childhood. I believe in a line of good infantry – or a column of Gothic wolf-lords, if it comes to it.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Gamaliel, ‘the Son of God was born under a star descried by eastern Magi, was he not? And of a virgin? According to the ancient Jewish prophecy?’
‘There’s religion and there’s superstition. Don’t confuse the two, old man. “By their fruits ye shall know them”.’
Gamaliel raised his bushy eyebrows. Then he changed tack. ‘This Attila, he is a superstitious man, is he not?’
Aetius hesitated. ‘He has shamans and witches about him, yes, though he pretends to scorn them.’
‘You know he believes. His people believe in him, too, for now, and that he is the son of Astur, the All-Father, and possessed by the bloody spirit of Savash, their god of war. This is a struggle not just between armies, but between what people believe.’
Torchlights were moving over the plain. Aetius strode to the edge of the battlements to order the wolf-lords to stand ready.
‘Remember the verse,’ urged Gamaliel after him. ‘“Four will fight for the end of the world, One with an Empire, One with a Sword, Two will be saved and one will be heard, One with a Son and One with a Word.” And also the verses about a King of Terror from the East-’
‘Baulk the main gates!’ roared Aetius.
‘Sir!’ replied one of the men down below. It was the centurion, Tatullus. ‘Listen to that!’
There was a kind of muffled movement, a tramping, and then he could hear it: the baaing of sheep.
Attila always admired the brave and bloody-minded. The men of Azimuntium had triumphed.
After the herds and the flocks had been returned, along with the captured shepherds, filthy but well enough, Aetius ordered Chanat brought up from the dungeons.
The old warrior glared at him. ‘A horse.’
‘You Huns have horses enough. You can walk back to the camp.’
Chanat growled, ‘Slaves walk.’
Aetius turned to the woman. ‘And what about you? Will you return to your lawful Christian husband, or do you wish to go with this ageing barbarian?’
The woman gave Chanat a look that said it all. Chanat grinned. ‘I take the woman instead of a horse. She is slow but comfortable.’ The woman bowed her head in shame, but stayed by his side.
Aetius sighed and looked away. ‘Open the postern gate.’
‘You have no courtesy, Roman, no hospitality for your guests,’ said Chanat as he departed.
‘You weren’t a guest, you were a prisoner.’
‘But I think we shall meet again. Maybe on some bright, bloody battlefield, and it will be a glorious death for both of us. But you should ride away quickly now. The shadow of Astur follows you over the earth, and we, too, are riding south. The next time we meet, the Lord Attila may not be so accommodating!’
After the gate had closed on the pair, Aetius turned to his wolf-lords. ‘Saddle up fast.’
He insisted that the empress ride in a carriage, but she well knew what threat lay over them, and that time was against them: not just this party, but the entire city of Constantinople. She rode on a horse, clutching her reins, pale and silent. Lord Ariobarzanes came down to bid them farewell, grimly satisfied with the return of the sheep and cattle, and swearing that if ever the Huns appeared in his domains again, the men of Azimuntium would destroy them. Finally, the old Jewish healer or whatever he was came and spoke to him. Aetius asked him to ride with them, but he said that his path was by another way. His arms were full of ancient scrolls which he had taken from the synagogue, fearing that they would fall to the Huns, to be used for lighting campfires. As if one man could gather all the scrolls of the ancient world and save them from the fire to come.
Aetius had other things to think about, such as checking their provisions, exchanging a half-lame horse for a better one, and deciding what route they should take before the path of the oncoming whirlwind. But still Gamaliel followed him, shambling around the courtyard of Azimuntium before the gates as the wolf-lords and the empress’s retinue assembled, tripping over the tattered hem of his old grey robe, talking of the Sibylline Leaves, which were destroyed but not yet silent. He told the general to remember the prophecy recorded by Livy, that Rome would stand twelve centuries plus six lustra, which period was soon coming. And the king who destroyed two kingdoms. All is not all that it seems. The story is not yet finished. Is it ever? Which is the real, time or eternity? In dreams there is no time.
Aetius peered into a pannier, checking grain, finding the old man very distracting.
‘Last night,’ said Gamaliel, ‘perhaps you dreamed of your boyhood again. You were back at school under the stern eye of the magister. ’
‘Dreams play us false,’ snapped Aetius.
‘Did the dreams of Pharaoh play him false? Or Nebuchadnezzar? God speaks in dreams. The wise man listens and attends. Have hope, Aetius. Have precious hope.’
Aetius mounted, called for the gates to be opened, and turned back to look over the column. So feeble, so few in number. The wolf-lords with their banners floating in the breeze… the empress with her dark, pained eyes. Then he muttered to Prince Theodoric at his side, ‘Time to go. Attila will be hunting us. The game has begun.’
‘He thinks war a game?’
‘He thinks all of life and death a game. Forward!’
16
Elsewhere, all over the Eastern Empire in those days, the armies of the Huns roved unchecked, destroying all in their path. The shadow of Astur was indeed over the earth. The clumsy attempt on Attila’s life would be paid for with the lives of thousands.
At the seaports of the Adriatic, refugees took ship and fled west, spilling out of ramshackle boats and making landfall along the Italian coast. Stories of devastation soon reached the horrified ears of the Court of Ravenna, and Valentinian, rather than leading the Army of the West to face Attila in a last, desperate attempt to halt him, as a man of a different stamp might have done, ordered his finest legions to huddle uselessly about him, camped on the debilitating summer marshes, while his Eastern brothers burned.
Attila and his horde left Moesia, Macedonia, Illyricum and Thrace nothing but scorched earth. They razed to the ground the cities of Nicopolis and Marcianopolis and the great regional capital of Sardica. Their fury and their appetite for destruction knew no bounds, and they slew all they found. They destroyed Philippopolis, and Adrianople, and Edessa in Macedonia, and on the Euxine coast the lovely cities of Salmydessus, and Apollonia, and Tomi where Ovid in exile once wept. On the Aegean coast they destroyed Amphipolis, and the great port of Thessalonika, taking all that city’s rich stores of silver and lead away in their huge covered wagons. Some of their war parties rode on further, as if unable to rein in, and laid waste to Thessaly and even ancient Hellas itself. They found Corinth and Athens deserted, but destroyed many of the finest monuments of those revered cities in vengeance. Their victims numbered in the thousands, tens of thousands. The stench of rotting bodies was always on the wind.
Constantinople, the sweetest dish, the Red Apple as they called it, was left till last. The walled city of Constantine, the New Rome, was all that stood between the Huns and the treasures of Asia: the teeming millions of Syria and Egypt, the cities of Nicomedia and Ephesus and Antioch, the ancient centres of Christianity, far greater and more populous than any the Huns had yet devastated. As the terror of the coming storm increased, so, too, did the slow and horrified realisation that this was a storm which would not cease. Constantinople once taken, the Huns would cross the straits of the Bosphorus, and the rest of the world would be at their feet.
The Byzantines had visions of the Huns riding their rough ponies into the very Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, or the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, laying waste the site of Calvary and man’s redemption itself. Huns traversing the desert east and besieging far Damascus; crossing the Sinai and trampling the rich cornlands of Egypt, burning and flattening Alexandria, barbarous steppe horsemen amid the immemorial pagan temples and palaces of that ancient kingdom. Huns riding across North Africa, via the burning shells of Cyrene and Leptis Magna, and on to
