called the name of Rome, and of Aetius.
Aquileia offered him no resistance. Rounding up its notables, he demanded to have one Nemesianus brought to him. That venerable senator was old and too weak to move, he was told. But his villa was He galloped away, Orestes barely able to keep pace with him.
He dragged the white-haired old senator out of his bed and out onto the fine terrace looking down upon the great city of Aquileia, and the autumn Adriatic beyond. He waved his drawn dagger over the city.
‘All this,’ he rasped, ‘all this will be destroyed first. Because of you.’
Nemesianus was on all fours, weeping. Orestes halted his horse and dismounted with half a dozen warriors. The senator stared at them – their tattoos, shaven heads, weals, garlands of teeth and jawbones – with sick disbelief. Then he turned back to Attila, almost sobbing, ‘But why me? Why me? ’
Attila squatted down on his haunches and sighed, stropping his dagger on a fine sandstone paving-slab.
‘D-d-don’t, don’t do that,’ stammered Nemesianus. ‘D-d-dalmatian stone, the finest…’
Attila looked at him with arched eyebrows, and laughed. He continued stropping. ‘ Why me? ’ he repeated. ‘A question the gods find tiresome.’
The old man had bitten his lower lip till it bled. The spots of blood stood out against his ashen face like berries in old snow.
‘Forty years ago,’ said Attila, ‘on the road to Aquileia, there were three children. They were small, weak, hungry. There was no one to care for them. And then you came along the road.’
Nemesianus looked hopeful. ‘Forty years ago is a long time. Perhaps it is difficult for you to-’
‘There was a boy, a rude barbarian boy, his cheeks scarred with the blue tattoos of his people. A frightful creature.’ Attila drew his hair back over his gold-hooped ears and the man saw and groaned. ‘There was another boy, a blond Greek slaveboy.’ He pointed his dagger at Orestes. Nemesianus stared to and fro. Blood spotted his embroidered robe.
‘And there was a little girl. Her name was Pelagia. She was the sister of the Greek slaveboy. He loved her dearly. She was six years old.’
There was silence but for Nemesianus’ sobs. Then he began to say ‘Please’ over and over again.
Attila eyed him. ‘Shsh,’ he said softly.
Nemesianus fell silent.
‘The tattooed barbarian boy loved her, too, for she was as innocent as the spring. Perhaps because she was everything he was not.’
The old man began shaking his head very slowly. ‘No, no, no,’ he murmured under his breath, almost inaudibly.
‘You took them in, you cared for them.’ Attila shook his head likewise, as if in sympathetic sorrow. ‘Oh, how you cared for them.’
He stood up and went over to the old man. ‘So this is the answer to your bleating question, “Why me? O cruel gods, why me?”’ He locked the old man’s head in the crook of his left arm. ‘The gods are not cruel, after all. They are but just, and their punishments are hounds of heaven on the traces of our sins. In time, over long years, sometimes as much as forty years after the sin has been committed and enjoyed and forgotten, those tireless hounds of heaven will find you out. They run all night through the midnight forests, their path ahead lit by the fire in their burning eyes. They will neither slow nor cease, noses to the ground, following to its source and origin the stinking scent of your sins which cry to heaven for vengeance.’ He held the dagger motionless in front of the old man’s left eye. ‘Do you see now? Do you see, why me?’
With a jab and sideways flick of the daggerpoint, he impaled and dug out Nemesianus’ eye. The aqueous blob flew from the dagger’s end and splatted onto the ground, quivering there slightly like some primeval sea creature dragged untimely from the deep. The old man howled and struggled and tears flowed from the socket where the roots of his eyeball hung out over his lower lid, like the gory roots of some unearthed plant of flesh and blood. Tears and blood flowed down his furrowed old cheeks, and his liverspotted hands tightened round Attila’s thick forearm in feeble opposition.
‘Do you see now?’ said Attila again. ‘No. I fear you still only half see.’
Another jab and flick, and there were two sightless eyeballs losing their lustre in the dust. The old man’s twin eyesockets welled with watery blood.
‘Now you see,’ said Attila. He released Nemesianus’ head from its lock and wiped his daggerblade clean on the old man’s robe. ‘Now you see.’
Nemesianus collapsed and lay groaning.
‘You will not, I fear, be able to see the imminent burning of your beloved city.’ He stowed his dagger inside his leather jerkin. ‘But you will smell it well enough.’
He looked at Orestes. The Greek nodded. And they rode back into Aquileia.
It was a great city, a great port, one of the greatest in all of Italy. And now? Now the site of Aquileia can barely be found. No more than a heap of stones over which the south wind sighs. Sighs and moves on.
After Aquileia, Attila rode on across Italy and burned Patavium, Vicentia, Verona, Placentia… At Mantua a local poet called Marullus addressed florid verses of praise to the conqueror. Attila had him burned on a pyre of his own books.
Not until he came to Mediolanum did he learn that Galla Placidia had died a year before. He ground his teeth and flogged the man who told him. That night he dreamed of staggering through a gallery of statues, sending them crashing to the ground, crushing them underfoot. Galla in a green stola stepped between them and vanished before he could break her. At the end of the hall sat a horned king on a wooden throne, his hands no more than claws, divested of kingly robes, nothing but a filthy loincloth on him, his old dugs sagging low, his hair matted with fur and feathers. The king raised his head slowly, eyes bloodshot, haggard, horror-struck and then the terrible smile…
Attila awoke, screaming.
Orestes calmed him. ‘We are getting near Rome.’
‘And Rome is coming to meet us,’ said Attila. Ravenna itself was no more than a court of chattering apes in togas. They still talked of buying Attila off.
Valentinian demanded to know, ‘Why? Why? What does he want?’
‘Do not enquire too deeply into that black heart, Majesty,’ Aetius said quietly ‘You might lose your way as in a midnight labyrinth, and never find the light again.’
‘He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’ The emperor was clutching himself now, staring at Aetius fixedly. ‘A great friend. You knew him well.’
‘A long time ago.’
Aetius set about marshalling the last band of soldiers he could.
In Mediolanum Attila had himself installed in the Imperial Palace, where he ceaselessly walked its endless marble corridors, muttering to himself. He seemed in no hurry to advance on Rome. Some whispered that he was filled with superstitious dread, remembering the fate of Alaric, who had marched into Rome triumphant and died only six days later.
Despair and fury competed in his breast. One day in a deserted vestibule he found a vast mural depicting the kings of Scythia kneeling in tribute to a succession of Roman emperors. Roaring through the deserted corridors of the palace, he demanded that the mural be repainted depicting himself on the throne and the emperors of Rome kneeling to him. Afterwards, for no obvious reason, he had the terrified mural-painters executed.
At other times he ranted of his grandiose plans, while his little force beyond the city walls ebbed by the day. He would soon take Rome, and then Constantinople – that would become his base. Then he would turn on the tottering Sassanid Empire of Persia, and then India, and finally the Great Wall. They would destroy China itself, the greatest and most ancient enemy of all…
He would be king of the world.
His men felt aimless and abandoned as they looted the country round about. Orestes stayed with him, as did the witch Enkhtuya and, on the farthest fringes, appearing and disappearing again daily like dew, the shaman Little Bird.
‘A king had a mighty empire once,’ said Little Bird, ‘but what did he give it away for? For a bigger empire.’
Attila frowned.
The shaman laughed. ‘The boundless and infinite Empire of Nothing.’ He dared to lay his hand on Attila’s hoar
