‘You will be back in one week.’
Aetius bowed.
He was on the brink of departure when more news came. Two Hun ambassadors had arrived from the camp of Attila.
The emperor’s eyes lit up. ‘You see, we can negotiate! The empress will be safe. They wish to make peace.’
‘They do not wish to make peace. They come only to reconnoitre. This is a trap of Attila’s. Do not trust him. Blindfold the ambassadors, do not let them see the Walls, do not let them near anyone, do not let them speak except in a closed cell.’
But the emperor was no longer listening, his whole being flooded with relief. Theodosius hated war, with a fierceness more usually found in men who have experienced the crimson foulness of the battlefield themselves. For in truth no man dies well who dies in battle. And hating war, he had already sent out emissaries to find the approaching barbarians and their terrible king, and sue for peace. What could he offer them? Land? Their own kingdom south of the Danube? The whole province of Moesia, even? So far, none of the emissaries had returned, but now he revealed this new twist to the general. Voices were soon raised.
‘The emissaries have not returned, Eternal Majesty, because their crow-pecked corpses are even now hanging from trees all along the Egnatian Way!’
Aetius’ anger was barely controlled. In the West, as a letter from that good general Germanus had informed him, many of the lesser troops were already beginning to desert from the Roman side. News of the destruction of the Eastern Field Army on the Utus had already reached distant ears, and now the Western Field Army was also ebbing away. Terror, as Attila observed, is a powerful weapon; and very cheap. If only the Western legions could be embarked forthwith, Aetius urged, and sail for the East, the very mission itself might steady them. Galla Placidia had tried to persuade her son of this very policy, but Valentinian and his advisers were set against it. The Western Army must remain for the defence of the West. Germanus wished his commander well, and trusted that the Huns in the East could still be resisted. Aetius wrote back that for now he would have to trust in walls, not men.
Theodosius remained cold in the face of Aetius’ temper, and spoke of how all men in their hearts love reason.
Aetius paced, and clenched his fists unreasonably.
‘Is a man rational when in love?’ he cried. ‘A woman when she is defending her child against some wild beast, armed only with her own rage, fighting off a ravening lion with her bare hands, or a puny knife she has snatched from the table? And she will triumph, too, for she fights for everything that she loves, whereas the lion fights only for his dinner, and will soon slink cowardly away.’
‘You have seen this?’ asked Theodosius, wide-eyed.
Aetius suppressed a spasm of irritation. At times the learned emperor could be the stupidest of men. ‘I speak in a figure, Your Majesty. Reason does not reign supreme.’
He tried to explain – rationally – what he knew and understood of Attila, and his idea of himself and his demonic destiny.
The emperor listened, brow furrowed. ‘But this is madness!’ he said incredulously. ‘It is almost as if you are suggesting that Attila has no aim but to avenge the insults he suffered as a child – with vengeance in the form of purest destruction!’
‘To destroy his enemies is the sweetest thing to him, and his enemies are all those he feels have insulted him and his people. The more he destroys, the stronger he becomes. If you buy him off with gold, that makes him stronger too. It will not buy peace. Attila scorns peace, and loves power. Gold will only buy him more weapons, more armour, more warhorses, the service of freebooters and shiftless mercenaries.’
Still the emperor looked perplexed and angry.
Aetius approached him as closely as he dared, and fixed his eye urgently. ‘Majesty, you must imagine that Attila has sent you a message saying simply, “We do not want anything from you. We want to destroy you.”’
‘But it was on the orders of the Western Empire that the original attack on the Huns was mounted.’
‘And the Western Empire’s turn will come. But it was an Eastern legion that executed that order, a legion itself now destroyed. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. The Lord God punished them all.’
‘You are comparing Attila to God?’
‘Not my comparison, Attila’s own. Attila Tashur-Astur – “Flagellum Dei”.’
Theodosius pondered a moment, and then another party entered. It was Pulcheria, the emperor’s absurdly pious and misleadingly christened elder sister, a sour-faced woman in her sixth decade. With her came one of her closest counsellors, the lean, saturnine Chrysaphius, and a small, wiry man called Vigilas. She spoke quietly to the emperor, and a moment later Theodosius asked Aetius to leave them. Matters had already progressed from the military to the diplomatic, he said smoothly, despite the master-general’s ‘pessimism’ and ‘negativity’; further advice from him was now redundant.
The two Hun ambassadors were Geukchu, an intelligent-looking fellow in a fine silk robe, not in animal furs and skins as they had expected; and a quiet, very polite, bald-pated companion, Greek by birth, who introduced himself as Orestes. Within minutes, Theodosius felt he had mastered them. They brought the emperor some wonderful treasures, including a Cimmerian leopard in a cage; they paid him great respect, kissing the purple hem of his robe, and they said that yes, they would be happy to receive a Byzantine embassy in return. They were sure an accommodation could be reached in this unfortunate matter.
Behind them, Theodosius’ eyes met the gaze of Chrysaphius, and the counsellor, almost imperceptibly, nodded.
That night, Geukchu and Orestes dined and drank late into the night with Chrysaphius and Vigilas, and in the morning they took their leave of one another like brothers.
The emperor insisted that Aetius lead the Byzantine embassy to the Huns, despite the general’s lack of enthusiasm. He could combine the mission with escorting the empress home afterwards. Chrysaphius and Vigilas would go, too, the counsellor handling the actual negotiations; and he also sent his trusted Clerk-in-Consistory, modest Priscus, to record the historic meeting, along with a small retinue of guards. Aetius wished to take the two Visigothic princes and their fifty wolf-lords on the long and perilous journey, fully armed. The emperor grudgingly agreed. Those wolf-lords ate like oxen in winter. It would be good to be rid of them for a while.
A note came to Aetius from the Princess Honoria, smuggled out via a bribed slave, bribed in God knew what manner. The disgraced and dishonoured daughter of Galla Placidia and sister of Valentinian, long held in virtual captivity in the women’s quarters, she wrote mockingly that she too would like to ride out and meet this Attila. She thought he sounded interesting. Aetius grunted with grim amusement, sniffed the delicate little note and found it was indeed perfumed, then screwed it up and tossed it into the nearest brazier.
And so it was that I, Priscus, rode out that day with the man I still thought of as my beloved pupil, upon the most perilous journey of my life. Sailing back and forth from Italy to Constantinople was bad enough, but this was virtually into the wilds of Scythia! I took a flask of very strong red wine, heavily sweetened, to keep me warm; and an extra woollen blanket.
Thus prepared, I took my brief place upon the stage of History, tentative, blinking, and for what I hoped would be but a short scene. The public theatre is sufficiently unpleasant, what with the rotten fruit and the catcalls, but the stage of History is far worse, and for those who take their place upon it, the play often closes early.
I also took with me many scrolls to record this historic venture. In the night I dreamed that I was reading them over, and that I had called my account ‘A Journey Through the Thirteen Cities of the Ruined Lands.’
We rode out that morning through the Golden Gate, heading westwards along the shores of the Sea of Marmara on the ancient Via Egnatia, which people had travelled for six hundred years towards Thessalonika, and then over the Dinaric Alps to the Adriatic coast at Dyrrachium. But before Thessalonika we would turn north away from the coast and up into the hills. The wolf-lords and their two princes rode the finest white Cappadocian horses from the imperial stables. That favour, at least, the emperor had allowed his allies, though they still mourned their own drowned chargers, lying deep beneath the waves and far away.