behind the spearhead, and the shaft crudely decorated with shamanic runes of power. A Hun spear. He raised them up and held them side by side. Fighting together, thus.
The visual impact was tremendous.
The emperor staggered forward, his wooden lectern crashing to the floor. ‘No!’
‘My Lord,’ said Pytheas, ‘it is my sincerest hope that this is a terrible misunderstanding.’
But the image of Western Legionary and Hun spear-man fighting side by side was indelibly imprinted upon the vivid, vulnerable imagination of the emperor.
‘Indeed,’ said Pytheas, ‘it may even be that this is some malign plan of Attila’s, to drive a wedge between east and west.’
Oh cunning chamberlain! Not the first to realise that, by stating the truth so candidly, you can drive it away.
‘No!’ cried the emperor. ‘I have heard enough. First I was refused aid, then General Aetius wished to bring his army direct to our capital, without alarming us. Now I see why! My cousin Valentinian has said before that he always suspected Aetius’ ultimate aim was to make himself emperor, with help from the Hunnish hordes if necessary. Now I see that it is true. This will not be the first time the West has turned against the East. Remember Mursa, one hundred years ago. That was a calamitous battle.’
It pained me, Priscus, to hear that name. The list of military catastrophes in the last century was long: against the Goths at Adrianople; against the Persians, and Shapur, King of Kings, at the Night Battle of Singara. Yet Mursa was the greatest wound of all, and self-inflicted, the ruinous feat of Constantine the Great’s squabbling sons, and the usurper Magnentius; an empire rending itself to pieces, at the cost of sixty thousand casualties in a single day.
But now my beloved pupil Aetius was master-general in the West. Rome would live to fight again, and better. I prayed for it. Yet day by day, through the brilliant machinations and insinuations of Attila and his network of spies and accomplices, information continued to trickle through to baffle the scholarly, naive, gullible, well-meaning Emperor Theodosius, too unskilled by far in the ways of men. So far from doing evil himself that he suspected none, or he suspected the wrong men – unerringly erring in every judgement he made.
After Pytheas’ departure, I made so bold as offer advice to my lord the emperor. He had appointed no good advisers: the greatest failing of all for a ruler of men.
The first casualty in war is truth, I told him sententiously. He did not appear to listen, but he did not silence me, either.
‘It is not in Aetius’ nature to deceive,’ I said. ‘Remember, my lord, I was his tutor for a brief while.’
Theodosius looked up, brow furrowed. ‘That’s right,’ he said softly. ‘So you were. I had forgotten.’
‘He was not the best of students,’ I murmured, with a fond smile of remembrance. Then, with more attack, ‘But Attila is the Great Deceiver. He will try every trick.’
He seemed in an agony of indecision. I saw the man beneath the stiff golden robes, his very spirit writhing. How he hated to be emperor. It was nothing but a burden to him. Not for the first time, I was grateful I was not a ruler or a politician, whose lives are a long, thankless, much-scorned series of choices between lesser and greater evils. Politicians, unlike poets, do not live in the world of the Good and the Beautiful.
Then he waved me wearily away.
I slept poorly that night. Sometime towards dawn I stood out on my little balcony overlooking the still waters of the Golden Horn. Moonlight coming towards me in a silvered pathway; wisteria and judas trees, night-scented jasmine, nightingales in the pines; two night fishermen out on the water, drawing fish into their nets with lanterns on hooped sticks. By the moonlight I could see the ancient symbol of the stylised eye painted on the prow, white and blue, to ward off evil. Behind me, the city’s golden domes and cupolas would be shining beneath the round- faced moon, unimaginably beautiful. The great statue of Constantine aloft on its pillar, only a little lower than God. Would all this fall? All the strange wonders of this magical city, caught between east and west (wonders which I, Priscus of Panium, had written up with modest scholarship, in a little guide-book regarded with no small admiration among certain literary circles in the city)? The strange triple-headed brass serpent on its pillar in the forum, taken by Constantine the Great himself from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, made to celebrate Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea, 479 years before the birth of Christ. Or the towering column of Pharaoh Thutmose III, unimaginably ancient, the polished hieroglyphs in the polished granite, as clear as when they were cut there by slaves in ancient Egypt millennia ago, in a kingdom long since vanished. So even the greatest empires fall into night. The iron law of change applies to everything. All is metamorphosis. Yes, one day, sooner or later, even all this would change and fall.
The Ancients said hope was merely a sign of foolishness. We Christians now do not have their pessimistic strength.
There is chaos and ruin. And so there is grace and light.
In the marsh-girdled palace of Ravenna, there was an atrocious mix of pride and panic in those days. There was mistrust, plots and delusions of plots, wars and rumours of wars. Aetius, despite his best efforts, could not persuade the emperor to release any Legions to go east. Were the finest then simply to sit in Sicily, while the Huns ravaged all Moesia and Thrace? Yes, apparently.
Meanwhile, Valentinian harped on endlessly about what he called ‘my punitive expedition’, which had apparently stung the Huns into invasion.
‘We would not have heard from them again, had I led it in person,’ he explained to the assembled courtiers listening sycophantically, and to Aetius. Unusually for Valentinian, he was out of doors, taking the air in the palace gardens. The group passed beneath fine mulberry trees, between rows of box hedges, among statues of interestingly deformed children and little cupids strangling geese. ‘I would have shown those Hunnish hairy men.’
He called on one of his favourite court scholars, an orator named Quintilianus, to tell again what was known of the Huns.
Quintilianus bowed low as they walked. ‘Your Eternal Majesty. Like unreasoning beasts, these Huns are entirely at the mercy of the maddest impulses. They have no understanding of right and wrong, their speech is shifty and obscure, they know nothing of true religion or piety. Their greed for gold is limitless, they are fickle, prone to fury, serpentine of tongue. Their physical appearance is the outward sign of their inner animality. They have flat faces, yellowed skin like old parchment, high cheekbones which leave no room but slits for eyes. They stink of meat, milk and mutton fat, which they lard upon their coarse bodies as protection against the savage Scythian winters that they love so well. They ride brutish mounts, often quite naked, or dressed in the most tattered, ill-cured animal skins, which add to their foul odour.’
Valentinian nodded with pleasure at this eloquent description.
‘And now this dreadful people is against us,’ murmured another courtier. ‘People say that we live in desperate times, and surely the End is coming.’
‘How dare they say that!’ cried the emperor, turning and flailing his purple skirts, revealing his pearl-studded kid-skin boots. ‘Those who breathe such treason, I will have them racked and scourged, I will have them crucified in the Colosseum. Let them be an example, let their screams be heard, let the sands run red with their watery blood!’ He was dribbling slightly. ‘Let them-’
The wooden door to the enclosed garden opened and a tired old woman, tall once but now bowed and bent, shuffled in. Valentinian’s gaze rested on her a moment, and then he turned away and continued.
‘I was surprised to hear that my punitive expedition has not worked, but it was done inadequately, you see. They had no military understanding; they held back too much, my men.’
That it was an eastern legion meant nothing to him. The world was his and everything therein. No one really existed for Valentinian but himself. The rest were but figures in his own fevered dreams.
Returning to the palace alone, Aetius found the old woman in the porphyry-pillared entrance hall.
‘Your Majesty,’ he said, bowing.
‘Aetius,’ said Galla Placidia, her tired green eyes betraying a momentary pleasure. ‘I am glad you have returned.’
Aetius regarded her steadily, his expression too perhaps showing the faintest pleasure on seeing her. ‘One can only play King Theodoric at chess so many times.’
‘And lose?’
‘Deliberately, I assure you.’
