They hesitated, then one said, ‘He is a man of forceful character, my lord.’
‘Is he? Is he?’
He pulled out something else: a putrid, blood-clotted hand.
A figure hovered near. It was Enkhtuya, the witch. Attila seemed to know, without looking, that she was there and what she wanted. Wordlessly he passed the foul object back to her. She hid it in her cloak and slipped away.
He looked back at the six. ‘They tried to kill me,’ he said. They were frozen with fear. They did not know what their Lord meant. ‘In my youth.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘The traitor Pytheas,’ he murmured. ‘Well, well.’ He surveyed them with glittering eyes. Then he decreed, ‘Negotiation is tiresome. Revenge is profitable. All shall pay.’ And with that he ordered the six to be taken outside and crucified, men and women both.
His guards bound the six and led them away.
As they passed by, a motley little figure in a tattered old buckskin shirt covered in little black stick men crouched beside the doomed procession, and held his arms over his head like a monkey sheltering from the rain, and cried out in a muffled though audible voice, ‘This funeral sky grows heavier by the hour!’
Towards evening an old warrior with fine grey moustaches and long white hair rode out and surveyed the six crude crosses bearing the six dead and dying fugitives. Their faces were blue-white masks of agony, their breathing like a tortured wind in a ravine. He rode back to his tent, found his long spear and returned and killed them all one by one. The last was a round-faced woman. She should have been someone’s wife. The agony left her face as the spear entered her heart, and her eyes closed in something like peace.
He got off his horse and cleaned his spear in the grass, then drove it into the ground and squatted down and looked away south over the low hills, his back to the bodies hanging like withered fruit on leafless trees.
After a time another man came and squatted not far off in the gathering dusk. For a long while they said nothing to each other.
Eventually Chanat murmured, ‘My dreams are becoming as crazed as yours, old shaman.’
Little Bird hummed and tore grass.
The old warrior cupped his big bony hands round his ringing skull. His skull was thin as a bird’s now. Old age was wearing him thin all over.
‘It is not as it was before,’ he said with quiet disgust. He gestured over his shoulder at the crucified cadavers and the smouldering town beyond. ‘Look at our work.’
‘He is Tashur-Astur, the Scourge of God,’ said the shaman in his sing-song voice. ‘A fool may argue with God, but God will not answer.’
‘This is God’s judgement on wicked people? Do you believe that, Little Bird?’
The shaman looked away. He never answered a direct question for, as he said, how could he? He did not exist.
‘I did not come here to scalp infants in arms,’ growled Chanat.
He remembered seeing Candac amid the smoking ruins of Margus, standing silent upon rubble and slaughter, staring, a look unfathomable on his strong round face. Looking about him perhaps in judgement before he chose to vanish.
Chanat gasped and clutched his side. A week ago, he had cursed the witch Enkhtuya to her face. The cramps in his bowels still hurt. Such pettiness they had come to. He thought he saw nobility itself ebbing away like the last of the sun on a winter’s day. The cold and brazen light across the steps occluded by black cloud from some burning town.
Little Bird and Chanat both shivered.
7
Catastrophe followed hard on the heels of the small success of unmasking the spies. A brief and bitter communication came to the Imperial Court from Adrianople.
The Eastern Field Army under the command of General Aspar, Magister Militum per Thraciam, leaving from Army headquarters at Marcianopolis, engaged the Huns on flat country near the River Utus. Overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers, however, and the speed and ferocity of the enemy, as well as their unexpected mastery of both artillery and the heavy cavalry charge, the six legions and all their auxiliaries were destroyed. General Aspar himself continued to fight with utmost gallantry on foot after his horse was killed under him, but eventually he, too, was slain.
It is believed that the Hunnish army is continuing to advance south.
In Constantinople, there was outright terror at the news. Now there was nothing but a few centuries of the Palatine Guard, and scattered auxiliaries down at Trajanople and Heraclea, to stand between them and this demonic army of a million heathen horsemen. Who ate children’s flesh, they said, and drank bat’s blood mixed with wine. Some citizens fled across the Bosphorus to Asia Minor. Others prayed for twenty hours a day to the Holy Mother. All were infected with panic, as contagious as the plague.
Theodosius begged Aetius for Western aid, and the general duly wrote again to Ravenna. But he warned that there would be little time and that, now Valentinian knew of the Huns’ power, he might prefer to keep his legions for his own protection: frontier legions as well as field army.
The reply soon came by sea. There was to be no aid. Theodosius’ curses rained down on his cousin’s head.
‘He will fall on us soon now,’ he said. ‘This Attila, God’s punishment upon us. Yet in what have we so sinned? I do not know.’ He gave a deep sigh: the sigh of the foredefeated. ‘First he will devastate all of Moesia and Illyria, Thessaly and Thrace, and then he will fall upon this city. We cannot stand against him with only a few hundred ill-trained auxiliaries and the Guard. We will have to negotiate.’
‘We still have the Walls,’ said Aetius.
‘Not all of us are behind the walls.’
‘True,’ said Aetius. ‘In the provinces, the people must shift for themselves. But the city will be saved. And there will be recompense, I promise you. When Attila turns westwards against Rome, he will not meet with such easy victory.’
‘You do not understand,’ said the emperor haltingly. ‘Not all the
… imperial family is behind the walls.’
Aetius frowned. ‘The Princess Honoria?’
Theodosius smiled mirthlessly. ‘No, she is still in my sister Pulcheria’s charge. I mean… the Empress Eudoxia.’
The empress. Athenais. He had not allowed himself to think of that name for years.
‘She is in Jerusalem?’
‘Would that she were. No, she is visiting the convent at Azimuntium.’
‘I do not know it.’
‘A small hill-town near the Pontine coast, of ancient Thracian origin. Indeed, it is proposed by some of our most eminent mythographologists that the site may in fact be etymologically cognate with that of the Homeric-’
‘In the path of Attila?’
The emperor’s voice dulled again. ‘In the path, as you say, of Attila.’
‘Why was I not informed of this before?’
‘Your services were needed here – as indeed they still are. The Holy City must needs be defended even more than…’
‘Even more than the empress.’
‘Do not speak with such quick judgement,’ cautioned Theodosius, his voice low but his gaze again fixed on the general. ‘I know you, Gaius Flavius Aetius. You think yourself a man of very different mettle from mine. But an emperor’s choices are never easy, especially in time of war.’
Aetius bowed his head a little.
‘We have intelligence that the empress remains safe in the convent of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, Virgins and Martyrs, behind the considerable walls of that venerable hill-town. But the country round about is lawless, and the Huns draw closer daily. She will require an escort. I cannot spare the Imperial Guard, but I thought perhaps your
… rubicund friends from Gothia?’
Aetius smiled at the emperor’s feline words. To a man like Theodosius, the Goths would for ever be the barbarous immigrants who had caused the disaster of Adrianople, seventy years before.
‘Very well,’ said Aetius. ‘I will take my wolf-lords.’