Leaving nothing but corpses behind them. All down the roads of Gaul, all down the Via Poenina and the valley of the Rhone, nothing but corpses.
He had crossed Germania in winter. Not only his army, but his entire people, old men and wives and children in their high-wheeled wagons laden with loot. That could not be done, not through those trackless and silent forests. An impossible task; but for Attila, Flagellum Dei, what was impossible? Did he not have God on his side? He had ridden through those dark and snowbound pine forests, never weakening but only augmenting his strength. Perhaps he had chosen a colder climate for his people to destroy the sickness and fever among them. And it had worked.
With his Byzantine gold, he would have bought more and more support along the away. Among his latest allies would be Gepids and Alans and lean Sarmatian lancers. As he traversed Germania, more and more forest tribesmen would have flocked to his banner, seeing this as the greatest raiding-party in history – easy loot. Among those Germanic tribes, surely there still burned an ancient hatred of Rome in the race memory. Those distant sons of old Arminius, still singing their lays of the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest, four long centuries before.
Aetius stood stunned. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw Lucius moving to dismount. He turned on him angrily.
‘No! You go!’ He mastered himself again, spoke more quietly. ‘Old friend and guide, for God’s sake, go. Ride back to the coast, take ship for Britain once more, even in winter seas.’ Lucius hesitated. ‘As I said before, you are better off there in your green and gentle island. The rest of Europe is burning. Only you are left. Only in your far west, it may be, will anything of the old world survive. Let that put strength in your swords when you fight the Saxons.’
Lucius regarded him gravely from under his bushy white eyebrows. Then he heeled his horse, slowly pulled round and, without another word, headed down the road to Aquileia.
‘There is more news, sir – not of Attila.’
Aetius was gazing after the horseman riding south, longing in his eyes. ‘Go on.’
‘From Constantinople, sir.’
Aetius turned to him again.
‘The Emperor Theodosius is dead. He fell from his horse while out riding, and injured his spine badly. He bore his agony with great fortitude and piety, it is said, and died three days later, the name of the Saviour on his lips.’
Aetius crossed himself. That scholarly, kind-hearted fool…
‘The new emperor is one Marcian, sir. He has already married the old emperor’s sister.’
Aetius blinked with disbelief. ‘Pulcheria? That prune-like perpetual virgin?’
‘The same, sir.’
‘And what of Theodosius’ widow? The Empress Eudoxia?’
‘She has retired to Jerusalem. It is said that relations between her and Empress Pulcheria were always difficult. Emperor Marcian has meanwhile already communicated with Emperor Valentinian, wishing him every success against the Hunnish hordes, expressing only regret that the East cannot be of any more assistance. But they have too little manpower, and besides, they are busy with the great new Church Council of Chalcedon.’
Aetius smiled a faint, sour smile, nodding, his mind racing, for a moment forgetting even Gaul. So she was back in her beloved Jerusalem: further away from him than ever. Long, long ago there, a young army officer had once kissed a beautiful empress, adulterously, on a moonlit balcony. Now she was a widow, and free. Yet the times were against it. It was impossible. He was needed elsewhere.
He pressed his finger and thumb into his eyes. At times he could come close to cursing God. He felt as if he was about to be torn apart. Everything was in ruins, the world was sick, and yet above he could hear the sound of heaven laughing. He felt on the brink of hysterical laughter himself for a moment. The messenger moved uneasily. But when Aetius opened his eyes again, there was that stolid Germanus before him, and Tatullus just behind. They saluted. He could have clung to them like a drowning man. The sense of illimitable horror faded a little.
Time to take command again. He told them the news from Gaul. They looked grim.
‘Men ready to move out at dawn tomorrow, sir,’ said Tatullus.
‘But nowhere near enough ships at Aquileia,’ said Germanus.
‘Nor at Ravenna,’ growled Aetius, ‘quite apart from the fact that the military harbour there was condemned to neglect decades ago, and has since been planted with fruit trees.’
Germanus shook his big bullet head. ‘Bloody disgrace. How’s Rome supposed to fight her enemies these days? Throw figs at them?’
‘Quite. So we march. We have a prior appointment overland, anyway. Six hundred miles away, so it will take us a month.’
‘In winter?’
‘In winter.’
Germanus and Tatullus both looked puzzled.
‘At Tolosa,’ said Aetius. ‘At the court of the Visigoths.’
4
Attila crossed the frozen Rhine six miles south of Argentoratum, the bitter winter suddenly his ally, the great river as solid as a marble pavement. It took his titanic army over a week to ride from east bank to west over the sparkling ice. He rode with his remaining Chosen Men and his best warriors, and then the rest of the Hun people behind. There rode with him the Kutrigur Huns under their leader, Sky-In-Tatters, and the people of the Oronchan Valley under Bayan-Kasgar; Hepthalite Huns, White Huns, Black Huns, Huns from the shores of the Aral Sea and the very northern limits of the Scythian steppes, clad in furs, with their wicked curved bows and their quivers bristling with arrows.
Now there also rode with him Gepids from the Transylvanian hills, under their King Ardaric; Sarmatian horse-warriors, and blue-eyed Alan lancers, an Iranian people, cunning and untrustworthy. The ancient Persians, it was said, had been taught three things as boys: to ride a horse, to shoot an arrow, and tell the truth. The Alans still excelled at the first two.
There were stocky, bearded Rugians from the far northern shores of the Baltic Sea, Scirians in leather body-armour, carrying long javelins and battle-axes, and flaxen-haired Langobards with great two-handed swords. As the horde passed through Germania they were joined, as Aetius had guessed, by Thuringians, Moravians, Herulians, Burgundians, and even the sons and grandsons of those nationless freebooters who had once ridden under the banner of Rhadaghastus, and been so savagely defeated by the Huns themselves upon the Tuscan plain.
The losses that Attila had sustained at Viminacium and the other cities of the East, at the battle of the River Utus, and finally beneath the walls of Constantinople – a few thousand in all – had been made up forty- or fifty-fold. The chilly dust-cloud and the steam from their horses could be seen a day’s march away. His army shook the earth as it rode west.
In the cities along the Rhine they slew every living thing they found. They would have driven off the sheep and cattle as their own, but already they were overburdened, and it was late winter still, and not enough forage. So they took only what they could carry from those wealthy cities, loading it onto their groaning wagons: armour damascened with gold and silver, silken stuffs, rugs and furs all heaped together with sacred objects looted from burned churches, reliquaries studded with precious stones and housing the bones of forgotten martyrs, chalices, pat-tens, jewel-encrusted gospels they could not even read.
Among those they captured at Colonia Agrippina was a nobly born Cornish maiden called Ursula, who was to be betrothed to a son of a patrician in the city, and her eleven maidens. After amusing themselves for a while trying to make the girls fall to their knees and worship their god Astur, the Huns ravished them and slew them and hung their bodies from the walls of the city, along with many others. The Cornish maid was soon declared a saint, and a legend rapidly grew up about St Ursula and her Eleven Thousand Virgins. In this way, history was already reverting to myth, and in place of sober chronicles a new age was being ushered in which would prefer extravagant tales and foolish superstitions to hard-headed facts. It was as if Attila was drawing in, in the very wake of his horse as he rode, a new dark age which would cover all of Europe.