The city was a blackened skeleton of its former self, a skeleton of wood and stone, flattened walls, arches and buttresses broken off and hanging in space. Like Philippopolis and Marcianopolis, it had been a bishopric, and the Huns had knifed and stripped its bishop and hung him from the walls.
‘They would have spat in the face of Christ if they could,’ I muttered.
‘As did the Romans once,’ said Prince Theodoric beside me.
I could think of nothing more to say.
A few had survived the firestorm and the arrow-storm, and them we pitied most, for they must have envied the dead. Sick people sheltered beneath the broken walls of the churches. Rachitic or tubercular children, riven with coughing, held out their clawed hands to us for food, but we could not help. A small girl cradling an infant in her lap sheltered beneath a smashed stone altar table, dark eyes peering up at me through filthy hair. In a demolished side-street, a mere pattern of rubble now, there was another huddle of children, lips withered with hunger, worm-filled bellies like sails before the wind. Near them, though they appeared mercifully oblivious, lay two adult corpses, scalped, their temples stained as if with some dark chrism. Here I tired and could no longer look at the sights of the city.
I rode over paving-stones grouted with dried blood, my horse trampling over a tattered prayer book, an illuminated euchologion, torn pages turning to no purpose. My ears rang with sad litanies of mortal flesh and blood. My old pupil said, remounting and pulling his horse away, ‘And the emperor believes he can negotiate with this.’
A little further on he stopped again. His head was bowed and his big, scarred hands gripped the front of his saddle. I saw to my astonishment that, although his shadowed face was set as hard and grim as ever, tears ran down his furrowed cheeks and fell in dark splotches on the saddle leather. Yet why should I be astonished? That was Aetius to the core: the deepest passions, under iron control.
He turned in the saddle and looked back. The column of wolf-lords in their scarlet cloaks was riding out after us, and the Byzantine ambassadors, and the two wordless, expressionless Huns. We were leaving the sick people and the starving children behind. Aetius said, his voice trembling, ‘All we can do now, to help them, is defeat Attila.’
I understood. He was almost asking me to forgive him for riding on and not helping, here and now. I nodded. It was agony, but there was nothing to be done here. We had no food, no medicines, no resources. The people were too sickly to move, let alone make it all the way back to the safety of Constantinople. In a few days they would simply… vanish. Their souls would be gathered in. I nodded again, I hoped consolingly. We must do the emperor’s bidding and speak with Attila. Then we must ride back to the city. There were a million or more people there whom we could save. And beyond that… the rest of the empire.
The two princes reined in, flanking Aetius on either side, behind them the powerfully built wolf-lords Valamir and Jormunreik. No word was spoken but, as is the way of men, the meaning was plain. They rode with Aetius: to whatever doom.
The two Huns were not addressed again.
We camped on a nearby hillside in the coarse tussock grass. We would rather have camped in the lush watermeadows down by the river, but the water was befouled, and there were too many bones of the slain littering the country round about.
Over the following days we passed more ghosts of towns and cities, each as bad as or worse than the last. On the road we glimpsed trickles of frightened fugitives who fled from us into the woods before we ever reached them; and one old woman, who could not flee. It is terrible to see a mother wailing over her child, but worse still to see an old woman wailing over her aged husband, lying broken in the mud, snapped like a dry twig. He with whom she thought to live out her last quiet days.
After the devastated cities of the plain we ascended into low foothills and then rough, barren mountains, over mighty gorges, treacherous wilds barely touched by the magisterial hand of Roman law, where men dressed in sheepskin jackets tied around the waist with twisted leather, and women were safe only beside their own hearthfire. We traversed many rivers by dugout canoe, and villagers fed us on mead rather than wine, and on millet not wheaten bread.
Later in our journey there were no villagers left. We could only forage like beasts.
We came to a fire-blackened valley, and among the still-smoking stubble there were other black shapes, not of sheaves but of men, women, children, infants burned in their mothers’ arms, mothers clinging to their children, mouths open, black and charcoal. From such unimaginable weathering, we can only hope their souls do well to fly. In the night there was a downpour from a summer cloudburst over the valley, and in the dawnlight the bodies were ash-grey under the rain, some of them no more than washed white bones showing like strange root-crops through the folded grey mud half covering them like sodden earthen shrouds.
Our Hun guides remained expressionless throughout. The one called Geukchu only commented that this would be the work of their brothers the Kutrigur Huns, in their battle-madness. But he did not say it in exculpation.
We moved on a way before we camped that night, but it was not far enough. The smoke from the campfires rose into the night air as we lay on our backs and stared into the heavens, dreaming bad dreams open-eyed. Through the drifting smoke, the starry sky, those white celestial worlds where all things are pure and good, far above this sinful sublunary world so darkened by violence and wrath, and by the furious selfhoods of ambitious men. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the little child shall lead them, saith the Lord. And they shall not kill nor hurt in all my Holy Mountain.
But how long, O Lord? How long?
It seemed to us that the viper and his venom would outlast all our days; that the bloodlust of Attila might rise even to the heavens and stain the white radiance of eternity, as the heavy smoke rose from that blackened charnel field, thick and greasy from where the bodies still smouldered, a choking veil between our wondering upturned faces and those white celestial worlds now lost to our sight.
8
At last we came down onto a broad grassy plain and there we saw stretched out in encampment, as far as the eye could see, the People of Attila. A city of leather tents beside a wide lakeshore; sunlight and slow plumes of woodsmoke and children’s laughter: a tranquil scene.
Aetius spoke at last, addressing the Greek. ‘So you have brought down your women and children again?’
Orestes’ eyes were very pale blue. ‘Why not? There is no danger to them now.’ He gave his almost-smile again. ‘Your army is destroyed.’
We had begun to set up camp on a small hill when a group of Hun warriors rode out to us and, with mockery and contempt, told us to camp lower down in the damp valley so that we should not overlook the tent of the Great Tanjou. We obeyed without a word. They also demanded that the wolf-lords hand over their weapons. Prince Theodoric answered, with undiplomatic brevity, ‘No.’ After brief talk among themselves, they said no matter, the Huns had never feared any Visigoths yet, armed or unarmed. One of the hulking wolf-lords, Jormunreik, growled at this barb, but his prince silenced him. The Huns said that the Lord Attila was out hunting, but would speak to us in time and galloped away, laughing.
When we rode into the camp towards the King’s tent at its heart, I marvelled at how many races there were. The great majority were horse-bound Huns, of course, stocky and immensely strong, sparsely bearded, with long black hair and moustaches; but there were also Greeks like our guide Orestes, and renegade Teutons, Thuringian chieftains in bearskins, even Celts. There were Africans, Spaniards, Syrians, many marked with the marks of criminals. They were fugitives from Roman law, consumed with disgust at the insipid life of the tottering empire, longing once more to be on History’s winning side. There were more savage Huns who were heavily painted and tattooed and stuck with feathers, and wore their hair limed white in a stiff topknot; other people, who looked almost like Chinamen, their language unknown to us, camped a little apart. We knew what this meant well enough. All these people believed that victory over the whole Roman world lay with Attila, and their fortunes with him.