The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  Attila looked at him shrewdly, his legs apart and one hand on his knee. ‘So, Flavius Aetius Gaudentius, nephew of magister militum Aetius. Why have you really come here?’

  Flavius stared him in the eye. ‘I have come here on behalf of Aetius to challenge you to battle.’

  ‘To challenge me to battle.’ Attila wiped his nose and glanced at Bleda. ‘That’s a new one. I don’t recall any of the eunuchs offering me that as a concession, or that gangly scholar Priscus and his tribune friend from Constantinople.’

  ‘That’s because they were representing an emperor, not a general. I come to you not with offers of concessions, but with an offer of war. It may not be this year, or next year, but it will be soon, at a place of your choosing. The mother of all battles.’

  ‘The mother of all battles,’ Attila repeated slowly, eyeing him. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’ Flavius remembered too late that the expression had come from Priscus, who had quoted it from Attila himself. He suddenly felt on a knife-edge, not daring to look at Bleda. Priscus and Maximinus had left under a cloud, and if Attila guessed that he had been in contact with them, things might go wrong very quickly. He tried not to look tense, but his heart was pounding and he could feel the sweat trickling down his back.

  Attila narrowed his eyes. ‘There were two others with you. Who are they?’

  ‘My centurion, Macrobius, and my manservant and armourer, a Gaul from Armorica. Your daughter is taking them to find a grinding wheel in your armoury. Our swords need sharpening.’

  Attila thought for a moment, grunted, and then got up, putting the book carefully aside and walking towards a shuttered window in the side wall of the room. ‘I’m told that in Rome and in Constantinople the military scholae include dioramas for mockups of battles,’ he said. ‘Well, here’s my playground.’ He pushed open the wooden shutters and led Flavius out onto a balcony, into the blazing light of the sun. Flavius shielded his eyes, blinking against the glare, and began to make out features that they had seen on the way in, the surrounding cliffs with the steppe-land above, the road leading out to the palisade and the entrance formed by the ravine.

  From this height atop the citadel he could appreciate the immensity of the bowl, at least a mile across, with their position commanding views in all directions. Attila opened his arms expansively. ‘When I exercise my warriors, we play war games for real. From my last excursion against the Persian Empire we have a thousand captured Parthians, infantry and cavalry, fully equipped and armed. If they survive until sundown, they gain their freedom. If my warriors fall to their arms, that is their lot. I can ask my men to recreate any battle I choose, using the flat land of the plain to the east or the undulating land to the west. Sometimes I watch it from here alone, sometimes with my daughter, sometimes with my commanders. Today, I will go down and join them.’

  He turned and bored his eyes into Flavius. ‘Let me see what a nephew of Flavius Aetius Gaudentius is made of. Ride with me.’

  The next four hours were the most exhilarating Flavius had ever experienced outside real battle, and also the bloodiest since that morning ten years earlier before the walls of Carthage. Attila had set up two scenarios to replicate successful encounters with the Parthians during his campaigning season the previous winter, as a way of introducing his younger warriors to Hun battle tactics and to give them a taste for killing. Flavius and Attila had observed the first one on horseback from the west side of the citadel, where they saw a Parthian force take a ridge blind, without forward observation of the Hun positions; they had been shot down by a fixed line of Hun archers below their side of the ridge as they bunched above, unable to retreat because further Parthian troops pressing behind were unaware of their dire situation. The few survivors had been mercilessly cut to pieces by the Hun infantry soldiers who had sprung forward from behind the archers to finish them off, and the victors had then run and galloped in review order past Attila and Flavius, ululating and clashing their arms as they sped east to the next killing ground.

  The second scenario was on a larger scale, involving at least a thousand mounted archers, lancers and swordsmen, and the remaining five hundred-odd Parthians. The prisoners had been told to defend a wagon laager that was too small to contain an adequate number of defenders or to provide protection for the Parthian troops in the field, allowing them to be broken apart and encircled by columns of Hun cavalry who then shot them down and laid into them with the sword, finishing off each cluster of men one by one.

  This time, to Flavius’ astonishment and delight, two men under instruction from Attila rode up and slipped a cuirass of segmented armour and chainmail over Flavius’ tunic, fitting him with gloves and helmet and greaves and slinging a long Hun cavalry sword over the flanks of his horse. When they had finished and Flavius had flexed himself and drawn his sword Attila slapped the back of his horse and it reared up, galloping at high speed into the fray. Attila caught up and rode beside him, keeping close by as they joined the great wheeling movement of the cavalry, seeking prey among the Parthians who were now panicking and running around wildly to escape the horses.

  Flavius rode at a group that was making a stand and cut down two of them, men with bows who were aiming at him, the great slashing sweeps of his sword decapitating one man and splitting the other almost in half across his chest. Attila had watched approvingly, and then had leapt off his horse, scooped up gore from the second man’s wound and splashed it over Flavius’ horse and body, pulling him down and smearing it over his face. He had pushed him back upright, his face creased with pleasure, and then had tensed himself and roared, a great bellow that was taken up and repeated by all of the Hun riders around them until they sounded like a herd of raging bulls. Attila stood back, panting and sweating, the blood dripping from his face. ‘I bet your uncle Aetius can’t do that,’ he bellowed, roaring again.

  Flavius’s horse had reared up, and he brought it under control, the adrenalin coursing through him. He reached down and picked up a spear and rode at another Parthian, skewering him where he stood, and then dropped the spear and rode off with a group of archers who had galloped around him, enveloping him and driving him on. One of them threw him a bow with three arrows attached, and he let go of the horse’s reins, riding only with his knees, strung an arrow and released it at another cluster of Parthians, hitting one in the leg but nearly falling off the horse as he did so, his legs clamped tightly to the animal as he pulled himself on again.

  The Huns around him shouted their approval and ululated, a strange howling sound above the battlefield, and then they were off again, heeding the call of a commander for a massed wheeling movement to bring as many bows to bear as possible on a beleaguered group of Parthians sheltering behind the wagon laager. Flavius had released his two remaining arrows, not knowing whether they found their mark, and then he slung the bow over his shoulder and pulled out the great sword once again, riding in a great sweep round and round the laager with the bowmen, seeing them release arrow after arrow until none of the prisoners was left standing. He was breathing in the smells of battle, of horses and the dust, of his own sweat and adrenalin, of blood and fear from the Parthians. He realized that he was yelling at the top of his voice, bellowing, the sound completely submerged by the din around him, but he did not care. He was having the time of his life, and he was learning what it meant to be a Hun warrior. He was learning what it was that made Attila tick.

  As the dust settled and the field cleared, the ground thick with Parthian corpses, Flavius cantered off in the direction of the citadel, sheathing his sword and looking for Attila. Bleda came riding up to him, pulled up short and then circled around him, a sneer of contempt on his face. ‘Attila has other business to attend to. He told me to take you to your friends and see you on your way. And don’t expect any favours from me, Roman. I’d have killed you there and then in the throne room, regardless of your tall tales and flattery.’

  Flavius doffed the armour, dropping it on the ground along with the sword,
and followed Bleda as he sped off. He began to cool off after the excitement, taking a deep draught from the water skin that was hanging from the neck of his horse and pouring some on his face, seeing the blood from the Parthian he had killed come off when he wiped his chin with his hand. It had now been over five hours since he had left the others, far longer than they had imagined it possible to keep Attila’s attention, and he could only hope that they had managed to get into the strongroom. But the involvement of Bleda was an unwelcome development, as this was a man who was suspicious and volatile by nature and who, with any hint of what they had been up to, might terminate their mission with terrifying rapidity.

  They reached the entrance to the citadel, tethered their horses and went in through the same route that Erecan had taken. At the point where Flavius had previously gone on alone to the audience chamber they now veered left, dropping down a stone-floored passageway that seemed to penetrate the deepest recesses of the citadel. After about a hundred paces they turned right, and Flavius froze. Ahead of him on the ground were the bodies of two Hun warriors, clearly the guards of the armoury that was now visible ahead. In the split second that it took him to register them, Macrobius had launched out of the shadows at Bleda, forcing him back against the wall. The two men tumbled to the ground, locked together, Bleda snarling like a dog and Macrobius desperately trying to get him in a neck lock. Flavius had whipped out his sword and was trying to find an opportunity to use it, but the two men were rolling across the floor in a single mass. Suddenly Macrobius was on his knees, holding Bleda’s head and bringing it down against the floor with a crack, moving back as the Hun staggered and reeled. Then the Hun shook himself and came on again, charging like a bull. Macrobius pulled out his own sword just in time and brought it down with full force on Bleda’s right bicep, slicing through the thick muscle and bone and severing his arm just above the elbow. He bellowed in pain, his arm spurting red, and fumbled for his sword before slipping on his own blood and falling heavily on a raised wooden revetment along the side of the passageway, his lower back breaking with a sickening crunch of bone.

  Erecan appeared in the passageway, bow in hand, followed by Arturus, and Bleda tried to move, swinging wildly at them with his left hand, his face contorted with rage and pain. Erecan lowered her bow and Bleda dropped his sword, clutching at the stump of his right arm, his legs paralysed. He looked up at her, breathing heavily, his lip curled in disdain. ‘Go on, daughter of a whore. Kill me.’

  ‘I would rather not waste the arrow.’

  ‘Your mother was not so lame when I killed her. She kicked and screamed like a real Hun.’

  ‘So it was you,’ she hissed.

  ‘Your father did not wish to sully his hands with a woman’s blood. For me, doing his dirty work was no problem.’

  ‘I thought you were enraged with me because I had told Attila that I knew she was my mother, and because he ordered her – your mistress – killed.’

  ‘Pah,’ Bleda said, spitting. ‘Whores are ten a penny. I was enraged because I had the Hun bloodlust, which means that when you kill a woman you want to kill all of her offspring as well.’

  Erecan was still for a moment, and then bared her teeth like an animal and said something ferocious to him in the Hun language, a snarling, guttural noise that made Bleda pick up his sword with his remaining arm and elbow himself upright. In one swift movement Erecan took the bow off her back, strung an arrow and shot it clean through his head, the arrow clattering away down the passageway with a piece of skull attached to it and the hole in his forehead pumping blood. She stared at him, watching his eyes glaze over and his mouth droop, the puddle of blood rapidly spreading over the floor. ‘Now I really can’t stay,’ she said.

  ‘Suits me,’ Arturus said. ‘I could use a Hun archer in my army.’

  ‘Are you really going back to Britain?’ Macrobius said, leaning on his sword and breathing heavily.

  Arturus nodded. ‘I’ve done all I can for Rome.’

  Flavius looked at the three of them. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ Erecan said.

  ‘Shall we show him?’ Arturus grinned at her.

  ‘Why not.’ She led them quickly down the passageway past the dead guards to the armoury, a vast chamber full of weapons and armour of every description, rack upon rack of Hun swords and bows, past two more sprawled bodies to an opened metal grille at one end. She waved a heavy iron key. ‘Only the daughter of Attila knows where he hides it, in a secret chamber beneath the big kettle drum on top of the citadel that’s used to raise the alarm,’ she said.

  ‘It looks as if you had a little resistance,’ Flavius said, picking his way over the two blood-drenched corpses, then leaning over and pulling himself towards the entrance of the strongroom.

  ‘There are three more dead on the far side of the room.’

  Flavius squeezed inside and gasped in astonishment. It was a dragon’s lair of gold, vast quantities of coin, some of it spilled onto the floor, as well as loot in precious metal from everywhere that Attila had taken his army, from Parthian gold plaques to heavy silver dishes from Gaul decorated with classical scenes and Christian motifs. But it was the object that Erecan lifted off a platform in the centre that took his breath away, that made everything else fade to grey. It was a great sword of cavalry length, like the one he had just been wielding against the Parthians, but with a hilt decorated with a sparkling black pommel and a blade shining with an extraordinary pellucid lustre. ‘The sword of Attila,’ Erecan said, handing it to him. ‘Look after it well.’

  Flavius felt the heft of the blade, its perfect balance, and shook it, sensing the slight give. Whoever had made this, the smiths from the island far to the east that Priscus had talked about, were master craftsmen, able to forge a blade of surpassing beauty but also a perfectly honed weapon of war. He stared, hardly believing that he was holding it, and then he remembered where they were and how little time they might have before the alarm was raised. He took the leather sheath that Erecan handed him, slid the sword into it and turned to the entrance. ‘We need to get out of here.’

  Macrobius had followed him in, and looked wistfully at the spilled gold on the floor. ‘A down payment on a small farm in the hills of Etruria, that’s all I ask for.’

  Flavius slapped him on the shoulder. ‘All right, centurion. Everything you can pick up in the next two minutes, provided you take it back and share it out evenly among the men of the numerus. But not so much that they’ll go soft and give up fighting. And the same goes for you.’

  Macrobius gave him an uncomprehending look. ‘Since when did we ever fight for gold? I can’t remember the last time I was paid.’

  ‘I hear you. Just get on with it.’ Macrobius knelt down and scooped coins into his pack, slinging it on his back and following Erecan and Flavius out. They joined Arturus, and the three men then quickly gathered their weapons and bags and made their way behind Erecan down another passage to the outer wall of the citadel, through a small gap that led out to the plain. In the shadows outside two Hun warriors stood with half a dozen horses. Macrobius reached for his sword, but Erecan halted him. ‘They’re Optila and Thrastilla, my bodyguards,’ she said. ‘I’ve ordered them to escort you back to Rome. As soon as my father finds that I’ve gone and Bleda is missing he’ll send riders out along the main routes, but we’ll have a head start leaving now and travelling in the dark. If he catches up with you after this, his reception won’t be quite so friendly. Most thieves get flayed alive, but stealing that sword would demand a unique punishment.’

  ‘Understood,’ Macrobius said, slinging his and Flavius’ bags over two of the horses and tying them onto the saddles. Flavius wrapped the sword in the cassock from his bag and strapped it to his back, then sprung up onto one of the horses. The others followed behind, and together they swung west, towards the setting sun, leaving the citadel and its king behind in the haze, then hearing the clamour and the beating of the great drum as the alarm was raised.

  They be
gan to ride for their lives.

  PART FOUR

  THE CATALAUNIAN FIELDS, GAUL

  AD 451

  15

  Flavius and Macrobius stood with their horses in the courtyard of the monastery at Châlons, once the villa of a wealthy Gallic nobleman with Roman tastes but after the conversion of Constantine given over to the Church as a house of God. The monks had offered it as a headquarters to Aetius in the expectation that they would lead him in prayer before battle, but he had brusquely swept them aside, cleared out the main rooms as accommodation for his staff and set up his operations room in the convocation hall, once the atrium of the villa. They were still moving in, bullock carts bringing all of the clerical equipment of Aetius’ secretarial and logistics staff, and Flavius knew that they were going to have to be patient before they had a chance to see the general himself.

  He thought back over the events that had led them here, and realized that they had been on campaign now for nearly three months. It had been almost two years since he and Macrobius had arrived exhausted back in Rome after their escape from Attila, having parted ways with Arturus and Erecan in the southern Alps and watched them ride west towards the Atlantic shore and Britain. Erecan’s Hun bodyguards Optila and Thrastilla had come south and entered Aetius’ service as his bodyguards when he was in Ravenna, an appointment engineered by Aetius so that they could be his eyes and ears in the court. What he had discovered there had dismayed him, but it came as no surprise. The eunuch Heraclius had encouraged Honoria, Valentinian’s increasingly deranged sister, to pursue a fixation on Attila with an offer of marriage, an embarrassment for Aetius which became worse when Valentinian himself became involved, sending his own emissary to refute the marriage and protest at the dowry Honoria had offered of half the western empire.