The Scourge of God (9 page)

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

THE NEW KING 

OF CARTHAGE

H
ow 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 northwestern 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 democratic 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.

A hairy red giant of a Vandal lieutenant summoned Eudoxius inside for his audience, so he left the blinding courtyard for the cool darkness of its throne room. At first he could barely see, smelling instead the animal rankness of a crude barbarian court. There was the sweat of rarely washed bodies; the stink of the discarded food that the slovenly Vandals could not bring themselves to clean away; the thick incense Gaiseric burned to mask the smells; the tang of sword oil; and the musk of public, shameless sex. Gaiseric’s captains were sprawled on heaps of stolen carpets and lion skins. Their women lolled with them, some as pale as snow and others as black as ebony, curled like satiated cats, many with breasts and hips bare and one, snoring, with her legs splayed so obscenely that Eudoxius could scarcely believe these savages had converted even to the heretical Arian creed. Of course, Arians were false Christians, believing the Son inferior to the Father, but worse than this they prayed indifferently while slaying with ferocious intent, mixing Christian creed with pagan superstition. They were, in sum, savages, as apt to quail at thunder as they were to charge a Roman battle line. But these crude warriors were the necessary means to his noble end. His scheme was to let legionary and barbarian destroy each other in a single great battle until none were left, and then build after the slaughter.

Taking breath through his mouth to avoid the smell, Eudoxius made his way to the dim end of the hall.

“You come from Attila.” It was Gaiseric, sixty years old now but still tall and powerful, seated on a gilded throne. His hair and beard were like a lion’s mane, and his arms had the thickness of a bear’s. The Vandal king sat upright and watchful. There were no women at
his
side. Two guards flanked him instead, one a Nubian and the other a pale and tattooed Pict. Gaiseric himself peered with bright, piercing blue eyes as out of place in this climate as ice. How far his people had marched! The Vandal king wore silver chain mail over captured Roman linens, as if expecting an attack at any moment, and a circlet of gold rested on his brow. A dagger was on his belt and a long sword and spear leaned on the wall behind him. He’d been lame since being thrown from a horse as a youth, and his lack of mobility and a life of enemies had made him cautious of attack.

Eudoxius bowed, his robes a curtain around his feet and his gray beard brushing his chest, gesturing with his hand at waist level in the manner of the East. “I come from your Hun brothers, great Gaiseric.”

“The Huns are not my brothers.”

“Aren’t they?” Eudoxius boldly came closer. “Don’t both of your kingdoms fight Rome? Are not both of your treasuries hungry for its gold? And is the accession of Attila and your own capture of Carthage not a sign from God, or all the gods, that the time has come for the world to be ruled anew? I have come with Attila’s blessing, Gaiseric, to inquire about an alliance. The West has yet to feel Attila’s wrath, but he is tempted by the opportunities there. Aetius is a formidable enemy, but only if he has one battle to fight at a time. Were Attila to attack Gaul at the same time the Vandals attacked Italy from the south, no Roman combination could stand before us.”

Gaiseric brooded quietly for a while, considering the vast geographies that would be involved. “That is an ambitious plan.”

“It is a logical plan. Rome prevails only by fighting the tribes and nations of the barbarians separately or by shrewdly pitting one against the other. The ministers in Ravenna laugh at how they manipulate their enemies, Gaiseric. I am of their world, and I have seen it. But were Hun and Vandal to march together, with Gepid and Scuri, Pict and Berber, then perhaps the man I see before me would be the next emperor.”

This discussion was made in the earshot of Gaiseric’s followers, in the open manner of barbarians who insisted on hearing a plan before following it. These final words made his lieutenants shout and hoot in agreement, banging goblets and daggers against the marble floors and roaring at the idea of ultimate triumph. Their king as emperor of Rome! But Gaiseric himself was quiet, his eyes probing, careful not to promise too much.

“I as emperor, or Attila?”

“Co-emperors, perhaps, on the model of the Romans.”

“Humph.” Gaiseric’s fingers tapped on the arm of his throne. “Why is it
you
who have come with this proposition, physician? Why aren’t you out lancing boils or brewing potions?”

“I’ve fought Aetius and his minions in eastern Gaul and seen poor men, whose only hope was to be free, slain by Roman tyranny. I barely escaped with my life and sought refuge with Attila, but I’ve never forgotten my people. Am I a mere doctor? Yes, but I minister to men’s health by being their political champion as well as their physician. My role is to see that you and Attila understand how your interests coincide with all good men.”

“You have a smooth tongue. Yet this Aetius is
your
enemy, not mine.”

Here Eudoxius nodded, having anticipated this very objection. “As Theodoric and the Visigoths are
your
enemies, not mine.”

Now the Vandals fell silent, as if a cloud had passed before the sun. Romans were targets, sheep to be harvested. But the rival Visigoths who had settled in southwestern Gaul were a deeper and more menacing opponent, a barbarian power as dangerous as their own. Here was rivalry that went back generations, two Germanic tribes with a long history of feuds. It was to a Visigoth that the Roman empress Placidia had once been wed, and it was the Visigoths who haughtily claimed to be more civilized as a result: as if they were better than the Vandals!

At one point King Gaiseric tried to heal the breach by having his son marry King Theodoric’s daughter, to join the tribes with blood. But when the Roman emperor Valentinian later offered the boy his own daughter instead—clearly a more important and prestigious marriage—Gaiseric had tried to send the Vandal bride, a princess named Berta, back to her father in Gaul.

It was then that trouble truly started. The haughty Visigoths had refused to countenance the divorce of their already married Berta to make room for a new Roman wife. But the Roman princess, a Christian, wouldn’t agree to polygamy. Visigothic refusal had been followed by recriminations, and recriminations by insult, and finally in a burst of drunken fury Gaiseric himself had slit the nose and ears of Berta and sent her in humiliation back to her father. Ever since, his dreams had been tormented by the possible vengeance of Theodoric: War with the Visigoths was what he feared above all else. “Do not mention those pig droppings in my court,” he now growled uneasily.