Nemesianus collapsed and lay groaning.
‘You will not, I fear, be able to see the imminent burning of your beloved city.’ He stowed his dagger inside his leather jerkin. ‘But you will smell it well enough.’
He looked at Orestes. The Greek nodded. And they rode back into Aquileia.
It was a great city, a great port, one of the greatest in all of Italy. And now? Now the site of Aquileia can barely be found. No more than a heap of stones over which the south wind sighs. Sighs and moves on.
After Aquileia, Attila rode on across Italy and burned Patavium, Vicentia, Verona, Placentia ... At Mantua a local poet called Marullus addressed florid verses of praise to the conqueror. Attila had him burned on a pyre of his own books.
Not until he came to Mediolanum did he learn that Galla Placidia had died a year before. He ground his teeth and flogged the man who told him. That night he dreamed of staggering through a gallery of statues, sending them crashing to the ground, crushing them underfoot. Galla in a green stola stepped between them and vanished before he could break her. At the end of the hall sat a horned king on a wooden throne, his hands no more than claws, divested of kingly robes, nothing but a filthy loincloth on him, his old dugs sagging low, his hair matted with fur and feathers. The king raised his head slowly, eyes bloodshot, haggard, horror-struck and then the terrible smile ...
Attila awoke, screaming.
Orestes calmed him. ‘We are getting near Rome.’
‘And Rome is coming to meet us,’ said Attila. Ravenna itself was no more than a court of chattering apes in togas. They still talked of buying Attila off.
Valentinian demanded to know, ‘Why? Why? What does he want?’
‘Do not enquire too deeply into that black heart, Majesty,’ Aëtius said quietly ‘You might lose your way as in a midnight labyrinth, and never find the light again.’
‘He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’ The emperor was clutching himself now, staring at Aëtius fixedly. ‘A great friend. You knew him well.’
‘A long time ago.’
Aëtius set about marshalling the last band of soldiers he could.
In Mediolanum Attila had himself installed in the Imperial Palace, where he ceaselessly walked its endless marble corridors, muttering to himself. He seemed in no hurry to advance on Rome. Some whispered that he was filled with superstitious dread, remembering the fate of Alaric, who had marched into Rome triumphant and died only six days later.
Despair and fury competed in his breast. One day in a deserted vestibule he found a vast mural depicting the kings of Scythia kneeling in tribute to a succession of Roman emperors. Roaring through the deserted corridors of the palace, he demanded that the mural be repainted depicting himself on the throne and the emperors of Rome kneeling to him. Afterwards, for no obvious reason, he had the terrified mural-painters executed.
At other times he ranted of his grandiose plans, while his little force beyond the city walls ebbed by the day. He would soon take Rome, and then Constantinople - that would become his base. Then he would turn on the tottering Sassanid Empire of Persia, and then India, and finally the Great Wall. They would destroy China itself, the greatest and most ancient enemy of all ...
He would be king of the world.
His men felt aimless and abandoned as they looted the country round about. Orestes stayed with him, as did the witch Enkhtuya and, on the farthest fringes, appearing and disappearing again daily like dew, the shaman Little Bird.
‘A king had a mighty empire once,’ said Little Bird, ‘but what did he give it away for? For a bigger empire.’
Attila frowned.
The shaman laughed. ‘The boundless and infinite Empire of Nothing.’ He dared to lay his hand on Attila’s hoar head. ‘O Little Father of Everything and Nothing.’
‘Silence, fool, or I shall take away your tongue.’
‘Take it freely, master. You have already taken everything else from your people.’
A savage blow, a stamp on his ankle, an agonised cry, and the little shaman limped from the palace.
A strange, feathered creature sat on a stone lion in the forum of Mediolanum and sang to the frightened people.
‘In our loneliness wandering
Stormcloud and empty steppe
We thought these things would never cease.
‘We saw the white man bowed to earth
With his swords and his spears and his gold,
His cities, his streets, his cloud-capped palaces,
And with the People’s land,
And with the vanished lion’s hide
He hunted to nothing, the fierce Libyan lion,
And we thought, this cannot last. This will cease.
‘Twice now, O my people, we have been wrong.’
He raised his arms up and laughed. The people of Mediolanum scurried away.
One day Little Bird tiptoed into the palace, and found his master seated alone on one of the old imperial thrones in a vast audience chamber. He was talking with himself, his eyes roving over the frescoed walls and ceiling, seeing nothing. Little Bird could have wept, but instead he sat down before the Great Tanjou and waited. Attila stared at him. At the heart of his madness was despair, as perhaps at the heart of sanity there is hope.
The King suddenly stood and swept his arm wide. ‘Be still and hear me, O People!’
Little Bird sat looking up at him, cross-legged and wide-eyed, a child in his seventh decade.
There was a long silence, Attila standing with his head hung low on his breast. Then he said, so softly that Little Bird strained to hear, ‘He is very wroth with us, he has utterly cast us off, we are rejected and despised. It is in the book of the Christians - I knew it as a boy. Long Roman winter afternoons with the pedagogue, a hostage, the cold sun sinking low beyond the bars. We are the people of Gog and Magog. I despised the bones and rags and worshipped fragments of the saints in their charnel-house churches, and the prophecies of their holy books, but now they come back to haunt me in my age. Now I go to the house of death myself with faltering steps, and I leave my people abandoned by their God.’
‘Oh, my mad master, do not say so.’
‘We will be blown away as the old song says, “like the wind, like the wind”. And of the great Hun people in after-years there will be neither sight nor sign in all the wide world, as if we had never been. And is it I ... ? A King of Kings from Palestine, a King of Terror from the East. Oh, my dreams are relentless now, they come to me nightly without cease, those seers and tellers beside the haunted stream beneath the trees in that misty morning in my boyhood long ago, when I had none but my beloved Orestes to comfort me. We laid his sister in the earth ...’
Little Bird went to him.
Attila did not see. His eyes roved. ‘Comfort is not, consolation is not, in the midnight my heart murmurs that even the gods are not! You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me, you have taken my hate from me and my love from me; sad is my song now, my head is heavy, my heart hums a song of ash. And you who have taken all from me are nothing but a formless Void without voice or sense or feeling, the Beginning and the End of all things, for ever and ever.
‘Their prophecies hum about my ears like angry flies. Two empires were o’erthrown ... One empire’s birth was Italy, the other was his own. And is it I ... ? It is a thought that I can hardly bear, oh, help me bear it, little shaman, as you would help an old man staggering under a burden. Fortune’s fool, history’s halfwit.’ He leaned forward and put his hands on Little Bird’s skinny shoulders.
Little Bird winced as if the touch was as cold as Scythian frost. ‘You might as well ask a mouse to bear a boulder on his back, my master.’
Attila’s arms fell by his sides again, and he sat back again.
‘In my hoar old age I thought I had had reverence, piety, glory, empery, and now it is gone from me, everything is taken from me, my empire stutters and fails like a pauper’s tallow candle. A seer once said my beloved son Ellak woul
d inherit my empire. I know now what empire he spoke of: the great, the infinite empire of nothing.’
‘Do not say so, master.’
‘My sons quarrel with one another and soon enough they will war with each other, once their father is gone and nothing remains of him but fading footprints and bones. My Checa is gone the way of all flesh, motes of dust in the sun, the ribs of long-dead cattle bleached white, no birdsong, no sweet waters, an empty desert place, a tattered village beside a dying lake.
‘I am as broken as the earth riven by ice. There is none to help me bear it; a king must die alone. My heart sings with grief, a lonely, mountain-top grief which only a dying king can know. The Madness of King Goll. I heard the Celtic slaveboy singing, long ago, who knew the ancient prophecies of the Sibyl. The grey wolf knows me ... The hare runs by me, growing bold ... “They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.” King Goll, old friend, I know you, and I see your face in the water. Is it I who has brought them to this pass and this predestinate end?’ He stirred and trembled, his eyes wild, his hands gripping the finials of the alien throne. ‘Oh, I shall go mad! Oh, let me not be mad!’
‘O Father,’ said Little Bird, laying his head in his lord’s lap, ‘my heart will keep company with yours as both break.’
12
THE GOD WHO THUNDERED
At last word came that Attila was marching on Rome.
Aëtius rode down the Flaminian Way from Ravenna to cut him off, with a force of little more than one thousand men. A ludicrous number. He had hoped that the citizens of Ravenna, Fiorentia, Rome itself, might have joined him in this last, wretched battle in Roman history, little more than a skirmish. But the people had already fled.
As Aëtius and his column neared the half-abandoned city on the seven hills, however, they met an extraordinary sight: a cortege headed by the Bishop of Rome, Leo, proceeding north, unarmed, to meet Attila. Priests in their chasubles carried crosses, banners, censers, and chanted hymns; the gold of the monstrances and dalmatics gleamed in the Italian sunlight; Bishop Leo himself, stocky and round-faced and cheerful like the Campanian countryman he was, riding a plump white horse slightly too small for him, was flanked by long lines of choirboys and deacons.
‘What the hell is this?’
The bishop reined in. ‘Master-General Aëtius? Join us. Ride with us. And allow us to talk with Attila first, before—’
‘Talk with Attila! Your Holiness, with all due respect, talking with him, pleading with him, paying him off - at this late stage - is like a hind pleading with a lion, when the lion has already got its teeth in her arse!’
The bishop smiled indulgently. Such vigorous similes reminded him of his country boyhood. ‘Talk with Attila,’ he resumed composedly, ‘before you and your brave soldiers line up to face him for battle.’
Aëtius stared. Then he gave the order to fall in behind.
It was near the Mincius river that Attila and the Bishop of Rome had their talk. The gentle farmland of Virgil and Catullus, now trampled by barbarian cavalry.
In Leo’s small party of priests and chaplains was also a burly old fellow with a white beard, and a younger man with brown eyes. Some said they were all the way from Britain, but others doubted that as a tall tale. Many tall tales grew up about that meeting. That Attila and the Britons and the papal party exchanged ancient Sibylline verses, and that after he had heard them in full the dread King of the Huns, the Scourge of God, hung his head, and began to pull his men back and turn them round. Some even claimed that Rome was saved by Attila’s superstitious dread of the Christian Church, and a few old, garbled rhymes. Others commented that Attila’s force was spent anyway; he had been defeated on the Catalaunian Fields.
The meeting did confirm one thing. The legions of Rome truly belonged to the past. Attila did not fear armies, but he feared the god of the Christians: the god who had thundered at him from the dark depths of Rhemi cathedral. The old military power of Rome was extinguished, but the new power of the Catholic Church had replaced it.
‘It was not the priest of the Christians who made me depart,’ said Attila, ‘but that other, in the white robe, standing behind him.’
Orestes frowned. ‘There was none such.’
‘He bore a flaming sword.’
Orestes fell silent and then stepped out of the king’s tent. He heard a sing-song voice away in the darkness.
‘The Great Spirit wills it.
Dry your eyes.
The white man comes.
A People dies.’
13
THE DEATH-BED
In the west of Britain, an old man and his son at last came home to their simple long-house. The old man eased himself off his horse and a woman only a few years younger came out and wept and embraced him. They clung to each other, then went inside. The younger man went to stable the horses.
The woman said, ‘The Christians prevailed?’
Lucius nodded. ‘This time.’ She helped him off with his heavy British cloak. ‘What news?’
She shook her head.
‘From the fortress of war?’
‘It has been silent. A messenger rode out, travelling by water. But ...’
‘He has not returned?’
Seirian shook her head again, pleading, ‘But the fortress of war cannot have fallen?’
Lucius turned to see Cadoc stepping over the threshold, unbuckling his sword-belt. He reached out a hand to his son.
‘Keep it on.’
Cadoc looked up, his hand still on his buckle, eyes bright and prophetic.
Attila’s sons were already squabbling over his inheritance while the aged King sat upon his wooden throne in his tent upon the Hungvar, bow clutched in hand, staring ahead, his face as grey as old lead, his thoughts devouring him.
‘For of this generation of men they shall not say we were the mightiest. The great Eagle of the Skies turns his head away, his golden eyes no longer mark us, his gaze is upon far other kings and empires now. We are little creatures to him, we are chirruping crickets in the grass, we are tedious to him, and all our vaunts and wars are ridiculous to him. He has left us here, our All-Father has abandoned us, and we are but orphans of the steppe, orphans of the world. The gold and the precious stones and all the treasury of his divine blessing is passed on to another people, and we are utterly forgotten.
‘I read it all in the book of the Jews and the Christians. He has cut us off in the day of his fierce anger. He has led us into darkness and not into light. Surely he has turned against us. He has made our chains heavy, and our ways desolate. The joy in our hearts has ceased, for he has set his bow against us and made us a mark for the arrow. Our dance is turned into mourning, and the crown of the world is fallen from our heads.
‘The ghosts of my people came to me, skeletal, barely fleshed, clawing at me, ancient hags with wrinkled dugs, saying I killed my father; and now my Father kills me. The Lord Astur is against me, the wind of the world is turned upon me, my sons fight before my eyes, the battle is lost and the dream is done. We are all orphans in the end, O my soul.
‘How all things fall and perish! And how all things come about again. Our crimes and iniquities, which we fancied we left on the road behind us, long ago, as we went forth to our glory, in truth ran ahead of us in the night while we were sleeping, and wait for us on the road ahead to greet us, their smiles grim and their hands outstretched.’
But his pride was very great and, rather than ask forgiveness, he would go down stiffnecked and unrepentant to Hell. A great city which looked much like Rome.
Only the wind plays the shepherd’s pipe,
Only the north wind sings your song,
O my People ...
At a banquet he apportioned out his imaginary empire among his favourite sons. China to Dengizek, Gaul to Emnedzar, Italy to Uzindar, the Homeland of the Hungvar to his beloved Ellak, Persia to Ernak, and Africa to Geisen. Even as he was talking, his sons were laughing among themselves. The old fool!
Attila: The Judgement Page 51