Attila (54 page)

‘Sir, it's the Alans!' gasped the messenger. ‘They're falling back – Attila's got them on the run!'

‘Splendid,' said Aetius, smiling enigmatically.

‘They're falling
back
, sir.'

‘Thank you, Tribune,' replied Aetius crisply, ‘I heard you the first time. Off you go now and find out what's happening on the right wing. Dismissed.'

‘Well, gentlemen, Attila's taken the bait it would seem,' Aetius
remarked with satisfaction to his two generals. ‘Now to see how well young Torismund can play his part.'

Some time later the galloper returned with news of heavy fighting on the right: the Visigoths were apparently beginning to gain the upper hand.

‘Tell the trumpeters to sound the advance,' Aetius ordered him. Then, turning to his generals, ‘To your posts, gentlemen.' He shook each by the hand, then added quietly, ‘May God be with us. Jupiter or Christ? Perhaps it does not matter what we call Him, for surely He has heard our prayers and will grant us victory this day.'

As the last deep notes of the
bucinae
died away, the whole left wing began to move – infantry in the centre, cavalry on the flanks. Both Roman and German foot advanced in attack formations,
cunei
, which, despite the name, consisted of broad-fronted columns rather than triangular wedges. Carapaced in armour, legs swinging as one at the regulation marching pace, the Roman columns resembled monstrous metal centipedes. The enemy – Attila's German subjects other than the Ostrogoths – surged forward to meet the Roman-led wing, chanting their war-cry and banging spear-butts on shields. As the gap between the two forces narrowed, the Roman
campidoctores
began to call out their ritual training admonitions: ‘
Silentium
;
mandata captate
;
non vos turbatis
;
ordinem servate
– Silence; obey orders; don't worry; keep your positions.'

On the command ‘
Jacite
', a storm of javelins and lead-weighted darts arced up from the Roman ranks, who then immediately locked shields fore and above, in the ancient but tried and tested
testudo
formation, to form an impenetrable ‘tortoise-shell' against which the enemy missiles thudded harmlessly – in contrast to the Roman volley, which took a heavy toll. Then the two sides slammed together with an earth-shaking crash. For a while, the battle swung to and fro, with neither side gaining the advantage. Then slowly, inexorably, the allied forces, stiffened by the steady and disciplined Roman contingents, began to push Ardaric and his Gepids back.

From Torismund's hill, Titus was able to observe the progress of the battle from the start. In the centre, under relentless pressure from the Huns, he saw Sangiban's front begin to waver and buckle, and a great concave salient form in the Alan line as Attila's onslaught started to take effect.

The Ostrogoths were now in action against the Visigoths, while to his right the two wings of the opposing armies were as yet unengaged. Gripped by a dreadful fascination, Titus watched as the battle slowly began to evolve its own patterns and rhythms. In the centre, the Hun advance pressed relentlessly forward, while to the left, after some ferocious fighting, the Ostrogoths were beginning to fall back. Now, on Titus' right, the Romans and their allies were moving, meeting head-on Attila's subject Germans under Ardaric. For a time, the outcome of the battle swayed in the balance. Then the two wings of Attila's force, its weakest sections, began to crumble. With shocking suddenness, they broke, first the left wing then the right, and streamed back in headlong flight, looking like a scatter of moving dots, pursued by the dark clumps of their victorious foes. Around Titus on the hill, the Visigoths formed up at Torismund's command, and charged downhill to attack Attila's retreating forces from the rear.

With his wings disintegrating, Attila's centre – now isolated by its forward momentum against the retreating Alans – was dangerously exposed on both flanks. Suddenly, Titus saw the genius of Aetius' plan: calculating on the Alans' expendability, he had ensured that the Huns' initial success became their downfall. Leaving Torismund and his men to deal with Attila's broken wings, the other Visigoths and the Romans, together with the other federates, abandoned the pursuit to smash into the Hun centre from either side. So mighty was the impact that Titus could hear, faint with distance, the clash of shields meeting and the ring of steel on steel. Then, guiltily aware that he had allowed events to overtake him, he began to scramble down the slope to where he had left his horse tethered.

Badly mauled, the Huns managed to make it back to their entrenchments where, from behind the wagon-wall, their archery kept their foes at bay, until the coming of darkness caused the allies to withdraw.

Although far from destroyed as a fighting force, Attila's army had sustained enormous losses, and he knew that he had been soundly beaten – his first defeat. Curiously, the thought did not trouble him – the reverse, in fact. He realized, with a stab of wry astonishment, that his chief feeling was one of relief. No more struggle, no more never-ending demands on his ability as a leader
to conquer more and yet more lands, and reward his people with a constant bounty of pastures, gold, and plunder. Life as King of the Huns had become a burden he was ready to lay down. Tomorrow the Romans and their German allies would close in for the kill, like hunters with a bayed lion. But he would cheat them of their greatest prize, himself. For Attila, there would be no captive chains, no exposure to jeering mobs as he was dragged behind a Roman chariot to face a shameful death. No; he would die magnificently, and in a manner befitting a king, so that generations down the ages would recount with awe and admiration how Attila had perished.

He gave orders for a great funeral pyre, consisting of the saddles of his cavalry and his own finest trophies, to be erected within the wagon-walls, and issued instructions to his most trusted captains to set fire to it when the final assault came – as it surely must on the morrow. Then, seated atop the monstrous pyramid, he prepared to wait out the night, his last on earth.

The moon rose, illuminating a stark and dreadful scene. Between the two fields of myriad flickering lights that marked the rival camps, and extending on either hand for as far as he could see, the dead lay strewn in heaps and windrows where they had fallen, for the fighting had ended too late for burial to be possible. Attila cast his mind back over his long and eventful life. He would not dwell with regret on his unfulfilled ambitions for his people; the time for that was past. Instead, he would savour those defining moments when the blood ran high and keen, with the senses at their sharpest – when he faced the challenges that marked great turning-points in his life.

He recalled how, as a boy of ten, he had fought a lynx which had attacked the flock he had been guarding. Braving the great cat's snarling spitting rush, riding the pain as its claws raked his arms and chest, until he managed to draw his knife and plunge it into the creature's neck. Then his first raid: riding as a youth at his father's side against a Sarmatian war-band, his thrilled surprise at seeing warriors fall to the arrows he shot in quick succession from the powerful recurved bow of laminated wood and sinew that was his father's gift. He remembered Margus, where he had stamped his authority on the Huns, and forced the Romans to a shameful treaty. Incidents in his long friendship with Aetius (now, such were the strange workings of fate, his deadly
foe) paraded in his memory – the great hunt where Carpilio, the Roman's son, had faced the bear; the shooting of the rapids of the Iron Gate . . .

Attila jerked awake, chilled and stiff. The moon had set. The shimmering greyness of the false dawn came and went, leaving the night blacker than before. Then a rosy flush appeared in the east and a tide of light spilt over the horizon, gradually suffusing the wide expanse of the Catalaunian Plains. The time had come, Attila told himself with a kind of defiant exultation. He would embrace death joyfully, with no regrets.

An hour passed.

When the camp beneath him was fully astir, and the full light of Midsummer's Day exposed a silent battlefield, empty save for corpses, Attila knew that the Romans would not come. He was being allowed to escape. A wave of weary disillusionment engulfed the tired old warrior. The struggle would resume, and once more he must take up the burden of leading his people, a burden grown so heavy as to be well-nigh unendurable.

As Attila began his retreat towards the Rhenus, he heard again the final words of Wu Tze's prophecy: ‘The eagle is joined by the boar, and together they put the ass to flight.' The eagle was Rome; the boar was the favourite emblem of German warriors; the wild ass of the plains represented the Huns. The meaning was clear: Rome and Germany would join together to defeat the Huns. All along, the seer's prediction had proved correct, Attila reflected, with gloomy wonder. In the end, it seemed, no man was master of his fate.

Titus exclaimed in disbelief, ‘You let him go, sir! Why?'

Aetius looked up from scanning a tally. All over the battlefield moved little knots of men, burial parties, and assessors compiling lists of the fallen. They were all Romans, the Visigoths and other allies having left the Catalaunian Plains for their homelands. In the case of Torismund, elected king on the battlefield after his father's death, he had taken Aetius' advice to return without delay to Tolosa, to prevent his brothers challenging his succession.

‘It was the wisest course,' said Aetius. He gestured at the buzzards wheeling overhead. ‘Would you wish their feast prolonged? This has been Rome's bloodiest victory. Another day's
fighting would have all but wiped out the remaining legions, cohorts, and
auxilia
¹
of my army. Attila is a wounded tiger – best let him escape, to lick those wounds. He may still be dangerous, but he can never again be the menace he was before. Besides, we need him.' He smiled at his courier enigmatically.

‘
Need
him?'

‘Indeed. Without the fear of Attila to make the federates stay friends with Rome for their own safety, they'd start carving out more territory for themselves. Unless I get fresh Roman troops, which there isn't the money to raise, I'd never be able to stop them. Which is why I persuaded Torismund to head for home as soon as possible – just in case he was tempted to start getting above himself.'

‘A shabby way to treat our staunchest ally,' said Titus, unable to conceal his disgust at the general's cynicism. ‘Without the Visigoths we'd probably have lost.'

‘Not “probably” but certainly,' conceded Aetius. ‘To spare my Roman troops who, being virtually irreplaceable, are too valuable to be squandered, I had to ensure that the Visigoths bore the brunt of the toughest fighting. Pitting barbarians against barbarians – that's been a policy of all our generals regarding federate troops, in order to cut down on Roman casualties. I salute the Visigoths; they performed magnificently.'

‘But might that not have dangerous repercussions? They're bound to feel exploited.'

‘Which is why I want them as far away as possible,' observed Aetius, like a lecturer expounding an elementary point of logic. ‘At this moment, despite their losses, they're elated by victory. Resentment will come later – against myself, against Rome. But that's a price I'm prepared to pay for victory against Attila.'

‘I see,' said Titus, both impressed and shocked by this revelation of the general's calculating craftiness. He paused, then added gently, ‘But there was another reason, apart from keeping the federates on side, why you spared Attila, wasn't there?'

Aetius shrugged, then gave a wistful smile. ‘True,' he admitted; ‘the most important reason. He was my friend.'

 

¹
‘Cohort' was a sub-division of the old legion. ‘Auxilium' (a ‘regiment') was the name for one of the new formations replacing the legion.

And God breathed life into the dead and lifeless hand and she stretched out to take the tome

Theophylact,
Chronicles
, seventh century

‘Chalcedon!' screamed Valentinian, leaning forward in his throne to point an accusing sceptre at the sturdy old man in pontiff's robes who stood before him. ‘A boatload of bishops to the Bosporus! Did you hear that, Heraclius?' The emperor turned to the plump eunuch, his chief adviser, standing beside the throne. ‘He means to ruin us.' To the pope he continued, ‘Do you have the least idea how much this expedition will cost in fares, in board and lodging, in expenses? And for what? A vast quantity of hot air expended in theological hair-splitting.'

Pope Leo controlled his temper. ‘With respect, Your Serenity, to determine the true nature of Christ can hardly be dismissed as hair-splitting,' he countered, with some difficulty keeping his tone reasonable. Had he been dealing with Valentinian's predecessors, Honorius, the Emperor's pious and gentle uncle, or his grandfather, the great Theodosius, who had knelt in humble supplication before Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, this conversation would have been very different. With disapproval, Leo noted the colossal statues of pagan gods and emperors that lined the walls of the great audience chamber of Domitian's palace in Rome – which city the Emperor increasingly favoured for his residence over Ravenna. It was said that Valentinian was a Christian in name only, that in secret he practised the black arts of sorcery and divination. But of course it was wise to keep knowledge of such rumours to oneself.

‘The matter is closed,' snapped Valentinian. ‘The state cannot afford it. Tell him, Heraclius.'

‘I think, Your Serenity, the Treasury might
just
be able to find the funds,' said the eunuch smoothly. ‘The defeat of Attila last month liberated monies which otherwise would have been
earmarked for the war. Besides, the state's contribution to the expenses of the trip need not be very great. The Church's income from legacies and donations is considerable, and would help substantially to cover costs. And it would enhance your imperial prestige, Serenity, if for once Rome could be seen to be dictating terms to Constantinople.'