‘My son,’ said Chanat softly, his eyes bright with tears.
Aladar stirred himself, and bade his mother and his wives and comrades ‘ bayartai ’, the farewell to those one will see no more. He raised his head and straightened in the saddle, gazed heavenwards into the Eternal Blue Sky, and held his spear aloft. ‘It has been good to ride with the Lord Attila all these years!’ he cried. ‘Bless you, Great Tanjou! In the name of Astur and Savash and the Lady Itugen and all the Gods, this is a good day to die.’
His spear dropped down again, his arm trembling with the effort. Then father and son rode out of the camp, the wives and concubines kneeling on the ground, wailing and throwing dust over their heads. The Lord Attila himself did not appear from his tent, but the people lined the way in silence, for such reverence do a noble people feel for death.
The rain had ceased again, and the two horses splashed through shallow puddles gilded by the setting sun, their tails swishing. Ahead loomed the high walls of the city, the foreground strewn with the wreckage of broken walls and engines and mounds of the slain yet unburied.
As they neared the walls the two warriors saw men stir and rise behind the battlements. Chanat raised his right arm and Aladar his left, and they clasped hands above their heads, and gave the battle-cry. Then they dug their heels into their horses’ flanks, and the beasts reared, whinnying, came down and broke into a canter, then a gallop.
Aetius was watching from the walls.
Arapovian said, ‘The warrior on the right, I know him. It’s the old general who met us on the road, the one we captured at Azimuntium.’
Aetius nodded. ‘And the one on the left?’
‘I do not know him. He is younger. He seems wounded, or sick.’
‘Ah.’
The two Huns were already approaching the flooded moat, slowing to a trot, picking their way across a half-broken pontoon.
Jormunreik and Valamir came near.
‘Ready your bows,’ said Aetius. ‘When you can hit him cleanly, kill the one on the left, the sickly one.’
The wolf-lords looked faintly disgusted.
‘Trust me,’ said Aetius. ‘It’s what he wants.’
The horsemen were across the moat now, and kicking their horses into a gallop across the shattered terrace below the walls, yowling their battle cries, waving their spears, shouting defiance in the very faces of the defenders. Aladar made it as far as the base of the walls, and had his shaking hand outstretched upon a remnant of net which would not even have supported his weight, when three arrows slammed into him from above, two angled into the shoulder and one straight through his heart. His hand fell back from the net, his spear dropped from the other hand, and he sat his horse, bowed forward, still. The horse shifted its hooves uncertainly but did not move.
‘No more!’ cried Aetius. ‘Lower your bows!’
The old warrior rode over to the dead man in his saddle, put his arm round him and pulled him across his own horse, face down. Let him sleep now, face turned away from the sun. For did not his warrior soul already soar with his heavenly father, a great eagle, into the eternal blue sky? High over the measureless green grasslands of his beloved homeland where the flowers would bloom again yellow next spring, soaring for ever and ever over the white and gleaming mountains of the Holy Altai? For the earth itself was heaven.
The old warrior took the reins of the riderless horse and turned round and headed back towards the moat with his son across his lap and the riderless horse walking close behind. At the last moment he turned again and gazed up at the walls. His old eyes were very bright, even as he stood there darkly silhouetted against the sinking sun, the sky a blaze of colour behind him.
For a moment the old warrior and the defenders on the walls gazed at each other, and Chanat tried to identify the commander who had understood so well and given the order. His eyes were tired, and a little blurred, and he could not see so far. Yet it seemed to him that some of those on the walls raised their hands to him, without weapons. So he raised his hand likewise, then pulled his horse round again, with the second horse following, and walked them back over the broken pontoon bridge and away over the darkening plain.
24
That night Aetius and his men slept. At dawn he was summoned to the palace.
Before he went, Captain Andronicus sent word that he should step up onto the platform of the tower. He did so, and looked out.
There was nothing but a low haze of dust. The Huns had vanished, like a people who had never been.
There in council were the emperor and the empress, and inevitably the emperor’s sour-faced sister, misnamed Pulcheria; and Themistius, an aged scholar and orator, and also the chief chamberlain, and the bishop of the city, Epiphanius. When Aetius entered, to his embarrassment several present bowed down to him and touched their foreheads to the ground. The emperor hastily ordered them to their feet again.
‘General Aetius,’ he said, ‘we have done well. You have seen the results? The enemy is’ – he spread his hands wide and smiled – ‘gone!’
Aetius nodded. ‘But not forgotten.’
‘Against the stone of sickness they stumbled,’ intoned Bishop Epiphanius, ‘the steeds and their riders both. The sinners drew the bow and put their arrows to the string, and then sickness blew through them and hurled the host back into the wilderness. Glory to God in the Highest.’
There were murmured affirmations and many crossings of chests.
A little poetic, thought Aetius, biting his tongue. The horses didn’t actually suffer from camp fever. But the people were dying like flies. He thought his men deserved a little praise as well, but that was probably too much to hope for.
‘Peace has been made,’ said the emperor. ‘See, we have the paper.’
Old Themistius passed it to the general. Attila himself had signed it. Attila, Tashur-Astur. Flagellum Dei, the Scourge of God.
‘His royal sign,’ added Theodosius eagerly.
Aetius shook his head. ‘It is not his royal sign. It is Hunnish.’
Theodosius sat back. ‘And you speak that rough tongue, of course.’
Aetius did not answer.
‘Well,’ said Theodosius impatiently, ‘what is it that makes you look so solemn, man? This is the paper of peace! This is the signal for the end of bloodshed, and surely a cause for celebration! Or do you want still more war?’
‘Not I,’ murmured Aetius.
Themistius glanced at him, but the jubilant emperor had not heard.
‘Once more,’ he said, rising to his feet and stepping down from his throne, ‘as of old in the days of King Uldin, the great Hun nation, those fierce, barbarian yet, I think, noble-hearted steppe warriors, are our allies!’
‘Allies!’ cried Aetius. ‘But he has signed himself Attila, Scourge of God.’
Theodosius laughed an uncertain little laugh. ‘The name given to him by a Gaulish chronicler, apparently, which he has adopted with alacrity. And with good humour! A Royal moniker. They have fierce names, those Germanic tribesmen, you know. Godric the Wolf-Slayer, Erik Blood-Axe and so forth. Like our own emperors. Why,’ he asked jovially, ‘do they not call me Theodosius the Calligrapher?’
Aetius could have wept with frustration. ‘Majesty, this is not so innocent a name. He believes he is our punishment, sent by the Eternal Blue Sky – by his heavenly father – to be our destruction, and to announce the end of our world to us. He will never be our ally, nor at peace with us. He was mocking you even as he signed this paper. He will always be our enemy.’
‘Nonsense, nonsense.’ Theodosius came forward and actually put his sovereign arm around the broad shoulders of his grim and difficult general. He walked him round the vast audience chamber. ‘Indeed, far from being our enemy, it seems that Attila might even have become one of the imperial family, if a certain plot of the Princess Honoria’s had not been uncovered.’