Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Read online

  Two days after the arrival of the little group from Ravenna, the empress returned from a week beside the cool fountains in the gardens of the Summer Palace at Hieron, which she loved. It stands on a wind-cooled promontory where the straits meet the Euxine Sea, and is especially grateful at the dry, rank end of the season, when even the voices of the cicadas sound hoarse and choke with dust.

  And I was there; I, Priscus. I was there, present as a humble and unremarked court scribe, when their haunted, bewildered eyes first met. In the Triclinium of the Nineteen Couches. Aëtius and Athenaïs, both so confident and self-assured beyond their years, though in wholly different ways. There I saw all confidence and self-assurance flee from them.

  ‘The Princess Galla Placidia, and Master-General Aëtius of the Western Legions,’ announced the chamberlain.

  They stepped into the room, first Galla, then Aëtius. Galla and Theodosius smiled politely at each other, then the emperor stepped forward and they kissed.

  Aëtius seemed strangely frozen to the spot.

  Athenaïs likewise.

  For then she knew what true love was. Her whole being seemed to lurch towards him and she thought with instant desperation: This is the man I love and will always love. Oh, what have I done?

  I saw how they avoided each other all that winter. How for them even to see the other was the sweetest, acutest pain imaginable. They barely spoke a word to each other. When a diplomatic mission to the court of the Sassanid kingdom of Persia departed, Aëtius went with them, to the surprise of some. He spent the winter out east.

  Athenaïs seemed sometimes strangely distracted for a young bride; and at other times she boasted too loudly and too publicly, to some embarrassment, about the marvellousness of her husband. Women who boast excessively of their husbands are rarely the most faithful. But in her case people put it down to natural warmth and generosity of spirit.

  In the spring it was announced that the empress would be going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  ‘And,’ Theodosius announced, ‘though the route through our empire is perfectly safe, she will be accompanied by the First Cohort of the Imperial Guard, under the command of General Aëtius.’

  The emperor had a high regard for the young general, and proudly felt that only the finest military escort would do for his beloved wife.

  It was the best and worst thing that could have happened. To spend time together - on the orders of her own husband! It could only add to the pain. And yet perhaps they secretly wanted the pain. Does the human heart want to feel happiness, or does it merely want to feel much, greatly, intensely? No matter what the emotion?

  I went with them, and I saw all and wrote nothing. But now in these last days, when only I am left of all that brave and beautiful company ... now the truth may be told.

  The empress’s party stepped abroad the royal barge, which rode at anchor on a mild sea in the Harbour of Phospherion. They traversed the narrow straits of the Bosphorus, and made landfall upon the Asian shore amid crowds of cheering people waving branches of olive and myrtle. There they dined with the urbane governor of the golden city of Chrysopolis. Some already commented that the empress and the general must despise each other, for they barely looked at each other, let alone exchanged a civil word. When forced to be in close company, at dinner for instance, they kept their eyes and their voices lowered as if in obscure shame.

  They processed east and traversed the province of Bithynia to Nicomedia. The empress rode in a fine four-wheeled carriage. Aëtius and the guard rode far ahead.

  The empress travelled next to Hierapolis, to bathe her lovely limbs in the health-giving hot sulphur springs. From thence she visited the Asian Mount Olympus and its monasteries, and held long and learned talk with the monks there, which left them astonished, humbled, and some of the younger and more hot-blooded, adoring of their new empress to the point of idolatry. She was likewise welcomed and fêted in Smyrna, and Sardis, and Ephesus, and all the great cities of the Ionian coast, and south to Pamphylia in the shadow of the Taurus mountains, and so on to Seleucia, and Tarsus, the home of the evangelical tentmaker.

  So this ostensible pleasure jaunt fulfilled its secret political purpose of cementing the love of the people, the Church, and the political and senatorial classes across the Levant for the young emperor and his beautiful bride, and making the radiant imperial presence known and respected far beyond the walls of Constantinople.

  After several weeks of travelling they came to the teeming city of Antioch, ‘the third city of the empire’, a bewildering hubbub of Cretans, Syrians, Jews, Greeks, Persians, Armenians. It was also called ‘Antioch the Beautiful’; its famed marble streets had been laid down by Herod the Great, and it was the place where the term ‘christianoi’, ‘Christians’, was first used. Athenaïs loved it on sight. She visited the sanctuary of Apollo, where Mark Antony and Cleopatra had been married, now half destroyed by her zealous co-religionists. And she insisted on an afternoon trip out of the heat and dust of the city, and beyond the miles of shanty-towns that stretched over the surrounding hillsides, to see for herself the notorious Grove of Daphne, where hundreds of prostitutes still plied their trade ‘in honour of the goddess’.

  At a dinner she gave a magnificent extempore speech upon the glories of Antioch’s magnificent past, and quoted from the Odyssey, ‘υμετερης γενεης τε και αιματος ευχομαι ειναι.’

  ‘I claim proud kinship with your race and blood.’ It always goes down well when a visiting foreign dignitary claims to be of the same descent as his audience.

  The next day they rode out of the city southwards, heading for the magnificent temple of Baalbek; but on the empress’s orders they turned east and headed out into the desert, following the crowds who streamed over the hills in their hundreds to visit the product of a religion very different from that which built proud Baalbek: the celebrated ascetic St Simeon Stylites on his pillar, out near Telanessa. There, in the shimmering Syrian desert, Athenaïs and Aëtius and their entourage saw with their own eyes the famous saint, sitting atop his pillar seventy feet into the sky, where he had already sat for ten years, and would sit another twenty yet. The crowds of devotees sat round the foot of the pillar, gazing up in wonder at the saint’s holiness, and collecting the lice that fell from his filthy, emaciated body to the ground. These they tucked away among their own robes as precious relics, calling them ‘the pearls of God’.

  Neither Athenaïs nor Aëtius collected any pearls.

  In the years to come, many came to imitate Simeon. News spread of his great act of penance, his self-hatred made manifest, his self-abasement raised high, the odour of him spreading out across the valley. As far away as the Ardennes forest in Gaul, a Lombard deacon tried to emulate his example until his rather more pragmatic bishop told him not to be so foolish.

  Near Simeon sat another pillar-dweller, Daniel Stylites. Daniel had started on a rather small pillar, but a wealthy benefactor had paid for a magnificent double-column to be erected for him. He had managed to cross to it from his first pillar, by way of a makeshift bridge of planks, so that he never had to sully his feet with the dust of the world. And there he sat, and prayed, and excreted, and praised the Lord.

  When they came to the magnificent temple of Baalbek it was evening, and the deserted temple stood proud and pagan in the late rose-light that stretched across the desert. They wondered at the cedar-roofed Portico of Caracalla, the magnificent mosaics in the marble floors, the bas relief of Jupiter Heliopolitan, and above all, at the breathtaking temple of Jupiter, its columns of a size unrivalled anywhere in the world: some eighty feet in height and eighteen feet in girth. They never shall be rivalled, I think, in all the days and works of man. One of the foundation stones of the temple weighed over a thousand tons. Already the knowledge of how to cut and move such titanic blocks is vanishing from the earth. Never shall we see such majesty again.

  They saw, too, the temple of Venus, goddess of love and beauty, now a basilica dedi
cated to St Barbara, virgin and martyr. It was whispered in the neighbouring town that the ancient rites still took place around the temple complex, to the anger of the Christian authorities but with the secret cognisance of more secular powers; and that these silent stones yet witnessed the nature worship of the old gods, ancient even compared to the Olympians who overcame them: Astarte, and Atargatis, and Baal himself, who glared out darkly over his devotees two thousand years before Christ walked on earth.

  Eusebius wrote only a century ago that men and women still came here to ‘clasp together’ before the altar in honour of the goddess. Husbands and fathers allowed their wives and daughters to sell themselves publicly to passers-by and worshippers, in honour of their mysterious goddess of love, and some men even took a lewd pleasure in seeing their womenfolk thus made harlots. All night they sang, and drank, and danced, accompanied by the sound of barbarous drums and flutes. Baalbek was never a place with a naturally Christian soul.

  It was a place of sacrificial blood as well as sacred love. Can one exist without the other? There was no gentleness in the ancient religion. Blood was riotously shed upon these stones. ‘Anath, the sister of Baal, waded up to her knees, up to her neck in human blood,’ say the ancient texts. ‘Human hands lay at her feet, they flew about her like locusts. She tied human heads around her neck, and hands upon her belt. She washed her hands in the streams of human blood that flowed about her knees . . .’

  At Baalbek, it seems, gods are mortal. They are born, and worshipped; they flourish, and have mighty temples built to them. Later, when men and women cease to believe in them, they wither and die, and a new generation of mortal gods takes their place. In time, too, even Christ will die for ever from the earth.

  None of the imperial party spoke their secret thoughts at Baalbek. But they lingered there a long time.

  Finally Jerusalem, the Holy City of Zion. This place, too, Athenaïs greatly loved, and she lingered here for longer that might seem appropriate. For her husband awaited her in Constantinople, and it was high time she was back in his bed. Her highest duty now was to give him sons. An empress had no other reason to live than this.

  It was the last night in Jerusalem, before they were due to descend from that holy mountain to the coast, to Caesarea, and take ship for home. The empress was walking on the lonely terrace of the modest palace where they were residing, overlooking the valley of Gehenna, the valley of Sheol, where the ancient Hebrews had tumbled the bodies of their dead into the smoking abyss below and burned them. From beyond the place of Hell came the gentle breezes from the garden of Gethsemane upon the Mount of Olives.

  Another figure stepped out from the shadows of the palace onto the terrace to take the night air before retiring. The two of them almost collided. They stepped back and stared with the same wide-eyed astonishment as when they had first set eyes upon each other, three long months before. Their eyes were wide and bright and innocent under the eastern moon. And then like sleepwalkers they moved towards each other again in the soft velvet night. From the olivegroves across the valley came the harsh warning call of a bird, and the moon was golden in the late summer sky over the Valley of Sheol, where the air was hazed with the chaff beaten from the late summer wheat in the surrounding country, and misty with smoke from the chaff heaped up for the burning.

  They said nothing. And with consummate awkwardness, like two adolescents—

  It is impossible to say who kissed whom. Their lips met. They both fought not to give in to this desire, or rather this need, to touch the other. Both were proud. But both were defeated.

  After they had kissed they drew back and looked at each other for a long time. They said nothing. Minutes passed. Neither of them moved. Neither of them could move.

  The next day at dawn they left the city for the long journey down to the coast. They rode far apart, heads bowed and silent, like two people recently bereaved.

  Galla knew. Galla saw it, with her gimlet eyes, the moment they returned.

  Marriage and hardship had perhaps softened Galla’s heart. Motherhood certainly had. She responded to others’ weakness with pity more than with scorn as heretofore. She saw this living agony before her eyes: Athenaïs and Aëtius unwillingly yet so willingly, so longingly, in each other’s company, constrained by the cruelty of circumstance and the stiff rituals and formalities of the court. Her reaction was that of a woman who is herself a little in love with a man who loves another: a sad smile, and silence.

  Perhaps also she recognised already that she and Aëtius had something in common, that would endure all their lives: they each loved another, and neither of them would ever in this world possess that other.

  Between Galla and Athenaïs, where you might have expected rancour, cattiness, or worse, there was none. Between Pulcheria and Galla, there was as much warmth as that life-sworn virgin, the emperor’s thin-lipped sister could ever muster for a fellow creature of flesh and blood. Pulcheria’s feelings toward Athenaïs were, inevitably, seething jealousy and resentment, disguised as pious reserve. (Prudes are driven by jealousy, not morality. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, preach.) But as for cool, green-eyed Galla, perhaps she saw that Athenaïs’ feelings for Aëtius mirrored her own. Perhaps she saw also that the poor girl, married so young and with so much love in her to give, to one whom she was fond of but would never come truly to love, would find only unhappiness in her life. Perhaps. Whatever the reason, she never treated the young empress, so different from herself in temperament, with anything but kindness.

  And then on the twenty-sixth day of August 423, a messenger came with shocking news from Rome. Emperor Honorius had died of dropsy, and a usurper, Johannes, had raised legions in Illyria and declared himself the new Emperor of the West.

  Aëtius seemed relieved to be getting away at last. ‘The enemies of Rome are not growing any fewer,’ he observed dryly. ‘There is fighting to be done.’

  11

  THE BARBARY COAST IN FLAMES

  The shops of Constantinople were shut for seven days, in a demonstration of public grief for Honorius. The new emperor, Theodosius, even ordered the horse-races to be cancelled, which nearly caused a riot.

  Thus at last Galla returned to Rome, together with Aëtius, and her son was made emperor at the age of four.

  From an early age, Valentinian displayed every sign of taking after his uncle rather than his father: a lamentable inheritance. He was slothful, greedy, childish, petulant and cruel. Galla herself, it was poisonously gossiped, had deliberately made her son stupid with feeble education and enervating superstition. Though Christian in name, Valentinian was obsessed with the darkest arts of magic and divination.

  To blame these failings on the teachings of his mother was sheer ill-informed malice: Galla’s faith in the Christian God was real, and sober. Not for her the hoarse gabblings of haruspices amid the splashes and flecks of a dying pigeon’s blood, and all the other tawdry trappings of a moribund paganism. In an age when loud professions of religious zeal were everywhere, and true, divinely inspired loving-kindness almost nowhere - that is to say, an age much like any other - Galla, for all her ruthlessness and pride, devoted herself all her life to the officially sanctioned religion of the empire.

  Besides, those sly gossips were ignoring one salient fact: Valentinian was quite stupid and corrupt enough to discover the joys of witchcraft for himself.

  Nevertheless, as the only obvious heir to the western throne, the crafty-eyed little boy was solemnly crowned with the diadem and the imperial purple; and his mother became effectively ruler in the West.

  For some years after that, the Empire knew an uneasy, unaccustomed peace, except for one stunning loss, which seemed to happen overnight, and to resist every attempt at recapture: the grainfields of North Africa were taken by the Vandals.

  Suddenly, in the blazing June of 429, the Barbary Coast was in flames. The Vandal raiders were a Germanic horse-people of the steppes, lately settled in southern Spain but with an appetite for conquest and dest
ruction unabated. In a single generation, so it seemed, they had mastered the arts of both shipbuilding and sailing from their native Spanish subjects. From their kingdom of Vandalusia, or ‘Andalusia’, as the Berbers called it, they had crossed the narrow straits, overrun the province of Mauretania, and fallen upon the precious grainfields of Numidia and Libya with fire and sword.

  Rome was taken utterly by surprise. None but Aëtius seemed aware of how disastrous this was. It is said that when he heard the news he sat down, ashen-faced, gripping his left wrist in his right hand, and did not speak for half a day.

  The imperial court, the wealthy senatorial classes and the chattering crowds of Rome carried blithely on, as if unaware of the vast, blood-dark cloud slowly seeping across their sky from the far horizon.

  The following year the Vandal armies set out eastwards across the Mahgreb, bent on ‘conquest to the gates of the rising sun’. City after city fell to their fury. On clear nights, it was said, you could see the African shore lit up as if with mighty beacon fires all along the coast from Tingis to Leptis Magna.