Attila:The Scourge of God

provincial office. ‘Just remember,’ he grated, ‘that like yourselves these people are Roman citizens. They’re to be treated with restraint and consideration. If I hear there’s been any. .’ Marcellus trailed off in impotent frustration: any threat he made would be an empty one. Failure to collect outstanding dues meant that the shortfall would have to be made up from his own purse and those of his fellow decurions. A blind eye had, perforce, to be turned to methods of extraction.

‘Persuasion?’ With an insolent grin, the foreman completed Marcellus’ phrase. ‘We’ll be as gentle as lambs, won’t we, boys?’ he continued, turning to his men, who responded with a chorus of ironic assent. In a significant gesture, some touched the cudgels in their belts.

When the last of the compulsores had trooped from the office, Marcellus found that his hands were shaking and his heart was thumping in his chest. A wave of helpless fury swept over him. He felt ashamed — and dirty.

Apprehension gnawed at Petrus the cobbler, making it difficult for him to concentrate on his work. Spraying nails from his mouth, he cursed for the third time that morning, as his hammer struck his fingers instead of the nail he was driving through the sole of the shoe on his last. Replacing the dropped ‘sparrow-bills’ between his lips, he tried once more to focus on his task. It was no good. The dread that had been building up relentlessly for weeks before the Indiction, seemed to have formed a permanent cold lump in his stomach. The tax-collectors would be arriving at any time, and he could pay them but a fraction of their seven solidi — to say nothing of the arrears he owed from the previous Indiction. That none of this was his fault would, he knew, make no whit of difference to the agents of the tax officials.

For most of the last year, by drastic scrimping and saving, and working far into the night by flickering lamplight until his eyes ached, Petrus had managed to earn enough nummi — the little copper coins worth seven thousandth of a solidus — to cover both amounts owed. Then the Franks, ferocious yellow-haired giants, came rampaging through the district. Fondly, he had thought his hoard — in sealed bags, or folles, each containing a thousand nummi, and buried inside a jar beneath the earthen floor of his workshop — would be inviolate. But with practised efficiency, the raiders had forced him to disclose it, by the simple expedient of holding his wife’s feet to an open fire. Though superficial, the burns had turned septic; a week after the Franks had gone, she had died from blood- poisoning, leaving behind Petrus and their twelve-year-old daughter.

‘Let him go,’ sighed the compulsores’ leader in disgust. ‘He’s telling the truth. Seems the Franks did take his savings.’ Reluctantly, his men released Petrus — minus three teeth, and with a broken nose.

The foreman cast an expert eye around the workshop. ‘Take the tools and stock,’ he ordered. ‘They’ll fetch something at auction. Then strip the house.’

Petrus’ pleas — that without tools he could no longer earn a living and would therefore be unable to pay future tax — were ignored. His few pathetic possessions — an iron cauldron, a bronze skillet, some sticks of furniture and kitchen crockery — joined his work gear on the gang’s cart. Then one of the compulsores appeared in the workshop, dragging a weeping girl. ‘Look what I found hiding in the privy,’ he announced with a lascivious leer. ‘Skinny as a plucked chicken and a bit on the young side.’ He grinned at the foreman. ‘But not too young, eh?’

The foreman shrugged and said carelessly, ‘Go on, then.’

Helpless in the grip of his tormentors, Petrus roared and wept, while his daughter was raped by all the gang in turn.

‘Think of it as part payment in kind,’ sneered the foreman, as they departed.

Hours later, Petrus was roused from his stupor of misery and helplessness by an ominous creaking from the living-quarters adjoining his workshop. He rushed into the room and saw his daughter’s body gyrating slowly, suspended from a roof beam.

Numb with grief, Petrus buried her in the weed-choked yard behind his cottage. Then, making a bundle of a spare tunic and a stale loaf, all that the tax-collectors had left him, he set out for the west. In Aremorica, so he’d heard, men lived freely and paid no taxes. Now without family or means of livelihood, it seemed he had but one option: to seek a new life beyond the reach of Rome.

Awkwardly, young Martin hefted the axe in his left hand and raised it above his right, which was pressed flat against the log, with thumb extended. His mouth dried, and a red mist seemed to form before his eyes. He could feel his pulses racing. Twice he laid down the axe, his courage failing him at the last moment. Suddenly, he heard the distant calls of searching bucellarii, the private retainers whom the landowner, like most Gallic magnates, employed in these times of insecurity. Realizing that if he didn’t act now, he might be leaving it too late, Martin gritted his teeth and swung the blade down with all his strength.

From the moment he could walk, Martin had been put to work on the estate where his parents laboured as humble coloni. He had always hated the back-breaking drudgery of farmwork, and at every opportunity slipped off to the woods bordering the fields, to study the wild creatures and plants there, to fish, or just to dream. He longed above all to enter a monastery like those he had heard of in far-off Caesarodunum and Limonum,³ founded sixty years before by his namesake Martin, who had been a peasant before enlisting in the legions. In such a community his knowledge of plants and animals might, he hoped prove an asset. But when he had asked the landowner for permission to follow his vocation, he had been curtly informed that a recent edict of the Emperor specifically forbade such a thing. He was adscriptus glebae — tied to the land — and tied he would remain.

Which left only one avenue of escape from his present lot, the army, an alternative which for a gentle dreamer like Martin, held even fewer attractions than the life of a colonus. Like all magnates with large estates, the landowner was required by law to provide recruits for the service, on an ad hoc but fairly regular basis. Invariably, the ones selected were his least useful tenants, so it should have come as no surprise when the steward told Martin to present himself at the estate office the following morning, to await the recruiting-agents. But Martin was surprised. Surprised and appalled. The thought that (from the landowner’s view) he was an ideal recruit had never occurred to him. His only recourse, he realized with horror, was to amputate a thumb, preferably the right one — the standard way to render oneself ineligible for service.

Martin stared in shock at the severed thumb lying on the ground, then at the raw, gaping wound on his hand, where bone gleamed briefly white before vanishing in a tide of blood. Without the thumb, it no longer resembled a hand; more the clawed forefoot of an animal. Pain and nausea clubbed him; before fainting, he managed to staunch the bleeding with a pad of spiders’ webs secured with a bandage, both of which he had ready.

He stirred into consciousness, saw he was surrounded by bucellarii, one of whom was shaking him. He was dragged to the steward’s office where, besides that official, were three soldiers in undress uniform of undyed linen tunics, with indigo roundels on the hems and shoulders. Their height and flaxen hair suggested they were Germans, and therefore unlikely to have any local sympathies. Martin saw the steward pass a purse to their circitor, the one in charge.

When Martin displayed his thumbless hand, the circitor laughed and shook his head. ‘Another murcus,’ he declared, not unkindly. ‘You’ve lost your thumb for nothing, lad. We’ve orders now to take anyone, mutilated or not. Two murci equals one sound recruit.’ He pointed at Martin, then at the purse in his hand. ‘Two murci,’ he chuckled.

On the way to the town where his escorts were billeted, they crossed a bridge over a fast-flowing tributary of the Mosella. Martin seized his chance and threw himself over the parapet into the water. He was swept away by the current and carried a mile downstream before he managed to struggle ashore.

Coughing water from his lungs, Martin orientated himself from the sun’s position. Motivated more by instinct than a reasoned plan, he began to plod westwards through a sodden waste of osier beds and boggy scrubland. He could hardly return to the estate, not after good money had been paid to be rid of him and spare the landowner the