There is chaos and ruin. And so there is grace and light.
In the marsh-girdled palace of Ravenna, there was an atrocious mix of pride and panic in those days. There was mistrust, plots and delusions of plots, wars and rumours of wars. Aetius, despite his best efforts, could not persuade the emperor to release any Legions to go east. Were the finest then simply to sit in Sicily, while the Huns ravaged all Moesia and Thrace? Yes, apparently.
Meanwhile, Valentinian harped on endlessly about what he called ‘my punitive expedition’, which had apparently stung the Huns into invasion.
‘We would not have heard from them again, had I led it in person,’ he explained to the assembled courtiers listening sycophantically, and to Aetius. Unusually for Valentinian, he was out of doors, taking the air in the palace gardens. The group passed beneath fine mulberry trees, between rows of box hedges, among statues of interestingly deformed children and little cupids strangling geese. ‘I would have shown those Hunnish hairy men.’
He called on one of his favourite court scholars, an orator named Quintilianus, to tell again what was known of the Huns.
Quintilianus bowed low as they walked. ‘Your Eternal Majesty. Like unreasoning beasts, these Huns are entirely at the mercy of the maddest impulses. They have no understanding of right and wrong, their speech is shifty and obscure, they know nothing of true religion or piety. Their greed for gold is limitless, they are fickle, prone to fury, serpentine of tongue. Their physical appearance is the outward sign of their inner animality. They have flat faces, yellowed skin like old parchment, high cheekbones which leave no room but slits for eyes. They stink of meat, milk and mutton fat, which they lard upon their coarse bodies as protection against the savage Scythian winters that they love so well. They ride brutish mounts, often quite naked, or dressed in the most tattered, ill-cured animal skins, which add to their foul odour.’
Valentinian nodded with pleasure at this eloquent description.
‘And now this dreadful people is against us,’ murmured another courtier. ‘People say that we live in desperate times, and surely the End is coming.’
‘How dare they say that!’ cried the emperor, turning and flailing his purple skirts, revealing his pearl-studded kid-skin boots. ‘Those who breathe such treason, I will have them racked and scourged, I will have them crucified in the Colosseum. Let them be an example, let their screams be heard, let the sands run red with their watery blood!’ He was dribbling slightly. ‘Let them-’
The wooden door to the enclosed garden opened and a tired old woman, tall once but now bowed and bent, shuffled in. Valentinian’s gaze rested on her a moment, and then he turned away and continued.
‘I was surprised to hear that my punitive expedition has not worked, but it was done inadequately, you see. They had no military understanding; they held back too much, my men.’
That it was an eastern legion meant nothing to him. The world was his and everything therein. No one really existed for Valentinian but himself. The rest were but figures in his own fevered dreams.
Returning to the palace alone, Aetius found the old woman in the porphyry-pillared entrance hall.
‘Your Majesty,’ he said, bowing.
‘Aetius,’ said Galla Placidia, her tired green eyes betraying a momentary pleasure. ‘I am glad you have returned.’
Aetius regarded her steadily, his expression too perhaps showing the faintest pleasure on seeing her. ‘One can only play King Theodoric at chess so many times.’
‘And lose?’
‘Deliberately, I assure you.’
There were those in the court of Ravenna, and in senior positions in the Western Army, who were said to have talked to Aetius in utmost secrecy, to have joined together in urging him to seize the imperial throne for himself, to set the diadem on his head and the purple about his shoulders. They said that Valentinian was a babbling fool leading the empire to destruction. But Aetius said that it was as the Church taught: the emperor was God’s annointed, for some purpose hidden from the eyes of men.
‘Then we should have killed him before he became emperor,’ said Germanus, a stocky red-head with a round, rubicund face, one of Aetius’ best, most forthright generals.
‘You cannot kill a boy.’
‘Would you not have killed Hannibal in boyhood, had you been able? Think how many lives you would have saved at Cannae.’
Aetius shook his head.
‘Or Judas Iscariot himself?’
Aetius murmured, ‘“In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.”’
Germanus regarded him blankly. He wasn’t a great one for poetry.
Aetius sighed. ‘Had Christ not been betrayed to crucifixion, how would our sins have been forgiven? Judas, too, was an instrument of God.’
‘But the emperor’s a gibbering fool!’ sputtered Germanus.
Aetius counselled him to lower his voice. ‘I know that,’ he added. ‘Many emperors are. But it is not for us to rescind the appointments of heaven. They are St Paul’s “powers that be”.’
‘Even if those powers are betraying the empire to disaster?’
Aetius said nothing.
‘You owe it to the senate and the people,’ persisted Germanus, ‘the good old “Senatus populusque romanus”, to defend the weak and undefended, the widowed and orphaned, the Christian peoples of Europe.’
‘And so I shall defend that Christian peoples of Europe!’ retorted Aetius, beginning to anger. He quelled his undignified passion, and was silent for a time. Eventually he added, ‘But not that way.’
He said they must live the life that God had allotted to them. He was a general of men, a commander of soldiers, not an assassin. He would do his duty. So must they all.
Valentinian continued to insist that, though the western legions languished, the Eastern Field Army would soon deal with Attila.
‘Besides,’ he said with a peculiar smile, ‘there are other operations afoot.’
For the Vice-Regent of God in the West, Defender of the Church, Shield of the Faithful, had given himelf up to degrading superstitions and the practices of witchcraft, which appeal only to those who are simultaneously corrupt and stupid.
Galla Placidia herself came to Aetius one evening, shaking and white. He insisted she sit. She refused wine.
‘My son,’ she gasped, and buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders trembled, and Aetius realised that he was seeing her cry for the first time in his life. Men dying he could cope with. But women crying… At last he summoned the resolve to reach out and lay his broad right hand on her shoulder. Immediately she came round, like someone waking abruptly from a dream. She wiped her eyes with a small white cloth, then stood and walked slowly round the room.
‘My son… is mad,’ she said.
Aetius waited.
As conscious as Aetius that time was running out, and perturbed by what secrets lay in Valentinian’s private chambers beneath the palace, Galla’s patience – and perhaps, she admitted now, her wilful self-delusion – had at last evaporated. She had demanded entrance. A eunuch had been so insolently adamant that she was not permitted entry that she had grown enraged, given him a mighty cuff for a woman of her years, and entered the chambers in a fine rage.
She was met by a horrible sight, but one she had known in her heart she would find – she bit her lip almost to bleeding. There stood her son, clutching a ridiculous willow wand, naked but for a purple silk cape around his upper body, and wearing a primitive animal mask. The small chamber was in gloom except for flickering candles in grubby candelabra. In the impenetrable dark, a slave sat in a corner beating a drum. Foul concoctions steamed in pots, necromantic brews of curdled milk and bitter herbs. There were skulls around the floor, and in the centre, around the emperor, a chalk circle inscribed with the names of JHWH and Hermes Trismegistus.
The great magician turned.
‘Have you brought her?’ he mumbled behind the mask. His eyes flared wide in the chiselled holes, and he snatched the mask off. ‘Mother!’