“Today we ran your race,” I said. “Tomorrow we run mine. Not a sprint but endurance: whoever goes farthest between sunrise and sunset.”
“That’s a fool’s race, Roman. A Hun can cover a hundred miles in a day.”
“In your country. Let’s see it in mine.”
So Skilla and I set out at dawn, the others in the party making their own bets and cheering us as we departed, joking about the frisky foolishness of young men. The Rhodope Mountains were to the left and Philippopolis ahead. There I first encountered Attila’s destruction. We skirted the devastated city at mid-morning; and while Skilla scarcely glanced at it, I was stunned at the extent of the ruin. The roofless me-tropolis looked like a torn honeycomb, open to the rains.
Grass grew in the streets, and only a few priests and shep-herds resided around a church the barbarians had somehow spared. The surrounding fields had gone to weeds, and the few villagers peered from huts like kittens from a den.
I had to beat the Huns who had done this.
The road crossed the Hebrus River on an arched stone bridge, crudely repaired by the locals, and became rougher, side hilling along the river’s valley. With the rising terrain, my confidence grew. Still we kept within sight of each other: sometimes the Hun riding ahead, and sometimes my determined mount passing him. Neither of us stopped for lunch, eating in the saddle. In the early afternoon we crossed the river again and then the land began to steepen as the road climbed toward the Pass of Succi.
Skilla cursed at the grade.
His lighter pony could keep an easy pace on level ground.
On a slope its gait was less even and the horse’s lighter muscles and lungs began to strain. My mare was bigger in relation to her rider, her lungs giving her a reserve of air and her oats giving her a store of energy. As we climbed, the Hun’s gelding began to slip behind. When it lost sight of Diana, it slowed even more.
The sun was setting over a sea of blue mountains when I reined in at the crest of the pass. The rest of the party wouldn’t make it this far today and it would be cold to wait for them at the summit, but I didn’t care. I had ridden a smarter race.
Skilla finally came up at dusk, his horse looking ragged, as morose in defeat as he was jubilant in victory. “If not for the mountains, I would have beaten you.”
“If not for the sea, I could walk to Crete.” I held out my hand. “Two solidi, Hun. Now you must pay tribute to me.”
It was such a bold insult that for a moment Skilla seemed ready to balk. Yet the Huns had their own sense of fairness, part of which was acknowledgment of debt. Grudgingly, the Hun handed over the coins. “Tomorrow again?”
“No. We’ll get too far ahead of the others and kill our horses.” I tossed a coin back. “We each won one day. Now we’re even.” It seemed the diplomatic thing to do.
The Hun contemplated the coin for a moment, embarrassed at the charity, and then cocked his arm and hurled it away into the dark.
“A good race, Roman.” He tried to smile but it was a grimace. “Someday, perhaps, we will race for real, and then—
no matter how long your lead—I will catch you and kill you.”
VI
I
THE NEW KING
OF CARTHAGE
How far the fight for justice has taken me, thought the Greek doctor Eudoxius.
It was dazzling noon at conquered Carthage on the shore of North Africa, and the rebel physician found himself in a world of bizarre color. Marble and stucco shimmered like snow. Arcades and antechambers were hollows of dark shadow. The Mediterranean was as blue as the cloak of the Virgin, and the sands shone as blond as a Saxon’s hair. So different from the hues of Gaul and Hunuguri! How odd to come to this capital that had been destroyed by the Roman Republic so many centuries ago, rebuilt by the Roman Empire, and now captured and occupied by Vandals—a people who had originated in gray lands of snow and fog. Down from the cold the tribe had come, carving like a knife through the Western Empire for decade after decade. Finally they marched through Hispana to the Pillars of Hercules and learned to be sailors, and then they seized the warm and fecund granary of Africa, the capital of which was Carthage.
The Vandals, once disdained as hapless barbarians, now rested their boots on the throat of Rome.
As if to fit their sunny new kingdom, King Gaiseric’s rude and chaotic court was a rainbow of recruited human color, of blond Vandal and red-headed Goth, black Ethiopian and brown Berber, swarthy Hun and bronzed Roman. All these opportunists had been collected in the migratory conquest and now roosted in a half-deserted and decaying city that no one bothered to keep up anymore. Carthage’s palaces had become barracks, its kitchens sties; its aqueducts were falling into disrepair, and its roads were buckling from the assault of sun and rain. There were no engineers left, no scholars, no priests, no astronomers, and no philosophers.
All had been slain or fled, and the schools had closed. The barbarians paid no money to maintain them. There was just Gaiseric’s powerful army and navy, foraging on the carcasses of the countries they conquered like a tide of ants and wondering how soon they must resume their ravaging march.
Eudoxius believed he knew the answer. Ignorant, arrogant, and illiterate these Vandals might be, but they had seized Sicily and could almost throw stones at Italy itself. As a result, Rome was in the lion’s jaw. The top of the mouth was represented by the empire of Attila, occupying the roof of Europe. The bottom was Gaiseric, the conqueror of north-western Africa. Now the two rulers merely had to be convinced to snap their jaws shut in unison and the oppressive fragment of empire left between them would at last disappear. With it would go the greedy landlords, the heartless slave traders, the pompous aristocrats, the cruel tax collectors, and the corrupt priests who lived like lice on the body of the poor. Had not the Christ himself condemned such leeches? Ever since Eudoxius had realized how the world truly worked—that the strong stole from the weak—he had been determined to change it. Rome was a cancer, and from its excision would rise a better world. These ignorant barbarians would be his unwitting tool to forge a new paradise.
The Greek plied the physician’s trade only when hunger and the lack of a patron made it necessary. Medicine was a messy business replete with failure and blame, and Eudoxius didn’t really like to work. His real passion was politics, and he imagined himself the liberator of the vast peasantry that Rome had oppressed for centuries. In the early days the Romans had exemplified a golden age of yeoman farmers and free men, the Greek believed, banding together to triumph through virtue as well as courage. But this Republican brotherhood had gradually been replaced by tyranny and sloth and the worst kinds of taxes, slavery, tenant farming, and compulsory military service. In his youth, Eudoxius had preached reform, just as the Lord Jesus had preached his own kingdom in the hills of Judea, but his Greek neighbors jeered at him, too ignorant to understand their own demo-cratic history. So after migrating to northeastern Gaul, where the inhabitants were simpler and less skeptical, he had helped organize an uprising of the Bagaudae tribe against the Romans. His dream was to create a kingdom of free men, with him at its head! Then the great and ruthless General Flavius Aetius had led his mongrel mix of Roman soldiers and barbarian mercenaries against the rebellion, slaughtering the Bagaudae and forcing Eudoxius to flee to Attila. How humiliating! The doctor had been forced to pledge fealty to the worst tyrant of all, the king of the Huns.
At first Eudoxius was in despair. Then he realized that this must all be God’s plan and that he had been given an opportunity to create alliance. How shrewd were the mysterious ways of the Almighty! The doctor began to whisper in Attila’s ear.
Aetius! The very name was a curse. Romans hailed a man whom Eudoxius considered to be a toad for Emperor Valentinian and his mother, Placidia, a scheming and slippery general who had been sent as a hostage to the Huns in his youth, learned their language, and then hired the Huns to annihilate his ever-changing enemies. Aetius represented the whirlpool of alliance, betrayal, and assault that passed for imperial policy. For decades the wily general had played one tribe against another to hold the rotten toga of Rome together. As long as Aetius existed, Rome existed. And as long as Rome existed there could be no true democracy: nothing, at least, like the great civilization of ancestral Athens. But now Attila had united the Huns, and Gaiseric had seized Carthage and Sicily. It was time for the lion’s final bite.