The Sword of Attila (16 page)

Flavius may never have seen Valentinian in the flesh before, but ten years after gazing at the image of the emperor on those gold
solidi
in front of the walls of Carthage, he knew he had been right to have his doubts. Superficially Valentinian looked the part, his face square-jawed like the soldier-emperors of the past, but Flavius knew that it was no more than a façade, the face of an emperor who had never once led his army into battle or reviewed them on the parade ground; even the legionary armour he appeared to be wearing was a sham, the breastplate made of puffed-out golden cloth and the chainmail from woven strands of shimmering silk. Like the bishop, his eyes and those of the two ladies were looking upwards, not even glancing at the lines of officers, a seemingly devotional act that Flavius knew in truth represented a sense of their own divine status, an emperor and his sycophants as divorced from God as they were from their own people.

Bringing up the rear, surrounded by boys throwing flower petals, came the eunuch Heraclius, grossly corpulent, taller even than the Goths, the rolling fat of his chin and stomach wobbling as he went forward, skipping and gesticulating as if he were delighting in a garden, gasping and clapping his hands and singing snatches of verse in his high-pitched voice. It was a spectacle beyond farce, repulsive to a soldier's eyes, and yet this was not a man with eyes that were aloof like the others – his shifted constantly, staring, absorbing what he saw, catching Flavius' eyes in a split second that unnerved him, the piggy black orbs inscrutable and frightening. In that moment Flavius understood what scared even Aetius about the eunuchs – the ability that their singularity gave them to operate outside normal parameters, with motivations that were unfamiliar and disarming to those trying to undermine their power.

Flavius thought of another ancient monument that had fascinated him as a boy – the arch of the emperor Titus on the south side of the forum. There, the sculpted reliefs showed scenes of triumph, of great treasures held aloft by Roman soldiers as they processed forward, armed and exuberant, the people of Rome crowding around and cheering them, the emperor standing tall and visible. If today's procession of catamites and eunuchs was the modern equivalent of the triumphal processions of old, then Rome truly had gone to the dogs, and the time when the barbarians among the officer ranks rose up and swept away this grotesque spectacle could not come too soon.

The trumpets blared again, and the Suebi guards began jostling the officers out of the hippodrome. The once-in-a-lifetime encounter with the emperor for whom they had fought and bled was over. Flavius walked a discreet distance behind Arturus, watching the other officers stream away outside the palace towards the barracks and the Field of Mars, and then he caught up with him on the stairs leading down to the old forum. Macrobius was waiting at the bottom, his cloak on and carrying two army-issue backpacks. As Flavius approached he handed him his belt and
gladius.
‘I sharpened and oiled it myself,' he said. ‘You wouldn't have had time.'

Flavius buckled the belt on, staring at Macrobius. ‘I was expecting to see you at my quarters.'

Macrobius took him aside, speaking quietly. ‘I asked Una to bring your gear to me on her way out of the city. It was fortunate, because when I went to your quarters they had been ransacked.'

Flavias stared at him, aghast. ‘
Ransacked.
How?'

Arturus swivelled around, checking for anyone following them, pulling up the hood of his cloak. ‘It was only a matter of time before Heraclius' agents were on to us. We need to get to our rendezvous, fast.'

‘There's worse news,' Macrobius said. ‘Uago has disappeared. Four men were waiting outside the
fabri
headquarters this evening, and they pounced on him and took him away hooded and gagged. The captain of the guard at the headquarters is a friend of mine and saw everything, but was powerless to intervene. The men wore the purple capes of the emperor's bodyguard.'

‘That means Heraclius,' Arturus said. ‘And it means we won't be seeing Uago again.'

‘But he knows nothing,' Flavius said, a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. ‘He shouldn't pay with his life for our visit to his map room.'

‘If he knows nothing, then he can tell nothing,' Arturus said grimly. ‘Put him from your mind. The best thing we can do for him is to carry on with our mission.'

‘We need to know what that is.'

‘Follow me. It's dark enough now that we won't be conspicuous. It's time we received our orders.'

As they stole away into the night Flavius thought again about the procession he had just witnessed. He had been repelled by what he saw, and was sickened to have been standing so close to one who had probably just ordered the execution of his revered teacher and friend Uago. But above all it was the hollow image of the emperor that troubled him. At the time of the Caesars, despite all the corruption and the venality, the boorishness of Nero and the insanity of Caligula, there had always been men of the imperial purple ready to lead Rome to war, and warrior emperors such as Trajan whom any of the officers in that hall today would have yearned to follow into battle. But with Honorius and then Valentinian that seemed a thing of the past. Flavius now understood more than ever why Arturus and so many other officers held his uncle Aetius in such high regard, a man who seemed to stand, as Julius Caesar had, at the end of the Republic, both of them seeking to return Rome to the honour and virtue of the past. And just as it had been for Julius Caesar five hundred years ago, that return now could only be to a republic. The imperial experiment had seen its glory days, its moments of supreme triumph when the idea of an emperor seemed unassailable, but it had run its course and was now sinking bloated into a mire of its own creation. If Flavius were to return from this mission, and if Rome herself had not by then been conquered by a barbarian king, by Attila himself, he would no longer fight in the name of the emperor, but in the name of Rome as the founding fathers of the Republic saw it, a Rome where a man like Aetius would find his greatest fulfilment in serving the people and the state.

They had passed through the Aurelian Walls and now marched quickly along the worn stones of the Appian Way, the tombs of Rome's greatest
gens
looming around them. Flavius recognized the entrance to the Tomb of the Scipios, a place he had visited in his youth to pay respects to another of his heroes, the conqueror of Carthage, Scipio Aemilianus Africanus. Arturus took them off the road to the left, hurrying past the perimeter of the Circus Maxentius and then through a complex of baths and around another corner, pausing to look back and see whether they were being followed. He pointed to a low entrance in a wall – an old sewer or an abandoned aqueduct channel – then ducked and led them down it, pausing about ten paces in and lighting a tallow candle with a flint and steel. ‘These are the catacombs of Zakarias,' he said. ‘This is a secret entrance used at the time when Christians were being persecuted, but abandoned after the emperor Constantine's conversion when the catacombs became public. The section beneath us has been unused for centuries, cut off from the rest, and is a meeting place for Aetius and his agents. There are about five miles of passages and tunnels, and thousands of bodies. Watch your heads, and follow me closely.'

He sat on the edge of a hole in the wall and slid in, dropping softly to the floor below. Flavius followed, and then Macrobius, pulling their bags down with him. The passage ahead had been crudely cut out of the rock, providing just enough room for one person to get through bent almost double, and Flavius was grateful that Arturus' candle only hinted at the claustrophobic dimensions of the place. He had been expecting the sickly sweet smell of decay, the odour he was used to from the drainage holes in stone sarcophagi, but here it was just musty and cloying, the last body having putrefied and decayed generations before. Almost immediately they began to pass niches and alcoves in the walls, some of them filled with shrouded human forms and others with stacks of bones where families had reused the same
cubicula
for centuries. They turned a corner and came across the first sign of early Christianity, a plastered-over alcove with the painted words PRISCILLA IN PACE and a Chi-Rho symbol, and then they entered a wider chamber with an altar and a crude wall-painting of Christ with thorns and the two thieves being crucified on the hill of Calvary. Flavius thought of those who had worshipped here, some perhaps apostles of Jesus himself, and then he thought of the dripping opulence of the bishop he had just seen in the palace, a world away from the simplicity and austerity of the early followers of Christ.

They turned another corner, past a blackened shrivelled corpse whose arm had fallen out of its niche, and then carried on through a sinuous passage where another source of light was visible ahead. Arturus snuffed out his candle, and then they were there, standing in a widened chamber lit by oil lamps, in front of a man in a cassock sitting on a chair with a book. He had long hair and a beard like Arturus, but it was almost completely white, and as he looked up and smiled, Flavius saw that he too had the blue eyes and high cheekbones of the Britons. He stood awkwardly, his tall frame bent under the low ceiling, and clasped hands with Arturus, who turned to Flavius. ‘This is Pelagius, my superior in the intelligence service.' He gestured into the shadows beside Pelagius, where another figure could be seen. ‘And this man you know.'

The second man was wearing a hood, but on a military cape rather than a cassock, and as he stood out of the shadows and threw it back Flavius saw that it was his uncle, Flavius Aetius Gaudentius,
magister militum
of the western empire, the most powerful man in the known world other than Attila the Hun. He tried to stand to attention, saluting his uncle, and then turned back to Pelagius. ‘I didn't know you worked for Aetius.'

Pelagius sat down again and looked at him. ‘You will know me for my heretical writings against Augustine and the Church in Rome. Unlike Augustine, I believe that we are able to make choices of our own free will, that battles, for example, are not preordained in some grand divine plan, but that their outcome depends on the free decision-making of individuals. Mine is not a bellicose Christianity, but it provides a better creed for the soldier than the Augustinian version, which makes the soldier out to be nothing more than an agent of a higher purpose.'

‘I have not seen your writings,' Flavius said. ‘They are banned in Rome, by order of the Bishop. But I have heard much about you from Arturus.'

‘I take my beliefs from what you see around you here, from the reality of early Christianity, from what attracted my people to the teaching of Jesus when Christianity first reached the shores of Britain more than four hundred years ago. I am a Christian monk, but I come from a long line of druids, the spiritual leaders of the Britons, and I have another, older name that I will revert to when Arturus and I leave the service of Rome to lead our people against the Saxons.' He smiled at Arturus, reaching out and holding his arm, and then looked deadly serious. ‘Meanwhile, there are more pressing matters to hand. I have also worked for Aetius for more than fifteen years now; it was I who first brought Arturus to his attention. Aetius first came to me in secret because he shared my beliefs, and after that I agreed to use my network of contacts among my followers in the monks and monasteries of Gaul to provide him with intelligence. I believed in his cause then, and I still do now, more strongly than ever.'

Flavius stared in astonishment at his uncle. ‘You are a follower of Pelagius? That carries an immediate death sentence.'

‘You will have seen the Bishop of Rome today,' Aetius said, his voice measured and precise. ‘Could you follow such a man?'

Pelagius leaned forward. ‘When the emperor falls, the new Rome will have no bishops, no priests. The people will be encouraged to reach out to God without mediation, without fear.'

‘When the emperor falls,'
Flavius repeated, his voice almost a whisper. ‘Is that what this is all about? Are you planning a coup?'

Aetius gave him a grim look. ‘Nothing can happen until Attila is destroyed. For now, all of our attention is focused on that goal. That is why you and Macrobius are here. Less than an hour from now you will have embarked on a mission that could change the course of history.'

Flavius squatted down. ‘Tell us what we have to do.'

Arturus pulled out from his tunic the map that he had taken from Uago and handed it to Aetius, who knelt down and unrolled it on the floor. ‘Has Uago told you anything?' Aetius asked.

‘What do you mean?' Flavius said.

‘He's one of our circle. For years he has been my eyes and ears in the city of Rome, the main reason he stayed teaching in the
schola
for so long. I've kept his role secret even from Arturus, for Uago's own protection.'

Flavius glanced at Arturus. ‘Then we have some bad news. He was taken by four imperial guards this afternoon.'

Aetius stared at the ground, and Flavius saw his lips flicker almost imperceptibly. ‘Then you must move quickly. The purpose of your journey is only known to those of us in this room, but Uago knew your destination. He will attempt suicide if he thinks there's a risk of him being forced to talk, but Heraclius' torturers are brutal and ingenious, and they have a eunuch's fascination with male anatomy to guide them. We cannot risk Heraclius' agents already being on the route, ready to waylay you.' He pursed his lips and then pointed at the map. ‘You will go disguised as monks. Pelagius has cassocks for you here. You will travel up the river Danube, and from there make your way to the Hun capital, using Arturus' insider knowledge and contacts to get what we want. Once you have it, you will return to Rome and leave it at this spot, where it will be taken and concealed by Pelagius until it is needed, until the long-awaited battle is nigh.'