Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  Singerich, the cousin of Alaric, came to him and told him that the situation looked very bright to him. Alaric laughed bitterly at his cousin's misunderstanding of the simple military situation. But no, Singerich had not misunderstood the military situation; he had as good an eye for that as anyone, and it was rather pressing, he admitted. But he had been talking with a number of the enemies, on the heights and elsewhere, and he had found a deep dissatisfaction in them. It might not be all over, he said; and Alaric laughed again mordantly.

  It gives an idea of the enigmatic young man Singerich, that he had entered into easy conversation and discussion with various of the enemy all that day, even when the conflict was at its most bitter. He was a born ambassador and minister and saw no reason for negotiations to cease just because people were killing each other.

  The Goths were in red heaps of dying and dead, but Singerich claimed that he also shed blood in the cause. He suffered nosebleed, Hafras reports, from the heat of the day. The other intimate friends were dead, Vargas and Bacurinius and dozens more.

  The Goths had lost three-quarters of their troops—more than ten thousand dead—and there was not one man among them not somehow wounded or lamed. They stood in a narrow point of the Vallone, near the end of it, and stopped the heavy assault as night came on.

  They heard the movement of troops to their left, going eastward on the sea plain along the south face of the Carso, and they knew that all night the Western troops would be getting to their rear at every point. They heard the movement of troops to their right, and knew that the space between the Sontius and the Doberdò was being occupied in overwhelming numbers—where Stilicho had failed to clean them out in the day-long fight.

  Alaric heard from messengers that Bacurius, the commander of the right wing of the Theodosian army, was dead, and that most of the intrepid irregulars were scattered and slaughtered. The Western armies were crossing the Sontius above the Frigidus junction and moving to positions behind the main forces of the Easterners—unless those were continuing in head-long flight through the night.

  The Western attackers in the mouth of the Vallone had adopted a massive and disconcerting tactic. They had brought up heavy ballistae, and with these they launched great fireballs above the line of the stubborn Goths. These may have been the first artillery shells ever. Whatever their composition, they exploded with great flashes in the air. The damage was done by a thousand Western archers who let fly, from a hundred yards, at the moment of the flashes; the thousand arrows would whisper down on the numbed Goths in the suddenly following darkness. A man can see and fend an arrow of long course in daylight, but there was no fending these.

  It would be a long night. The Arbogastians left off their games of the fireballs, and came in with torchmen and sword and spear to finish the Goths.

  The Emperor Theodosius, in a make-shift tent on the Frigidus, was taken by a terrible fever—the same that would kill him four months later; for he would linger and never recover. He had seen the collapse of his Empire and his own coming death. He had seen also, he believed, the collapse of the Christian Church forever; for he, more than others, had appreciated what the victory of Arbogast and Eugenius would mean. Now he saw something else.

  This was a dream, he recounted later; and yet it was a standing-up dream, for he left his pallet in the tent and went out in the night air. A fevered man, of course, might see anything in the configuration of the wild lightning that obtained that night; and a man of the vivid imagination of the Emperor might see just what he claimed he saw. Or it may be that the celestial riders actually appeared.

  The Emperor Theodosius saw St. John and St. Philip on horseback in the sky. This is their first known appearance in military matters. They appeared to the Roman Emperor and not to his Goths; though, in the next thousand years, it would be to the descendants of those Goths that they would appear countless times in the same aspect, particularly to the Spanish descendants. In the latter appearances, the two Santi would most often be accompanied by St. James.

  The Emperor saw the two Saints on horseback in the sky. He pointed them out carefully enough; but no others could see them, and it was believed that the Emperor was delirious.

  Yet the Saints were there.

  The turning of the fortunes came about midnight. Alaric discovered the trend from a Western soldier whom he took on the top of the Doberdò. The soldier told him that the trend was very widespread and would carry everything with it. Alaric was thoughtful, and sent to find his cousin Singerich; but the Greek-Goth had long been out and about the business of facilitating the switch.

  The first and most important of the leaders of the force of Arbogast who came to the Christian side was Saul, himself a pagan. His importance was in that he, as an old-line pagan in all his antecedents, had been placed by Arbogast in charge of the security apparatus to discover and prevent defections. But Saul was of the old rural pagans, not of the new cult paganism that had swept the West. He had little but name in common with the paganism of Arbogast and Eugenius.

  The motive of Saul in switching to the Theodosian side is not known. The story that he, like his namesake, saw a Great Light must be rejected. Saul was still the cheerful pagan when he died in battle several years later. He was a friend of Theodosius and Stilicho; but he was also a friend of Arbogast. He was not particularly an opportunist and was known later to refuse preferment. He was a great soldier, and he came over to the Christian side during the night; the reason for it cannot now be known.

  It was in the same hour that various men began to come in to Stilicho under the cover of darkness, to Stilicho who held all the strands in his hands. The distant sowing had finally fruited, and the late harvest might be ripe by morning. Arbogast had been suppressing a rumble, and now it would turn into an explosion. The distant intrigues and projects of Theodosius and Stilicho hadn't rooted in the great Western leaders, except Saul; but they had had effect on the medium leaders and on the men.

  There was much coming and going through the electric night. One emissary thundered in, his foam-covered horse crashing dead at Stilicho's feet—the man leaping clear and giving the word that a raiding detachment, as intrepid as that of Sarus, had switched. Fifty more came or sent word, and the pattern formed in Stilicho's mind. He knew now what hills he owned and what regions he would own by morning. He knew who it was that was encircled and trapped.

  Stilicho sent what troops he could find to reinforce Alaric, who was still holding out in the south end of the Vallone and whose forces were now almost completely diminished. The holding of the Vallone had been essential to the resurrection of whatever hopes the Easterners might have had; the holding of the narrow way between the Doberdò and the Sontius had not been essential.

  Stilicho now sent troops to complete the occupation of that Doberdò, and assembled guides who knew the west face of that height intimately and understood where troops could be brought down that face like torrents.

  But Stilicho sent no troops at all to the main Carso shield. He was told, and he had no choice but to accept the information, that the Carso would not be a threat. Instead he drew troops, Western troops who would come over, from the Carso where they had been building up through the night.

  Nor had Stilicho worry to spare for his lost right wing—for the dead Bacurius and his broken raiders. Stilicho was told, and again he had no choice but to accept the information, that he would be provided with a new right wing. But he did not let his trust in these things overwhelm him. He sent hundreds of his most loyal men as contacts and reinforcements to his new fiderati.

  Daylight showed a fearsome panorama, the meaning of which was not immediately apparent to all. The Emperor Theodosius cried out in despair at seeing the armies of Arbogast and Eugenius filling the valley of the Sontius on both sides of the river, at seeing the standards of those Western forces on the peaks behind him, at seeing the pass of the Frigidus behind him black with their numbers, at hearing their trumpets and fifes all through the Carso and the Doberdò
and entirely around him in a thirty-mile circle. The sounds of the horns was particularly full and heavy, from a peculiarity of the atmosphere.

  There was also a terrifying noise building up like trumpets in the sky. It had been singing over the high Alps through the night. The sun rose blood-colored, and the whole sky and air were red. The Emperor was ready to give his soul to God, but Stilicho comforted him and told him to wait a bit.

  Theodosius waved his hand to the thousands of Western troops, now infiltrated to the east of them, and asked in a shaking voice—for he had begun to die that night—how it could have happened; how could the master generals not have known that it was happening?

  “They are not theirs. They are ours,” Stilicho told the fevered Emperor.

  The encircling troops of Arbogast, free of the tight hand of that master, had revolted during the night; and either murdered their commanders or compelled them to swear loyalty to the legitimate Emperor. The commanders of those troops, the old Roman Christians, had been subverted by Arbogast and Eugenius in the two-year indoctrination, and had been solid in their support of the pagan movement. It was the new “barbarian” Christians, the commoners who made up the bulk of the forces, who had gagged at the treason and waited their opportunity. They were barbarian in their ancestry, but they had swung to the Roman Emperor against the barbarian Pretender, Arbogast.

  The Master General Stilicho had gathered into his hands, in the six hours before dawn, the divergent strands of that revolt. It was a late harvest but a good one, and from a field not considered. Fate had been compelled, and the draft on Fortune was honored.

  The Imperial army, coming from the east, had been defeated in the battle of Frigidus and Aquileia the day before, for an army attacking from the east could not win. They had lost the battle at sundown. But victory was waiting for them in the morning.

  But prelude to, and final effector of, the victory was the tempest.

  The storm, having become entwined in legend, cannot be appraised as can non-legendary storms. Yet the accounts of it that have come to us may not be too much exaggerated. An English traveler of the nineteenth century describes a tempest in exactly the same locality in even more extravagant terms.

  Terrible end-of-the-summer tempests, coming out of the Julian Alps onto the plains that begin in front of Aquileia, had been known for thousands of years. They would follow on a burning heat of two months' duration in their incredible climate.

  The tempest of the morning of September fifth (or sixth—the date is disputed) of the year 394 must have been, by any standards, a violent one. It had been building up through the torrid months to the final hellish heat of the day before. There had been dust in the air so heavy that one could taste it, and the sun had risen blood red. It struck in full fury, blowing dead out of the east, down from the heights, shortly after dawn.

  The force of it, coming on the Western foot soldiers where they stood, knocked them flat. Supply wagons were tumbled and rolled and blown for long distances high in the air. It blinded the Western army and encompassed them in a solid red cloud.

  And out of the tempest struck the Eastern Imperial forces. They had lain flat on their bellies letting the strength of it pass over them. Now they came on its trailing edge, down from the Doberdò heights, around the shoulder of the shielding Mount St. Michael, out of the sea plain from the lower end of the Vallone.

  The assault of the Imperial Eastern Army might not have been of effect without the previous terrible assault of the tempest. Many of the Western Christians-turned-pagan saw the tempest, coming at that moment, as the Storm of God, and they became Christians again. Many had been injured—and even killed—by the sudden force of the hurricane, and their confusion was complete.

  Arbogast saw, with disbelief, his own left wing turn on his own forces, becoming the new right wing of the armies of Theodosius and Stilicho. They were behind him on the western bank of the Sontius, and behind him all the way to the walls of Aquileia. His most talented forces, which he had sent out in the night to cut off the flight of the Eastern army, had returned as his enemies in the van of those Eastern armies.

  The revolt spread like grass fire around the person of Arbogast. Legions and detachments, one after the other, struck their standards and set their heralds to crying out their new, and original, allegiance to the Emperor Theodosius. It was a rout, and it could not be stemmed. Arbogast, the traitor, was betrayed. For better or for worse, that was the end of the Roman pagan effort, though it was not clearly seen in that light except by the “barbarians” of the Western forces who had spontaneously revolted. Spontaneously—but as the fruit of the two-year counter-intrigue of Theodosius and Stilicho.

  It was also, very nearly, the end of the budding Gothic effort—for they had lost ten thousand men, dead, from their finest forces. It is not known to what degree the inscrutable Stilicho had intended this side effect.

  The pseudo-Emperor Eugenius was killed where they found him. It is said that he died cravenly, but that is a partisan report. He may have died bravely enough.

  Count Arbogast, however, found a horse and cut his solitary way through half a dozen encirclements, wilder than the most daring of the raiders; swam his mount across the Sontius, left it dead in the shallows, and went up a cliff face on the east bank of that river.

  Three days later in the mountains, unable to gather followers and hounded tightly, he ended it in the pagan manner—with his own sword.

  9. Of the Return of East and West

  The Emperor Theodosius died in January of the year 395. He was the last of the Roman Emperors who led his troops in battle, and the last who reigned by sheer ability. His son Arcadius was seventeen years old. His other son, Honorius, was eleven years old. He left the Empire to these two and, in so doing, divided it once more into East and West. It would remain divided forever.

  Theodosius had resurrected a dead Empire, but he had not the time to bring it to health. It is disputed whether it could ever have been brought to real life again; but for fifteen years, till the very end, it had seemed as though it might.

  Of the contemporaries of the Emperor Theodosius: Siricius was Pope in Rome and would die in three years; St. Ambrose of Milan would be dead in two years, as would be St. Martin of Tours. St. Ambrose, however, had won his battle; the two great minds of the opposing parties had been his and that of the pseudo-Emperor Eugenius.

  Augustine, a man of forty, would become Bishop of Hippo Regius in Africa in the following year. He has been called the first modern man and may have been the most intelligent observer and actor in the Empire in all those years. St. Jerome was in Jerusalem about the business of the great Bible, his translation of the Hebrew and Greek into the Vulgate Latin which became fixed and remains the Latin of the Church. It was the case of a man's—a mere translator's—personal style becoming the style of a universal church and a civilization.

  St. Benedict, the father of monasticism, was unborn; but the institution was in vigorous life before the birth of its father. Gregory of Nazianzen was dead five years, and Gregory of Nyassa died in the same year as Theodosius. St. Cyril of Alexandria was fifteen years old. It has been called the Golden Age of the Greek fathers, but it doesn't take much to make up a Golden Age. Actually, the Early Middle Ages had already begun, unnoticed.

  Galla Placidia, the future Empress and wife of a King and an Emperor (not the same person) and mother of an Emperor, was two years old. St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, was the same age; as was Attila the Hun.

  There was a shiver went over the world on the death of the Emperor Theodosius—a shock that was felt only by a very peculiar group. There was in the world an ancient brotherhood of kings and emperors—the most exclusive club ever. They might not know each other, even by name; but when one of them died, all the rest of them knew it and felt it as though they had suffered a stroke to their own body. They felt a very heavy stroke now, for the greatest of them was dead.

  At that time, Chandragupta Vikramaditya was Emperor in north
India, and Upatissa was King in Ceylon. In fragmented China, Toba of the eastern Tsin was King in Ta-tung Fe; Wu Ku was King in Hsi-ping; Kuei ruled the state of Tai in northern Shansi; and there were lesser kinglets in every province. The Empress Jingo was supreme in Japan; Niall was High King in Ireland; Xhusru was Regent in Armenia; and Varahran IV was Pad-Shah in Sassanian Persia. But they were not the world—they were only on the fringes of the world. All of them knew which was The Empire, and that it was The Emperor himself who was dead; and that the latter days had come to the world.

  After the victory of the battle of the River Frigidus and Aquileia, the stricken Theodosius had gone directly to Milan and embraced the Archbishop Ambrose. Rome was the See of the Pope, Ravenna was in the process of becoming the seat of the Western Emperor—though there was no Emperor at the time except Theodosius, the Emperor of both East and West—but it was Milan that was the moral focus of the Empire, due to the presence of Ambrose there. The Archbishop Ambrose had represented the only effective resistance in the West to the paganism of Arbogast and Eugenius. He was the only man who was not broken by their influence; sometimes subtle, sometimes murderous.

  It was at Milan that Theodosius received the submission of the rebellious provinces of the West; and it was to Milan that he called his son Honorius from Constantinople, after peace had been established.

  This eleven-year-old son was now made Emperor of the West by his father, Theodosius, to be under the guardianship of Stilicho. The machinery for the transfer of power was clearly put into Stilicho's hands. It was given to the Emperor Theodosius to know the day and the hour of his death in advance and while he was still ambulant and clear in his mind. This is sometimes spoken of as a divine favor to him; but many persons would be willing to forego such a favor.