Aetius slept briefly, breathing rapidly through a nightmare in which he was walking alone on a desert shore, with a monstrous shark cruising through the waves on his left, and on his right a ravening lion coming through the dunes towards him, eyes glinting and yellow. If he kept wading through the waves at about waist height, neither lion nor shark could quite reach him. But they followed him along on either side, deathly companions, knowing he would tire long before they did… He awoke with a start, needing no seer to interpret the dream for him.
A one-eyed storyteller loomed out of the night, bare-headed, hair plastered down, bloodshot eye red-rimmed and shining.
‘Oh, no more madmen and their tales, please, ’ said Malchus.
But the storyteller wanted them to know that the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus had awoken. The end was indeed coming near.
Wearily, they asked him to explain. Squatting down before them in the pelting rain, he said that generations ago, when the Emperor Decius was persecuting the Christians, seven noble youths of Ephesus concealed themselves in a cave in the nearby mountains. Decius ordered the cave to be sealed and left them to their grim fate. There they had slept unharmed and protected by God for one hundred and eighty-seven years. Then lately, the slaves of one Adolius, who owned the cave, came to take away the stones for building. The sun flooded into the cave, and the Seven Sleepers awoke, thinking only a single night had passed.
They sent one of their number, Iamblichus, into Ephesus to buy bread for their breakfast. He came down into the city, amazed by the sight of a huge cross over the main gate. He offered the baker a coin of Decius, speaking in an antique fashion and peculiarly dressed. On suspicion of possessing secret treasure, Iamblichus was dragged before a magistrate in the basilica. Enquiry established the astonishing facts. All went to see the cave – the magistrate, the captain of the guard, the city prefect, – and all was as Iamblichus had told them. With that, the sleepers blessed their visitors, departed back into the cave, rejoicing that they had lived to see the Triumph of the Cross, and peacefully lay down and died.
There was silence but for the pelting rain. A stray dog pattered through the downpour. It was an eerie story. At last Malchus offered the man a coin, but he said there was no need. The end was upon them now. He fixed them with his single bloodshot eye. ‘The Lord care for all souls,’ he said softly. ‘“This ae night, this ae night, Every night and all, Through fire and sleet and candle heat, Then Christ receive your soul.”’
A night bird called in the darkness above the walls. And then the earth began to tremble.
As they ran, they heard a great howl from out of the darkness, all the more terrible for being the howl of a man of steel. It was the general, at last giving way to despair.
The earthquake lasted perhaps a minute at most. A deep rumbling in the earth, the ground shifting beneath people’s feet, animal cries of pure terror. Within the houses of the rich, mosaic floors creased and crumpled, candelabra trembled and were still and then flung down. Precious stained glass in the churches cracked and then exploded. Walls shuddered and shed their plaster amid clouds of dust. Stones fell and bodies were brutally laid out below.
All through it and for hours afterwards, the autumn rain fell ceaselessly. Whereas the city had been in a state of silent, pent-up hysteria, now all chaos was let loose. In the drenched midnight the bells of the churches of St Irene, and the Apostles, and the Chora Monastery, and the great basilica of St Sophia Augusteion rang out, as if to summon the people to judgement. The bells of the Apostles suddenly went silent, and then there was a terrible clanging crash. The quake had weakend the bell-tower, and it had collapsed. Four bell-ringers were laid out dead.
The streets turned to mud, the animals were maddened, wailing people ran to and fro with blazing torches. Some made to escape from the city altogether. Even in the pitch-black night, in the driving rain, they fled down to the half-ruined harbours, pushed past the few guards there, and piled into little boats. Some even tried to swim across the Bosphorus. But the currents were strong, the waves were wild and clashing after the shaking of the earth, and the next day the sun rose on the sight of many hundreds of bodies washed up along the silent golden shores of Asia like strange seaweed. The first offerings.
From the depths of his despair, somehow the master-general stirred himelf and found the strength and resolution to go on. He gave orders that no more were to pass. All remaining boats down to the smallest dinghies and rafts were to be smashed, and even the smallest harbours of Julian and Constantius and St Mary Hodegetria were to be blocked up. The general was ubiquitous on his white horse, one moment down at the Hippodrome, clearing out the many refugees there and billeting them on existing households, the next inspecting the cisterns of Aelius and Mocius, thanking God that neither had been ruptured in the quake. For good measure he took time to excoriate their overseers and insist the great tanks should be at their highest levels – especially in this damned rain.
He hectored the city watch at the end of every street, struggling to contain and appease the hysterical people. He addressed the populace at times, sitting his white horse, and they grew familiar with the sight of him. He told them to return to their homes and keep calm. This was their best hope now, in a city unmanned and soaked and half ruined by earthquake. Outside the walls their fate would be far worse. Then he was riding north and overlooking the Golden Horn, his horse picking its way through the rubble of collapsed shacks and stalls and even whole stone houses. He nodded with approval that at least one order had been correctly carried out. The normally placid waters were still ruffled from the aftershocks, and drummed into a dark mist by the rain, and spiked with the masts and timbers of half-sunk boats, an impassable obstacle course. Even more importantly, the Great Chain had been laid across the mouth of the Golden Horn, from the tower just below the Acropolis – mercifully still standing – to the oppposite side, locked onto the sea walls of Galata. No ship could break through that chain.
Let the Vandal ships come, he thought grimly, through quake and storm. They’ll get nowhere. All our attention will be on the Walls. Then he reflected a moment, and sent an order for one, just one, artillery machine to be released from the walls of Theodosius, whichever was furthest from Military Gate V, and brought down here to be stationed on top of the towers of the St Barbara Gate, overlooking the chain. If the Vandal ships do cluster here like the amateurs they are, he thought, at least we can take a few vengeful potshots at them. Good for morale.
Then… the Walls. He turned with a heavy heart and rode west. As he came round to the Charisius Gate, he saw the worst. The Walls were half ruined. In places, the sections between the towers were no more than head height. The rain slowed and stopped and the sun came out abruptly, mist steaming off the piles of broken masonry.
He climbed one of the towers and saw that the great Inner Walls had suffered most. Accursed luck. But one small consolation: the moat didn’t seem to have been ruptured. It still held twenty or thirty feet of water, now covered with a fine spray of limestone dust from the shivered and shaken walls.
He rode the three miles south with the Visigothic Princes, and Tatullus, and Captain Malchus. The Isaurian chieftain, Zeno, came down to say that the walls of the Blachernae Palace had barely been touched. But beyond that things were terrible. Tower after tower had shivered to rubble, jumbled piles of brick and stone, the bright marble of the proud gateways grubby red with brickdust. Broken statues lay face down along with broken people. What the most skilled and powerful besiegers could not have achieved in a month, nature had achieved in a minute. All rode on silently, thinking the same thoughts. God has turned against us. We have been judged.
‘Check with the outriders,’ was the only order Aetius could give.
By the time they reached the southern end of the Walls, they had counted fifty-seven of the ninety-seven towers damaged or fallen, and almost half the Walls likewise.
‘Find me the Easterner,’ he ordered.
They sat their horses. The September sun shone down. Flies buzzed over puddles in the humid air. Not a word was spoken. Then Arapovian came. He saluted.
‘So, Easterner,’ said Aetius. ‘With your intimate knowledge of earthquakes, tell me: if the Huns are fifty miles off, will they have felt it?’
‘I do not know, sir. If they are more than two hundred miles off still, then perhaps not.’
Aetius brooded. The aqueducts still flowed, had not been destroyed. There might just be a chance.
He spoke more thoughts aloud. ‘The moment they feel it, for them it will be Astur shaking His enemies to the ground. It will be our righteous punishment. And they will be here at the gallop. But it is just possible – just – that they are still unaware of our calamities.’
‘Then what do we do?’ asked Tatullus. ‘Other than fight to the death?’
‘Other than fight to the death,’ said Aetius, ‘a destiny which most certainly awaits us, we rebuild the
