The Sword of Attila (17 page)

Flavius leaned forward. ‘What is it?'

Aetius paused, staring at him intently. ‘We've tried to build up our strength against Attila. I've worked on the
comitatenses,
improving recruitment and training, bringing in the best officers and centurions such as you and Macrobius to train a new generation of tribunes, keeping you in Rome when I know you must have been itching for active service. And we have tried to forge alliances. Pelagius has worked among the monks of Gaul to influence the Visigoths in our favour. Arturus has just returned from an arduous undercover trip to the Sassanid court. But neither has yet given us the results we want, and we need more, some other way of combating Attila's power.'

He nodded at Pelagius, who leaned forward. ‘Every time a new Hun prince is born, a great sword is revealed as if by magic and used to slash the marks of a warrior on his face, to see if he can bear the pain. Those who pass the test become the next king, and the sword becomes their most powerful symbol of status, a rallying point in battle. Without it, the power of the king would be weakened, and battle might be swayed in favour of the enemy.'

Flavis stared in astonishment at his uncle. ‘You want us to steal the sword of Attila.'

Arturus looked at him. ‘It can be done.'

Macrobius, who had been standing behind listening, heaved his two bags back up on his shoulder. ‘When do we leave?'

‘You leave now,' Aetius said. ‘Arturus has gold for the journey, and knows the route.'

Flavius stood before his uncle. ‘I will not fail you.'

Aetius took his hand. ‘
Salve atque vale,
Flavius Aetius Gaudentius.'

Pelagius put his hand on the book in front of him. ‘Godspeed to you all.'

AD
449

 

 

Ten days later Flavius sat with Arturus and Macrobius in a boat on the middle reaches of the river Danube, the sail billowing and the paddles they had used to strike out from shore now stowed away. It had been an arduous if uneventful journey from Ravenna, first across the plain of the river Po to the lagoon port of Veneto, then by ship down the Adriatic to the site of the palace of the emperor Diocletian at Spalatum, from there by stages east across the rugged foothills and mountains of Illyricum, and finally on horseback and then on foot as they traversed the high passes and carried on towards the course of the great river, reaching its western bank and the furthest extent of Roman territory the evening before. As they were monks travelling towards barbarian lands no questions had been asked about the purpose of their journey, and the weapons concealed beneath their cassocks had gone unnoticed by fellow travellers and the owners of the inns where they had stayed on the way. Others had come this way in a trickle from the western empire, some lured by the riches to be had in the Danube river trade, others seeking escape and anonymity in the borderlands of the empire, others genuine monks looking to convert the pagans beyond the frontiers, but only they were intent on the perilous journey up the river and across the steppes to the court of Attila the Hun.

Macrobius was at the tiller in the stern, his hair tonsured like a monk and his face uncharacteristically clean-shaven, a crude wooden cross hanging from his neck over the front of his cassock. He had grown up along the Illyrian shore and had taken charge of navigating the boat, having first inspected it with the hoary old fisherman who had sold it to them. The man had wagged his finger when they had told him they were intending to go upstream, shaking his head and listing the dangers, but no questions were asked after Flavius had produced a generous handful of gold
solidi.
The boat reeked of fish and its scuppers were plastered with the distinctive palm-sized scales of the sturgeon that was the main catch on the river, but it was a flat-bottomed type familiar to Macrobius, with a shallow keel and ample room for the three men and their shoulder bags. Crucially, it had a retractable mast and a square sail, large enough for them to make headway against the current using the south-easterly wind that had begun to blow that morning.

Flavius stared back at the river bank. They had just passed between the crumbling concrete piers of a great bridge built by the Caesars to cross the Danube, the wooden roadway that had once been held up by the arches long gone and the piers themselves buffeted and damaged by the floodwaters of the river. On either side was a
castrum,
the one on the far side abandoned long ago, but the nearer one garrisoned within living memory, its walls built in sections of brick alternating with courses of flat tile that Arturus said he had seen in the Roman ruins of Britain. Before taking to the boat, they had spent the night in the fort – an eerie experience among the detritus of men who could have been from their own unit,
limitanei
who had been ordered to abandon the fort early in Valentinian's reign and who had been absorbed into the mobile
comitatenses
army.

This had once been a frontier of the Roman Empire, but the concept of frontier had changed radically since the time when emperors such as Trajan had pushed forward against barbarian resistance and established a border that needed to be manned and defended, in this case along the natural boundary of a great river. Now, the barbarian threat was greater, but it was concentrated far away in the forests and steppe-lands to the north; there, great armies could be marshalled to strike deep into the Roman Empire, to east or to west. Even the most strongly defended frontier would stand no chance against such a force, and it made more sense to withdraw the remaining frontier troops and absorb them into the
comitatenses,
armies that could meet the barbarians head to head on battlegrounds that might be deep within the boundaries of the empire, places to which the barbarians could be drawn to increase their exhaustion and make foraging more difficult, among a hostile population. The decisive battle would no longer be spread out along the frontiers, but instead would take place hundreds of miles within the empire, in Gaul and in Italy itself. Flavius remembered the policy being drummed into the tribune candidates at the
schola militarum,
and yet seeing these ruins today had made him wonder. Despite the strategic sense of withdrawal, the abandoned forts were a sorry sight and represented the one inevitable drawback of the policy: it removed the visible display of Roman troops and Roman might from barbarian eyes, meaning that for many soldiers of both sides, their first view of the enemy, their first chance to size him up, came in the few seconds of headlong charge as the opposing armies joined in battle.

Ahead of them on both sides the rocky ground rose to jagged cliffs as the river narrowed into a gorge, the beginnings of many miles of virtually impenetrable upland terrain that divided the final Roman outposts from the steppe-lands beyond. The wind had picked up as the gorge constricted, and Macrobius brailed up the sail to half-size in order to slow them down and make it possible to navigate around any of the submerged rocks that the fishermen had warned them lay in the passage ahead. Arturus came up to the bows beside Flavius, his grey hood still over his head, and together the two men scanned the water for any signs of danger. It was opaque, but without the milky hue of glacial meltwater that Flavius had seen in the Alps; here, the waters were darker, a deep brown, a colour that Arturus said he had seen in the tributaries that fed the Danube from the peaty uplands of the North. It was a forbidding sight, and impossible to tell the depth of the water or whether there were any submerged rocks. As the wind began to funnel and echo from the cliff walls, Flavius had a sense of the foreboding that had led many before them to turn back at this point and let the current return them to safer lands in the South.

Macrobius gestured at the cliff face on the west shore, brailed up the sail completely and swung the tiller so that they came alongside, holding the boat off from the rock with a paddle. An eroded inscription came into view, set within a recessed plaque that had been carved into the living rock:

Flavius held up his hand and Macrobius steered closer so that the letters loomed above them. ‘It's old, from the time of the Caesars,' Flavius said. ‘When I was a boy in Rome my teacher Dionysius taught me how to read these inscriptions.' He paused, scanning the lines, before translating it for the others. ‘
Emperor Caesar, son of the divine Nerva, Nerva Trajan Augustus Germanicus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribune for the fourth time, Father of Rome, Consul for the third time, by excavating mountains and using wooden beams has made this road.
' He looked back at the ruined arches of the bridge still visible behind them. ‘That's the work of the emperor Trajan, from almost four hundred and fifty years ago, during his campaign against the Dacians,' he said. ‘This records the completion of the military road, and must mark the furthest point up the river reached by Roman forces, then or since.'

‘Take a look ahead,' Macrobius said, pointing high above them.

Flavius followed his gaze, and gaped in astonishment. Where the gorge reached its narrowest point just beyond the inscription, the cliffs towered higher than before, constricting the passage until the river was no more than two hundred paces wide. But instead of the craggy cliff face they had seen before the rock had been carved into two enormous human figures, facing each other across the gorge with their heads almost out of sight high above. On one side the figure was Roman, wearing the breastplate of the legions and with the cropped hair of the Caesars, and on the other side a barbarian king, with long, flowing hair and a beard; both held swords point-down in front of them, the Roman a
gladius
like Flavius' own, and the other a longer sword similar to those of the Goths and the Huns. It was as if the two figures had walked forward towards each other, a Roman emperor and a barbarian king, but had been turned to stone just before they had made contact, doomed to stand before each other for eternity like ancient giants frozen by the gods on the cusp of combat.

‘It's Trajan and Decebalus, the Dacian king,' Flavius said. ‘Roman and barbarian, neither victor nor vanquished.'

‘They call these the Iron Gates,' Arturus said. ‘Here the rule of Rome ends and the lawless land before the empire of Attila begins.'

‘You have been here before, Arturus?' Macrobius said, unbrailing the sail and steering the boat out again. ‘You seem to speak with first-hand knowledge.'

‘I only know about this place from intelligence reports,' explained Arturus. ‘Before we left Ravenna I spoke to everyone I could who had been this way before. When I went to Attila's court as a mercenary in Gaiseric's bodyguard it was through the mountains of the North, east from the Alps and over the upper reaches of the Danube.'

‘What is our next stop?' Macrobius asked.

Arturus pointed down the gorge. ‘The island of Adekaleh, perhaps a full day's journey ahead if this wind keeps up, beyond a place where the river widens again. The island is a free port, an emporium where traders arrive from all over the known world, inhabited by a race of merchants who are said to have been there for hundreds of years. From Adekaleh the Huns get the silk from Thina which has become the fashion for their women, as well as green peridot from the Red Sea which they favour for their jewels. With the gold that has been pouring into Attila's coffers from Theodosius in tribute, the Huns can get anything they choose. But it's a place outside any jurisdiction, ruled only by the merchants themselves who employ mercenaries to police the rules of fair trade. Sometimes the mercenaries take over, and there have been decades, whole generations, when it has been the most dangerous place on earth, where enormous profits could be made but the life expectancy for anyone with gold in their pockets could be measured in days, if not hours. Traders arrived, did their business and got out as fast as possible.'