The Scourge of God Read online

  “You were brave to stand up to Edeco at the ruined villa.”

  “Or foolish. He expects submission. I don’t think he’s done with me yet.”

  Messengers found us with word that Attila was at his camp many days away, so on we went. We found the Tisza River, a broad and gray-green river that is a tributary of the Danube, and followed it northward into Hunuguri. Its banks were lined with timber, like its sister river, and again no ships were available to provide easy passage. Instead, we paralleled it on a great open plain the likes of which I had never seen. While before the sky was hemmed with mountains, now it was a vast bowl that bent to distant horizons. Grass had become an ocean, and animals moved across it in browsing herds. Hawks wheeled high above, while butterflies danced ahead of the legs of our horses.

  Sometimes we saw distant curtains of smoke, and Onegesh told us the barbarians kept the flat landscape open by setting fires. Their animals also kept it mowed. Vast collections of horses and cattle roamed seemingly at will, yet the warriors were able to tell at a glance which tribe a herd belonged to: here Gepid, there Goth, now Scuri. Stucco and tile Roman architecture had given way to villages of wattle-and-daub huts or timber cabins. Their smoke holes carried new and foreign smells.

  Maximinus, who had studied the maps and reports of travelers, said we were in a vast basin between two mountain ranges, Alps to the west and the Carpathians to the east. “Hunuguri has become their promised land,” he told us. “You’d think that having conquered a place better than their homeland they would be content, but instead they have multiplied and become fractious. There’s not enough grass to hold them all, so they raid.”

  For the most part our diplomatic party kept to itself, making better progress by skirting the villages. But on the fifth day after we had left the Danube some freakish weather gave us a taste of Hun hospitality and made me reassess this barbarian people yet again.

  The day had been muggy, the sky to the west heavy and yellow. When we stopped for the night at the shore of a large lake, the sun set in murk so thick that the orb turned brown. Vast clouds began to ominously form, their tops as broad and flat as anvils. Lightning flickered in their black bases.

  For the first time, I saw the Huns uneasy. If men couldn’t scare them, thunder might. “Witch weather,” Edeco muttered. Onegesh surprised me by quickly crossing himself. Was the traitorous Roman still a Christian? The grumble of the storm began to walk across the lake and the water turned gray and troubled, waves breaking and leaving a scud of foam.

  “Come in our tents,” Maximinus offered.

  Edeco shook his head, eyes darting. “We will stay with our horses.”

  “Your animals will be fine.”

  “I don’t like canvas holes.”

  Dark tentacles of rain were sweeping across the lake, so we left the Huns to themselves. “They don’t have the sense of dogs sometimes,” Rusticius said. And, indeed, we’d no sooner huddled inside than the fabric suddenly began a furious rattle and the wind rose to a shriek. A downpour began, the tent twitching under its pounding.

  “Thank the Lord we came with shelter,” Maximinus said, eyeing the hammered canvas uneasily. The wind rose, the fabric rattling. Our poles leaned from the strain.

  “There’s nothing on this shoreline to block the wind,” Bigilas pointed out unnecessarily, and then the air cracked with thunder, the boom echoing in our ears. The air smelled like metal.

  “It will soon be over,” Rusticius hoped.

  No sooner had he said it than a higher gust struck like a wall and our shelter collapsed, pegs and ropes flying wildly and poles snapping in two. We were trapped, just as Edeco had feared, and the enclosing folds beat on us like flails. We crawled for escape. “Here’s the flap!” Maximinus called. We struggled out into a night that was now completely black and howling.

  “Where are the Huns?” The senator gasped against the suck of wind.

  “They have abandoned us!” Bigilas cried. Indeed, there was no sign of them, the horses, or the mules.

  “What do we do now?” I shouted above the sting of rain. Waves crashed on the lakeshore like ocean surf, and spray whipped off their tops.

  “There was a village two miles back,” Rusticius remembered.

  “Tell the slaves to secure our tents and baggage,” Maximinus shouted. “We’ll seek shelter in the town.”

  We struggled back along the lakeshore, clinging to each other, and at length stumbled upon the cluster of cabins. We called for help in Hunnish until the portal of the largest house opened.

  Stumbling inside, blinking in dim firelight, we saw our rescuer was a middle-aged Hun woman, slight, wizened, and with sad but luminous eyes.

  “Ah, the Romans,” she said in Hunnish. “I saw you passing and thought I might see you again when I noticed the storm. Edeco tries to avoid me, but now he can’t.”

  “We’ve lost him,” Bigilas said.

  “Or they lost you. They will come here looking.”

  “A woman alone?” Maximinus whispered to me in Latin. “He seeks to know your husband,” I interpreted to her rather loosely.

  “My husband is dead. I, Anika, head the village now. Come, let’s light more lamps and build up the fire. Sit, have some meat, kumiss, and kamon.”

  Chilled, hungry, and thirsty, I gulped the latter. It was a dark and foamy liquid that is made, she explained, from barley. While sour compared to sweet wine, it was rich and warming, and heady enough that I soon saw the hut through a pleasant haze. The wood joinery was quite fine, I decided blearily, and the proportions pleasing: There was more craftsmanship in barbarian dwellings than I expected. The fire pit glowed with hot coals and the storm was reassuringly muffled, hissing against the thatch. Rushes covered the dirt floor, woven blankets hung on the walls, and crude stools gave us places to sit. What a refuge this was, after so many days in camp! Anika ordered her slaves to fetch help, and soon men and women were entering to bring stew, bread, berries, and fish. I drifted in a happy haze. After a time the wind began to die. Eventually Edeco, Onegesh, and Skilla appeared from the storm, dripping wet but apparently well satisfied that they had either safeguarded the horses or outmaneuvered their demons and witches.

  “You were not going to say hello, Edeco?” Anika challenged.

  “You know the animals needed pasture, Anika.” Clearly they had some awkward history. He turned to us. “I told you those tents were no good. Learn to make a yurt.”

  “Which I have not seen you erect,” Anika chided him.

  He ignored her. “If the horses had stampeded, we would have a long walk to catch them,” he explained unnecessarily, perhaps embarrassed that we had been separated by the storm. He sat, looking away.

  Maximinus, curious, leaned to him and I translated. “She has authority like a man.”

  “She has the respect accorded her dead husband,” Edeco muttered.

  “And who was her husband?”

  “Bleda.”

  Maximinus started at this news.

  I had not heard this name.

  “Bleda was Attila’s brother,” Bigilas explained self-importantly. “For a time they ruled together, until Attila killed him. This must be one of his widows.”

  I was intrigued. “He murdered his own brother?”

  “It was necessary,” Edeco muttered.

  “She’s allowed to live?”

  “She’s kin and no threat. Attila honors her with this village. If he did not, the blood feud would continue. This village is konoss.”

  Again, a word I was unfamiliar with. “What is konoss?” “It is payment for a blood debt. A man caught stealing cattle can be killed, or he or his relatives can give konoss by paying the man stolen from. Goods can be paid for a life. A life can be traded for another’s. Attila or Bleda had to die— everyone knew that—because they could no longer rule together. So Attila murdered Bleda and paid konoss to his wives.”

  I looked around. This hut seemed meager payment for the life of a husband, a king.

&nbs
p; “When you are as powerful as Attila,” Bigilas said slyly, “you can decide how generous your konoss is going to be.”

  “When you are a helpless woman,” Anika said, who had clearly overheard our whispering, “you must decide how little you will accept to keep the peace.” There was an edge of bitterness, but then she shrugged. “Yet I offer the hospitality of the steppes to any travelers. Our women will still warm you to sleep.”

  What did this mean? As if in answer, soft laughter and the light shuffling of feet caused us to turn. A dozen pretty females slipped into the room, heads cloaked against the now-drizzling rain, eyes bright, their forms draped in intricately embroidered dresses and their feet shod in boots of soft deer leather, soaked from the wet grass. They giggled as they reviewed us shyly, golden girdles cinching their slim waists and lace curving across the hillocks of their breasts. I found myself embarrassingly aroused. It had been weeks since I’d seen young women, and the long abstinence added to my enchantment.

  “What in Hades is this?” Maximinus asked, looking more frightened than intrigued.

  “Not Hades, senator, but Heaven,” Bigilas replied with relish. “It’s the custom of the Huns and the other nomads to offer women in hospitality.”

  “Offer? You mean for sex?”

  “It is the pagan way.”

  Edeco, not embarrassed enough by Anika’s history to turn down this opportunity, had already grabbed a plump and giggling girl and was dragging her away. Skilla had chosen a yellow-haired beauty, no doubt the product of capture and slavery. Onegesh was pointing to a redhead. I myself was captivated by a maiden with hair as black as raven’s wings and fingers that sparkled with rings. I was both excited and nervous. My father had initiated me in the ways of love with courtesans in Constantinople, of course, but as a bachelor in an outwardly pious Christian city, my opportunities for lovemaking had been limited. What would it be like to lie with a girl of another culture?

  “Certainly not,” Maximinus announced. He turned to Anika. “Tell her thank you very much, but we are Christians, not pagans, and this is not our custom.”

  “But, senator,” Bigilas pleaded. “It is their custom.”

  “We will make a better impression on Attila by displaying the stoic dignity of our Roman ancestors, not copying barbarians. Don’t you think so, Jonas?”

  I swallowed. “We don’t want to hurt their feelings.”

  “Tell her that in our world we have one wife, not many, and that we revere our women, not share them,” Maximinus insisted. “They are lovely girls, just lovely, but I for one will be more comfortable sleeping alone.”

  “For those of us who are not the diplomat . . .” Rusticius groaned.

  “Will benefit from my example,” the senator said.

  Our Hun escort emerged in the glistening morning looking much more satisfied than we were, and their women tittered as they served us breakfast. Then we resumed our journey. Attila was said to be only two days away.

  Again, Skilla was curious, riding next to me. “You did not take a woman?”

  I sighed. “Maximinus told us not to.”

  “He does not like women?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did he tell you not to?”

  “In our world a man marries a single wife and is faithful to her.”

  “You are married?”

  “No. The woman I was interested in . . . rejected me.”

  “She scratches?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The ones not chosen were very hurt, you know.”

  My head ached from too much kamon. “Skilla, they were lovely. I was simply following orders.”

  He shook his head. “Your leader is a fool. It is not good to store up your seed. It will make you sick and cause more trouble later.”

  IX

  THE LEGIONARY

  FORTRESS

  What a hollow thing our empire has become, Flavius Aetius thought as he continued his inspection of the fort of Sumelocenna, on the banks of Germania’s Neckar River. What a hollow thing I have become. A general without a proper army.

  “It’s difficult to find masons these days, and so we’ve reinforced the walls with a timber stockade,” the tribune who was his guide was explaining with embarrassment. “There’s some rot we’re hoping to get to when replacements arrive from Mediolanum. The local patrician is proving reluctant to contribute the trees. . . .”

  “You can’t teach your soldiers to lay one stone atop another, Stenis?”

  “We’ve no lime and no money to buy any, commander. We’re two years behind in disbursements, and merchants have ceased delivering because we can never pay. The soldiers today won’t do hard work; they say that’s a task for slaves and peasants. These tribesmen we recruit are a different breed. They love to fight, but to drill . . .”

  Aetius made no answer. What was the point? He’d heard these complaints, repeated with little variation, from the mouth of the Rhine to this outpost on the eastern side of the Black Forest—had heard them, in fact, his entire life. Never enough men. Never enough money. Never enough weapons, stones, bread, horses, catapults, boots, cloaks, wine, whores, official recognition, or anything else to sustain the endless borders of Rome. The garrisons scarcely even looked like an army anymore, each man drawing an allowance to clothe and armor himself. They preened in military fashions that were sometimes as impractical as they were individualistic.

  Aetius had lived half a century now, and for much of that time he had replaced his absence of military power with bluff, the tattered tradition of “inevitable” Roman victory, and shrewd alliances with whatever tribe he could persuade, pay, or coerce to oppose the menace of the moment. His was a lifetime of hard battles, shifting alliances, truculent barbarians, and selfish emperors. He had beaten the Franks, beaten the Bagaudae, beaten the Burgundians, beaten usurpers, and beaten the politicians in Italy who constantly whispered and conspired behind his back. He’d been consul three times, and, because he ran the army, ran the Western Empire in ways the Emperor Valentinian scarcely understood.

  Yet instead of getting easier, each victory seemed more difficult. The moneyed sons of the rich bought their way out of the army, the poor deserted, and the barbarian recruits boasted more than they practiced. The relentless discipline that had marked Roman armies had eroded. Now he feared that the most dangerous enemy of all was casting a baleful eye in his direction. Aetius knew Attila, and knew how the angry, truculent youth he had once played and scuffled with had become a crafty, aggressive king. Aetius had been sent to the Huns as a boy hostage in 406 to help guarantee Stilicho’s treaty with the tribe; and later, when his own fortunes were low in the political circus that was the Empire, he had fled to the Huns for safety. In turn, when Attila needed employment for his restless horde, Aetius had used them against Rome’s enemies, paying generously. It had been a strange but useful partnership.

  That was why the fool Valentinian had written him the latest dispatch.

  Your requests for more military appropriations, which increasingly sound like demands, are entirely unreasonable. You, general, of all people, know that the Huns have been our allies more than our enemies here in the West. It is your skill that has made them a tool instead of a threat. To pretend now that the Huns represent danger goes against not only all experience but also your own personal history of success. The needs of finance for the court in Italy are pressing, and no more money can be spared for the frontiers of the Empire. You must make do with what you have . . . .

  What Valentinian didn’t understand is that all had begun to change when King Ruga died and Attila and Bleda succeeded him. The Huns had become more arrogant and demanding. It changed even more when Attila murdered Bleda and turned the Huns from marauders to imperialists. Attila understood Rome in ways that Ruga never had, and he knew when to press incessantly and when to make a temporary peace. Each campaign and treaty seemed to leave the Huns stronger and Rome weaker. The East had already been stripped as if by locust
s. How long before Attila turned his eye west?

  The weather today matched the general’s mood, a gray pall with steady rain. The drizzle showed all too well how the fortress leaked, and rather than properly repair stone buildings that were two and three centuries old, the garrison had patched them with wood and wattle. The trim precision of the old fort’s layout had been lost to clusters of new huts and wandering pathways.

  “The men of the Twelfth are nonetheless ready for anything,” the tribune went on.

  That was prattle. “This isn’t a fortress—it’s a nest.”

  “General?”

  “A nest made of twigs and paper. Your stockade is so wormy that it’s ready to fall over. Attila could punch through it with his fist.”

  “Attila! But the king of the Huns is far away. Surely we don’t have to worry about Attila here.”

  “I worry about Attila in my dreams, Stenis. I worry about Attila in Athens or Lutetia or Tolosa or Rome. It’s my job and my fate to worry.”

  The tribune looked confused. “But you’re his friend. Aren’t you?”

  Aetius looked somberly out at the rain. “Just as I am friend of the emperor, friend of his mother, friend of Theodoric at his court at Tolosa, and friend of King Sangibanus at Aurelia. I am friend of them all, the one man who binds them together. But I trust none of them, soldier. Nor should you.”

  The officer blanched at this irreverence but decided not to challenge it. “It’s just that Attila has never come this way.”

  “Not yet.” Aetius felt every moment of his fifty years. The endless rides on horseback, the hurry to every point of danger, the lack of a proper home. For decades he’d loved it. Now? “Soldiers prepare for the worst, do they not?”

  “As you say, general.”

  “True Roman soldiers don’t wait for money or permission to repair their walls, they do it today. If they’ve no lime, they buy it. If they can’t buy it, they take it. And if those they take it from complain, they tell them that the army comes first, because in the end the army is Rome. Do the complaining merchants want a world of barbarian warlords and petty princes?”