Aetius had asked me to detour to the legionary fortress of Sumelocenna. “I told the tribune named Stenis there to make his men into wasps,” the general recalled. “I want you to see if he has succeeded and write me the result.”
The fort seemed low and unimpressive as I approached, one tower broken and its paint long peeled away. Yet as I drew nearer I took heart from what I saw. The ditches had been cleared of brush and weeds. A hedge of wooden stakes had been planted within crossbow range to ward off siege towers and battering rams. The old walls were dotted with pale new stones. Peasant recruits were drilling in the courtyard.
“We are a nut Attila might not want to bother cracking,”
said Stenis with rare and welcome pride in his voice. “A year ago a child could have captured this outpost, and Aetius recognized that in an instant. Now I’d like to see an army try.
We’ve built twenty new catapults, a hundred crossbows, and recruited seventy-five men.”
“I will tell this to the general.” I decided not to reveal the size of Attila’s army.
“Just tell him that I am ready to sting.”
I traveled southwest to the Rhone where a barge carried me downriver toward the Mediterranean. As I traveled south, the sun brightened and the land grew lush. It was beautiful country, greener than distant Byzantium, and I wondered what it would be like to live here. Yet the oncoming rush of spring also heightened my apprehension.
Time was hurrying, and so would Attila. How could I persuade Theodoric?
I bought a horse near the river’s mouth and took the main Roman road west toward Tolosa and the Visigoths, occasionally spying the glittering sea far below to my left. How far I had come! From home. From Ilana. From dreams to nightmare.
It was late April when I finally came to the Visigothic capital in the old Roman city, its central fortress rearing above the red tile rooftops. I paused a minute before the city’s gray stone walls and wondered how I would convince these semicivilized barbarians to ally with the Empire they had half conquered, resented, envied, and feared. Frighten Theodoric with stories of Attila? My mission was absurd.
Yet destiny has its own devices. Unknown to me, watching secretly from a slit window high in a tower, was my answer.
XXI
I
THE SCOURGE OF GOD
The armies of Attila were too huge to advance on any single road or path, so they ascended the Danube valley in a series of parallel columns, engulfing the ancient border between Rome and Germania like a wave. The Hun cavalry went first as the tip of the arrow, striking ahead of any warning and overpowering weak garrisons before they had time to prepare. The heavier Ostrogoth cavalry came next, their big horses, heavy shields, and long lances crushing any line that resisted. Should the inhabitants instead try to seek refuge in a tower, fort, monastery, or church, they then would be left for the long snake of infantry, its ranks speck-led with mercenaries and engineers with the skill to build catapults, siege towers, and battering rams. Roiling columns of smoke marked where each pocket of resistance had been overcome.
Never had the Huns assembled so great an army, and never had its supply been so challenging. They stripped the land like locusts. Those who hid emerged to desolation. The upper Danube valley had become a wasteland. Every house was burned. Every granary was emptied. Every vine and fruit tree was chopped down. It was not so much conquest as depopulation. After slaughtering the men and raping and enslaving the women, the Hun cavalry took particular care to kill infants and pregnant women. No generation would be left to seek revenge. The few surviving orphaned children shivered in the woods like animals. Abandoned dogs went feral and fed on the corpses of their former masters.
One by one the outposts of civilization became ruins. As-tura, Augustiana, Faviana, Lauriacum, Lentia, Boiodurum, Castra Batava, Castra Augusta, Castra Regina . . . all were erased from history. It was as if the earth was swallowing civilization. Ash drifted in the air instead of apple blossom, and every smashed home had the forbidding smell of burnt timber, rot, and damp decay. Dried blood spattered intricate mosaics. Wall murals were smeared with the brains and effluent of the owners who died looking at them. The prophets were right: The armies of doom were signaling the end of the world. Never in a thousand years would Europe forget this march. Evil had come on shaggy steppe ponies, and the angels had fled. It was the spring when days grew darker.
Attila was well pleased.
He paused one afternoon to eat the looted rations of a ruptured Roman fort called Sumelocenna, its garrison massacred with particular fury because it fought so uncharacteristically bravely. Attila rested his boots on the body of a tribune they said had been named Stenis, noticing that the dead man’s tunic was closed by a golden clasp in the shape of a wasp. The king bent to rip the brooch free. He had never seen its like before and would give it to Hereka. “The man who wore it stung,” he would tell her.
No officers had trained Attila in the arts of war. No courtiers had coached him in the grace of nobles. No singer had persuaded his rough fingers to touch harp or lyre. No woman had soothed his constant anger, that simmering rage from a childhood of beatings and harsh training and a manhood of treachery and war. No priest had explained to his satisfaction why he was here, and no prophet had dared suggest he could fail. He was a primeval force, sent to cleanse the world.
Huns were different from other men, he believed—so different that perhaps they weren’t men at all but gods. Or perhaps there were no fellow men but rather that his people preyed on a world inhabited by odd forms of lower beings, mud men. He didn’t know. Certainly the deaths of these Romans had no meaning to him. Their lives were too foreign, their habits inexplicable. He understood that life was struggle, and the joy that some found in simple existence utterly baffled him. One was either a killer or a meal. This belief that life was pitiless colored everything he did. Attila would lead his Huns to glory but he trusted no one. He loved no one. He relied on no one. He knew there would never be any rest, for to rest was to die. Wasn’t it when he’d slept that the Roman bitch had almost set fire to him? What a lesson that had been. He slept only in snatches now, his features aging, his dreams troubled. Yet this was how it should be. Killing was the essence of life. Destruction held the only promise of safety.
Attila was no strategist. He couldn’t envision the lands he planned to conquer. Their desirability, or lack of it, was almost immaterial. Attila understood fear, and he was con-cocting a catastrophe, but a catastrophe that was to fall on Aetius. For every Roman he killed, two or three went running to his target in Gaul. Each had to be fed. Each carried panic like a plague. In every story his horsemen grew uglier, their aim more deadly, their stench more rank, their greed more insatiable. This use of terror was necessary. His horde, vast though it was, was small compared to the millions upon millions in the Roman world. Its strength was its seeming invincibility. Huns were never defeated because no one believed they could be defeated.
He didn’t know that Aetius began to intercept tens of thousands of fugitives like a net, drafting the men into his forces and sending the women and children to help farm.