soldier in the West was with the Field Army, not six miles east of Ravenna. She reeled them off. The expeditionary force Aetius himself had assembled in Sicily for the reconquest of Africa: six crack legions, including the Batavian, the Herculian, the Cornuti Seniores, the Moorish Cavalry, numbering some eighteen thousand in all.
‘Twenty thousand,’ he interrupted.
‘There have been desertions, even there.’
He looked down.
From the frontiers, a few sad remnants. The only legions worth the name, at around a thousand men each: the Legio I Italica pulled back from Brigetio, the II from Aquincum. The fierce IV Scythica at Singidunum had absconded entirely, quite possibly to the Hunnish side. But Aetius also had the XII Fulminata, the Lightning Boys, good artillerymen; the XIV from Carnuntum; a useful troop of Augustan Horse, around five hundred men; and, finest of them all, the two thousand crack troops of the Palatine Guard. That was it.
The frontiers were, for the first time in centuries, undefended. He saw in his mind’s eye those once mighty legionary fortresses, now desolate and forlorn beside the cold, bleak waters of the Rhine and Danube, an eerie wind blowing through their narrow windows and around their squat U-shaped bastions, starlings nesting in their proud, deserted towers.
He had around twenty-five thousand men. Attila had more than double that in first-rank warriors alone. In total, with mercenaries, lesser tribes, opportunists, nameless eastern peoples, the wild rumours that he rode at the head of half a million were edging towards the uncomfortable truth.
Galla’s old face was bleak indeed. ‘I do not doubt,’ she said at last, very slowly, ‘that if Attila defeats us this last time – if his greatly superior numbers defeat yours – then, with nothing more to oppose him, he will not simply colonise our empire for his kingdom. He will destroy it. He will make a sacrifice to his gods upon an altar called Europe.’
Aetius did not disagree. He said without expression, ‘We gave the order for him to be killed, when he was no more than a boy. Now we are paying the price.’
‘ I gave the order,’ said Galla, unflinching, ‘that he be slain. That the Huns not turn against us. Even that they fight with us, against Alaric and his Goths. His uncle Ruga was not our enemy.’ She shook her head. ‘So long ago. It seems another world. And we failed: we did not kill the boy, though we tried hard. Yet I am not the first ruler who has given the order to take innocent lives in order to save more. And I shall not be the last. I still do not repent it. But God be my judge.’
There was a long silence, and then she said, ‘I feel – forgive an old, dying woman’s hackneyed prophesying – but I feel that he will never see Rome again.’ She seized his hand. ‘I feel that, Aetius. He saw Rome as a boy, a savage boy, and he rejected it and all it stands for. He will not be offered that vision of the city again. I tell you
… he will never… see… Rome again.’ Each pause was an agonised intake of breath, her face implacable and unpitying throughout.
‘One day, one day… and in another world,’ she whispered, so quietly that he had to lean down to hear her. He told her she must rest, but her thin lips curled with scorn. She had not rested once in sixty years. She whispered, ‘I have always… held you in the highest esteem… and the deepest affection… Gaius… Flavius… Aetius.’
Her hand went lifeless in his.
She was expertly embalmed and robed in purple cerecloths in the Triclinium of the Nineteen Couches, the diadem of Roman royalty on her head. In the centre of the hall, the great golden catafalque held her slight body. Forests of candles burned on golden pricket stands amid clouds of incense. Friends and mourners passed where she lay and kissed her: then bishops and priests, senators, patricians, prefects, magistrates, wives, ladies-in-waiting, all coming to kiss her cold cheeks and lament.
Valentinian came, too, to kiss her goodbye, with tears running uncontrollably down his cheeks. Aetius was shocked to see his appearance. He looked an old man, his hair thin and grey, his legs strangely bowed, his gait an exhausted shuffle, clutching a little white cloth to mop both his tears and his constantly dribbling mouth. He brought his mother a present: a lavish set of jewels for her to wear in the tomb. They would have been better used to buy mercenaries, thought Aetius. Galla’s head was gently raised by an attendant, and the sobbing emperor placed the jewels round her neck with trembling hands, and then held her for a long time. He had to be led away.
The funeral cortege processed down to the magnificent Basilica of the Resurrection, accompanied by chanting priests and wailing women mourners. All the way, riding his white horse, Aetius could only think, In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was crucified. It was as if, he began to realise, Galla herself had killed the one thing she loved: Rome. She had maltreated the boy Attila so harshly, unwittingly instilled in him such hatred, that now he came back to destroy the city and the empire she stood for. Truly the drama of the world had been written not by that warm-hearted praise-singer, blind Homer, but by the lonely tragedian Galla had quoted on her deathbed: Euripides, gazing out to sea from his hermit’s cave.
In the basilica, Galla’s diadem was at last removed and replaced with a band of purple silk.
The Patriarch called out in a sonorous chant, ‘O Princess, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords calleth thee!’
She was entombed in her own sarcophagus in the mausoleum nearby, between the two men who had gone before her: her second husband, Constantius, and her brother, the Emperor Honorius. Her own sarcophagus was the largest of the three. She was seated upright within it, as if still reigning over the domain of which she had been ruler in all but name.
The door was drawn closed and there was silence.
2
It was well that Galla died when she did. Only three days later, a message came to the court of Ravenna. It was from Attila’s amanuensis, Orestes. He wrote that Attila was betrothed to the Emperor Valentinian’s sister, Galla Placidia’s daughter, the Princess Honoria, and that he would take as his dowry half the Roman Empire. Specifically, the Western half.
Valentinian laughed hysterically. Even Aetius nearly smiled. That demonic sense of humour was still intact. Then he recalled something Theodosius had said, something about a plot of Honoria’s being discovered…
It was no joke of Attila’s, as rapid communication with the embarrassed court of Theodosius proved. It was all true.
In this winter of AD 450, Princess Honoria, still living an enclosed life with the emperor’s sister Pulcheria and her pious ladies’ maids in the palace in Constantinople, was still only in her late twenties. Amid the chaos of these days, she had at last seen her chance for escape, and for revenge upon the family who had humiliated her and stolen her girlhood from her.
She managed to bribe one of the guards who was escorting the seven thousand pounds of gold to Attila – what manner of bribe it is perhaps best not to enquire but, given her character, it is not difficult to imagine. She persuaded the guard to smuggle out to Attila a gold betrothal ring, and a brief message from her. An offer of marriage, if he came to her rescue and liberation. Quite what sort of freedom Honoria thought she would enjoy as one of the junior wives of the Great Tanjou in the Hun camp, one can only speculate. But Attila accepted the offer, adding that for dowry he’d expect half the empire. She said that he was welcome to it.
Hence the message sent by Attila to Ravenna. In deadly earnest.
Thank Christ, thought Aetius, that Galla Placidia had not lived to see her daughter conspire with Attila himself. Constantinople was all ready to have Honoria strangled for treason on the spot, but further hurried communication dissuaded them. Personally, Aetius thought the poor girl had suffered long enough. One youthful indiscretion as a girl – and a clumsy attempt to have her brother assassinated… Well, that was certainly understandable. Why couldn’t she be married off now to some unfussy old dotard, for God’s sake? Pen her up there in the Imperial Palace like a nun, with that old harridan Pulcheria, and it wasn’t surprising she dreamed of marrying what she must have pictured to herself as an exotic Scythian warlord.
Theodosius gave the command, and at the age of twenty-nine, Honoria was married instead to the fifty- nine-year-old Fabius Cassius Herculeanus. By all accounts it was a very happy marriage – not least, court rumour
