And they smiled mockingly at the bristling boy.
Attila rejected their approaches with contempt. Indeed the brothers, like all the other hostage children, seemed to him as blissfully foolish and unaware of the truth about their world as sleek and fattened cattle in rich pasture, feeding and lolling complacently in the warm summer sun, oblivious of the fact that when winter set in their keepers would in a trice become their killers.
He kept himself even more isolated than before, and one rolling glare of his eyes was usually enough to make even the stoutest adversary back off.
The other children plumed themselves on their ability to speak Latin and Greek, seduced by what they saw as the superior culture of their hosts. They would quote Horace or Virgil to each other, or the exquisite couplets of Sappho; and they would half close their eyes, and sigh, for all the world like the most enervated aesthetes of Baiae or Pompeii. Attila continued to learn Latin doggedly, and with grim determination, just as he continued to learn his Roman history, while regarding his Greek pedagogue, poor, put-upon Demetrius of Tarsus, with scorn.
He learnt of the great victories of Scipio Africanus, of Caesar in Gaul, of Fabius Cunctator, Fabius the Delayer, who defeated the Carthaginians by refusing to engage, but by harrying them with constant guerrilla warfare.
‘That is how my people would fight Rome,’ said Attila. ‘With patience and guile.’
Demetrius snapped, ‘You will desist from-’
‘All these great heroes of Rome defeated other peoples and extended Rome’s boundaries so gloriously,’ queried the boy. ‘Does that mean that warfare and conquest are always glorious?’
The pedagogue was wrong-footed, as usual. ‘Only if the victor is also the party of superior laws and culture,’ he said carefully. ‘As is Rome, compared to the uncouth tribes beyond its borders. Indeed, if Rome were not a superior culture, Providence would never have permitted her to win such an empire in the first place.’
The boy considered briefly, then smiled. ‘In philosophy,’ he said, ‘that is what would be termed a circular argument. And logically it is quite worthless.’
Demetrius was rendered momentarily speechless. The boy laughed.
Once, Rome had been great. That much the boy perceived, and grudgingly admired. When he read of Regulus, or Horatius, or Mucius Scaevola, those strong, grim-faced, relentless heroes of ancient Rome, his blood thrilled in his veins. And when he gazed up at the lofty buildings of the city, he admitted greatness when he saw it. But that was long ago and from another world. Now it was all decadence: a rotten fruit, a hollow shell. The Romans had lost their way, and did not even know it.
As for the barbarian peoples whom Rome continued to cultivate and disarm, they forfeited their barbarian virtues without gaining any of the countervailing old Roman strengths: fortitude, stoicism, self-discipline, warrior hardihood; a pride in self and nation and race; and that humility before the gods which is the mark of true wisdom: a proud and even joyful acceptance of whatever fate the gods have decreed for you, no matter how terrible that fate might be.
Instead, the princes of the Vandals or the Sueves or the Burgundians were wretchedly seduced, passing their wasted days in listless self-indulgence, like Beric and Genseric. And when they were released back to their people, they took with them chefs and court dancers and masseurs, tailors and musicians and poets, and established them in their barbarian homes in a clumsy and ludicrous aping of Roman ways. They even took back with them their own personal hairdressers.
The only time a court hairdresser ever tried to get close to Attila’s shaggy mop, he ended up regretting it.
The Goths at least, it was said, were made of sterner stuff. And in the fitful skirmishes between the Huns and those tall Germanic horsemen, with their mighty ashen spears and their tawny plumes nodding in the wind, it seemed that their reputation was deserved. But many too many of the barbarian tribes were being destroyed: not by weapons of war, but by baths, and wine, and silk.
Attila gagged on the perfumed courts of Rome, even as he saw that those courts were tottering. Within, amid the vast colonnaded staterooms of marble and gold, malachite and porphyry, the emperor and empress and their fawning courtiers might dress in brocades heavy with rubies and emeralds, their white arms wreathed in gold bracelets, their hair piled high with pearl diadems, as they glided in sinister silence beneath their vast, self-laudatory mosaics gleaming through clouds of incense. But close up the barbarian boy, the little wolf-cub in their midst, saw with his unblinking yellow eyes the fissures in the great buildings and abandoned temples of the city, and he observed the many draughty and untenanted rooms of the palace. He saw the people beginning to starve, while still the Roman rich wore silk. Attila scorned silk robes as unfit even for women – was it not Heliogabalus, the monstrous boy-emperor Heliogabalus himself, who had been the first in Rome to wear robes of pure silk? After three terrible years, sickened by his insane cruelties, the people had risen up and killed him. But now they aped him – and not only in his dress: in his greed and his depravity, too. So it seemed to the boy. Aesthetes even told tales of Heliogabalus’ exquisite jests, and reminisced with a fond nostalgia about how he had murdered his guests at a banquet by suffocating them in falling clouds of rose-petals. The guests had gasped and expired beneath deep drifts of flowers, crying out for mercy. The emperor had looked on and laughed. The aesthetes, too, now laughed.
The boy longed instead for the banks of the wide brown Danube, and the Kharvad Mountains, and the plains beyond. He longed for simple mare’s milk and meat, loathing the rich novelties, the ridiculous, contrived delicacies that the Romans ate. He longed for the sound of the wolves in the high mountain passes, and the sight of the black felt tents of his people, and the great royal pavilion of his grandfather, Uldin, hung with animal skins and decorated with carved and painted horses’ heads.
He watched and waited. Patience was always the supreme virtue of his people. ‘Patience is a nomad,’ they said.
In time, the Huns would come.
One evening he was making his way to the kitchens for dinner when he was accosted by one of the palace chamberlains.
‘Tonight you will be dining in the private chambers of Prince Beric and Prince Genseric,’ he purred.
The boy scowled. ‘No I will not,’ he said.
‘By orders of Princess Galla Placidia,’ said the chamberlain icily, not even looking at him.
The boy considered for a moment, then his proud shoulders slumped a little, and he turned and allowed himself to be led to the private chambers of the Vandal brothers. The chamberlain knocked, and a languid voice called, ‘Enter.’
The chamberlain opened the door and pushed Attila inside.
So, thought Attila, staring around, this is what you get if you behave yourself. This is how Rome seduces its enemies.
The door slammed shut behind him.
Before him was a large chamber with a colonnade of pillars running round three sides. Although it was still broad daylight outside, the long summer evening not yet run, in here the drapes were already drawn and the only light was artificial. It also felt as if the underfloor heating was on, even at this time of year. He was suffocating already. Especially as the overheated air was perfumed with attar of roses.
The floor was elaborately decorated with mosaics and black marble, and the chamber was dimly lit with multiple candelabra – not smoky clay oil lamps such as he had in his own chamber, but the finest, most expensive, creamy-coloured beeswax candles, set in silver candelabra that towered over his head. At the back of the chamber, in the dim light, further rooms opened off, and there came the sounds of laughter, high-pitched shrieks and giggles.