He wore kohl round his eyes like a harlot. She went closer. His naked belly was a sagging little white pouch like an old man’s, though he was only in his early twenties, and, shame upon shame, his lower parts were smeared with fat, probably mixed with opium and henbane, wolfsbane and hemp. She prayed it was only animal fat. His pupils were black and dilated.
She could not speak. Almost unconsciously she held her arms out to him, her eyes blurring. Her son…
He regained composure of a sort; even smiled. ‘Who is this coming to the sacrifice?’ he slurred. ‘For Abraham, it was his son. For me, apparently it is my mother.’
She stood trembling, still speechless.
‘But you are no virgin, are you, mother?’
Finally she regained control of herself, and called to the eunuch at the door. ‘Bring more light!’ To the unseen slave in the darkness, she snapped, ‘And stop beating that wretched drum if you want to sleep tonight with the skin on your back.’
At that Valentinian went berserk.
‘I am God’s anointed, not her! Drum, slave! No light, no light, this act of darkness shall transpire in darkness! Snuff the candles, senators! “Render unto Caesar”, did not Christ say? Then render unto me, mother! Down on your knees!’ He tore off the flimsy silk cape. His nipples, too, were rimmed with kohl. ‘Render unto me, to me!’ His voice was a bestial shriek. He arched his skinny white chest towards her. Suddenly he was staring intently at her breasts, his lips curled back like a rabid dog’s, teeth bared, his gaze darting to her stricken face and back again, without embarrassment, his eyes glittering with maniac light. He leaned closer, almost touching her, teeth showing in a silent snarl, and Galla knew in that terrible moment what he wanted. His sick desire was to bite off the breasts that fed him, to lunge at the mother who still overshadowed him, and mutilate her into powerlessness.
She stepped back. She called him by the nickname he had as a little boy.
Slowly he came out of the nightmare, though his eyes still glittered and stared.
Then he twirled naked on the spot, apparently oblivious of his nakedness before her, and waved his willow thyrsus.
‘I do but jest, mother,’ he said gaily. He tossed his wand away and rubbed his hands together briskly, as if to free them from dirt. He looked down. ‘Call me Adam, for I am naked, yet not ashamed.’
Galla felt differently. ‘Bring his Majesty a robe,’ she snapped to the eunuch as she swept from the room.
The eunuch obeyed and went.
Galla lingered unseen in the shadows of the antechamber.
The eunuch returned with a clean linen robe. Following the emperor’s orders, he also brought a platter bearing a fieldmouse drowned in spring water, two moon beetles, fat from a virgin nanny goat, two ibis eggs, two drams of myrrh, four drams of Italian galingale and an onion. The slave recommenced drumming. Valentinian masturbated into a clay dish, pounded his semen together with these ingredients, poured in oil, and then sculpted a raw figurine with quivering fingers. Then he placed the figurine, a foul anthropic caricature stuck with eggshell and mouse-fur, before one of the grimy candelabra and raised his eyes ceilingwards.
‘I come announcing the blasphemy before heaven of Galla Placidia, that defiled and unholy woman. Take away her sleep, put a frenzied passion in her thoughts, and a burning heat in her soul. Make her mad before you destroy her, O gods.’
‘Having heard that,’ said Galla, ‘I departed.’
Aetius poured a small goblet of wine. Still she refused.
‘A general is not accustomed to having his orders refused,’ he murmured.
A risky strategy. She looked up. But then she smiled the faintest smile and took the goblet.
‘And no moon beetles drowned in it, either, I assure you.’
She drank and set the goblet down again. ‘My son is mad,’ she repeated. ‘He is emperor and he is mad. I do not understand the will of God.’
How tragic it had been, this flinty, green-eyed woman’s life. At least one, perhaps both, of her husbands murdered. Her daughter a slut, pregnant by her own chamberlain when still a girl, and even now still in confinement in the Palace of Hormisdas in the East. Galla never saw her. Instead she saw, daily, her son, who was an idiot, and a malevolent idiot at that.
Aetius said nothing. He would not lie, so there was nothing to say. The murder of any ruler was wrong. But there was this thin, world-weary care-worn woman sitting before him, whom in a way he did love. He had to remind himself that she was only a few years older than he was. They had grown old together, but she far faster than he. Life on the battlefield might be hard, but it was nothing like so hard as life at court. That friendless and airless world into which she had been born, a fetid world of backstabbings and complots, at whose heart she had remained out of sheer duty. No, he could not rebel against his emperor. And he could not kill this woman’s only son.
They drank more wine, toasting each other.
‘To wine!’
‘The peasant’s solution to all ills!’
They stepped outside.
Galla said, ‘I still do not understand why Theodosius is angry with us.’
‘It was Valentinian’s decision to attack the Huns, remember. The VIIth Legion carried it out. Attila attacked the VIIth Legion in return, and has destroyed it, if reports are correct. So of course Theodosius feels he is paying a terrible price for carrying out his cousin’s wishes. It was a brilliant stroke. The Huns have people working among us. As you have noted, Attila has attacked right at the border between the two empires. He is also playing havoc with communications – I do not yet understand how. I fear his grasp of intelligence is phenomenal.’
They stood in companionable silence and anxiety. The stars glimmered over the palace roofs. There was the sound of the trickling dolphin fountain in the courtyard, and the mesmeric hum of mosquitoes coming in from the marshes for the evening feed. Aetius slapped his forearm.
There were many things they could have said but sometimes it is better to say nothing. They stood together, looking out into the darkness with their thoughts: thoughts of decline and fall, of empires’ collapse; of how the manifest destiny of Rome seemed to have grown obscured almost to vanishing point in these latter days and years. Behind them they felt centuries of history, a weight both pleasant and unpleasant, comforting and burdensome; the gaze of many steadfast emperors upon them, Augustus, and Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius; Constantine the Great, of the House of the Flavians, direct forefather of Flavius Aetius; and Vespasian, too, that old soldier, who had his bust sculpted to show his laughter lines and his bald pate, and who liked to joke, ‘If you want to know whether the emperor is truly divine, ask the man who empties his chamber pot.’ He had even joked on his deathbed, saying sarcastically, ‘Good grief, I think I’m turning into a god!’ Not all Rome’s emperors had been mad with power.
Further off still, through distant mists of time, the stern, unflinching grey eyes of the old republic, which looked on the world and saw it clear, as it was, and were not dismayed. No Scipio or Cato had ever sought refuge in spells and charms. Now he and Galla and Theodosius were the last heirs of Rome. How would they be judged? What would their legacy be?
Down below, in his occult chamber, was the latest ruler of Rome, mad as the mist and snow. What swamps the Imperial Palace of Ravenna stood on, or was sinking into; swamps which no mere engineer could drain. What empire could find firm foundation in such base ooze, the sewage of dark centuries? In troubled times, end-times, people turn to strange cults and practices. Conscious of their ebbing power in the real world, they turn to fantasy power, and to beliefs and false enchantments that would shame a stronger man. Normality itself falls victim, and everywhere there is the triumph of pained uncertainty and panicked delusion.