When we now write that the Goths did such a thing, we use a short form. It is understood that we mean “It is the legend that they did such a thing.”
The Goths remained but six days in Rome, a city from which all the fire had gone, a dead town of empty-eyed people watching mutely. There was no great slaughter, only the deaths of such misled men as chose to resist, who did not understand that it was all ended. The Goths took few lives, but they took much else—all the wealth they could carry, five hundred wagon loads of loot. It was the gold and jewels of Rome, the fine ornaments and the art; and they carried it away to the south when they left.
There is a legend within a legend that it turned to ashes, that the boxes of it when opened later for examination held only cinders, and were so abandoned. But the great known pieces have been turning up ever since in every land where the Goths went, and they went everywhere. The pieces are in the still preserved crowns of the later kingdoms and in their crown jewels, in the museums and in private vaults. They have a life of their own, and all of them did not turn to ashes. They represented the secret golden hoards of Europe for the next thousand years.
The Goths left a garrison in Rome and went into south Italy. They were in a daze. They had fulfilled one aspect of their old destiny: they had killed Rome and been revenged on her. Nobody doubted that now she was dead, who had come living through more serious things. The Goths had a rational program to take the provinces of Sicily and Africa and so have a key to all the resources of the Empire. But this rational program was only an excuse; it was a homing instinct that drew them south. Elements of the Goths had come from one of these two provinces many centuries before, and they felt the call to return.
They built a great fleet in South Italy, and the first ships of it went to sea. There arose then a tempest more severe than any that is recorded in history, for this was a thing outside such bounds. Waves more than three hundred feet high, and bearing whole islands and towns on their crests, shattered the fleet. And every time thereafter that the Goths laid even one keel for a new fleet, the great waves came ashore, even into the hills and forests, and destroyed their work. They would not be allowed to go home. They must wander.
Alaric died of a fever in the same year, three months after the taking of Rome. He was buried (it is the legend that he was buried) in the bed of the River Busento, which torrent was said to have been diverted from its bed and a great mausoleum built for Alaric. He was placed there with all the treasure, and the Busento River turned into its bed once more to flow over him. Thereupon the slaves who had performed this labor were killed, that the secret of the place might not be found.
It has not been found, and there is likely no such place; but Italians still come on holiday and wade and drag the river; and of late years they use ticking instruments that might indicate the presence of golden metal, should they be the lucky ones.
Three stories are told of the end of Stairnon the Valkyrie, two of them unlikely, and one of them most probable. The first is that she expected that Alaric, like Christ, would rise from the dead on the third day; and that she killed herself with sword when he did not. The second is that she had herself immured alive in the mausoleum with the dead Alaric; and that she is alive there yet, her keening still to be heard above the thunder on stormy nights.
The third story is that she acquired land and slaves in South Italy and remained there as a great estate proprietor through a long lifetime, that she wore always the long bull whip coiled about her arm as she had in Little Moesia, and that she became somewhat unbending and cruel in her later years. The latter account is from Hafras who visited her, on such estate and in such condition, many years after the death of Alaric.
The horrible double fratricide that came to the Balthi family after the death of Alaric is like a murky dream inside a dream. Athaulf, in possession of Galla Placidia taken at the conquest of Rome, had in turn been possessed by her, and had married her. He became by this the brother-in-law of the shadowy Emperor Honorius. Athaulf and Galla Placidia then began, too late and with insufficient base, a sincere attempt to restore the Empire, not realizing that it was dead forever. Athaulf now bore the title of King of the Goths, and he took the field against the pretender Emperor Constantine, who was now actually the King of Gaul. It was an inconsequential campaign of the Low Middle Ages, and had nothing to do with the vanished Empire.
Sarus, coming still to kill his brother Athaulf, found him in South France, and attacked him in the last of his memorable charges. Once more Sarus rode furiously with less than one hundred men, calling out his intent in a loud voice in broad daylight, and launching into the middle of thousands of guards. Athaulf stood, as he had once before near Ravenna, waiting with black laughter, which, it is said, turned to fear in an instant when Sarus cut a path impossibly to the very core of the guard.
But Sarus had horse killed under him, and was himself driven clear through the upper body with lance as he continued his charge on foot. But it took eight men to pinion the dying lion as he still came on in fury; and it was not till he was so held that Athaulf came and sank his great fingers into his brother's throat.
Athaulf continued to throttle Sarus long after he was dead; till long after dark, it is said, when everyone had left them. Then he gave the body of Sarus to the dogs.
Singerich came one year later. It had taken that time for the news to come to him in Constantinople, and for himself to come and find Athaulf. He found him in Spain, in what is now Barcelona, and killed him; how he killed him is not known.
Singerich himself then reigned as King of the Goths—for seven days. The second brother had been killed for the murder of the first, and the third must follow. Singerich, after his one week's reign, was in turn murdered by an unnamed partisan of Athaulf. There followed as King of the Goths a man named Vallia, a more distant cousin from among the Balthi family. And there followed a hundred other Gothic kings in a dozen kingdoms for a thousand years. By the time that the remembered name Athaulf had evolved into its modern form of Adolph, the Goths had themselves so evolved and been assimilated that no one could say who was Goth and who was not.
But we are all Goths, for all that, whoever we are; which is to say, Outlanders. And like the Goth Sarus we still owe loyalty to an Empire, but we no longer know of what the Empire consists. We are still bound by the statement of Stilicho that the highest duty in the World is the proper ordering of the World. There will be, and are, other worlds; and perhaps it is not a terrible thing that a world should end. But we are still in admiration at the great corpse of it.
Table of Contents
The World's Narration
The Ten Thousand Masks of the World
Great Awkward Gold
Something New Under the Black Suns
More Worlds Than One?
For a Little Bit of Gold
Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus
Through the Red Fire
Tell It Funny, Og
Rare Earths and Pig-Weeds
The Gathering of the Tribes
The Day After the World Ended
It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs
Shape of the S.F. Story
Review: Some Things Dark and Dangerous
Review: Tales of the Natural and the Supernatural
Review: Mysteries of Time and Space
Tolkien as Christian
Review: Again, Dangerous Visions
Review: The White House Transcripts
Review: The Last Western
Review: Sioux Trail
The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician
True Believers (Verse Statement)
That Moon Plaque
True Believers (Prose Statement)
Introduction (Ringing Changes)
Memoir (About a Secret Crocodile)
Memoir (Nine Hundred Grandmothers)
Afterword (Land Of The Great Horses)
How I Wrote “Continued On Next Rock”
Letter ( Science Fiction Review #18)
> Notes From the Golden Age
Cover
Prologues
CHAPTER ONE - All About Goths
CHAPTER TWO - About Alaric of Balthi
CHAPTER THREE - Of the School for Generals
CHAPTER FOUR - Of Master General and Boy Giant
CHAPTER FIVE - Being a History of the World
CHAPTER SIX - About Little Moesia
CHAPTER SEVEN - Of Gothic Lightning and Frankish Thunder
CHAPTER EIGHT - As Good a Graveyard as Any
CHAPTER NINE - Of the Return of East and West
CHAPTER TEN - Of the Game Named King
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Of Kings in the Day of Their Blessing
CHAPTER TWELVE - Of Res Romana
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Of the Goth in the Mirror
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Of Pollentia and Verona
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Of the Seven Waves
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Of the Death of an Oak
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Of the Empire Misplaced
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - The Day the World Ended
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Which Is Epilogue
Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction Page 47