Serena was marched along at swordpoint behind him.
He glanced back once, and she said something to him. It was too soft for him to hear her words but he knew what they were. And then she was gone.
They pushed him into a cell as black as a moonless night, as damp as an underground cave. He managed to get his teeth into a brawny forearm and tear out a small chunk of flesh as they shoved him in. He spat it back at the guard. There was a roar of pain and fury, and he was slammed against the wall, his head reeling with red stars. He fell in a bundle of chains into a fetid corner of the cell, his head dropped onto his chest, and he lost consciousness.
When he came round, he could see nothing. From a far dungeon he heard a woman’s voice, almost deranged with terror, crying, ‘No, no, no!’ But he knew it was not her. They were both dead. His only friends, his beloved… His head throbbed abominably, enough to make him weep with pain. Worse still, the constriction of the chain round his arms was a perpetual agony.
But his anger outweighed his pain. He saw them clearly in the blackness of his cell. Stilicho with his long, lugubrious face. His gravelly voice calling him ‘my young wolf-cub’. And her: her large dark eyes, her gentle smile. His last sight of her.
‘ My darling… ’
‘But my people will come,’ he said quietly to himself, despite his pain. ‘They will not tolerate this insult.’ And then, more loudly, so that even the gaoler down at the end of the row heard his words and frowned, he said, ‘The Huns will come.’
9
Such was the night on which General Stilicho and his entire circle were savagely destroyed.
An official version was put out by the imperial court, saying that he had been secretly plotting with the barbarian tribes, perhaps with the Huns themselves, to overthrow Honorius and all his family, and to install his own son, Eucharius, on the throne instead. But few believed this, for they knew that Stilicho was an honourable man. And for my part, I do not think he had a traitor’s heart. I think that Honorius, encouraged by his sister Galla Placidia and unscrupulous and self-seeking courtiers such as Eumolpus, Olympian and the rest, came to see Stilicho as a rival in the affections of the people.
In his encampment outside Pavia, the great general, so many times the saviour of Rome on distant battlefields, could have taken up arms against the small troop of soldiers, under the command of the pusillanimous Count Heraclian, who came to arrest him that night; for the great majority of the army would certainly have fought and died for him. Their loyalty was to Stilicho, not to the emperor. But Stilicho could not find it in himself to take up arms against his beloved fatherland, even when his fatherland sought to kill him. Instead he rode from Pavia to Ravenna, and sought sanctuary in a church there. Count Heraclian stationed his troops around the church, lured Stilicho out with false promises of safe passage, and then, as soon as he was in his clutches, shamefully had him beheaded on the spot, according to the strict but secret orders of the emperor himself.
Rome always kills its finest servants, its bravest sons; or so it sometimes seems.
Along with them, the emperor also had killed Stilicho’s young son, Eucharius; the Praetorian Prefects of both Italy and Gaul; two masters-general of the army who were devoted to Stilicho; the quaestor Bonaventura; the imperial treasurer; and many others, their names now forgotten to history, though not to the hearts that loved them.
Following the massacre, every fawning courtier who had previously sung Stilicho’s praises suddenly saw the light, admitted that they had always mistrusted him from the start, and fervently agreed that he had indeed been the most heinous and malicious of traitors.
The many friends of Stilicho were horribly tortured, to make them confess to treachery. Without exception they went to their graves in silence, nobly justifying by their deaths Stilicho’s friendship with them in life.
Stilicho’s wife, Serena, was also killed, strangled in a dungeon with a ligature of silk. They say that she went calmly to her end, praying to Christ for the souls of those who killed her. They say that she died with a strange serenity, as befitted her name. As if she could already see her beloved husband waiting for her there, on the shores of that eternally sunlit country, beyond the cold dark river she must cross.
But Stilicho’s troops, at least, refused to believe that their commander had been a traitor. And the only immediate result of the massacre was that thirty thousand of them, in their furious indignation at the behaviour of the imperial court of Rome, promptly went over to join Alaric and the army of the Goths. Whereupon Alaric, sensing that the empire was once more coming apart, turned his eyes again on the prize of Rome.
A mood of festering hatred settled over the courts of the city. A mood of sullen coercion, abject flattery, and naked fear showing through the ghastly smiles.
Attila did not smile. Still a prisoner, his life spared, still the best guarantee that the Huns would not turn against Rome.
Honorius spent more and more time in Ravenna with his chickens.
Galla Placidia spent more and more time in Rome giving orders.
And the Hun boy spent more and more time alone in his dim-lit cell, his fists bunched up and pressed against his ears, or into the red stars of his eyeballs. Torn apart by the promises he had made to Stilicho, by what he knew Stilicho would have wanted of him, and yet also by the knowledge of what had become of Stilicho himself. That most loyal servant. ‘Do what is right, Attila.’
But another year passed, and the Huns did not come.
Although at all times the boy remained under strict guard, his lessons were resumed, his regime was relaxed, and he was even given a slightly larger chamber.
Other hostage children came and went, depending on what diplomacy had achieved with the various Germanic peoples who threatened the empire’s borders. But Attila would mix with none of them. He despised them all.
He especially depised the two Vandal princes, Beric and Genseric, the most willingly and thoroughly Romanised of the hostages. They had been released before back to their people, and now returned to Rome quite eagerly, under some new diplomatic deal.
They were a few years his senior, perhaps sixteen and eighteen respectively, and very much convinced of their own superiority and their urbane and raffish wit. On one occasion, Attila heard them making a cynical joke about the deaths of Stilicho and Serena. He turned to them and, fixing them with those eyes of his, which even at this age were beginning to take on a terrible aspect beneath his lowering brows, said that if he ever heard them saying such things again he would see to it that they were both dead before nightfall. The brothers looked at each other and laughed at this outrageous threat. But their eyes betrayed more than a little anxiety; and they never mentioned the murdered general or his wife in front of the boy again.
Nevertheless, the Vandal princes, perhaps under pressure from more highly placed palace courtiers, continually tried to persuade the boy to relax and enjoy the soft delights that Rome had to offer. For it is well known that the Vandals are the most slothful of people.
‘Do you have hot baths, and fine wines, and robes of silk, and such foods as we eat here, back among the black tents of your people?’ Genseric asked him mockingly.
Beric added, ‘I have never yet seen a Hun in a robe of silk, have you, Genseric?’
‘Indeed not,’ murmured Genseric, stroking his own silken robe as he spoke. ‘In a motley of dusty leather leggings and, I think, rabbit fur, perhaps, but in silk? No.’