and skewered the snake through the head.
Aetius regarded him curiously.
Later he addressed him casually in simple Gothic, and then Aramaic, but the fellow looked blank. He spoke only Latin and Greek, the former somewhat stiffly. A poor linguist for a diplomat.
‘He is my personal bodyguard,’ said Chrysaphius defensively. ‘Let us concentrate on the task in hand, Master-General.’
Aetius assured him that he was all concentration.
Sleeping out at night was bad, although, as it turned out, far from the worst horror that we would face. How I longed night after night for the hot baths and cool chambers of the Palace of the Emperors, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, silvered by the moon. Instead I went along, and saw things that I have never forgotten and would never have dreamed.
For the first time I saw with my own eyes the horrors of war. I, Priscus of Panium, obedient son, studious pupil, humble scribe in the Imperial Court of Theodosius II, and lately raised to the post of Chief Clerk-in-Consistory. How tearfully proud my parents would have been, had they lived to see! I was never meant for the battlefield, and was a little fearful even of that more playful battlefield which lies between the opposing armies called Men and Women. I was happier, generally speaking – but for an occasional scampering visit to the local bawdyhouse on the Street of the Golden Cock just behind the Hippodrome – to keep myself to myself, and to stay peacefully and diligently among the scrolls and texts of the ancients, reading and writing and dreaming of other ages than this.
But now I was riding out to see the world as it is. I do not think that I have known the same peace of mind since seeing the world as it is. My dreams have been more vivid, and more troubled. In the old days I barely remembered my dreams at all, but now they come to me in the silence of the night, messengers and harbingers unsought. I have less of my old equanimity now. But perhaps I will be a better chronicler for it. There is no reason to think that Tacitus and Thucydides were happy men.
Of the things I witnessed, I asked myself, did the armies of Rome not commit similar atrocities? Yes, they did. Perhaps not on such a scale; perhaps not with such malevolent randomness or glee, perhaps with rather a dutiful grimness. But if you are the victim, does it matter whether your killer is grinning or grimfaced when he cuts your throat? I tried to discern that the violence of Rome was a means to an end, committed to secure peace, stability and the rule of law, but the violence of the barbarians was committed for its own sake, for the pleasure of terror, and as such would never cease or find satiety.
But I do not know any more. I do not enjoy the ordered comfort of such thoughts. I know little with certainty, and I can only record what I saw. At my age I no longer have opinions, only memories.
I had hope
When violence was ceas’d, and War on Earth, All would have then gone well, peace would have crowned
With length of happy days the race of man;
But I was far deceived…
And one battle looks much like another when you survey the corpses after.
Our journey was long and arduous, and I often slept in the saddle. I remember a violent storm, and fires of blazing reeds, detonated by the lightning and burning up even in rain. I remember weariness and disorientation, tiredness beyond measure, and the sun appearing to rise in the West one morning. A bad omen.
When we came to the ruins of what had once been a city, the omen was fulfilled: the first of numberless settlements, villages, towns and cities we were to encounter, destroyed and utterly laid waste by the hand of Attila. The rich and golden cities of the Eastern Empire that would never again recover from his wrath. Through all the destruction, our two Hun ambassadors, our guides through this wasteland which their own people had created, seemed not a bit contrite. Guilt they doubtless regarded as a form of cowardice, like most barbarians. Only at a certain rest stop did the one called Orestes, Greek by birth – shame on him! – wave his hand over the void before us, and say softly, ‘You see now why it would be in your interests to negotiate.’ He almost smiled. Aetius’ face was dark with fury and he did not speak. Not for days.
The city was a blackened skeleton of its former self, a skeleton of wood and stone, flattened walls, arches and buttresses broken off and hanging in space. Like Philippopolis and Marcianopolis, it had been a bishopric, and the Huns had knifed and stripped its bishop and hung him from the walls.
‘They would have spat in the face of Christ if they could,’ I muttered.
‘As did the Romans once,’ said Prince Theodoric beside me.
I could think of nothing more to say.
A few had survived the firestorm and the arrow-storm, and them we pitied most, for they must have envied the dead. Sick people sheltered beneath the broken walls of the churches. Rachitic or tubercular children, riven with coughing, held out their clawed hands to us for food, but we could not help. A small girl cradling an infant in her lap sheltered beneath a smashed stone altar table, dark eyes peering up at me through filthy hair. In a demolished side-street, a mere pattern of rubble now, there was another huddle of children, lips withered with hunger, worm- filled bellies like sails before the wind. Near them, though they appeared mercifully oblivious, lay two adult corpses, scalped, their temples stained as if with some dark chrism. Here I tired and could no longer look at the sights of the city.
I rode over paving-stones grouted with dried blood, my horse trampling over a tattered prayer book, an illuminated euchologion, torn pages turning to no purpose. My ears rang with sad litanies of mortal flesh and blood. My old pupil said, remounting and pulling his horse away, ‘And the emperor believes he can negotiate with this.’
A little further on he stopped again. His head was bowed and his big, scarred hands gripped the front of his saddle. I saw to my astonishment that, although his shadowed face was set as hard and grim as ever, tears ran down his furrowed cheeks and fell in dark splotches on the saddle leather. Yet why should I be astonished? That was Aetius to the core: the deepest passions, under iron control.
He turned in the saddle and looked back. The column of wolf-lords in their scarlet cloaks was riding out after us, and the Byzantine ambassadors, and the two wordless, expressionless Huns. We were leaving the sick people and the starving children behind. Aetius said, his voice trembling, ‘All we can do now, to help them, is defeat Attila.’
I understood. He was almost asking me to forgive him for riding on and not helping, here and now. I nodded. It was agony, but there was nothing to be done here. We had no food, no medicines, no resources. The people were too sickly to move, let alone make it all the way back to the safety of Constantinople. In a few days they would simply… vanish. Their souls would be gathered in. I nodded again, I hoped consolingly. We must do the emperor’s bidding and speak with Attila. Then we must ride back to the city. There were a million or more people there whom we could save. And beyond that… the rest of the empire.
The two princes reined in, flanking Aetius on either side, behind them the powerfully built wolf-lords Valamir and Jormunreik. No word was spoken but, as is the way of men, the meaning was plain. They rode with Aetius: to whatever doom.
The two Huns were not addressed again.
We camped on a nearby hillside in the coarse tussock grass. We would rather have camped in the lush watermeadows down by the river, but the water was befouled, and there were too many bones of the slain littering the country round about.
Over the following days we passed more ghosts of towns and cities, each as bad as or worse than the last. On the road we glimpsed trickles of frightened fugitives who fled from us into the woods before we ever reached them; and one old woman, who could not flee. It is terrible to see a mother wailing over her child, but worse still to see an old woman wailing over her aged husband, lying broken in the mud, snapped like a dry twig. He with whom she thought to live out her last quiet days.
After the devastated cities of the plain we ascended into low foothills and then rough, barren mountains, over mighty gorges, treacherous wilds barely touched by the magisterial hand of Roman law, where men dressed in sheepskin jackets tied around the waist with twisted leather, and women were safe only beside their own hearthfire. We traversed many rivers by dugout canoe, and villagers fed us on mead rather than wine, and on millet not wheaten bread.
Later in our journey there were no villagers left. We could only forage like beasts.
