Aetius, you were born out of your time.’ He clapped politely at the scene being enacted below, then resumed. ‘Veritably, the Scipio Africanus of our age.’
The fear of sincerity, the faithlessness, the catch-all ironic twang, the enervated drawl, the emptiness beneath the cleverness, the baseness of vision: Aetius could have wrung his neck.
Instead he steeled himself and arose and wished the senator well in his future life, with his private villa on an Ionian island, and his obedient slave-boys. A noble dream.
As he left the amphitheatre, brushing the clawing prostitutes away, the lines that the exiled Euripides wrote during the ruinous Peloponnesian War returned to him.
In the theatres, the People laugh at phalluses. On a fair Aegean island, beardless boys are butchered in their name. This is the world from which I take my leave. How far and fast we fell.
The games had left a foul taste in his mouth. He strode through the narrow streets of the old city, leading his horse, glaring down. For this was not the whole story of Rome. There had been courage and sacrifice and human dignity. There had been Regulus and Horatius, Trajan and Augustus, rulers of decency and vision. But was the good all in the past now, and the glory departed?
Despite himself he thought again of the bare steppes, and the copper-skinned warriors, their honour and unflinching bravery, their lean self-denials, their magnificent scorn for death, their love of their king.
On the one hand, cruelty and magnificence. On the other, cruelty and squalor. What a richness of choice.
Hardly aware of his actions, he tethered his horse and went into a lowly church, a small, chilly, whitewashed building with an arched apse, narrow windows, half a dozen smoking candles. He was greeted by an old deacon, grey beard streaked with lamp-black, his cassock faded to a powdery stale-bread green, a cheap wooden cross on a string of olive-wood beads around his neck. On the west wall was a clumsy, deeply sincere painting of Christ with the loaves and fishes, and the faces of the hungering people crowding round. He sacrificed himself; the people ate. They lived.
Even here could be heard the intermittent roar of the crowd in the arena. The old deacon crossed himself as he watched the powerfully built old officer on his knees before the cross. Then he went over and began to speak without preamble, as is the way with holy men who live much alone; they lose their taste for small talk.
‘We live in the end of times,’ he said, his voice croaky with disuse. ‘But the choice before each human soul is clear. The broad path or the strait? The arena’ – he jerked his head – ‘or the House of God. Quo vadis?’
‘Neither,’ said the general. ‘My place is on the battlefield. ’
The old deacon looked grim.
‘But I fight for this,’ said the general, gesturing around the church. ‘Not for that,’ and gestured towards the arena, where another massed roar went up.
The deacon’s dark eyes bored into the general’s. At last he said, ‘St Michael and all angels ride with you.’
When Aetius arrived back at camp, he was told he had a visitor.
‘No time,’ he said brusquely.
‘He has come a long way, sir. From Britain.’
‘ Britain? ’
3
He was an old man now, perhaps sixty-five, or even seventy, his garments travel-stained, and not as tall as Aetius remembered him. But then when Aetius had last set eyes on him, he himself had been only a boy. He remembered the grey eyes, the broad shoulders, the determined look. The old Briton had close-cropped white hair now, and sported a long white barbarian beard. Underneath the beard, Aetius remembered, he had a scar on his chin.
‘You’re Lucius,’ he said.
The old man nodded but didn’t salute. He was no longer a soldier of Rome, after all. ‘I always knew you were a smart lad. Now you rule the Western Empire, I hear.’
‘The emperor rules the Western Empire.’
‘Is that so?’
They regarded each other. Not equals in power, but maybe equals in spirit.
‘And your friend, the old Jew, Gamaliel,’ said Aetius. ‘I have met him since.’
‘Old Jew?’ Lucius frowned. ‘I have not seen him for years, but he is a true Celt.’ The two stared at each other a moment, then Lucius sighed. ‘In truth, I don’t think we will ever know what he is.’
‘He’s old now, and he no longer pretends he used to know Aristotle. But at Constantinople he was a good physician.’ Aetius grinned, despite himself. ‘Come on in.’
They sat on stools and Aetius poured his visitor wine with his own hand. They clunked cups. Once, decades ago, Lucius had come to the Hun camp and taken Aetius back to Rome, along with his own freed son, the boy Cadoc. And Attila had ridden into the wilderness of exile.
On the long journey back to the Danube, Lucius, a Roman lieutenant in those days, and the haughty Roman boy Aetius, solemn beyond his years, had developed a friendship of sorts.
‘I remember now,’ said Aetius. ‘The scar on your chin. You got it from tripping over a dog, when you were drunk, and hitting a stone water trough, in Isca Dumnoniorum.’
Lucius raised his cup. ‘I salute your memory, Master-General. You’re out of date, though. The city, what’s left of it, is called Esca now.’
‘Esca?’
‘I shouldn’t worry. As I say, there isn’t much of it left. A couple of broken walls, the remains of a market- place, a ruined church, a few sad kale yards. The old basilica’s a furnace and marl-pit.’ There was bitterness in his low voice. ‘And I am Ciddwmtarth. Lucius was a Roman name. But the Romans abandoned us. I know Britain never contributed much to the empire: in four long centuries, we produced only a heretic, a rotten poet and three traitors. So it’s said.’
Aetius smiled faintly and then looked grave again. ‘Is there peace with the Saxons?’
Lucius snorted. ‘There will never be peace with the Saxons. They already call us the Wealha, foreigners and slaves. In our own country! They crucify one in ten captives to their heathen gods. They are the worst: their drunken barbarism knows no limits, they shall never count among the civilised peoples of the world. My people are few and hard-pressed. I lead them in the fight, but the fight is continual, and they are very weary. They dream only of fleeing into the mountains westward, always westward. Already the Saxons have pressed as far as Corinium, and Viroconium of the White Walls. To think that we invited them in to work for us, and now they want the whole island of Britain for themselves, under their laws and customs. We have destroyed our own world.’
Aetius set down his cup. ‘My old friend and guide, I know why it is that you have sailed here all these weeks – and in winter, too. I know how bitter it must be for you. But we cannot send men to help you.’
Lucius seized his arm, suddenly impassioned. ‘Just a thousand of your men, I implore you! For the sake of old friendship, for the sake of Christ! Master-General of the West, whom I knew and travelled with as a boy, do not deny me. One thousand of your best, and I tell you we will meet the Saxons in open field, even ten thousand of them, and defeat them once and for all. They are many, but they fight wild, all solo howls and heroics. One good legion could take them. Then the kingdom of Christian Celtic Britain will be at peace. But my own people, they’re no warriors, only simple farmers. They cannot do it.’
‘Nor can I do it.’ Aetius’ tone was unbending. ‘I cannot give you a hundred, not fifty. There are twenty-five thousand men under my command, and every one counts. The barbarian army coming west numbers at least a hundred thousand mounted warriors, with twice as many followers. I cannot do it.’
‘And Rome matters more than Britain.’
‘It does,’ said Aetius evenly.
Lucius glowered at the ground. ‘And to think,’ he muttered, ‘that three times I saved his life – the Hun
