He climbed one of the towers and saw that the great Inner Walls had suffered most. Accursed luck. But one small consolation: the moat didn’t seem to have been ruptured. It still held twenty or thirty feet of water, now covered with a fine spray of limestone dust from the shivered and shaken walls.
He rode the three miles south with the Visigothic Princes, and Tatullus, and Captain Malchus. The Isaurian chieftain, Zeno, came down to say that the walls of the Blachernae Palace had barely been touched. But beyond that things were terrible. Tower after tower had shivered to rubble, jumbled piles of brick and stone, the bright marble of the proud gateways grubby red with brickdust. Broken statues lay face down along with broken people. What the most skilled and powerful besiegers could not have achieved in a month, nature had achieved in a minute. All rode on silently, thinking the same thoughts. God has turned against us. We have been judged.
‘Check with the outriders,’ was the only order Aetius could give.
By the time they reached the southern end of the Walls, they had counted fifty-seven of the ninety-seven towers damaged or fallen, and almost half the Walls likewise.
‘Find me the Easterner,’ he ordered.
They sat their horses. The September sun shone down. Flies buzzed over puddles in the humid air. Not a word was spoken. Then Arapovian came. He saluted.
‘So, Easterner,’ said Aetius. ‘With your intimate knowledge of earthquakes, tell me: if the Huns are fifty miles off, will they have felt it?’
‘I do not know, sir. If they are more than two hundred miles off still, then perhaps not.’
Aetius brooded. The aqueducts still flowed, had not been destroyed. There might just be a chance.
He spoke more thoughts aloud. ‘The moment they feel it, for them it will be Astur shaking His enemies to the ground. It will be our righteous punishment. And they will be here at the gallop. But it is just possible – just – that they are still unaware of our calamities.’
‘Then what do we do?’ asked Tatullus. ‘Other than fight to the death?’
‘Other than fight to the death,’ said Aetius, ‘a destiny which most certainly awaits us, we rebuild the Walls.’
The men stared at him long and hard.
‘There are a million people at hand, doing little at present but wailing and praying. We put them to work. Any fool can learn to build a wall.’
His eyes roved over a section still standing, and settled on an old tombstone which had been used to baulk a weak point. ‘ To the memory of Crescens,’ read the crude lettering, ‘ oil-dealer from the Portico of Pallas, born at the mouth of the Danube, lifelong Blues fan .’ Nearby on the wall itself was a scrawled graffito. ‘ Up the Greens! ’ it read. ‘ The Blues be crushed! ’
Aetius’ face settled again into its old, deep-graven resolution. ‘Get me two teams,’ he said. ‘Everyone in this city is almost as mad about chariot-racing as they are about the Holy Mother. Everyone supports either the Greens or the Blues. Order all the Greens to assemble at the Marble Tower. Order all Blues northwards to the Chora Monastery. Order every mason in the city to oversee them. Let us have a competition.’ He surveyed their dumbstruck expressions. ‘You are thinking this is no time for games. On the contrary, this is exactly the time for games. The spirit of competition between Greens and Blues is a wonderful thing!’ He added wryly, ‘When they’re not slaughtering each other in the streets.’
His men continued to stare.
‘ Move! ’ he bellowed.
From the outriders came news that no enemy had yet been sighted. Water still flowed into the cisterns from the great aqueducts. It was a miracle. The earthquake had been a calamity, but now, it seemed, God had changed his mind. The God who blasts and blesses in one breath.
As He had stayed the sun in the sky for Joshua, so He seemed to be staying the advance of the Huns. Had they attacked now – had they known – the city would have been theirs in hours.
And so the citizens of the Holy City of Byzantium, men, women and children of every station, turned stonemasons and builders. The children carried buckets of water and small pouches of clay and sand. Older men and women mixed the mortar. The stongest men, overseen by experienced masons, retrieved what solid stones they could find and began to re-lay them. Crude cranes were improvised from fallen timbers, from collapsed houses, or from bundles of wooden scaffolding tied with rope. Mules were yoked and worked hard, but none was worked to death: their strength was too valuable to squander. On the remaining towers, the Guard and the Auxiliaries, the wolf-lords and the artillery scanned the horizon ceaselessly. Nothing came. The aqueducts still flowed. It was a miracle.
Aetius ordered water for the workers, but no food. ‘We eat at nightfall, not before. You can work all day on an empty belly. Just keep the water coming.’ Yet when nightfall came, after snatched mouthfuls of bread and meat, many continued to work by torchlight. Sweating, begrimed faces were lit a fiery red, like those of workers in hell.
‘These Byzantines,’ growled Tatullus, grudgingly impressed, ‘I thought all they ever did was pray and argue theology.’
After a little snatched sleep that night, Aetius received a message towards dawn from the overseer at the Cistern of Mocius. He went to inspect. Citizens were filling their pails from the opened spouts at the base. The overseer greeted the general respectfully, shooed the people back, shut off the spouts, and then asked him to climb the steps and look into the cistern. Aetius did so. There was no more inflow. He looked down questioningly.
‘The Aqueduct of Valens,’ said the overseer, ‘supplies this cistern.’
‘But it’s been shut off?’
‘It’s been shut off,’ said the overseer.
So. They were not far away now.
He went to look at the Walls, and could have wept. People lay open-mouthed in the dirt, beyond exhaustion. And the walls…
Unlike the people, the walls were far from finished.
It was then that the men of the Church showed their mettle, their faith in the protection of Christ and his Holy Mother never wavering. They brought the most Holy Icon of the Hodegetria, She Who Leads the Way, painted by St Luke himself, out into the streets from the Church of St Saviour in Chora near the city walls, mounted the icon on a wooden pallet, and processed through the narrow streets, swinging censers, chanting penitential psalms. Black-robed priests and cantors and barefoot laity alike sang the haunting quartertones of the ancient hymns, walking beneath the swaying icon, gilded and jewelled and decorated with fragments of the True Cross. Elsewhere in the city, bishops in brocade vestments raised their croziers in blessing, and deacons sprinkled the faithful with holy water from bunches of dried basil.
They raised the mummified figure of St Euphemia from her open casket and paraded her around the streets in blessing, her head like a dried melon. Bands of Syrian monks emerged from their monasteries, chanting their long litanies to the crucified Christ and calling the faithful to labour again, proclaiming that ‘ Laborare est orare,’ and telling them that the Lord of Hosts was with them. Swelling music came from the interior of every church in the city that morning, the doors thrown open so that the magnificent chants and liturgies of the Roman Church should be heard, surging forth like a tide out of those vast basilicas covered in glimmering mosaic, hung with silk embroidered tapestries and thousands of oil lamps in massive silver candelabra.
True faith moves mountains. The people roused themselves and worked on all that day. It was a Sunday, but today, of all days, God would pardon them for breaking the Sabbath.
A work-gang of Greens, dust-caked youths, came to Military Gate V and asked how the badly damaged Porta Aurea, the magnificent Golden Gate built by Theodosius the Great, should be repaired. Aetius said, ‘A soldier fights best whose armour is so highly polished that it gleams like silver in the sun.’