‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ whispered the slave.
In ordinary circumstances, a slave was strictly forbidden to address anyone unless first addressed himself. But circumstances were far from ordinary.
Attila frowned. ‘I’m not frightened,’ he said haughtily. ‘Just disgusted.’
It was the slave’s turn to frown.
Attila waved towards the princes’ chambers. ‘Some of the other hostages I’m supposed to mix with,’ he said. ‘Scum.’
The slave allowed himself a very slight noncommittal smile.
‘Why should I be frightened, though?’
The slave’s eyes widened. ‘You mean you haven’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘About Alaric?’
‘What about Alaric?’ He could almost have shaken him. ‘Tell me.’
The slave drew in a deep breath. ‘He’s marching on Rome. At the head of a hundred thousand men.’
At the news, the strange Hun boy looked anything but frightened. Instead, to the slave’s astonishment, a slow smile spread across his face as he digested the news.
‘Like Rhadagastus all over again,’ he murmured.
‘Except that Alaric is no Rhadagastus,’ said the slave quietly. ‘By all accounts he is a great leader, who has the absolute loyalty of his men. And besides, who does Rome have to command her own armies, now that… you-know-who is gone?’
Attila nodded. He reached for the jug, took another long draught, and set it back in the slave’s hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Apparently it’s not done to thank a slave. But thank you anyway.’
Then the strange Hun boy turned to walk back to his chamber, and the slave could have sworn that he actually heard him whistling.
The rest of Rome cowered in fear. In the palace at Ravenna, there was outright panic. People ran around like the emperor’s own chickens at the scent of a fox. For with General Stilicho so recently murdered, and no fewer than thirty thousand of his men consequently gone over to join Alaric and his grim-faced Goths, who was there now to save Rome? Count Heraclian, they said. But Heraclian was a far lesser man than Stilicho; just as Alaric was a far greater man than Rhadagastus.
‘That fool Emperor Honorius,’ they whispered in the shadowy courts of the palace. ‘He has cut off his own right hand with his left.’
Throughout Rome, and Ravenna, and throughout all of Italy, from the plains of the Po and Cisalpine Gaul to the high hill-towns of Calabria and across to the golden hills of Sicily, there was the hum of fear and imminent panic.
Except in one small, silent chamber, lit only by cheap and smoky oil lamps. There a boy of some thirteen or fourteen years, but small for his age, his cheeks deeply riven with strange blue scars, knelt and prayed.
He prayed to the god of the Huns: a bare sword driven into the earth, forming a cross like the cross of the Christians, but of hard steel. He prayed to his father Astur, the Lord of All that Flies, and in the name of the murdered General Stilicho and his wife, Serena. He clenched his teeth and set his jaw and prayed for vengeance upon their murderers, and remembering them he wept again.
And he prayed that the Goths might come and do the work that the Huns had so far shamefully failed to do. Even though they were the immemorial enemies of his people, let the Goths come, and raze Rome flat in the red wind from the steppes.
See the Tiber foaming with Roman blood.
See the buildings fall like broken bones.
Let it all fall. Let it all be destroyed.
And when it was razed flat, let the very dust be trampled beneath the barbaric hooves of a hundred thousand horses. Leave not one stone standing. Nothing but seven bare and desolate hills beside a blood-red river where great Rome once stood. Nothing on those hills but a single tomb beneath the wide bare sky. A tomb for a murdered general and his beloved, murdered wife.
He heard her sigh again, through his ragged tears: ‘ My darling. .. ’
He closed his eyes and prayed to Chakgha, the horse-god of the plains, and to the kotu ruh, the daemon-spirits of the wind, and to the kurta ruh, the wolf-spirits of the holy Altai Mountains, and to the Father Spirit of the Eternal Blue Sky.
‘O Lord, I pray,
Rain down tonight,
Drown every light,
Rain down tonight.’
PART II
The Flight and the Fall
1
As far as China, meanwhile, the tribes were stirring…
They say that the northern boundary of the Empire of China is defended by a great wall, greater by far than the wall that cuts across the north of Britain in defiance of the attacks of the blue-painted men of the Caledonian wastes. But they say many things, and the historian must be judicious in what he believes and records. Does not Herodotus himself record that towards China, in the endless wildernesses of Scythia, there live a tribe of men called the Arimaspians, each of whom has only one eye? And also that in those regions there dwell griffins, which defend great treasure-troves of gold? That there is a tribe there called the Pedasians, among whom, when danger is about to threaten the people, their priestess grows a luxuriant beard?
We are furthermore told that towards the mountains that divide Scythia in two from east to west, there live the Argippaeans, who subsist on nothing but cherry juice, which they drink from little bowls with lapping tongues, like cats. They know no weapons of war for they are utterly peaceful. They are regarded as sacred by all the other tribes of Scythia, and never harmed. For my part I long to meet such a gentle people, but I fear they are as much a childish fairy-tale as the gold-guarding griffins, and that there is not a tribe in the world, howsoever remote, which knows not war or the sorrowful weapons of war.
Further north from these mythical peace-lovers, historians tell us, the air is full of feathers; and then north again, and there live a people who sleep six months and wake six months, for that is how their year is made up, half day and half night. But this is plainly absurd. And among a people called the Issedonians, Herodotus tells us, women have absolute equality with men – which is even more absurd than the idea of a people subsisting entirely on cherry juice! No society could survive for long which practised that kind of lunacy.
I for my part do not believe such myths and fairy-tales, and am astonished that Herodotus, who called himself an historian, should trouble himself even to record such extravagant oddities. Yet it is not only Herodotus, the Father of History (or the Father of Lies, as some wits have called him), who records such things. In that immortal epic The Voyage of the Argo, by Apollonius of Rhodes, do we not read of the strange Mossynoeci, who inhabit the remote region of the Sacred Mountain in Asia Minor? Everything that other people do in public, these people do in private, and everything others do in private, they do in public. But of course Apollonius was a poet and, as Plato said, all poets are liars. Apollonius drew his story from Xenophon’s Anabasis, whose account of the Mossynoeci is even more outlandish. He tells us that they use dolphin fat where the Greeks would use olive oil; and that their pale skins are beautifully tattooed all over with brightly coloured flowers; and that if they laugh in public they are deeply ashamed, and generally go into their own houses to laugh in secret; as they do also to dance, all on their own, like madmen. They will only eat in absolute solitude, for they regard the act of putting food into an orifice in their face as quite disgusting. On the other hand, these topsy-turvy people defecate quite freely in the streets, without embarrassment; and most shamefully of all, they see nothing wrong with enjoying sexual congress with their own wives or, it seems, like the Etruscans of old, with each other’s wives, most lasciviously, in the open. As Apollonius says, ‘like swine in the fields, they lie down on the ground in promiscuous intercourse and are not in the slightest bit troubled by the presence of others watching them.’ One wonders if the poet of Rhodes has not let his imagination run away with him here, and exchanged the inspiration of the Muses for inspiration of a more salacious kind…