‘This is a time of waiting,’ she said, ‘to see where he will strike next. But we know, do we not? We know he will come.’
She gestured to him to sit down.
‘It is twelve centuries from the founding of Rome. You know it. And it has been held, since before Cicero and Varro, that the twelve vultures who appeared to Romulus when he founded the city signified the twelve centuries Rome would endure. This is borrowed time.’
She breathed slowly. ‘Has the fratricidal death of Remus at last come back to destroy Rome? The shedding of his brother’s blood was the price Romulus paid for Rome’s twelve centuries of glory. They say Attila slew his brother, too – for all of a dozen years of glory. Perhaps now both debts are being called in. The first city was called Enoch and it was built by Cain. The murderer. Perhaps all cities and empires are founded in blood; and in the end that blood must be paid for.’ She closed her eyes, the lids leaf-thin, fluttering. ‘I cannot see the future, Aetius, but it must be… re-made. Rome may not be the future. But Attila and his pure spirit of destruction must not be, either.’
She opened her eyes again. ‘Some of the wise say that it is only the old world that is dying. A new world is being born. Well, ask a woman how painful childbirth can be. As one of Euripides’ women says: “I’d rather stand in the line of battle than lie again in childbed.”’ She smiled weakly.
‘I have heard,’ said Aetius, ‘that the harvests were poor, and weather-watchers say we have an exceptionally hard winter ahead.’
‘Which will hurt Attila more than us.’
He grunted. ‘You should have been a general. That’s good insight.’ He stood again. ‘With your leave, Your Majesty, I must check troop numbers, find my general, Germanus.’
‘I can tell you,’ she said.
He laughed aloud. ‘You really would have been a good general.’
‘Hm. Wrong gender.’
She drew painful breath and then told him. The Rhine and Danube frontiers had been pretty much stripped bare. She herself had given the order, via her son. The East had no army left to speak of, and every last decent soldier in the West was with the Field Army, not six miles east of Ravenna. She reeled them off. The expeditionary force Aetius himself had assembled in Sicily for the reconquest of Africa: six crack legions, including the Batavian, the Herculian, the Cornuti Seniores, the Moorish Cavalry, numbering some eighteen thousand in all.
‘Twenty thousand,’ he interrupted.
‘There have been desertions, even there.’
He looked down.
From the frontiers, a few sad remnants. The only legions worth the name, at around a thousand men each: the Legio I Italica pulled back from Brigetio, the II from Aquincum. The fierce IV Scythica at Singidunum had absconded entirely, quite possibly to the Hunnish side. But Aetius also had the XII Fulminata, the Lightning Boys, good artillerymen; the XIV from Carnuntum; a useful troop of Augustan Horse, around five hundred men; and, finest of them all, the two thousand crack troops of the Palatine Guard. That was it.
The frontiers were, for the first time in centuries, undefended. He saw in his mind’s eye those once mighty legionary fortresses, now desolate and forlorn beside the cold, bleak waters of the Rhine and Danube, an eerie wind blowing through their narrow windows and around their squat U-shaped bastions, starlings nesting in their proud, deserted towers.
He had around twenty-five thousand men. Attila had more than double that in first-rank warriors alone. In total, with mercenaries, lesser tribes, opportunists, nameless eastern peoples, the wild rumours that he rode at the head of half a million were edging towards the uncomfortable truth.
Galla’s old face was bleak indeed. ‘I do not doubt,’ she said at last, very slowly, ‘that if Attila defeats us this last time – if his greatly superior numbers defeat yours – then, with nothing more to oppose him, he will not simply colonise our empire for his kingdom. He will destroy it. He will make a sacrifice to his gods upon an altar called Europe.’
Aetius did not disagree. He said without expression, ‘We gave the order for him to be killed, when he was no more than a boy. Now we are paying the price.’
‘ I gave the order,’ said Galla, unflinching, ‘that he be slain. That the Huns not turn against us. Even that they fight with us, against Alaric and his Goths. His uncle Ruga was not our enemy.’ She shook her head. ‘So long ago. It seems another world. And we failed: we did not kill the boy, though we tried hard. Yet I am not the first ruler who has given the order to take innocent lives in order to save more. And I shall not be the last. I still do not repent it. But God be my judge.’
There was a long silence, and then she said, ‘I feel – forgive an old, dying woman’s hackneyed prophesying – but I feel that he will never see Rome again.’ She seized his hand. ‘I feel that, Aetius. He saw Rome as a boy, a savage boy, and he rejected it and all it stands for. He will not be offered that vision of the city again. I tell you
… he will never… see… Rome again.’ Each pause was an agonised intake of breath, her face implacable and unpitying throughout.
‘One day, one day… and in another world,’ she whispered, so quietly that he had to lean down to hear her. He told her she must rest, but her thin lips curled with scorn. She had not rested once in sixty years. She whispered, ‘I have always… held you in the highest esteem… and the deepest affection… Gaius… Flavius… Aetius.’
Her hand went lifeless in his.
She was expertly embalmed and robed in purple cerecloths in the Triclinium of the Nineteen Couches, the diadem of Roman royalty on her head. In the centre of the hall, the great golden catafalque held her slight body. Forests of candles burned on golden pricket stands amid clouds of incense. Friends and mourners passed where she lay and kissed her: then bishops and priests, senators, patricians, prefects, magistrates, wives, ladies-in-waiting, all coming to kiss her cold cheeks and lament.
Valentinian came, too, to kiss her goodbye, with tears running uncontrollably down his cheeks. Aetius was shocked to see his appearance. He looked an old man, his hair thin and grey, his legs strangely bowed, his gait an exhausted shuffle, clutching a little white cloth to mop both his tears and his constantly dribbling mouth. He brought his mother a present: a lavish set of jewels for her to wear in the tomb. They would have been better used to buy mercenaries, thought Aetius. Galla’s head was gently raised by an attendant, and the sobbing emperor placed the jewels round her neck with trembling hands, and then held her for a long time. He had to be led away.
The funeral cortege processed down to the magnificent Basilica of the Resurrection, accompanied by chanting priests and wailing women mourners. All the way, riding his white horse, Aetius could only think, In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was crucified. It was as if, he began to realise, Galla herself had killed the one thing she loved: Rome. She had maltreated the boy Attila so harshly, unwittingly instilled in him such hatred, that now he came back to destroy the city and the empire she stood for. Truly the drama of the world had been written not by that warm-hearted praise-singer, blind Homer, but by the lonely tragedian Galla had quoted on her deathbed: Euripides, gazing out to sea from his hermit’s cave.
In the basilica, Galla’s diadem was at last removed and replaced with a band of purple silk.
The Patriarch called out in a sonorous chant, ‘O Princess, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords calleth thee!’
She was entombed in her own sarcophagus in the mausoleum nearby, between the two men who had gone before her: her second husband, Constantius, and her brother, the Emperor Honorius. Her own sarcophagus was the largest of the three. She was seated upright within it, as if still reigning over the domain of which she had been ruler in all but name.