There were those in the court of Ravenna, and in senior positions in the Western Army, who were said to have talked to Aetius in utmost secrecy, to have joined together in urging him to seize the imperial throne for himself, to set the diadem on his head and the purple about his shoulders. They said that Valentinian was a babbling fool leading the empire to destruction. But Aetius said that it was as the Church taught: the emperor was God’s annointed, for some purpose hidden from the eyes of men.
‘Then we should have killed him before he became emperor,’ said Germanus, a stocky red-head with a round, rubicund face, one of Aetius’ best, most forthright generals.
‘You cannot kill a boy.’
‘Would you not have killed Hannibal in boyhood, had you been able? Think how many lives you would have saved at Cannae.’
Aetius shook his head.
‘Or Judas Iscariot himself?’
Aetius murmured, ‘“In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.”’
Germanus regarded him blankly. He wasn’t a great one for poetry.
Aetius sighed. ‘Had Christ not been betrayed to crucifixion, how would our sins have been forgiven? Judas, too, was an instrument of God.’
‘But the emperor’s a gibbering fool!’ sputtered Germanus.
Aetius counselled him to lower his voice. ‘I know that,’ he added. ‘Many emperors are. But it is not for us to rescind the appointments of heaven. They are St Paul’s “powers that be”.’
‘Even if those powers are betraying the empire to disaster?’
Aetius said nothing.
‘You owe it to the senate and the people,’ persisted Germanus, ‘the good old “Senatus populusque romanus”, to defend the weak and undefended, the widowed and orphaned, the Christian peoples of Europe.’
‘And so I shall defend that Christian peoples of Europe!’ retorted Aetius, beginning to anger. He quelled his undignified passion, and was silent for a time. Eventually he added, ‘But not that way.’
He said they must live the life that God had allotted to them. He was a general of men, a commander of soldiers, not an assassin. He would do his duty. So must they all.
Valentinian continued to insist that, though the western legions languished, the Eastern Field Army would soon deal with Attila.
‘Besides,’ he said with a peculiar smile, ‘there are other operations afoot.’
For the Vice-Regent of God in the West, Defender of the Church, Shield of the Faithful, had given himelf up to degrading superstitions and the practices of witchcraft, which appeal only to those who are simultaneously corrupt and stupid.
Galla Placidia herself came to Aetius one evening, shaking and white. He insisted she sit. She refused wine.
‘My son,’ she gasped, and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders trembled, and Aetius realised that he was seeing her cry for the first time in his life. Men dying he could cope with. But women crying… At last he summoned the resolve to reach out and lay his broad right hand on her shoulder. Immediately she came round, like someone waking abruptly from a dream. She wiped her eyes with a small white cloth, then stood and walked slowly round the room.
‘My son… is mad,’ she said.
Aetius waited.
As conscious as Aetius that time was running out, and perturbed by what secrets lay in Valentinian’s private chambers beneath the palace, Galla’s patience – and perhaps, she admitted now, her wilful self-delusion – had at last evaporated. She had demanded entrance. A eunuch had been so insolently adamant that she was not permitted entry that she had grown enraged, given him a mighty cuff for a woman of her years, and entered the chambers in a fine rage.
She was met by a horrible sight, but one she had known in her heart she would find – she bit her lip almost to bleeding. There stood her son, clutching a ridiculous willow wand, naked but for a purple silk cape around his upper body, and wearing a primitive animal mask. The small chamber was in gloom except for flickering candles in grubby candelabra. In the impenetrable dark, a slave sat in a corner beating a drum. Foul concoctions steamed in pots, necromantic brews of curdled milk and bitter herbs. There were skulls around the floor, and in the centre, around the emperor, a chalk circle inscribed with the names of JHWH and Hermes Trismegistus.
The great magician turned.
‘Have you brought her?’ he mumbled behind the mask. His eyes flared wide in the chiselled holes, and he snatched the mask off. ‘Mother!’
He wore kohl round his eyes like a harlot. She went closer. His naked belly was a sagging little white pouch like an old man’s, though he was only in his early twenties, and, shame upon shame, his lower parts were smeared with fat, probably mixed with opium and henbane, wolfsbane and hemp. She prayed it was only animal fat. His pupils were black and dilated.
She could not speak. Almost unconsciously she held her arms out to him, her eyes blurring. Her son…
He regained composure of a sort; even smiled. ‘Who is this coming to the sacrifice?’ he slurred. ‘For Abraham, it was his son. For me, apparently it is my mother.’
She stood trembling, still speechless.
‘But you are no virgin, are you, mother?’
Finally she regained control of herself, and called to the eunuch at the door. ‘Bring more light!’ To the unseen slave in the darkness, she snapped, ‘And stop beating that wretched drum if you want to sleep tonight with the skin on your back.’
At that Valentinian went berserk.
‘I am God’s anointed, not her! Drum, slave! No light, no light, this act of darkness shall transpire in darkness! Snuff the candles, senators! “Render unto Caesar”, did not Christ say? Then render unto me, mother! Down on your knees!’ He tore off the flimsy silk cape. His nipples, too, were rimmed with kohl. ‘Render unto me, to me!’ His voice was a bestial shriek. He arched his skinny white chest towards her. Suddenly he was staring intently at her breasts, his lips curled back like a rabid dog’s, teeth bared, his gaze darting to her stricken face and back again, without embarrassment, his eyes glittering with maniac light. He leaned closer, almost touching her, teeth showing in a silent snarl, and Galla knew in that terrible moment what he wanted. His sick desire was to bite off the breasts that fed him, to lunge at the mother who still overshadowed him, and mutilate her into powerlessness.
She stepped back. She called him by the nickname he had as a little boy.
Slowly he came out of the nightmare, though his eyes still glittered and stared.
Then he twirled naked on the spot, apparently oblivious of his nakedness before her, and waved his willow thyrsus.
‘I do but jest, mother,’ he said gaily. He tossed his wand away and rubbed his hands together briskly, as if to free them from dirt. He looked down. ‘Call me Adam, for I am naked, yet not ashamed.’
Galla felt differently. ‘Bring his Majesty a robe,’ she snapped to the eunuch as she swept from the room.
The eunuch obeyed and went.
Galla lingered unseen in the shadows of the antechamber.
The eunuch returned with a clean linen robe. Following the emperor’s orders, he also brought a platter bearing a fieldmouse drowned in spring water, two moon beetles, fat from a virgin nanny goat, two ibis eggs, two drams of myrrh, four drams of Italian galingale and an onion. The slave recommenced drumming. Valentinian masturbated into a clay dish, pounded his semen together with these ingredients, poured in oil, and then sculpted a raw figurine with quivering fingers. Then he placed the figurine, a foul anthropic caricature stuck with eggshell and mouse-fur, before one of the grimy candelabra and raised his eyes ceilingwards.
‘I come announcing the blasphemy before heaven of Galla Placidia, that defiled and unholy woman. Take away her sleep, put a frenzied passion in her thoughts, and a burning heat in her soul. Make her mad before you destroy her, O gods.’
‘Having heard that,’ said Galla, ‘I departed.’
Aetius poured a small goblet of wine. Still she refused.
‘A general is not accustomed to having his orders refused,’ he murmured.
A risky strategy. She looked up. But then she smiled the faintest smile and took the goblet.
