In one of those forlorn chapels, barely more than a hermit’s cell in the woods, with whitewashed walls, a stark stone altar at one end, and a crude little wood-panel icon hanging above it, a single holy man had lingered when all others fled. He said he would go as a martyr to heaven to be with his Christ, and spoke as if he was tired and longed only for sleep.
Now he knelt before the altar and prayed to Christ, even as the wooden door of the chapel swung open behind him and he heard the tramping of horses and the low laughter of men. First in the doorway was a man with a dagger in his hand, gleaming yellow eyes feasting hungrily on the helpless sight before him.
Behind him, Orestes spoke with urgency. ‘Do not delay here. This earthquake we have heard of, it will have done damage.’
But Attila lingered, smiling.
Finally the priest turned, and crossed himself at what he saw. Attila strode into the chapel. Orestes lowered his eyes, his hand still on the doorhandle.
‘You tried to assassinate me,’ said Attila gratingly to the startled priest, who was already shaking his head. But he did not kneel or plead for mercy. He only reached out and took down the little icon, and held it to his breast. Attila fixed his gaze on the bewildered priest, his eyes burning. ‘Vengeance upon vengeance. Those Roman rats would not even face me in the open field. They sent an assassin, a viper, to me in a putrid basket. Now they will feel my fierce anger, now we spare not, now all will pay for Rome’s cowardice and weakness. I rejoice that they have angered me, anger is such a sweet fire!
‘When I ride away south you will breathe again, Christian pig, and think that this is over. But it is not over. After I have destroyed Byzantium and laid it waste, and metamorphosed all its precious treasures into faithful mercenaries’ – he showed his teeth – ‘I will come back and find you, eunuch priest.’
The priest shook his head. The man was mad. He made no sense. Behind him, one of his companions, a bald, fair-skinned fellow, was calling him, but he seemed oblivious, rapt in his own words and imaginings. He even trembled a little in his mad passion.
‘Hear me, priest!’ roared the Scythian war-lord, ‘and know how Attila punishes craven assassins! I will destroy Constantinople. I will not enslave its citizens, I will slay them, and on the ruins of the city I will build a pyramid of a million human skulls. And there is nothing you can do.’ He turned back to Orestes. ‘See how the poor Christian pig clutches this daubing of his little god, as if for protection. ’ He faced the holy man again. ‘Pray to your God? Who, this pale Christ?’ He seized the icon from the man’s grasp. The priest tried to hold it, but Attila knocked him reeling with a casual bear-cuff.
‘My lord,’ said Orestes again, with feeling in his voice. ‘We are wasting time here.’
Attila no longer heard him. He stared down intently at the icon in his hands. ‘Your bleeding and tortured god, is he so powerful? He does not look so powerful to me. How many battalions has he?’ He raised his dagger. Behind him, Orestes had vanished. ‘If he is god, let him strike me dead now as I mutilate him.’ He slid the tip of the dagger under the delicate gold foil of the icon, and the priest groaned. ‘What, this is the son of god? Why does his almighty father not stop me? Is this blasphemy?’ He gouged the dagger point into Christ’s right eye – the priest howled – then his left. Then he dug it into the emaciated hanging body, blue-white and stretched in his dying agony. ‘You say this is a holy icon. It seems to me your god is very feeble.’ He pulled his dagger free and dropped the mutilated image to the floor. He smiled. ‘It seems to me you should get yourself another god, for this one, too feeble even to intervene and stop the mutilation of his only son, will surely not intervene to save the stinking city of Constantinople.’
The priest was on his knees, retrieving the icon from the floor and cradling it, weeping. Attila kicked him hard in the ribs and sent him sprawling, retching for breath. Then he stuck his dagger under his belt, strode out into the night, vaulted onto his horse and kicked it forward. Orestes spoke no more.
Instead Geukchu came and rode by his side, and at his other side rode the witch Enkhtuya.
‘The earthquake we have heard of,’ said Geukchu in a low, sinuous voice, ‘surely Astur is with us! It is as if, my lord, you had planned it all yourself.’
But even at this stage Attila still disliked flattery, and he only murmured a couplet from some ancient Persian poem. ‘“ The spider weaves the curtains in the Palace of the Caesars, The owl calls the watches in the Towers of Afrasiab…”.’
They rode on, and night closed around them, and in the woods behind, as if in answer to those melancholy lines, there were only the sounds of a lych-owl and of a solitary holy man weeping in his cell for the sins of all the world.
19
Aetius stood on the walls beside Military Gate V. Near him stood the lean, ancient figure of Gamaliel.
‘You again,’ was all Aetius had said sourly to him in greeting; but he had put him in charge of the nearby Emmanuel Hospital, all the same, and ordered the monks there to do his bidding. There would be plenty of work there soon enough, and this old trickster seemed to know his stuff.
Below in the street children were playing, happily oblivious for a moment of the world and its shadows. People of all ages sat awake through the night now, huddled around fires, talking. The children sang an ancient nursery rhyme: ‘Tortoise, tortoise, what’s going on?
I’m weaving Milesian yellow and yarn.
How did your father happen to die?
Fell off his white horses and drowned in the sea.’
It seemed an ominous rhyme. In a sudden flash, Aetius pictured himself dying. A sign of old age: young men never imagine they will die, but now he felt all too often the stab of a dagger or a spear in his belly, saw himself lying in a blood-soaked hospital bed, arms outstretched in supplication but slipping away, the battle still raging on the walls. He hoped this was no foreseeing.
Tum magna sperabam, maesta cogitabam – Then greatly I hoped, but sadly I thought.
Gamaliel was talking about the Hun pantheon, as if delivering a lecture. He said the gods were fighting a battle among themselves by proxy.
‘The Hun gods fight well, and fight dirty,’ muttered Aetius. ‘Astur and Savash and the rest. Attila believes in them as he believes in himself.’
Gamaliel turned to him gravely in the darkness. ‘Men believe in a god who is a reflection of their own hearts. Dark heart: dark god.’
‘Then whose god is true?’ said Aetius.
‘Whose heart is true?’
Another was brought to him in the night, led by Prince Torismond, looking distinctly amused. It was the Cretan alchemist, Nicias.
Aetius growled, ‘I thought you were in Antioch, or Alexandria.’
‘I was,’ said Nicias woundedly, ‘collecting together another set of alchemical equipment – and very costly it was, too. Then I returned here to experiment upon the, ah, pre-mortem dismemberment of tunny by alchemical means.’
‘You’ve been blowing up fish?’
‘Precisely.’
‘You alchemists are strange.’
Nevertheless, the man of science assured him that, after further unplanned experimental outcomes – Aetius noticed that Nicias still had no eyebrows to speak of – a happy conclusion had finally been reached, when a large tunny was simultaneously exploded and incinerated, while still in the water.
‘A miracle to behold, I’m sure,’ said Aetius. Not without some misgivings, he gave Nicias permission to station his wretched firepots and God knew what else on the towers of the Gate of St Barbara, overlooking the entrance to the Golden Horn. He could take command of the single artillery machine there, and hit anything that moved. Vandal warships, ideally.