‘But nowhere near enough ships at Aquileia,’ said Germanus.
‘Nor at Ravenna,’ growled Aetius, ‘quite apart from the fact that the military harbour there was condemned to neglect decades ago, and has since been planted with fruit trees.’
Germanus shook his big bullet head. ‘Bloody disgrace. How’s Rome supposed to fight her enemies these days? Throw figs at them?’
‘Quite. So we march. We have a prior appointment overland, anyway. Six hundred miles away, so it will take us a month.’
‘In winter?’
‘In winter.’
Germanus and Tatullus both looked puzzled.
‘At Tolosa,’ said Aetius. ‘At the court of the Visigoths.’
4
Attila crossed the frozen Rhine six miles south of Argentoratum, the bitter winter suddenly his ally, the great river as solid as a marble pavement. It took his titanic army over a week to ride from east bank to west over the sparkling ice. He rode with his remaining Chosen Men and his best warriors, and then the rest of the Hun people behind. There rode with him the Kutrigur Huns under their leader, Sky-In-Tatters, and the people of the Oronchan Valley under Bayan-Kasgar; Hepthalite Huns, White Huns, Black Huns, Huns from the shores of the Aral Sea and the very northern limits of the Scythian steppes, clad in furs, with their wicked curved bows and their quivers bristling with arrows.
Now there also rode with him Gepids from the Transylvanian hills, under their King Ardaric; Sarmatian horse-warriors, and blue-eyed Alan lancers, an Iranian people, cunning and untrustworthy. The ancient Persians, it was said, had been taught three things as boys: to ride a horse, to shoot an arrow, and tell the truth. The Alans still excelled at the first two.
There were stocky, bearded Rugians from the far northern shores of the Baltic Sea, Scirians in leather body- armour, carrying long javelins and battle-axes, and flaxen-haired Langobards with great two-handed swords. As the horde passed through Germania they were joined, as Aetius had guessed, by Thuringians, Moravians, Herulians, Burgundians, and even the sons and grandsons of those nationless freebooters who had once ridden under the banner of Rhadaghastus, and been so savagely defeated by the Huns themselves upon the Tuscan plain.
The losses that Attila had sustained at Viminacium and the other cities of the East, at the battle of the River Utus, and finally beneath the walls of Constantinople – a few thousand in all – had been made up forty- or fifty-fold. The chilly dust-cloud and the steam from their horses could be seen a day’s march away. His army shook the earth as it rode west.
In the cities along the Rhine they slew every living thing they found. They would have driven off the sheep and cattle as their own, but already they were overburdened, and it was late winter still, and not enough forage. So they took only what they could carry from those wealthy cities, loading it onto their groaning wagons: armour damascened with gold and silver, silken stuffs, rugs and furs all heaped together with sacred objects looted from burned churches, reliquaries studded with precious stones and housing the bones of forgotten martyrs, chalices, pat-tens, jewel-encrusted gospels they could not even read.
Among those they captured at Colonia Agrippina was a nobly born Cornish maiden called Ursula, who was to be betrothed to a son of a patrician in the city, and her eleven maidens. After amusing themselves for a while trying to make the girls fall to their knees and worship their god Astur, the Huns ravished them and slew them and hung their bodies from the walls of the city, along with many others. The Cornish maid was soon declared a saint, and a legend rapidly grew up about St Ursula and her Eleven Thousand Virgins. In this way, history was already reverting to myth, and in place of sober chronicles a new age was being ushered in which would prefer extravagant tales and foolish superstitions to hard-headed facts. It was as if Attila was drawing in, in the very wake of his horse as he rode, a new dark age which would cover all of Europe.
The invaders laid waste the lovely valley of the Moselle, which Ausonius had once so rapturously praised, with its handsome villas amid lush meadows, its valley sides thickly planted with green vines, its bargemen transporting bales of cloth and casks of wine, shouting out to the laughing girls dressing the vines as they passed. At Augusta Treverorum the citizens showed spirit merely by shutting the gates, but Attila had his men drive forward at spearpoint women and children captured from the surrounding farms and villages, and threatened to slaughter them all unless the citizens of the town opened the gates and treated with him. The gates were duly opened to save innocent lives, at which the Huns slaughtered them all anyway, captives and citizens alike. At Mediomaurici there remained not a building standing except the solitary little chapel of St Stephen.
Often they came to towns and cities already deserted, and then the Kutrigur Huns galloped forward with particular alacrity, like hounds on the traces, putting their hunting and tracking skills to use. Almost always they found the absconded citizens, huddled in terror in a nearby stretch of forest, and put an end to them there.
After two or three weeks of wreaking havoc all down the Moselle, Attila and his horde left behind them a two-hundred-mile-long valley of the dead.
In all this destruction they met not a breath of opposition, yet all the time Attila himself grew more and more silent, solitary and withdrawn. He also became increasingly superstitious, never tiring of consulting Enkhtuya for signs and portents, and demanding to know when the Western Roman Army under Aetius would be marching north to meet them. Every night there were strange ceremonies in his tent, with fur-clad shamans beating deerskin drums to summon the ancestral dead, and antlered sorcerers dancing with rattles, flagellating themselves, wailing nasal incantations. The future was descried in the foam of boiling water, the entrails of chickens, sticks flung at random; by scapulimancy from signs read in the heat-cracked shoulderblades of cattle, and from the gyrations of smoke from burning incense. The portents were always good, but the Great Tanjou looked more and more like a man haunted by some vast and nameless sorrow.
Someone sang,
‘Turn back, turn back, my mad master,
For things are not as they seem,
My dreams are awakened to nightmare,
And all the world is a dream.
‘Such are the wages of vengeance,
Such is anger’s yield,
My master with all his sad captains
Lying silent in the field.
‘Kites and crows his companions,
His banner a banner of blood,
All treasures, all holy things
Lost in the flood.’
Attila did not silence the singer. He only bowed his head. So let it be.
From the Moselle, Attila’s army swung west through the dark and dense Carbonarian Forest: the country of the Batavians, of ghoul-haunted birchwoods and fens, stagnant ponds, thick mosses, dripping ferns, and foul- smelling bogs which could suck down a horse entire and close over its last pitiful struggles in silence as though it had never been.
One night as they lay encamped in that haunted country, Orestes heard his master crying out in terror. He ran into his tent with his sword drawn, and saw to his horror that Attila was rolling on his pallet, eyes wide and mouth foaming, yet apparently still asleep, unable to see. Orestes thought the King had gone mad. He dropped his sword and, seizing his shoulders, tried to shake him back to sense. The next thing he knew was an agonising pain in his side. Attila had stabbed him.
Orestes sat back, clutching his ribs. The wound was not deep but it bled badly. Gradually the king regained consciousness, staring wild-eyed. Orestes drew his hand up from his side, his fingertips wet and red. He held them
