One evening Attila called the twenty men and the twenty women to him in his fine new wooden palace, and gave them each a heavy purse of gold. But he ordered them otherwise to dress plainly. And then he sent them south, in the depths of winter, joking that they would appreciate the sunshine of the Mediterranean lands.
The women and the men went some as husband and wife, or brother and sister, or some in seeming family groups, and the king took care that none should go alone. And he sent them out south and west to the great cities of the empire, some to Sirmium, and some to Constantinople, to Ravenna and Mediolanum and Rome itself, or far to the west, to Treverum and to Narbo, or far south into the heat and dust of Antioch and Alexandria – strange destinations for those horse-people of the steppes! He told them to find work as scribes or servants for wealthy and powerful men, insinuating themselves wherever they might into the households of senators, patricians, landowners, bishops, prefects; and to describe themselves only as ‘easterners’ if asked about race and homeland. When they had important information, insofar as they could judge, they were to quit their masters at night-time and in secret, and sail home for the steppelands, never trusting a written message to any third party – in fact, never committing anything to paper.
From the distant ports of Massilia and Ravenna, Aquileia, Thessalonika, Alexandria and Antioch they would sail east again, through the Bosphorus and north to the shores of the Euxine Sea, stepping ashore at Tanais or Ophiusa or Chersonesus like the surviving Argonauts at Pagasae, bearing the Golden Fleece. And then upriver and finally by horseback to the camp of the Huns and the palace of Attila himself, where they would give him the treasure of their knowledge and he would bless them and bestow on them goblets and rings of gold beyond their dreams or imaginings.
With mingled fear and excitement, the spies left on their long and arduous journey.
As for the two Byzantine merchants, they had served their purpose. Attila never forgot or forgave their insolence to him on that dark night outside the gates of Tanais. They had learned now but alas, they had learned too late. On the morning of the spies’ departure, he ordered Yesukai and Aladar to take them down to the banks of the river. There they were ordered to kneel shivering in the long, frosted sedge, and the two warriors clubbed them to death, the most ignominious death for any man. Their bodies were rolled into the river, where they floated briefly amid the skim ice, the cracked eggs of their empty skulls trailing air bubbles, the grey roe of their brains floating in a greasy slick behind, steaming gently in the dawn in the freezing waters.
All that winter Attila waited, and into spring, when the ice on the river slowly thinned and vanished, smoking under the rising sun, and the snow melted away from the boundless land and the steppes turned as brilliant green under the sun as a kingfisher’s wings.
He waited in his solitude and his dreaming. Like the wolf, or the spider. Like the Iron River, the slow and steady and implacable Volga itself, for which, some say, he was named. But no man, I believe, will ever know the true meaning of his name.
In the royal palace, the wooden walls echoed to the sound of not one but two newborn infants, both daughters of the king. And in the tent of the king’s concubines, another score or more new lives were made. Attila himself named the boys. The girls were named by their mothers. Such names those proud, flushed women gave them as Aygyzel, meaning Beautiful Moon, and Nesebeda, meaning Everlasting Happiness, and Sevgila, meaning Beloved.
Out on the plains each day, throughout the bitterest winter winds, and then more willingly in springtime, his band of warriors, numbering as yet only a few hundred, galloped and wheeled under command, and learned to stop at an invisible barrier signalled by their commander’s call. They learned to fire their arrows at unimaginable speed, and the few bowyers and fletchers left among the people with the art still in their hands and eyes were set to work with a vengeance once more. His band of warriors grew strong, and, more important, confident in their strength. They began to long for battle to try their skills, and the strength of their souls.
One day one of the twenty chosen women returned, and went into the palace. It was many hours before she came out again, and she returned to her patient husband and her children with a pouch bulging with gold rings and a rare smile on her face. After that more came home, all that summer, bringing Attila the information that he wanted, and more.
At last all forty spies had returned, not one having run into danger through his own folly or failed in her mission. Thus he learned what he needed to learn, and daily grew stronger. The people too, the women as much as men, sensed this strange, growing power and energy among them and smiled more fiercely. The women sang their ancient harp-songs again, praising their men curtly for feats of arms, but scorning them lavishly and at length for weakness or doubt.
Their implacable king settled back upon his plain wooden throne in his wooden palace and, smiling, considered. For now it was time. The years pass, he thought, and all things ripen into sweetness. And there is a time, there is a time, to pluck the sweet ripe fruit of Rome. Or rather, to knock it from the tree and trample on it, for it is grown overripe and rotten and is no good to man or beast. And it is time. For I have counsel and strength for war. I shall make my people strong, and a mighty name among the nations. They shall no more be a laughing-stock, nor a footstool under the feet of foreign kings. Do not even the Christians in their holy book say that there is a time for love, and a time for hate, a time for war and a time for peace? Behold, my hand is strong; and I make my lands ready for war. From those sorrowful boyhood years of penal servitude in Rome, he could quote the Romans’ scriptures back at them as fluently as the Devil.
He smiled. Now it was a time for war. The gods must, after all, be entertained. Like their creature, man, straining forward in the arena to see the action… the gods, too, must be entertained.
7
This was how things stood, as Attila learned from his spies, in the late summer of the year which by Christian reckoning was called AD 442.
The years after 410 and the Sack of Rome had been bitter years. Yet it seemed to some in those days that at last the world had grown tired of faction and war. How wrong we were. As Plato said, only the dead know nothing of war. The living will never tire of it.
There were six days of sacking and looting, of a kind which surprised the city’s emaciated inhabitants in its restraint – King Alaric had given orders that no place of Christian worship should be touched. Then the Gothic armies withdrew from the city and turned south.
Only a few days later Alaric was dead, in mysterious circumstances. There was talk of a plot, of poison, of covert assassination… But nothing was ever known for certain.
Emperor Honorius’ sister, the cold-eyed, brilliant Galla Placidia, married a dull Illyiran general and had two children: a son called Valentinian, born in 419, and a daughter called Honoria, born three years later. Valentinian soon appeared to be as foolish and high-strung as his uncle, Honorius. Honoria was cleverer, playful, sharp-witted, a little charmer. Both children would in time have an untold effect upon their times.
Honorius had no children of his own, and his poor, neglected wife had died young. And then His Divine Majesty began to show more than a purely brotherly affection for his sister.
Emperors’ loves run not infrequently to members of their own family: Nero’s excessive affection for his mother and Caligula’s for his sisters are well known. Even Julius Caesar dreamed once of ravishing his own mother, although the soothsayers calmed his fears by assuring him that this symbolised that he should conquer his Mother Earth. Since the emperor was himself divine, however, perhaps he felt that only a fellow divinity was fit to share his bed. Moreover, so many were constantly plotting to kill him, that maybe the only ones he could trust in his bed were his own flesh and blood. Although, since it was so often his own flesh and blood who were the plotters, this policy of safety-in-incest was perhaps ill-advised.