The Scourge of God Read online

  To my mother, and in memory of my father.

  They gave me a children’s book recounting the Battle of Chalons and sparked a lifelong curiosity.

  Contents

  Dramatis Personae

  Map

  Introduction

  Part One The Embassy to Attila

  I Brother and Sister

  II The Maiden of Axiopolis

  III Plotting an Assassination

  IV A Roman Embassy

  V A Test of Horses

  VI The New King of Carthage

  VII A Ruined City

  VIII The Hospitality of the Huns

  IX The Legionary Fortress

  X King of the Huns

  XI A Woman Named Ilana

  XII A Plot Revealed

  XIII The Hostage

  XIV The Duel

  Part Two Rallying the West

  XV The Wine Jar

  XVI Escape

  XVII Pursuit

  XVIII The Avalanche

  XIX The Roman Tower

  XX The Drums of Attila

  XXI The Scourge of God

  XXII Theodoric’s Daughter

  Part Three The Battle of Nations

  XXIII The Secret Storeroom

  XXIV The Gate of Aurelia

  XXV A Gathering of Armies

  XXVI First Blood

  XXVII The Battle of Nations

  XXVIII The Sword of Mars

  XXIX The Laager of Attila

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by William Dietrich

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  ROMANS AND FRIENDS

  Jonas Alabanda: A young Roman envoy and scribe

  Ilana: A captive Roman maiden

  Zerco: A dwarfjester who befriends Jonas

  Julia: Zerco’s wife

  Aetius: A Roman general

  Valentinian III: Emperor of the Western Roman Empire

  Galla Placidia: Valentinian’s mother

  Honoria: Valentinian’s sister

  Hyacinth: Honoria’s eunuch

  Theodosius II: Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire

  Chrysaphius: His eunuch minister

  Maximinus: Ambassador to Attila

  Bigilas: A translator and conspirator

  Rusticius: A translator

  Anianus: Bishop and (when it suits him) hermit

  THE HUNS

  Attila: King of the Huns

  Skilla: A Hun warrior who loves Ilana

  Edeco: Uncle of Skilla and warlord of Attila

  Suecca: Edeco’s wife

  Eudoxius: A Greek doctor who is an envoy of Attila

  Hereka: Attila’s first wife

  Ellac, Danziq, and Ernak: Attila’s sons

  Onegesh: A Roman-born lieutenant of Attila

  THE GERMANS

  Guernna: A captive like Ilana

  Theodoric: King of the Visigoths

  Berta: Theodoric’s daughter

  Gaiseric: King of the Vandals

  Sangibanus: King of the Alans

  Anthus: King of the Franks

  Map

  INTRODUCTION

  Three hundred and seventy-six years after the birth of Our Savior, the world was still one. Our Roman Empire endured as it had endured for a thousand years, extending from the cold moors of Britannia to the blistering sands of Arabia, and from the headwaters of the Euphrates River to the Atlantic surf of North Africa. Rome’s boundaries had been tested countless times by Celt and German, Persian and Scythian. Yet with blood and iron, guile and gold, all invaders had been turned back. It had always been so, and in 376 it seemed it must always be so.

  How I wish I had lived in such security!

  But I, Jonas Alabanda—historian, diplomat, and reluctant soldier—can only imagine the old Empire’s venerable stability the way a sailor’s audience imagines a faraway and misty shore. My fate has been to exist in harder times, meeting the great and living more desperately because of it. This book is my story and those I had the fortune and misfortune to observe, but its roots are older. In that year 376, more than half a century before I was born, came the first rumor of the storm that forever changed everything.

  In that year, historians recount, came the first rumor of the Huns.

  Understand that I am by origin an Easterner, fluent in Greek, conversant with philosophy, and used to the dazzling sun. My home is Constantinople, the city that Constantine the Great founded on the Bosporus in order to ease the administration of our Empire by creating a second capital. At that junction of Europe and Asia, where the Black Sea and Mediterranean join, rose Nova Roma, the strategic site of ancient Byzantium. This division gave Rome two emperors, two Senates, and two cultures: the Latin West and Greek East. But Rome’s armies still marched in support of both halves and the Empire’s laws were coordinated and unified. The Mediterranean remained a Roman lake; and Roman architecture, coinage, forums, fortresses, and churches could be found from the Nile to the Thames. Christianity eclipsed all other religions, and Latin all other tongues. The world had never before known such a long period of relative peace, stability, and unity.

  It never would again.

  The Danube is Europe’s greatest river, rising at the foot of the Alps and running eastward nearly eighteen hundred miles before emptying into the Black Sea. In 376 its length marked much of the Empire’s northern border. That summer, Roman garrisons at posts along the river began to hear reports of war, upheaval, and migration among the barbarian nations. Some new terror unlike any the world had ever seen was putting entire peoples to flight, stories went, each tribe colliding with the one to its west. Fugitives described an ugly, swarthy, stinking people who wore animal skins until they rotted off their backs, who were immune to hunger and thirst but drank the blood of their horses, and who ate raw meat tenderized beneath their saddles. These new invaders arrived as silently as the wind, killed with powerful bows from an unprecedented distance, massacred with swords any who still resisted, and then galloped away before cohesive retaliation could form. They disdained proper shelter, burning all they encountered and living much of the time under the sky. Their cities consisted of felt tents, their highways the trackless steppes. They rolled across the grasslands in sturdy wagons heaped with booty and trailed by slaves, and their tongue was harsh and guttural.

  They called themselves the Huns.

  Surely this news was exaggerated, our sentries assured each other. Surely fact had become confused by rumor. Rome had long experience with barbarians and knew that, while individually courageous, such warriors were poor tacticians and worse strategists. Fearsome as enemies, they were valuable as allies. Had not the terrible Germans become, over the centuries, a bulwark of the Roman army in the West? Had not the wild Celts been civilized? Couriers reported to Rome and Constantinople that something unusual seemed to be happening in the lands beyond the Danube, but its danger was still unclear.

  Then rumor turned into a flood of refugees.

  A quarter million people from a Germanic nation known as the Goths appeared on the north bank of the river, seeking asylum from the marauding Huns. With no way to stop such a migration short of war, my ancestors reluctantly gave the Goths permission to cross to the southern shore. Perhaps these newcomers, like so many tribes before them, could be safely settled and become “federates” of the Empire like the unruly but calculating Franks: an allied bulwark against the mysterious steppe people.

  It was an unrealistic hope, born of expediency. The Goths were proud and unconquered. We civilized peoples seemed pampered, vacillating, and weak. Romans and Goths soon quarreled. Refugees were
sold dog meat and stole cattle in return. They became plunderers and then outright invaders. So on August 9, a.d. 378, the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens fought the Goths outside the city of Hadri-anopolis, just one hundred and fifty miles from Constantinople itself. The numbers were evenly matched and we Romans were confident of victory. But our cavalry fled; our infantry panicked; and, surrounded by Gothic horsemen, our soldiers were packed so tightly together that they could not raise arms and shields to fight effectively. Valens and his army were destroyed in the worst Roman military disaster since Hannibal had annihilated the Romans at Cannae, almost six centuries before.

  An ominous precedent had been set: The Roman army could be beaten by barbarians. In fact, the Romans could be beaten by barbarians who were fleeing even more fearsome barbarians.

  Worse was soon to come.

  The Goths began a pillaging migration across the Empire that would not stop for decades. Meanwhile, the Huns ravaged the Danube River valley; and, far to the east, they pillaged Armenia, Cappadocia, and Syria. Whole barbarian nations were uprooted, and some of these migrating tribes stacked up on the Rhine. When that river froze solid on the last day of 406, Vandals, Alans, Suevi, and Burgundians swarmed across to fall on Gaul. The barbarians swept south, burning, killing, looting, and raping in an orgy of violence that produced the horrid and fascinating tales my generation was weaned on. A Roman woman was discovered to have cooked and eaten her four children, one by one, explaining to authorities that she hoped each sacrifice would save the others. Her neighbors stoned her to death.

  The invaders crossed the Pyrenees to Hispania, and then Gibraltar to Africa. Saint Augustine died while his North African home city of Hippo was under siege. Britannia was cut off, lost to the Empire. The Goths, still seeking a homeland, swept into Italy and in 410 shocked the world by sacking Rome itself. Although they withdrew after just three days of pillage, the sacred city’s sense of inviolability had been shattered.

  The barbarians began to settle on—and rule—large tracts of our Western Empire. Unable to defeat the invaders, the increasingly desperate Western emperors sought to buy them off, to confine them in specific territories, and to play one barbarian nation against another. The imperial court, unable to guarantee its own safety in Rome, moved first to Milan and then to Ravenna, a Roman navy base on the marshes of the Adriatic Sea. The Visigoths meanwhile occupied southwestern Gaul and Hispania, the Burgundians eastern Gaul, the Alans the valley of the Loire, and the Vandals North Africa. Christian heresies competed as barbarian religion merged with that of the Messiah, leaving a thicket of beliefs. Roads fell into disrepair, crime increased, taxes went unpaid, some of the brightest minds withdrew to monasteries . . . and yet life, under a loose confederation of Roman and barbarian leadership, went on. Constantinople and the East still thrived. New palaces and churches were built in Ravenna. Roman garrisons still soldiered because there was no alternative. How could there be no Rome? The slow collapse of civilization was as unimaginable as it was inescapable.

  And still the power of the Hun grew.

  What had been mysterious rumor in the fourth century became grim and terrifying reality in the fifth. As the Huns rode into Europe and occupied what came to be called Hunuguri, they melded the barbarian tribes they overcame into a new and ominous empire. Ignorant of industry and disdainful of technology, they relied on enslaved nations, the plunder of raids, extorted tribute, and mercenary pay to sustain their society. Rome, wheezing and in decline, occasionally hired the Huns to subdue other tribes in its territories, trying to buy itself time. The Huns used such pay to attract more allies and increase their power. In 443 and 447, they initiated disastrous raids in the Empire’s eastern half that wiped more than one hundred Balkan cities off the map. While the stupendous new triple wall of Constantinople continued to deter assault, we Byzantines found it necessary to pay off the Huns to guarantee a humiliating and precarious truce.

  By the middle of the fifth century when I reached adulthood, the Hun empire stretched from Germania’s Elbe River to the Caspian Sea and from the Danube northward to the Baltic. Its leader, headquartered in Hunuguri, had become the most powerful monarch in Europe. He could with a word gather a hundred thousand of the most fearsome warriors the world had ever known. He could enlist a hundred thousand more from his conquered tribes. His word was law, he had never known defeat, and his wives and sons trembled in his presence.

  His name was Attila.

  What follows is his true story and my own, told through the eyes of those I knew well and, where I played a role, my own. I set this down so my children can understand how I come to be writing this in such strange times, on such a tiny island, so far from where I was born, with such an extraordinary wife.

  PART ONE

  THE EMBASSY TO ATTILA

  I

  BROTHER AND SISTER

  RAVENNA, A.D. 449

  My sister is a wicked woman, bishop, and we are here to save her from herself,” the emperor of the Western Roman Empire said.

  His name was Valentinian III, and his character was unfortunate evidence of dynastic decay. He was of only middling intelligence, without martial courage and with little interest in governance. Valentinian preferred to spend his time in sport, pleasure, and the company of magicians, courtesans, and whichever senatorial wives he could seduce in order to gain the greater pleasure of humiliating their husbands. He knew his talents did not match those of his ancestors, and his private admission of inferiority produced feelings of resentment and fear. Jealous and spiteful men and women, he believed, were always conspiring against him. So he’d brought the prelate for tonight’s execution because he needed the church’s approval. Valentinian relied on the beliefs of others in order to believe in himself.

  It was important for his sister, Honoria, to recognize that she had no champions in either the secular world or the religious, the emperor had persuaded the bishop. She was rutting with a steward like a base kitchen trollop, and this little surprise was really a gift. “I am saving my sister from a trial as traitor in this world and from damnation in the next.”

  “No child is beyond salvation, Caesar,” Bishop Milo assured. He shared complicity in this rude surprise because he and the girl’s wily mother, Galla Placidia, needed money to complete a new church in Ravenna that would help guarantee their own ascent into heaven. Placidia was as embarrassed by her daughter’s indiscretion as Valentinian was afraid of it; and support of the emperor’s decision would be repaid by a generous donation to the Church from the imperial treasury. God, the bishop believed, worked in mysterious ways. Placidia simply assumed that God’s wishes and her own were the same.

  The emperor was supposed to be in musty and decaying Rome, conferring with the Senate, receiving ambassadors, and participating in hunts and social gatherings. Instead, he had galloped out four nights ago unannounced, accompanied by a dozen soldiers handpicked by his chamberlain, Heraclius. They would strike at Honoria before her plans ripened. It was the chamberlain’s spies who had brought word that the emperor’s sister was not just sleeping with her palace steward—a reckless fool named Eugenius—but also was plotting with him to murder her brother and seize power. Was the story true? It was no secret that Honoria considered her brother indolent and stupid and that she believed she could run imperial affairs more ably than he could, on the model of their vigorous mother. Now, the story went, she intended to put her lover on the throne with herself as augusta, or queen. It was all rumor, of course, but rumor that smacked of the truth: The vain Honoria had never liked her sibling. If Valentinian could catch them in bed together it would certainly prove immorality, and perhaps treason as well. In any event, it would be excuse enough to marry her off and be rid of her.

  The emperor excused his own romantic conquests as casually as he condemned those of his sister. He was a man and she was a woman and thus her lustfulness, in the eyes of man and God, was more offensive than his.

  Valentinian’s entourage had crossed the mountainous spine of
Italy and now approached the palaces of Ravenna in the dark, pounding down the long causeway to this marshy refuge. While easy to defend from barbarian attack, the new capital always struck Valentinian as a dreamlike place, divorced from the land and yet not quite of the sea. It floated separately from industry or agriculture, and the bureaucracy that had taken refuge there had only a tenuous grip on reality. The water was so shallow and the mud so deep that the wit Apollinaris had claimed the laws of nature were repealed in Ravenna, “where walls fall flat and waters stand, towers float and ships are seated.” The one advantage of the new city was that it was nominally safe, and that was no small thing in today’s world. Treacheries were everywhere.

  The life of the great was a risky one, Valentinian knew. Julius Caesar himself had been assassinated, almost five hundred years before. The gruesome endings of emperors since was a list almost too long to memorize: Claudius poisoned; Nero and Otho both suicides; Caracalla, the murderer of his brother, who was assassinated in turn; Constantine’s half brothers and nephews virtually wiped out; Gratian murdered; Valentinian II found mysteriously hanged. Emperors had died in battle, of disease, debauchery, and even of the fumes from newly applied plaster, but most of all from the plottings of those closest. It would have been a shock if his cunning sister had not conspired against him. The emperor was more than ready to hear his chamberlain’s whisperings of a plot, because he had expected no less since being elevated to the purple at the age of five. He had reached his present age of thirty only by fearful caution, constant suspicion, and necessary ruthlessness. An emperor struck, or was struck down. His astrologers confirmed his fears, leaving him satisfied and them rewarded.

  So now the emperor’s party dismounted in the shadow of the gate, not wanting the clatter of horses to give warning. They drew long swords but held them tight to their legs to minimize their glint in the night. Cloaked and hooded, they moved toward Honoria’s palace like wraiths; Ravenna’s streets dark, its canals gleaming dully, and a half-moon teasing behind a moving veil of cloud. As a town of government instead of commerce, the capital always seemed desultory and half deserted.