He tried to explain – rationally – what he knew and understood of Attila, and his idea of himself and his demonic destiny.
The emperor listened, brow furrowed. ‘But this is madness!’ he said incredulously. ‘It is almost as if you are suggesting that Attila has no aim but to avenge the insults he suffered as a child – with vengeance in the form of purest destruction!’
‘To destroy his enemies is the sweetest thing to him, and his enemies are all those he feels have insulted him and his people. The more he destroys, the stronger he becomes. If you buy him off with gold, that makes him stronger too. It will not buy peace. Attila scorns peace, and loves power. Gold will only buy him more weapons, more armour, more warhorses, the service of freebooters and shiftless mercenaries.’
Still the emperor looked perplexed and angry.
Aetius approached him as closely as he dared, and fixed his eye urgently. ‘Majesty, you must imagine that Attila has sent you a message saying simply, “We do not want anything from you. We want to destroy you.”’
‘But it was on the orders of the Western Empire that the original attack on the Huns was mounted.’
‘And the Western Empire’s turn will come. But it was an Eastern legion that executed that order, a legion itself now destroyed. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. The Lord God punished them all.’
‘You are comparing Attila to God?’
‘Not my comparison, Attila’s own. Attila Tashur-Astur – “Flagellum Dei”.’
Theodosius pondered a moment, and then another party entered. It was Pulcheria, the emperor’s absurdly pious and misleadingly christened elder sister, a sour-faced woman in her sixth decade. With her came one of her closest counsellors, the lean, saturnine Chrysaphius, and a small, wiry man called Vigilas. She spoke quietly to the emperor, and a moment later Theodosius asked Aetius to leave them. Matters had already progressed from the military to the diplomatic, he said smoothly, despite the master-general’s ‘pessimism’ and ‘negativity’; further advice from him was now redundant.
The two Hun ambassadors were Geukchu, an intelligent-looking fellow in a fine silk robe, not in animal furs and skins as they had expected; and a quiet, very polite, bald-pated companion, Greek by birth, who introduced himself as Orestes. Within minutes, Theodosius felt he had mastered them. They brought the emperor some wonderful treasures, including a Cimmerian leopard in a cage; they paid him great respect, kissing the purple hem of his robe, and they said that yes, they would be happy to receive a Byzantine embassy in return. They were sure an accommodation could be reached in this unfortunate matter.
Behind them, Theodosius’ eyes met the gaze of Chrysaphius, and the counsellor, almost imperceptibly, nodded.
That night, Geukchu and Orestes dined and drank late into the night with Chrysaphius and Vigilas, and in the morning they took their leave of one another like brothers.
The emperor insisted that Aetius lead the Byzantine embassy to the Huns, despite the general’s lack of enthusiasm. He could combine the mission with escorting the empress home afterwards. Chrysaphius and Vigilas would go, too, the counsellor handling the actual negotiations; and he also sent his trusted Clerk-in-Consistory, modest Priscus, to record the historic meeting, along with a small retinue of guards. Aetius wished to take the two Visigothic princes and their fifty wolf-lords on the long and perilous journey, fully armed. The emperor grudgingly agreed. Those wolf-lords ate like oxen in winter. It would be good to be rid of them for a while.
A note came to Aetius from the Princess Honoria, smuggled out via a bribed slave, bribed in God knew what manner. The disgraced and dishonoured daughter of Galla Placidia and sister of Valentinian, long held in virtual captivity in the women’s quarters, she wrote mockingly that she too would like to ride out and meet this Attila. She thought he sounded interesting. Aetius grunted with grim amusement, sniffed the delicate little note and found it was indeed perfumed, then screwed it up and tossed it into the nearest brazier.
And so it was that I, Priscus, rode out that day with the man I still thought of as my beloved pupil, upon the most perilous journey of my life. Sailing back and forth from Italy to Constantinople was bad enough, but this was virtually into the wilds of Scythia! I took a flask of very strong red wine, heavily sweetened, to keep me warm; and an extra woollen blanket.
Thus prepared, I took my brief place upon the stage of History, tentative, blinking, and for what I hoped would be but a short scene. The public theatre is sufficiently unpleasant, what with the rotten fruit and the catcalls, but the stage of History is far worse, and for those who take their place upon it, the play often closes early.
I also took with me many scrolls to record this historic venture. In the night I dreamed that I was reading them over, and that I had called my account ‘A Journey Through the Thirteen Cities of the Ruined Lands.’
We rode out that morning through the Golden Gate, heading westwards along the shores of the Sea of Marmara on the ancient Via Egnatia, which people had travelled for six hundred years towards Thessalonika, and then over the Dinaric Alps to the Adriatic coast at Dyrrachium. But before Thessalonika we would turn north away from the coast and up into the hills. The wolf-lords and their two princes rode the finest white Cappadocian horses from the imperial stables. That favour, at least, the emperor had allowed his allies, though they still mourned their own drowned chargers, lying deep beneath the waves and far away.
Under a late summer sky heavy with stormclouds, Aetius was trying to keep other ghastly images at bay. The battle of the River Utus: is that how history would remember it – if at all? The Beginning of the End, far more surely than Adrianople, seventy years before. Six legions gone. Another at Viminacium, another at Ratiaria. Other cities destroyed since then, he was sure. He was glad he had not seen it, but he could imagine the scenes of carnage all too well.
They had mastered artillery and the heavy cavalry charge already. A bludgeoning bullock-headed charge: no lightly dancing, lethal arrow-storms now, but a heavy cavalry, gleaming and newly armoured from the armouries of Ratiaria, thumping into the aghast Byzantine line and shivering it to splinters. Shards of shieldwood and flying teeth, lost limbs, open mouths screaming silently, flailing, falling, trampled into the reddening mud. The Huns must have learned fast, clad in the laminar plate of their slaughtered foes, clutching long lances resting in slings and couched tightly under bulging biceps. Their squat muscled horses galloping in fast, a pummelling gallop with huge heads stretched forward and low, juddering into the Byzantine line like battering-rams, men flung aside, horses’ eyes rolling to the whites like those of horses gored by bulls, Roman horses rising up under the punch, staggering, toppling their own riders back into the melee, legs flailing, hooves turned upwards, kicking, horses screaming, their lips curled back over long yellow teeth and terrible horse cries, the foul stench of blood and ruptured bowels, the earth slippery with loosed innards and gore, the horror…
‘Deep in thought, Master-General?’
It was Prince Theodoric at his side, his voice light and young and jaunty. Aetius said nothing.
‘Worried about the Huns?’ asked Torismond, equally brightly. ‘Never fear, the mighty Visigothic nation will vanquish them by Christmas.’
‘Mind your tongue, little brother,’ cautioned the more sensible Theodoric, glancing round. The Hun ambassadors Geukchu and Orestes with their small party of Hun warriors rode at the back of the column. ‘This is just us. Our father’s people are not at war with the Huns.’
Aetius said softly, ‘They will be.’
‘Attila’s aim is Rome,’ said Theodoric, ‘and Constantinople.’
‘His aim is the world.’
‘Well, I pray that this embassy fails,’ said Torismond.
Aetius glanced sideways at his rubicund friend from Gothia. ‘It’ll fail.’
‘And then I pray that we meet some of ’em out there!’ he added eagerly. ‘A war party!’ He even leaned forward in his saddle as he spoke.
‘Pray that you don’t,’ said Aetius.
The threatened storm passed and we rode on west across the burning Thracian plains. Already many of the farms and homesteads were deserted. The people had fled, refugees stumbling back to the already overcrowded city of Constantinople, in dread of the approaching wrath. ‘The Huns are coming’ was the whisper throughout all that country. ‘Flee for your lives. The Huns are coming.’ The people, too, had no faith in embassies.
One solitary man stood at the side of the road watching us pass, clutching his hoe like a spear. Then he called out sardonically at our band of sixty or so, ‘You’re going to need a bigger army!’
We said nothing and rode on.
One night, as we camped, a snake appeared beside where Chrysaphius was standing. The counsellor froze in horror, a townsman to his marrow, but in a trice the little fellow Vigilas had drawn a gleaming dagger from his cloak
