The Judgement ath-3
The Judgement
( Attila the Hun - 3 )
William Napier
The Judgement
William Napier
LIST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
Characters marked with an asterisk were real historical figures. The rest might have been.
Aetius* – Gaius Flavius Aetius, born 398 in the frontier town of Silestria, in modern-day Bulgaria. The son of Gaudentius, Master-General of Cavalry, and himself later Master-General of the Roman Army in the West
Aladar – Hun warrior, son of Chanat, one of Attila’s eight generals
Amalasuntha* – only daughter of King Theodoric of the Visigoths
Andronicus – captain of the Imperial Guard, Constantinople
Arapovian – Count Grigorius Khachadour Arapovian, an Armenian nobleman
Ariobarzanes – Lord of Azimuntium
Athenais* – married to the eastern Emperor Theodosius II, and re-named Eudoxia
Attila* – born 398, King of the Huns
Bela – Hun general
Cadoc – a Briton, son of Lucius
Candac – Hun general
Chanat – Hun general, father of Aladar
Checa* – first wife of Attila
Chrysaphius* – a Byzantine courtier
Csaba – Hun general
Dengizek* – eldest son of Attila
Ellak* – son of Attila
Enkhtuya – a Hun witch
Galla Placidia* – born 388, daughter of Emperor Theodosius the Great, sister of Emperor Honorius, mother of Emperor Valentinian III
Gamaliel – an aged, well-travelled medical man
Genseric* – King of the Vandals
Geukchu – Hun general
Honoria* – daughter of Galla Placidia, sister of Valentinian
Idilico – a Burgundian girl
Jormunreik – Visigothic wolf-lord
Juchi – Hun general
Knuckles – baptised Anastasius, a Rhineland legionary
Leo* – Bishop of Rome
Little Bird – a Hun shaman
Lucius – also Ciddwmtarth, a British leader of his people
Malchus – a captain of cavalry
Marcian* – eastern Emperor, 450-457, married to Pulcheria
Nemesianus – a wealthy man of Aquileia
Nicias – a Cretan alchemist
Noyan – Hun general
Odoacer* – a Gothic warlord
Orestes* – a Greek by birth, Attila’s lifelong companion
Priscus of Panium* – a humble scribe
Pulcheria* – sister of Theodosius II
Romulus Augustulus* – the last emperor
Sabinus – Legionary Legate of the VII at Viminacium
Sangiban* – King of the Alans
Tarasicodissa Rousoumbladeotes* – Isaurian chieftain, also known as Zeno
Tatullus – First Centurion of the VII at Viminacium
Themistius* – an orator
Theodoric* – King of the Visigoths, 419-451
Theodoric* – Visigothic prince, eldest son of King Theodoric
Theodosius* – eastern Emperor, 408-450
Torismond* – Visigothic prince, son of King Theodoric
Valamir – Visigothic wolf-lord
Valentinian* – western Emperor, 425-455
Vigilas* – a Byzantine courtier
PART I
The Fury
1
MARGUS FAIR
The southern banks of the Danube, AD 449
A morning in early summer. The great river meandering slowly through the rich Moesian plains and eastwards to the Euxine Sea. A patchwork of ploughland and meadow, and further away from the town, blossoming orchards and copses of ancient woodland. The smaller River Margus flowing down northwards from the hills to join the majestic Danube.
Darting over the surface of the water, the bright green metallic flash of damselflies, and columns of tiny waterflies rising and falling in the warming summer air. Willows along the banks of the river and alders beside the damp streambeds. Black poplars releasing their fluffy white seeds in clouds, landing and revolving and floating on downstream. Minnows flashing and darting in shoals, trout in among the brown boulders, beautiful grayling. Nodding kingcups reflected in the water, and the meadows all around scattered with the yellow of marsh marigold and yellow flag. No sound but the wind rustling the reeds, or the single peep of a duckling as it raced over the water back to its mother, beating its stubby little wings to no effect.
Riverine nature so peaceful and serene on this morning in early May, that for a brief moment you might think yourself back in Adam’s Eden, long before the Fall.
And then the shadow of a heron over the waters, cruising in silent and low, its cold and passionless yellow eyes swivelling downwards in search of prey.
Come closer to the little town of Margus with its ancient walls and its cathedral tower with its solitary iron bell, and you hear the sound of human bustle and chatter. There are naked children laughing and splashing in the shallows, brown and shiny as pebbles, mischievously opening the sallow-wood fish-traps and letting the fish swim free. There is laughter on the roads, and then in the meadows stretching up to the walls of the town itself, laid out in many colours and resounding with the languages of many different peoples – the great and celebrated Margus fair.
A vast, rowdy, polyglot encampment, teeming with energy, enterprise and greed. Open-sided canvas tents and pied awnings and stalls of carved and painted wood. People buying and selling with clacking tongues and a whole grammar of gestures and winks and hand signals. Buyers slowly producing worn leather purses from inside their robes, and sellers biting coins to test their worth – plenty of bronze coins around that have been washed with arsenic to make them pass for silver. Fur merchants from the far north, from beyond the Roman Empire, selling bearskin and marten, beaver and sable. Bright-eyed songbirds whistling in their osier cages. Everywhere the savour of smoking fish and roasting meat, and girls selling slugs of wine straight from the barrel in wooden cups. More elaborate inns and taverns under canvas. Pickpockets, of course, preying on the drunk and unwary, and women looking for husbands or at least money, walking light-stepped and lazy-eyed, swaying their hips between the groups of men.
Further off, the warm ripe smell of livestock in wooden corrals. Cattle dealers and sheep sellers communicating in their secret language and occult numbers, with barely discernible nods and winks for deals. And the air everywhere filled with greetings and curses, jests and lewd remarks, the high piping cries of excited children, the cackle of geese, and a single screaming monkey in a cage. From the land of the Nubians, so the monkey-seller said, without any great conviction. The monkey reached out its paw and pulled the hair of unwary bystanders. And all this ripe human chaos under the supposed regulation of a handful of frontier troops from the towering legionary fortress of Viminacium, ten miles east.
There was a girl there, a gentle, dreamy girl with a hare-shot lip, because a hare had walked across her mother’s path when she was pregnant with her. So they said. She carried a yoke of wooden pails and sold goat’s milk by the cupful, but she was not in truth a bold or assertive seller and she made little money. She too frequently gave cupfuls of milk away to hungry-eyed, plaintive children pestering her. When she returned at the day’s end, her mother would scold her for not having sold enough, accusing her of daydreaming her days away. And scold her even more for not having found a husband to take her off her poor old mother’s hands.
She disliked jostling crowds, and was drawn to the edge of the fair where the gaudy tents and stalls gave way to open meadows, and then the low line of the hills to the west, and the jut of Mons Aureus, the mountain of gold, with its fabulous mines. The vaul
ts of Viminacium were full of gold, so they said. When it was transported down the great imperial trunk road to the emperor in Constantinople, it went with an escort of a thousand men. And the emperor… the girl always imagined him as made of gold himself, seated on his high throne covered in gold leaf, like a statue, immobile, unapproachable. A living god.
Now she lingered shyly before an old woman’s canopy of grubby canvas supported on gnarled staves.
‘Come you in, girl, come you in. It’s a lover you’ll be wanting at your age!’
The old woman grinned and bobbed about among her strange wares, performing almost a little dance, her white hair in a tight bun, her ringed fingers fluttering. The old woman was no witch, no purveyor of instruments for cruelty, malice and revenge, but only a fortune-teller. A preacher had earlier that morning come out of the town to stand by her tent and preach on the text ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, but the people only scowled at him and passed on, leaving the preacher impotent and the old woman alone and unlynched.
The girl hesitantly set down her pails and the old woman took her hand and drew her in. Within the shadows of the tent there were animals’ feet and tails, and strangely shaped stones like seashells, long dyed feathers of heron and bustard, tufts of multicoloured rags tied round sticks topped with small brass bells, leather pouches of herbs, bottles of dubious liquor. Then something else caught the girl’s eye, something very beautiful, which she took at first for a mirror. A little vanity such as rich ladies use to admire themselves when they are carried to dinner in their gilded litters, through the grand wide streets of great cities. Jewelled ladies with their white-chalked faces and forearms and little flattering mirrors.
The old fortune-teller knew at once what she wanted and bobbed over and retrieved it. It was a strange box made from hinged coloured glass, held together with silver wires. It would be very costly and the girl had no money but for the few desultory coppers she had earned so far that morning. But the old woman brought the coloured glass box out into the sunshine anyway and passed it to her without mockery.
‘Look into it,’ she said. ‘Hold it up to the light. Some see the world as it is, though in many pretty colours. But some, who have the gift, see the world as it will be.’
The girl hesitated. She didn’t know that she believed in such things. Not really. Besides, who has the strength to see their own future? Especially a poor goat-girl with a scold of a mother and a hare-shot lip?
The woman nodded encouragingly. ‘Look, child. The future may yet be sweet, and you have the gift.’
Somewhere in the distance there was a boy crying out from the river, drawing up his boat. Yelling, screaming about something. Running towards the fair. It was all the excitement no doubt, nothing more.
So the girl held the little box of coloured glass up before her face and opened one of the delicate little hinges. It was the deep red glass that she held up to her eyes, and she looked through and shuddered. Because she saw the world as if covered in blood. The mountain of gold to the west was a mountain of blood. The screaming of the boy running up from the river grew louder, closer. She saw the straggling meadows leading away along the river bank, groups of people carrying their baskets, pushing their handbarrows, coming through the long grass towards the fair on this gentle summer day. And beyond that, the low line of hills still catching the morning sun, but all red, all clouded red. The future.
She felt the old woman tugging at her sleeve, heard her saying something, and was about to tear her eyes away from this ghastly vision, this world of a blood-red future, when a movement in the far distance caught her eye, and instead of lowering the evil box she continued to stare through its red haze.
Rising up over the crest of the low hills to the west, she saw a line of horsemen. Banners in the breeze and spears against the sky.
2
MARGUS FALLS
Never would the people – those few who survived, stumbling away through the blood-soaked grass to cry their story into horror-stricken ears – never would they forget that day, nor their first sight of the horsemen from the east.
They rode muscular little ponies with big, ungainly heads, brutish and monstrous, like the heads of bulls. Shaggy even at the fetlock, with deep chests and haunches betraying their massive strength and stamina. Hooves and manes were dyed blood-red with crushed insects or dried berries from last autumn, boiled up again in water and fat. The riders had long arms and barrel chests, short legs and narrow, slanting eyes of cunning and glittering cruelty. Some of them, disdaining to wear helmets as they rode down upon the near defenceless fair, seemed to have skulls deformed and domed by some evil practice in infancy. Others wore pointed Scythian caps of leather, kalpaks, fringed with grey wolf ’s fur. Wolves falling on the stricken townspeople not in lean winter but in fat high summer, driven not by the stark necessity of hunger but by the love of destruction for its own sake.
Some had the sides of their heads scarred with burns to kill the hair there, others were crudely shaven, and almost all had their cheeks and the sides of their heads cut and deep dyed with tattoos. The thin, sparse beards on their chins were further garlanded and beribboned, or twisted into little plaits, and in their ears they wore heavy hoops of gold. Some rode barefoot and some wore leather leggings, gripping the sides of their mounts so surely that they seemed one with their horses. They wore barbarian breeches but most rode naked to the waist but for jangling bone jerkins, their dark chests and backs tattooed with snakes and grotesque faces. Their wrists and sinewy arms were wrapped with iron bands, gold bracelets, cloths and strips of leather, and they wore beaded silver torcs and the teeth of wolves and jackals on thongs around their dirty muscular throats. They rode with their reins hung with the flensed skulls of slaughtered enemies, with human scalps or hanks of blood-dried hair.
Each warrior bristled with the tips and points of a multitude of weapons. Short stabbing spears, long steel knives, curved swords slung across squat, powerful backs, curved spiked hatchets, and, clutched in the right fist, the deadly recurved bow of the steppes, with a bunch of arrows clutched alongside. Arrows strung and shot and falling interminably onto the stricken fair.
The people turned and ran among the falling tents and the already blazing stalls, but there was no escape. Already a column of the murderous horde had ridden round and taken the hills to the south, and cut the people off from flight that way. To the north there was only the river. Some fugitives threw themselves in and tried to swim for it, and of these a few survived, carried downstream and crawling back onto the southern shore miles away like half-drowned animals to tell their tale.
Singled out from among the wailing masses was the half-century of bewildered soldiers from Viminacium. The first were cut down where they stood, whirling on the spot in a spray of blood, unable to believe that this little light guard duty at a summer fair had suddenly turned into massacre, and this bright sunshine day to nightmare.
The captain of the guard, a centurion named Pamphilus, registered the numbers of the barbarian horde and immediately bellowed orders to a couple of his riders to head east, straight to Viminacium to call the full legion to arms. As an added precaution he despatched another squadron, an eight-man contubernium, to requisition a boat and make for Viminacium by river, just in case his riders were cut down on the road. Though he doubted very much that barbarians would have the foresight for such things.
But how had they got across the river? What had happened to the Danube lookouts? And the signalling stations that stretched all the way along the imperial frontier from the Euxine to the mouth of the Rhine? How could this have happened without warning? Where was the intelligence? Why hadn’t the exploratores reported back in advance? Raiding parties like this didn’t erupt out of nowhere.
None of it made any sense. All he could do now was drag his men back to the town bridge and form ranks. It was a hard decision.
His optio stared at him.
Pamphilus shook his head. ‘It’s not a general mass
acre. Most of them will be taken as slaves.’
‘A nice fate.’
‘Button your lip, Optio. We fall back to the town if we can. Otherwise we hold this damn bridge till the legion arrives.’
Whoever this horde might be, however many in number, he still had full confidence in the VII Legion, Claudia Pia Fidelis. ‘Six times brave, six times faithful’ was the legion’s motto. Stationed here for four long centuries on this far northern border, looking out over the Danube and into the wastes of Scythia. Waiting for the barbarians. And meanwhile building the imposing fortress of Viminacium, with wide roads south, east and west, and six miles of fine aqueduct. Good builders like all Roman soldiers, shovel in hand more than sword. The VII wasn’t the force it had been, true enough. None of the legions was. Numbers were down, the best drawn back to the field army based at Marcianopolis, the remainder derided nowadays as no more than an ‘hereditary peasant militia’. Some militia. Holding some fortress.
Still fifteen hundred of them, all told, though half of them would be out at their farms or in their workshops at any one time. Who could blame them? There wasn’t much to do back in the fort but drill and wait, under the stern eyes of the legionary legate. Otherwise they drank, they diced, gambling with the meagre pay too rarely received on time. But a legion was still a legion, or a rump of it, with a legion’s proud memories. And the legate of the VIIth, that big-bellied Gallus Sabinus, was no fool.
Pamphilus set up his men in ranks across the narrow bridge.
‘Barbarians out of the wilderness like these, opportunist raiders, they may be fast but they’ve got no staying power, and no siegecraft.’ Pamphilus was talking to his optio again, knowing he was only trying to reassure himself. ‘And no horse will ever charge a line of pikemen four ranks deep.
‘We hold them here for as long as possible. Fall back on the town if and when we can. They can’t outflank us on this bridge. And we wait for the legion and the cataphracts. We want as many heavy cavalry as possible. See how those naked devils take to being cut up by a line of charging lancers in full armour. Plus mounted archers. And then the good old mincing machine of the infantry. I don’t care how many of them there are, numbers are nothing. Till then, we hold out. It’s no great problem.’