Walls.’
The men stared at him long and hard.
‘There are a million people at hand, doing little at present but wailing and praying. We put them to work. Any fool can learn to build a wall.’
His eyes roved over a section still standing, and settled on an old tombstone which had been used to baulk a weak point. ‘ To the memory of Crescens,’ read the crude lettering, ‘ oil-dealer from the Portico of Pallas, born at the mouth of the Danube, lifelong Blues fan .’ Nearby on the wall itself was a scrawled graffito. ‘ Up the Greens! ’ it read. ‘ The Blues be crushed! ’
Aetius’ face settled again into its old, deep-graven resolution. ‘Get me two teams,’ he said. ‘Everyone in this city is almost as mad about chariot-racing as they are about the Holy Mother. Everyone supports either the Greens or the Blues. Order all the Greens to assemble at the Marble Tower. Order all Blues northwards to the Chora Monastery. Order every mason in the city to oversee them. Let us have a competition.’ He surveyed their dumbstruck expressions. ‘You are thinking this is no time for games. On the contrary, this is exactly the time for games. The spirit of competition between Greens and Blues is a wonderful thing!’ He added wryly, ‘When they’re not slaughtering each other in the streets.’
His men continued to stare.
‘ Move! ’ he bellowed.
From the outriders came news that no enemy had yet been sighted. Water still flowed into the cisterns from the great aqueducts. It was a miracle. The earthquake had been a calamity, but now, it seemed, God had changed his mind. The God who blasts and blesses in one breath.
As He had stayed the sun in the sky for Joshua, so He seemed to be staying the advance of the Huns. Had they attacked now – had they known – the city would have been theirs in hours.
And so the citizens of the Holy City of Byzantium, men, women and children of every station, turned stonemasons and builders. The children carried buckets of water and small pouches of clay and sand. Older men and women mixed the mortar. The stongest men, overseen by experienced masons, retrieved what solid stones they could find and began to re-lay them. Crude cranes were improvised from fallen timbers, from collapsed houses, or from bundles of wooden scaffolding tied with rope. Mules were yoked and worked hard, but none was worked to death: their strength was too valuable to squander. On the remaining towers, the Guard and the Auxiliaries, the wolf-lords and the artillery scanned the horizon ceaselessly. Nothing came. The aqueducts still flowed. It was a miracle.
Aetius ordered water for the workers, but no food. ‘We eat at nightfall, not before. You can work all day on an empty belly. Just keep the water coming.’ Yet when nightfall came, after snatched mouthfuls of bread and meat, many continued to work by torchlight. Sweating, begrimed faces were lit a fiery red, like those of workers in hell.
‘These Byzantines,’ growled Tatullus, grudgingly impressed, ‘I thought all they ever did was pray and argue theology.’
After a little snatched sleep that night, Aetius received a message towards dawn from the overseer at the Cistern of Mocius. He went to inspect. Citizens were filling their pails from the opened spouts at the base. The overseer greeted the general respectfully, shooed the people back, shut off the spouts, and then asked him to climb the steps and look into the cistern. Aetius did so. There was no more inflow. He looked down questioningly.
‘The Aqueduct of Valens,’ said the overseer, ‘supplies this cistern.’
‘But it’s been shut off?’
‘It’s been shut off,’ said the overseer.
So. They were not far away now.
He went to look at the Walls, and could have wept. People lay open-mouthed in the dirt, beyond exhaustion. And the walls…
Unlike the people, the walls were far from finished.
It was then that the men of the Church showed their mettle, their faith in the protection of Christ and his Holy Mother never wavering. They brought the most Holy Icon of the Hodegetria, She Who Leads the Way, painted by St Luke himself, out into the streets from the Church of St Saviour in Chora near the city walls, mounted the icon on a wooden pallet, and processed through the narrow streets, swinging censers, chanting penitential psalms. Black-robed priests and cantors and barefoot laity alike sang the haunting quartertones of the ancient hymns, walking beneath the swaying icon, gilded and jewelled and decorated with fragments of the True Cross. Elsewhere in the city, bishops in brocade vestments raised their croziers in blessing, and deacons sprinkled the faithful with holy water from bunches of dried basil.
They raised the mummified figure of St Euphemia from her open casket and paraded her around the streets in blessing, her head like a dried melon. Bands of Syrian monks emerged from their monasteries, chanting their long litanies to the crucified Christ and calling the faithful to labour again, proclaiming that ‘ Laborare est orare,’ and telling them that the Lord of Hosts was with them. Swelling music came from the interior of every church in the city that morning, the doors thrown open so that the magnificent chants and liturgies of the Roman Church should be heard, surging forth like a tide out of those vast basilicas covered in glimmering mosaic, hung with silk embroidered tapestries and thousands of oil lamps in massive silver candelabra.
True faith moves mountains. The people roused themselves and worked on all that day. It was a Sunday, but today, of all days, God would pardon them for breaking the Sabbath.
A work-gang of Greens, dust-caked youths, came to Military Gate V and asked how the badly damaged Porta Aurea, the magnificent Golden Gate built by Theodosius the Great, should be repaired. Aetius said, ‘A soldier fights best whose armour is so highly polished that it gleams like silver in the sun.’
So, even with the hordes of Attila riding down on them, these untrained youths reconstructed that gleaming wonder of white marble and gold, just as it had been. The four vast bronze elephants were raised up again, one of them repaired in a nearby forge, and set atop the gateway. Even more inspiringly, the two winged victories were set up again in their proper place, a little battered but facing boldly out over the surrounding plains, wings outstretched. Hundreds of people took it in turns to work at a furious rate and then to rest, and by nightfall the gate was more or less as it had been before the earthquake struck. There was huge rejoicing among the Greens at their feat, their spirits soared, and they danced and sang hymns and psalms of praise spontaneously in the streets below. Rumour of the achievement reached the ears of the Blues, whose work-rate redoubled in envious emulation.
It was Prince Theodoric who first made the observation to Aetius, regarding God and his mysterious ways. Aetius nodded, at last almost allowing himself a smile. When the Huns attacked, the Walls would not be as they had been. But they might just be enough. Aside from that, the achievement of the people of the city had put more spirit into them than they ever had before. Action makes men brave, inaction makes them timid. The earthquake might have damaged the walls, but perhaps it had been a blessing in disguise: a very heavy disguise. It had fired the citizens with a peculiar new ardour. Now they waited for the fight to begin with the eagerness of that hot- blooded Captain Andronicus. Aetius felt for the first time that he and his few troops did not stand alone. They had a million people behind them. It was a good feeling.
At last, at the end of that Sunday night, the Blues and the Greens came together at the St Romanus Gate, and there was no enmity left between them. They had achieved wonders together; besides, they were too exhausted for enmity. They embraced like brothers, and then sat in the dust, sweat-stained, coughing and aching, plastered ochre with stone and brickdust, and with barely the energy remaining to eat and drink. Then their beloved Patriarch Epiphanius came out to them, and preached to them from the Book of Ezekiel, having instructed that the same text be preached in every church and in every public place throughout the city.
He preached upon Gog and Magog, the demons in Ezekiel’s vision, who came from the north, and he said this time was come, and Gog and Magog were upon them. But the Lord of Hosts would not forsake his people Israel. ‘“And thou, Gog and Magog, shalt come from thy place in the North, thou and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army; And thou shalt come up against my people Israel as a cloud to cover the land; and it shall be in the Latter Days, and I will bring thee against my land, that the heathen may know me, when I shall be sanctified in thee, O Gog, before their eyes. And against my people, thou shalt not prevail.
‘“Though the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground; yet I will call for a sword against the Prince of the North throughout all my mountains, saith the Lord God. Every man’s sword shall be against him, and I shall plead against him with pestilence and with blood, and I will rain
