He heard violent shouting in the corridor outside, and then a sound like scuffling, and a man bellowing as if in raw pain. There were running footsteps, and doors slamming, and then the sound of wood being smashed and splintering. He gripped the edges of his bed with fear, as a man adrift on the ocean in the black night might grip a plank of wood. He was unable to move. Any moment, a couple of armed guards would burst in through his door with drawn swords, and drive those thick steel blades straight through him and into the straw pallet below.
But no one came. He forced himself to loosen his grip on the bed. He shook his head as if to clear it of the fog of nightmare.
He got up and wrapped his light woollen cloak round him for protection, though the night was warm. Then he took his sword and went over to the door. He gripped the hilt in both hands, raised the sword high above his head, and drove it deep into the heavy oak. He was determined to dig a hole through it, no matter how long it took. But at the first blow the door swung eerily open. The guards outside were gone.
He wrenched the blade back and it came free of the wood with a squeak. In a daze he smelt, even tasted, the unmistakable coppery tang of blood in the air. And he sensed with the very hairs on his head that all the palace was under a cloud of fear. The night was in silent, horror-struck uproar.
He started to run. He passed a man slumped in the darkness of a doorway, and then he stopped and ran back. The front of the man’s coarse tunic was dark and wet. It was Bucco, the fat Sicilian baker, his friend. He knelt and laid his hand against Bucco’s cheek. It was as cold as wet clay. He moved Bucco’s head slightly, and it fell awkwardly to one side, revealing a ragged gaping slash across his throat. Nearly gagging, the boy reeled to his feet and ran on. Why Bucco? Why a simple slave?
Now things came to him, through the haze of fear. There was nobody around. Even at this late hour, there should have been palace guards patrolling the courtyards, night-slaves working, aquarii replenishing the water-butts, priests and deacons in the service of the imperial family on their way to chant the early-morning offices of Lauds and Terce in the cold and incense-filled chapel. But there was no one. It was as if the palace were suddenly deserted – and yet sounds carried from afar on the hot night air.
From deep within the palace he heard that cry of the bird again, only now he knew it was no bird but a woman’s screams. Then rounding a corner into a small courtyard he almost ran into another woman standing beside a small fountain. He had never seen her before. She was dressed all in white, like a priestess, but she held out to him at arm’s length a dead kitten, her mouth hanging open in a silent scream, her eyes staring unseeing at him. None of it made any sense. He stumbled away from her. Madly he wanted to laugh. It was all as meaningless as a nightmare, but it was real, it was all too real. He was wide awake.
He heard running footsteps coming closer and then fading, he heard doors slamming, the clanking of chains being dragged over marble tiles. He came to a bundle of rags slung in a corner, and as he passed by the bundle stirred and a bloody human hand reached out. He ran on.
He could hear the distant clangour of church bells in the city now, and again it made no sense. They seemed to signal some dire and bloody event, sounding to his ears as if they came from deep underground, from the realms of chaos and ancient night. He didn’t slink like a wolf through the palace now. He ran with one hand clenched to his chest with the steel weight of his sword beneath. He would need it tonight.
No one seemed to notice him, a mere child.
Two soldiers shoved past him, with a man grasped by the elbows between them. They virtually had to drag him, for his legs were broken. He wore a high-ranking officer’s uniform. His face was so bloodily pulped that the boy could not recognise him. Only his teeth showed white from his darkened face, his lips drawn back in some terrible nameless smile.
The boy passed on, down endless deserted corridors and through great hallways, desperate to reach Serena’s chambers before someone else did. In one of the great halls of the palace, he found that the vast mosaic of the god Bacchus that decorated the floor had been smashed as if by a lunatic, the face of the god almost obliterated in shards of shattered tesserae. As if some frenzied madman had taken a heavy brass lampstand to it, and attacked it like a living being. Nothing made sense. Always in the air the acrid stench of spilt blood, distant screams, the aftertang of oilsmoke from lit torches where soldiers had passed by on their murderous task, torches in one hand, drawn swords in the other. Some of them would be well rewarded for this night’s work.
Other footsteps were coming closer, and there were more cries in the night.
The boy ran on, and at last he reached the doors to Serena’s chambers. He hammered on them. She heard his voice and opened the doors and he ran in to her. He clasped her round the waist and buried his face in the folds of her white stola.
‘My darling… ’ she said.
‘What is it? What is happening?’
‘You must go. You must go now. In the confusion and the darkness, you must try to… ’
He looked up at her. Her eyes were bright with tears. All distance and formality were gone.
‘I promised General Stilicho that I’d never try to escape again.’
‘Oh, my darling, my darling, it is an oath you need no longer keep.’ She cradled his head. ‘You need not keep an oath to a man who is dead.’
The boy cried out and the sound nearly broke her heart.
A bottle or a vase smashed somewhere nearby. There was the sound of sandalled feet being dragged over stone.
‘He can’t be!’ cried the boy.
She shook her head. It was the end. They clung together and wept.
‘They say my husband is a traitor – he and all his circle.’
Who were ‘they’? But he knew. The Emperor of Chickens, and his cold-eyed sister.
‘My darling, you must go.’
But he had already turned and drawn his sword when the soldiers came into the room. He walked towards them.
‘Attila,’ said her voice behind him.
He looked back. Two more soldiers had stepped from the doorway and were already flanking her with swords drawn.
He turned away. Ahead came a line of six or eight more soldiers of the Palatine Guard, resplendent in their black helmets and cuirasses. They smiled broadly.
‘Where’s Stilicho?’ he demanded.
The soldiers stopped. Their optio furrowed his brow. ‘That traitor? And what’s that to you, you little urchin?’ He considered. ‘Well, his head will by now be on top of a pikestaff on the walls of Pavia, I hope.’
‘And my son?’ Serena asked from behind him. ‘Eucharius?’
At that, even the optio could not bring himself to look directly at her. Eyes to the ground, he said, ‘He sleeps with his father.’
Serena fell against the wall, struggling for breath.
The boy stretched his sword out towards the guards. His hand trembled a little but he was unafraid. He fixed his unwavering gaze on them.
Normally the optio would simply have walked up to a boy like that, smacked him round the head, and taken his weapon off him sharpish. But there was something in this one’s eyes…
He signalled to his men. Almost casually, two of them walked forward with a length of chain, one each side of the boy, and slung it across his chest. Before he realised what had happened, they had walked round behind him, crossed over, and returned, and his arms were pinioned tightly by his sides. He stood as helpless as a trussed fowl in the marketplace.
‘Now,’ said the optio, ‘drop the blade like a good little girl.’
Attila told him to do something obscene to his mother.
‘Please,’ said Serena softly from the end of the hall.
The optio nodded to the two soldiers holding the chain. They leant back against it, as if in a tug of war, with the boy no more than a knot in the middle. The chain tightened sharply and he gasped in pain. The sword was squeezed from his hand and fell with a clang to the floor. The soldiers wrapped the rest of the chain round him and hauled him away.