wrath. Whole late-summer forests were put to the torch, laid waste like tindersticks, entire landscapes left ashen and silent and denuded of life.
Down the roads into Italy and the East, the people came fleeing. See them fleeing, harried by the wind, blown like chaff before the empty wind, puppets dancing to its ancient tragic roar, through the desolate fields. Through the long ages.
Aetius was right to believe that Attila had failed yet would not stop. Destruction had become the very air he breathed. Death had become his life.
Aetius eventually arrived back in Ravenna to face Valentinian’s harshest accusations and demands to know what had become of his army. Aetius told him with exaggerated calmness that there was no Roman army left to speak of. Perhaps they should negotiate with the Visigoths, the only remaining armed force of any significance in Western Europe. Valentinian howled and rent his robes, and bit his tongue till he spat out blood on the white marble floors of the palace.
Then the unbelievable news came to them that Attila was on the march again. He had looped back across Noricum and was riding down towards Aquileia. That he still had the men to fight and, more unbelievably still, the will…
It had all been for nothing. There was none left to oppose him. He would ride into Ravenna, and then Rome, and burn them flat. How many men had he still? All of ten thousand: the tattered remnant of his once mighty army, the rest having either been destroyed upon the Catalaunian Field, or else deserted and vanished back into the vastness of Scythia. But still, ten thousand of the most loyal rode with him – and the Romans had none to oppose him. None. The Visigoths could not be expected to fight for Italy as they had fought for Gaul.
Outside the palace, Aetius told the last of his close guard, ‘You should go now. Take ship for the east. There is no more for you here.’
Arapovian stared hard at him with his coal-black eyes, and at last nodded. ‘I would feel like a deserter,’ he said, ‘except that, as at Viminacium, there is nothing left to desert.’
‘You have served Rome well, Easterner. As well as any.’
Arapovian pulled himself up onto his horse.
‘Where will you go now?’
‘East, as you say. Not to my country – it no longer exists. But east somewhere. Perhaps a long way east. The further the better.’ He kicked his horse into a walk.
‘God go with you, Easterner.’
Arapovian raised his right hand and called back, ‘And with you, Master-General Aetius.’
‘And you, Centurion?’
Tatullus grimaced. ‘I stay. As ever.’
Lastly he went to a simple lodging house and asked to speak to two of the lodgers. Moments later, they appeared at the door. Lucius and Cadoc.
Aetius told them of Attila’s approach. ‘You should sail home now, for good. Forget about Rome, as Rome forgot about you.’
Lucius shook his head. ‘Britain will wait for us. Even I cannot exactly explain why, but we, my son and I, are still needed here, with you. We stay until the end.’
Every night now, Attila suffered visions and broken sleep. He saw his horsemen riding up the steps of the Roman Capitol, gouging out the eyes of emperors’ statues with their spearpoints. In his dreams he ceaselessly
