The crowds stamped their feet and clapped and hooted as a chain-gang of criminals was whipped into the arena, to be crucified and disembowelled for public edification.
The Church might have put a stop to gladiatorial combat decades ago, but the torture and execution of law-breakers was still regarded as a necessary lesson in civility. All round the expensive upper tiers, there were many spectators whose skilled spintriae or whores would bring them climax at the very moment of death in the arena; sex-slaves with names like ‘Desire’, ‘Happy’ and ‘Beloved’.
Aetius hated the games. The cruel faces of the spectators, brutalised by their own entertainment; the rotten fish sold at the stalls, deep-fried to disguise the stink; the scrawny prostitutes underneath the arches, their lines of customers waiting. That these games today were so shabby and meagre did not help. Two burglars were forced to fight to the death with nets and rusty swords. An aged horse which had trodden on a senator’s foot was roped down and clubbed to death. There was the inevitable re-enactment of the story of Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, always a crowd-pleaser. An aroused bull in a huge harness was lowered from a crane onto a tethered and shaven-headed female slave, guilty, so they said, of attacking her mistress and clawing the skin from her face. The girl died. The crowd was delighted.
Later, slaves would come and gather up the various organs and body parts that littered the ground, strew fresh sand, scrub down the seats. A cocktail of blood, semen, urine and faeces – for none liked to leave their seats during the entertainment, and the plebs always urinated or defecated where they sat – would flow away down to the city’s sewers and out to sea.
Aetius heard a voice saying, ‘Your empire is tottering. Rome’s all done. You have already lost whatever it was that you fought for. Join us.’
It was the voice of Attila, the voice of temptation. With it, Aetius had a vision of a wide and endless steppe-land, a clean wind blowing over the emerald spring grass; vast herds of beautiful horses running, or drinking at crystal streams; a peaceful encampment of free and simple-hearted people, men idly chatting, women busily cooking, children playing and laughing, plumes of woodsmoke rising into the still, clear air. Perhaps a girl there, an ordinary girl with a shy smile and kindly eyes, one hand on her pregnant belly, the other in the hand of a scarred, battered, fugitive man who had once called himself a Roman. And beyond them, great snow-capped mountains, and a golden eagle soaring into that eternal sky…
The crowd roared.
He shook himself free of that impossible dream, closed his eyes and drew breath, then laid out his plan to the bored-looking senator.
‘Rebuild the navy, you say?’ drawled Nemesianus. ‘Here at Aquileia?’ He shooed the slave-boys away for a moment.
Aetius nodded. ‘And turn the lagoon of the Veneto into a huge harbour. Defence would be easy. From there we could oversee the Adriatic, sail against the Vandals of Africa, recapture the grainfields…’
‘Bold plans!’ Nemesianus was looking at him with amusement – amusement! At this late stage. ‘And all this will cost a great deal of money? My money?’
‘Inaction will cost more. If Attila defeats us, what will be left? He will destroy everything. But if we defeat him, we too will be exhausted. We must plan for the future.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Nemesianus, ‘but at times such as these, each man must shift for himself. In the harbour of Aquileia a nice galley awaits me, ready to sail east. I have always fancied one of the Ionian islands. My wealth is secure, much of it now in a Levantine bank in Constantinople. My dear man’ – he made to touch Aetius’ knee, but thought better of it – ‘my dear, old-fashioned, stern, public-spirited, republican-hearted, patriotic Master-General Aetius, you were born out of your time.’ He clapped politely at the scene being enacted below, then resumed. ‘Veritably, the Scipio Africanus of our age.’
The fear of sincerity, the faithlessness, the catch-all ironic twang, the enervated drawl, the emptiness beneath the cleverness, the baseness of vision: Aetius could have wrung his neck.
Instead he steeled himself and arose and wished the senator well in his future life, with his private villa on an Ionian island, and his obedient slave-boys. A noble dream.
As he left the amphitheatre, brushing the clawing prostitutes away, the lines that the exiled Euripides wrote during the ruinous Peloponnesian War returned to him.
In the theatres, the People laugh at phalluses. On a fair Aegean island, beardless boys are butchered in their name. This is the world from which I take my leave. How far and fast we fell.
The games had left a foul taste in his mouth. He strode through the narrow streets of the old city, leading his horse, glaring down. For this was not the whole story of Rome. There had been courage and sacrifice and human dignity. There had been Regulus and Horatius, Trajan and Augustus, rulers of decency and vision. But was the good all in the past now, and the glory departed?
Despite himself he thought again of the bare steppes, and the copper-skinned warriors, their honour and unflinching bravery, their lean self-denials, their magnificent scorn for death, their love of their king.
On the one hand, cruelty and magnificence. On the other, cruelty and squalor. What a richness of choice.
Hardly aware of his actions, he tethered his horse and went into a lowly church, a small, chilly, whitewashed building with an arched apse, narrow windows, half a dozen smoking candles. He was greeted by an old deacon, grey beard streaked with lamp-black, his cassock faded to a powdery stale-bread green, a cheap wooden cross on a string of olive-wood beads around his neck. On the west wall was a clumsy, deeply sincere painting of Christ with the loaves and fishes, and the faces of the hungering people crowding round. He sacrificed himself; the people ate. They lived.
Even here could be heard the intermittent roar of the crowd in the arena. The old deacon crossed himself as he watched the powerfully built old officer on his knees before the cross. Then he went over and began to speak without preamble, as is the way with holy men who live much alone; they lose their taste for small talk.
‘We live in the end of times,’ he said, his voice croaky with disuse. ‘But the choice before each human soul is clear. The broad path or the strait? The arena’ – he jerked his head – ‘or the House of God. Quo vadis?’
‘Neither,’ said the general. ‘My place is on the battlefield. ’
The old deacon looked grim.
‘But I fight for this,’ said the general, gesturing around the church. ‘Not for that,’ and gestured towards the arena, where another massed roar went up.
The deacon’s dark eyes bored into the general’s. At last he said, ‘St Michael and all angels ride with you.’
When Aetius arrived back at camp, he was told he had a visitor.
‘No time,’ he said brusquely.
‘He has come a long way, sir. From Britain.’
‘ Britain? ’
3
He was an old man now, perhaps sixty-five, or even seventy, his garments travel-stained, and not as tall as Aetius remembered him. But then when Aetius had last set eyes on him, he himself had been only a boy. He remembered the grey eyes, the broad shoulders, the determined look. The old Briton had close-cropped white hair now, and sported a long white barbarian beard. Underneath the beard, Aetius remembered, he had a scar on his chin.
‘You’re Lucius,’ he said.
The old man nodded but didn’t salute. He was no longer a soldier of Rome, after all. ‘I always knew you were a smart lad. Now you rule the Western Empire, I hear.’