Under a late summer sky heavy with stormclouds, Aetius was trying to keep other ghastly images at bay. The battle of the River Utus: is that how history would remember it – if at all? The Beginning of the End, far more surely than Adrianople, seventy years before. Six legions gone. Another at Viminacium, another at Ratiaria. Other cities destroyed since then, he was sure. He was glad he had not seen it, but he could imagine the scenes of carnage all too well.
They had mastered artillery and the heavy cavalry charge already. A bludgeoning bullock-headed charge: no lightly dancing, lethal arrow-storms now, but a heavy cavalry, gleaming and newly armoured from the armouries of Ratiaria, thumping into the aghast Byzantine line and shivering it to splinters. Shards of shieldwood and flying teeth, lost limbs, open mouths screaming silently, flailing, falling, trampled into the reddening mud. The Huns must have learned fast, clad in the laminar plate of their slaughtered foes, clutching long lances resting in slings and couched tightly under bulging biceps. Their squat muscled horses galloping in fast, a pummelling gallop with huge heads stretched forward and low, juddering into the Byzantine line like battering-rams, men flung aside, horses’ eyes rolling to the whites like those of horses gored by bulls, Roman horses rising up under the punch, staggering, toppling their own riders back into the melee, legs flailing, hooves turned upwards, kicking, horses screaming, their lips curled back over long yellow teeth and terrible horse cries, the foul stench of blood and ruptured bowels, the earth slippery with loosed innards and gore, the horror…
‘Deep in thought, Master-General?’
It was Prince Theodoric at his side, his voice light and young and jaunty. Aetius said nothing.
‘Worried about the Huns?’ asked Torismond, equally brightly. ‘Never fear, the mighty Visigothic nation will vanquish them by Christmas.’
‘Mind your tongue, little brother,’ cautioned the more sensible Theodoric, glancing round. The Hun ambassadors Geukchu and Orestes with their small party of Hun warriors rode at the back of the column. ‘This is just us. Our father’s people are not at war with the Huns.’
Aetius said softly, ‘They will be.’
‘Attila’s aim is Rome,’ said Theodoric, ‘and Constantinople.’
‘His aim is the world.’
‘Well, I pray that this embassy fails,’ said Torismond.
Aetius glanced sideways at his rubicund friend from Gothia. ‘It’ll fail.’
‘And then I pray that we meet some of ’em out there!’ he added eagerly. ‘A war party!’ He even leaned forward in his saddle as he spoke.
‘Pray that you don’t,’ said Aetius.
The threatened storm passed and we rode on west across the burning Thracian plains. Already many of the farms and homesteads were deserted. The people had fled, refugees stumbling back to the already overcrowded city of Constantinople, in dread of the approaching wrath. ‘The Huns are coming’ was the whisper throughout all that country. ‘Flee for your lives. The Huns are coming.’ The people, too, had no faith in embassies.
One solitary man stood at the side of the road watching us pass, clutching his hoe like a spear. Then he called out sardonically at our band of sixty or so, ‘You’re going to need a bigger army!’
We said nothing and rode on.
One night, as we camped, a snake appeared beside where Chrysaphius was standing. The counsellor froze in horror, a townsman to his marrow, but in a trice the little fellow Vigilas had drawn a gleaming dagger from his cloak and skewered the snake through the head.
Aetius regarded him curiously.
Later he addressed him casually in simple Gothic, and then Aramaic, but the fellow looked blank. He spoke only Latin and Greek, the former somewhat stiffly. A poor linguist for a diplomat.
‘He is my personal bodyguard,’ said Chrysaphius defensively. ‘Let us concentrate on the task in hand, Master-General.’
Aetius assured him that he was all concentration.
Sleeping out at night was bad, although, as it turned out, far from the worst horror that we would face. How I longed night after night for the hot baths and cool chambers of the Palace of the Emperors, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, silvered by the moon. Instead I went along, and saw things that I have never forgotten and would never have dreamed.
For the first time I saw with my own eyes the horrors of war. I, Priscus of Panium, obedient son, studious pupil, humble scribe in the Imperial Court of Theodosius II, and lately raised to the post of Chief Clerk-in-Consistory. How tearfully proud my parents would have been, had they lived to see! I was never meant for the battlefield, and was a little fearful even of that more playful battlefield which lies between the opposing armies called Men and Women. I was happier, generally speaking – but for an occasional scampering visit to the local bawdyhouse on the Street of the Golden Cock just behind the Hippodrome – to keep myself to myself, and to stay peacefully and diligently among the scrolls and texts of the ancients, reading and writing and dreaming of other ages than this.
But now I was riding out to see the world as it is. I do not think that I have known the same peace of mind since seeing the world as it is. My dreams have been more vivid, and more troubled. In the old days I barely remembered my dreams at all, but now they come to me in the silence of the night, messengers and harbingers unsought. I have less of my old equanimity now. But perhaps I will be a better chronicler for it. There is no reason to think that Tacitus and Thucydides were happy men.
Of the things I witnessed, I asked myself, did the armies of Rome not commit similar atrocities? Yes, they did. Perhaps not on such a scale; perhaps not with such malevolent randomness or glee, perhaps with rather a dutiful grimness. But if you are the victim, does it matter whether your killer is grinning or grimfaced when he cuts your throat? I tried to discern that the violence of Rome was a means to an end, committed to secure peace, stability and the rule of law, but the violence of the barbarians was committed for its own sake, for the pleasure of terror, and as such would never cease or find satiety.
But I do not know any more. I do not enjoy the ordered comfort of such thoughts. I know little with certainty, and I can only record what I saw. At my age I no longer have opinions, only memories.
I had hope
When violence was ceas’d, and War on Earth, All would have then gone well, peace would have crowned
With length of happy days the race of man;
But I was far deceived…
And one battle looks much like another when you survey the corpses after.
Our journey was long and arduous, and I often slept in the saddle. I remember a violent storm, and fires of blazing reeds, detonated by the lightning and burning up even in rain. I remember weariness and disorientation, tiredness beyond measure, and the sun appearing to rise in the West one morning. A bad omen.
When we came to the ruins of what had once been a city, the omen was fulfilled: the first of numberless settlements, villages, towns and cities we were to encounter, destroyed and utterly laid waste by the hand of Attila. The rich and golden cities of the Eastern Empire that would never again recover from his wrath. Through all the destruction, our two Hun ambassadors, our guides through this wasteland which their own people had created, seemed not a bit contrite. Guilt they doubtless regarded as a form of cowardice, like most barbarians. Only at a certain rest stop did the one called Orestes, Greek by birth – shame on him! – wave his hand over the void before us, and say softly, ‘You see now why it would be in your interests to negotiate.’ He almost smiled. Aetius’ face was dark with fury and he did not speak. Not for days.