The Scourge of God

“Collapses? The Huns are raiders—”

“This Hun is a conqueror. As long as the West stands fast, Attila dares not risk all his strength against Constantinople.

As long as the East gives craven tribute, he satisfies his people by making threats and distributing gold. But now everything is changing, young ambassador. What little standing you might have retained as a member of a failed imperial embassy disappeared two weeks ago when news came that the Eastern emperor, Theodosius, died in a riding accident.

General Marcian has succeeded to the throne.”

“Marcian! He’s a fierce one.”

“And you are even more forgotten than you were.

Chrysaphius, the minister who sent you and secretly plotted to kill Attila, has finally been ejected from his post at the urging of Theodosius’s sister Pulcheria. Rumor says he’ll shortly face execution and that Bigilas may find himself rowing a galley. You’re simply a diplomatic embarrassment, best forgotten by all sides. Moreover, Marcian has sent word that the days of paying tribute to the Huns are over, that not a single solidus will ever be sent north again. A treaty had been completed with Persia and troops are being shifted from the eastern marches to Constantinople. Attila’s demands have gone too far.”

“So there’s to be war?” I brightened at this chance for rescue, then paled as I realized that Attila had threatened to execute me for far less imperial determination.

“Yes, but with who?” Zerco asked rhetorically, ignoring my expression. “Word of Marcian’s defiance had reportedly sent Attila into a rage. His little pig eyes began to bug out as if he were being strangled. His hands balled into fists. He cursed Marcian in seven languages and howled like a crazy man; and he became so frenzied that he flopped on the ground like a landed fish until blood spurted from his nose.

It came out in a froth, wetting his beard and flecked his lips and teeth with red. Ilana saw it! None of his henchmen dared go near him during this fit of rage. He vowed to teach the East a lesson, of course, but how? By subduing and uniting the nations of the West, he shouted, and bringing them all, Hun and slave armies, against the walls of Constantinople!

Attila said his people had endless enemies and would know no peace until they had conquered the entire world.”

“He would do so because of the accession of Marcian?”

“No, because this twit of a Roman princess has asked him to. If this eunuch and her signet ring can be believed, the woman Honoria, sister to the Western emperor Valentinian, has asked Attila to be her protector. He has chosen to interpret this as a proposal of marriage, which he believes would entitle him to half of the West as dowry. Failure to accede to this demand, he is claiming, means war.”

“Surely he doesn’t expect Valentinian to agree to such an absurdity. People say Honoria is a silly trollop.”

“Silly or scheming? Sometimes the two are the same thing. And, yes, Valentinian will not agree, unless another threat is so pressing that perhaps he would be forced to come to accommodation with Attila. And now this Eudoxius has brought just that threat, it seems. This wily traitor has become pivotal.”

“A fugitive Greek doctor?”

“A self-important troublemaker. He has visited the Vandal king Gaiseric in North Africa and extracted his promise to attack the Western Empire from the south if Attila will attack it from the north. If the Huns and Vandals act in concert, it is the end of Rome.”

“Surely Attila is not foolish enough to march west with Marcian showing new defiance in the east . . .”

“Wait, there’s more. Have you seen the Frankish prince Cloda?”

“From afar, as one more barbarian envoy. I’ve been a slave to Hereka, remember?”

“Not just an envoy. The Franks had a disputed succession, and Cloda’s brother Anthus seized the throne. Cloda is asking Attila to help him get it back.”

I sat, my mind whirling from all these simultaneous happenings. Maximinus had counseled that simply waiting sometimes solved problems between nations, but this time waiting seemed to have compounded them. “The prophecy,”

I murmured.

“The what?”

“Maximinus told me that twelve vultures Romulus saw in his dream meant Rome would fall after twelve centuries.

That would put the end at less than three years away. Not to mention that the priests think that the Huns are a manifesta-tion of biblical prophecy. Gog and Magog and the armies of Satan, or some such thing.”

“You understand more than I give you credit for, young man!” the dwarf exclaimed with delight. “Indeed, all signs point to such an end! But now it is the West that must fear, not the East. Edeco himself told me once he was impressed by the triple walls of Constantinople and wondered if the Huns could ever get inside them. Attila might wonder if the Western kingdoms are not easier targets of his wrath. Will the German tribes that have settled there ever unite under the Romans to resist him? It hasn’t happened yet. And now Attila has the sword of Mars, which he’s claiming is proof that he means to conquer.”

“He’s never been beaten. There seems little hope.”

“Unless Aetius can be warned and Attila’s momentum can be slowed, my young Roman friend—until the West can rally together against him.”

“But who can do that?”

Zerco gave me the smile of a Syrian rug merchant. “You can. Ilana has a plan.”

I could now count two truly foolish things I had done in my short life. The first was naively agreeing to serve as scribe and translator to the court of Attila. The second was agreeing to Ilana and Zerco’s desperate plan to not just escape by creating a diversion but to take history into our own hands.

Only the prospect of reunion with Ilana convinced me to try. Our dilemma was plain. I had no intention of trying to out-soldier Skilla in Attila’s army to win her back or give Skilla a chance to duel with me again. But the diversion of the strava had passed, and no similar opportunity for escape seemed likely . . . unless we made our own. Yet whatever Ilana’s guilt or confusion, I was determined not to leave her in Attila’s compound. So Ilana had come up with a magnificently reckless scheme so lunatic that of course Zerco immediately hailed it a work of genius. All it needed to succeed, he said, was me. I had little confidence it would work, but my virtual enslavement and wounds had made me anxious to strike back before Attila remembered his promise to torture me to death. I ached to escape from the limbo of my captivity and longed for Ilana with a desire that was almost overwhelming. Not her body, though that passed through my mind, too, but her Romanness, her connection to normality and home. What is love? Insanity, I suppose, the willingness to risk everything for what threatens to be a colossal mental illusion. Why had she affected me so? I don’t know. Our moments were stolen, our confidences brief, our knowledge of each other meager. Yet she haunted me in a way that made my feelings for distant Olivia seem childish and made me prefer to risk all. It made me, finally, ready to kill.

It was Ilana who suggested I be smuggled into Attila’s kitchen, but Julia who came up with how. I was to be carried in the kind of clay amphora that held looted wine. “It’s no different from Cleopatra’s being carried to Caesar while rolled in a carpet,” she reasoned.

“Except that the Egyptian monarch stayed drier and was no doubt lighter to carry,” her dwarf husband joked.

I admitted the idea had a certain simple charm; and while I didn’t know Julia well, I’d become impressed by her calm practicality. She was that blessed person who made the best of what was, rather than dreaming about what should be, and thus was happier with her odd companion than a hundred kings with a thousand wives.

Marriage to the dwarf had been a way out of slavery, though being a fool’s bride wasn’t exactly the path to re-spectability. From the pair’s mutual desperation had come an odd and touching form of love, similar to my own situation with Ilana. Zerco would have adored the allegiance of even the plainest woman, but Julia was not just attractive, she was engagingly good-humored, smart, able, and loyal, demonstrating faith in her diminutive husband that most men would envy. She had turned Bleda’s mocking joke of a marriage into partnership. Julia appreciated not just the dwarf’s intelligence and determination to survive but that he had voluntarily returned to humiliating bondage with the Huns in order to be with her. Clearly the halfling loved her, and that had been the first step