The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  They took the wine and drank it down, replacing the cups and then sitting on wooden stools in front of the table. ‘We don’t have much time,’ Flavius said. ‘We want to set out before sunset.’

  ‘Very wise,’ Priscus said. ‘Your boat will mysteriously disappear into the night otherwise, and you probably will as well.’

  Flavius pointed at the sheaves of paper on the table. ‘Your history of the Huns?’ he asked. ‘Arturus mentioned it.’

  ‘I’m writing it as a codex. I can’t get decent scroll any more, in papyrus or in vellum. It’s a history of the Huns from earliest times to the present day, including an account of my visit to Attila. If I’m to get nothing for my efforts other than death threats from people who were supposed to be on my side, then I thought I could at least write an account for posterity.’

  ‘It’s the present day that concerns us, not posterity,’ Flavius said, leaning forward with one hand on his knee. ‘What do you know of Attila’s intentions?’

  Priscus picked up the metal stylus that was lying on the table and placed it in an open inkpot. He stared at what he had been writing, and then looked at Flavius intently. ‘I can tell you this much. Attila intends to march east on Parthia, skirting the northern Black Sea and dropping down past the Caucasus mountains and over the plains of Anatolia to the headwaters of the Euphrates. But that’s really a sideshow, to keep his warriors exercised. His eyes are on Rome.’

  ‘On Rome?’ Flavius said. ‘Not Constantinople?’

  Priscus shook his head. ‘He knows that he can defeat Theodosius’ army in the field, but he does not have the ability to maintain a siege or to launch the seaborne assault that would be necessary to take the city. The land walls of Constantinople can be defended by the city garrison, especially if the field army is withdrawn to reinforce them, and as long as the sea lanes through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles are kept open Constantinople could survive almost indefinitely even if the rest of the eastern empire disintegrates. But the city of Rome is another matter. Attila knows what the Goths managed forty years ago, when Alaric smashed his way through and set up his standard in the old Capitoline Temple above the Roman Forum. The city may have been replaced by Ravenna as imperial capital in the West, but the sack of Rome was still a huge blow to Roman prestige and set other barbarian chieftains around the frontiers hungry with ambition. Attila’s father Mundiuk was one of them, and he passed his ambition on to his son.’

  ‘It was a wake-up call,’ Flavius said. ‘After the Goths got bored and left, the walls of Rome were strengthened, the garrison was reorganized and the schola militarum was set up for officer training, building on the lessons learned.’

  ‘I’m no military strategist, but if the schola in Rome is anything like the one in Constantinople, you’ll have been taught how many men are required to defend a city wall, right? My friend Maximinus tried to explain it to me once when we walked the walls of Constantinople. The walls built by the emperor Aurelian around Rome are impressive enough, but at nearly twelve miles in extent they are impossible to defend properly without a garrison far larger than Rome could ever sustain. Attila knows this, and he knows that if he marched his army on Rome he would be likely to take the city. He has his eyes above all on the abandoned palace of the Palatine. The city of Rome may be a backwater now, but under Attila it would become the capital of a new Roman Empire, one ruled by a Hun dynasty.’

  ‘Do you know the size of his army? Are there any alliances?’

  Priscus pursed his lips. ‘As Maximinus and I were making our hasty farewells, two other emissaries arrived, one from the Ostrogoth king Valamer and the other from the Gepids, ruled by Ardaric. There were other indications of alliances being forged, including the marriage of two of Attila’s daughters to Goth princes. Maximinus reckoned that in alliance with Alaric and Valamer, Attila could field an army of fifty thousand men.’

  ‘Fifty thousand men!’ Flavius repeated, shaking his head and turning to Arturus. ‘The only way Aetius could match that number would be in alliance with the Visigoths.’

  ‘You mean with Theodoric?’ Priscus said. ‘With his sworn enemy?’

  Flavius thought hard. ‘The eastern and western Goths have grown apart, with the Ostrogoths scorning the Visigoths for settling down in Gaul and Spain and becoming Romanized, and the Visigoths in turn despising the Ostrogoths as barbarians. There are blood feuds between the two that Aetius could play on to get the Visigoths on board, though he would want those set aside if the Visigoths were to be treated as allies alongside the comitatenses. Blood feuds do not make for good battle discipline; they lead men off on missions of their own to find some hated rival.’

  ‘Aetius would need to persuade Theodoric that he would have no future if he joined with Attila,’ Arturus said. ‘If that alliance were to be forged, the Visigoths would soon be subsumed by the Ostrogoths and Valamer would become the dominant Goth chieftain. But on the other hand, if Theodoric were to be persuaded to join Aetius, then he would need to be convinced that a Roman alliance with his forces would produce an army equal to Attila’s, of fifty thousand men or more, enough to give even chances of a victory.’

  ‘It would be a tall order,’ Flavius murmured. ‘But there are enough mercenaries and renegades with military training floating around the western provinces for Aetius to be able to rustle up foederati units to bolster the comitatenses, boosting the size of the force he can show Theodoric. If anyone can do it, Aetius can.’

  ‘Provided that he sees the sense of an alliance with Theodoric,’ Priscus said.

  ‘The future of the western empire is at stake,’ Flavius said. ‘And they may be sworn enemies, but the two men speak the same language. There are advantages to my uncle’s Goth ancestry.’

  ‘They’ll have no choice,’ Priscus said. ‘One of Attila’s daughters, Erecan, the one remaining in his court, came in secret to our camp on our last night and told Maximinus of her father’s plan. She said that Attila intended to destroy Milan and Ravenna and to march on Rome, but before that he would meet Aetius in one final apocalyptic showdown, in the greatest and bloodiest battle ever fought. She said he called it the mother of all battles.’

  ‘The mother of all battles,’ Flavius repeated, trying to absorb the enormity of it, and then turned again to Arturus. ‘We need to get word back to Aetius as soon as possible after we’ve reached the court of Attila. Aetius needs to begin marshalling his forces now.’

  Priscus leaned forward, his skin pale and diaphanous in the lamplight. ‘Whatever you hope to achieve there, you should know that what lies ahead, what lies beyond this island, is not for the faint-hearted,’ he said, his voice hushed and tremulous. ‘Everything we learned from the time of Trajan and the Dacian Wars is true, of another world out there, of witchcraft and shamans and human sacrifice, of shrieking eagles and wolves that howl in the night. You will see sights that will shock you, but you must keep your nerve. Those who do make it as far as the borders of the Hun kingdom have passed their first test, and may be allowed into the court of the great king.’

  Arturus stared back, his eyes intense. ‘We are prepared, Priscus. And now we have one last request.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tell us what you know about the sword of Attila.’

  13

  Flavius sat in the bows of the boat staring ahead into the mist, his cassock now used as bedding and the tribune’s insignia on his shoulders gleaming in the dull light. It had been an arduous three-day voyage since departing from the island, a place they had been all too happy to leave, through gorges and rapids and whirlpools, always against the current of the great river. But for the last day the rocky shoreline had steadily dropped in height until the banks now were no higher than the boat’s mast, and they had begun to feel that they were through the worst of it. They had been lucky with the wind, always strong enough to fill the sail and push them at a slow walking pace against the current, but every so often that morning there had been a chill brush from the north-east, a hint
of the harsh winds that they knew swept across the steppe-lands of their destination. Priscus had told them that they would feel it as they approached the rock that marked their turning point in the river, the entrance to a tributary that would lead them to a landing stage where their river journey would end and the final leg of their trip through the flat open grasslands would begin.

  Flavius thought about what Priscus had told them of the sword of Attila. It had been forged long ago in the days of the ancestors of Mundiuk, before the time of Trajan and Decebalus and the Dacian Wars, before the Romans had even tried to penetrate the northern lands of the barbarians. It was said that the smiths had come down the silk route from a mysterious island in the sea beyond Thina, a place where swords were made so sharp that to touch a blade was to lose a finger. The men with narrow eyes had set up their forge in a dark dell in the steppes, in one of the places at the bottom of an eroded stream bank where the Huns lived protected from the sweeping winds above, venturing out only to hunt and trade and go to war. There, for months on end, they had tempered and annealed the steel, making a blade that was immensely strong and yet ductile, adding to the iron a rare electrum that made the blade shine with a radiant lustre even in the dull light of the North. The chieftain who had ordered the sword made, a distant ancestor of Mundiuk, had given the smiths a stone that his own ancestors had seen fall from the sky on the ice sheets of their northern hunting grounds, a stone that attracted iron to it; they had made it the pommel of the sword. The smiths were still there now, burned and buried in the dell with their forge, killed by the chieftain with the very sword they had made him in order to prevent them from selling their skills to others who might stand against the power that now shone from his hands.

  Attila’s daughter Erecan had told Priscus that at the future king’s birth, Attila’s father Mundiuk had placed the sword in a bonfire, and that when he used it to cut the marks on the baby’s face and he had not cried Mundiuk knew he had beheld the future king, one whom he named after the ancient name for the sword itself. And then by tradition the shaman who had read the auguries had taken the sword and buried it in a secret place, arranging for the boy to find it when he came of age as a warrior. Since then Attila had used the sword at the birthing ceremonies of his own children, of Erecan herself, and had raised it in battle, at all other times storing it in a strongroom in his citadel along with his gold and the booty of war waged to east and west as he had grown stronger and his ambition for conquest had become all-encompassing.

  And yet Erecan had also said that Attila himself was not swayed by the shamans, that he did not believe that the sword itself had magical properties; like Aetius, who scorned the monks for wishing to bring the forces of Rome under the sign of Christ, Attila was too good a general to allow mysticism and religion to influence his judgement except where he could see its effect on the morale of his men. Attila knew that the power of the sword came not from the gods but from the genius of the smiths, from those able to create a weapon that shone over the field of battle, and that their skill was not some divine gift but the result of generations of them having crafted weapons for the warriors across the expanse of the known world who were able to call on their expertise.

  A rock suddenly loomed ahead, a stark white sentinel on the bank of the river, and in front of it Flavius could see the mist swirling over the entrance to a tributary that joined the river from the east. He put his hand up and Macrobius swung the tiller, then quickly furled the sail and lowered the mast for the final leg of their journey. The dense coniferous forest of the gorge had gone, and all they could see now was stark grassland and a few small trees. The tributary narrowed to little more than a stream, and as Flavius’ paddle struck the bottom he knew that their destination could not be far ahead. Minutes later he saw a gravelly foreshore with two boats pulled up on it, and Macrobius turned the tiller until the bow grounded into the gravel. Flavius leapt out, followed by Arturus and then Macrobius, who reached in and tossed their bags out before pulling the boat up as far as he could and tying the painter around a wooden frame in front of the other two vessels. He stripped off his cassock, stuffed it in his bag, slung the bag on his back and then peered over the stream, his hands on his hips. ‘Well, what now?’ he said.

  ‘That’s what,’ Arturus said, nodding up the slope. The other two followed his gaze, walking forward and then stopping abruptly in the same instant. A line of Hun horsemen was standing above the bank, the riders helmeted with their cloaks thrown back but their weapons still sheathed. They wore armour and garb that Flavius recognized as typically Hun: a blue woollen undercoat and light brown trousers, leather boots and a leather flapped cap, a conical helmet and the distinctive Hun body armour, a vest of segments of iron sewn into closely fitting flexible armour covering the torso and shoulders. Two of the men carried Hun bows, recurved composite bows made of horn, wood and sinew laminated together, two of them had war axes and all of them wore long swords in sheaths buckled to their waists. Unlike the Goths and the Alans, they were relatively short men, stocky and muscular, typical in their facial appearance of men from the windswept steppe-lands and tundra plains extending from the Hun heartland in the Danube watershed to as far east as men from the West had gone, to Thina and beyond.

  One of the riders cantered down to the gravel, coming to a halt about ten paces away, the horse stomping and snorting and being calmed by the rider, who Flavius could see was a woman. She wore the same armour as the rest but her head was bare and her long hair was tied tightly back, and she bore the birth scars of a warrior on her cheeks. She stared at them haughtily, lingering on Arturus, whose face was still concealed under his hood, and then cantered back to the men, speaking to them in the guttural language of the Huns.

  ‘That’s Erecan,’ Arturus said quietly, his face still down. ‘Like Attila, she speaks Latin fluently, having been educated by scholars brought from Constantinople for the purpose. She was the only one of Attila’s children to pass the birth ceremony, so she’s been brought up as a warrior princess.’

  Erecan returned to face them, and Flavius stepped forward, bowing his head slightly. ‘I am Flavius Aetius Gaudentius, tribune, nephew of magister militum Aetius and special envoy to the court of Attila of the emperor Valentinian, and this is my centurion Macrobius.’

  ‘Do you serve Valentinian or Aetius?’ she said, swinging her horse around, her voice sonorous and resonating. ‘I hear that Valentinian is only served by eunuchs.’

  ‘Valentinian is my emperor, and Aetius my general.’

  The horse snorted and she pulled its neck around, facing Arturus. ‘And who is this?’

  Arturus pulled back his hood and threw off his cassock, revealing his long hair and beard and the tunic and sword belt of a foederati commander. ‘I am Arturus of the Britons, former tribune of the foederati Britannorum of the comitatenses of the North.’

  She stared at him, and then leaned over and spat. ‘I do not know this man.’ She reined her horse hard to the right and galloped back up to the others, Arturus remaining stock-still. ‘Hold your ground,’ he said quietly. ‘This is just theatre.’

  ‘Just theatre?’ Macrobius exclaimed. ‘How well did you know this woman?’

  ‘I was her bondsman.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘She was my wife. In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Your wife. So it was a bit more than unarmed combat.’

  ‘A bit more.’

  Macrobius turned and peered at him. ‘When you left this place twelve years ago, did you say a proper goodbye to her?’

  ‘There wasn’t time. Quiet now. She’s returning.’ Erecan halted her horse again in front of the three men but this time she leapt off and walked towards Arturus. She stood in front of him and stared him in the eye, the birth scars on her cheeks livid, then took out a knife and held it under his chin. ‘Explain yourself,’ she demanded. ‘It was not like a future king to run away with your tail between your legs.’

  ‘A future king?’ Macrobius excl
aimed, staring again at Arturus.

  ‘He used to tell me his dreams,’ Erecan said, the knife still at his throat. ‘About how one day he would return to his native Britain and rally the people against the Saxons, and create a kingdom that would be a worthy successor to Roman rule. After he left me without a word, I decided that it had all been hot air, that he was just another one of the renegades who come this way with delusions of grandeur. Most of them we kill, and I thought I should have done so with Arturus. Now could be the time.’

  ‘I came to your father’s court twelve years ago as captain of Gaiseric’s bodyguard,’ Arturus said. ‘Already my cousin in the bodyguard had been murdered, and I was bent on vengeance. On the day that I left, one of the bodyguard, a Saxon with no love for a Briton like me, told Gaiseric that I knew he was responsible and was planning revenge. Once I heard that, I knew I had to leave immediately or risk being knifed in my sleep. You were out hunting on the steppe and I couldn’t wait.’

  She brushed the knife down his beard. ‘Well? Did you get your vengeance?’

  Arturus gestured at Flavius. ‘Thanks to my friends here, two years after leaving you I was able to stand my ground before the walls of Carthage and face Gaiseric’s army, sword in hand. Before the day was out I had accounted for two of his Alan bodyguard and six Vandal warriors, as well as an Alaunt war dog. The price of wergild for my cousin was easily paid, and vengeance was satisfied.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘My commission in the foederati was restored, and I have been fighting for Rome ever since.’

  ‘Fighting, or spying?’

  Arturus lowered his voice. ‘Erecan, we need to talk. Out of earshot.’

  She sheathed her blade and led them back a few paces towards the boat. ‘None of my Huns knows Latin. Their loyalty is to me, and not to my father. You can speak openly.’

  ‘It was no coincidence that it was you who came to meet us, was it?’