The Sword of Attila (14 page)

Flavius stared at her intently. ‘Have you met Pelagius?'

‘We never know the names of those who lead us in prayer, or see their faces. It's too dangerous for them. It's been that way for almost four hundred years, since the time soon after the crucifixion when the Apostles came to Neapolis and Pompeii, worshipping in secret among the sulphur pits of the Phlegraean Fields before spreading to Rome when the first catacombs were being dug. We are an underground Christianity, always in hiding, persecuted now under the Church of Rome just as we were in pagan times.'

‘What will you do?'

She reached into the folds of her robe and pulled out the golden cross on a necklace that she had removed when she went running, an elaborate latticework of geometric patterns with a square at the base that she had told him represented the Ark of the Covenant. She held it up, the moonlight shining through the lattice, and then turned to him. ‘What do you know of the kingdom of Aksum?'

Flavius hesitated, then said, ‘It's the place Arturus told his two Nubian slaves to find when he sent them away before the fall of Carthage. He said it would offer them safe haven, and freedom from slavery.'

She lowered the cross and looked out at the horizon. ‘Aksum borders my own land to the north, occupying the valleys and hills that lead down to the Erythraean Sea. It's the first nation you reach when you travel south from Egypt. Its capital city has great granite columns, taller even than the column of Trajan, and tombs and houses dug from the living rock, built by an ancient civilization that some believe was one of the lost tribes of Israel, those who brought the Ark of the Covenant with them. Since the time of Constantine the Great when the monk Gregorius converted the Aksumite king Ezana to Christianity the kingdom has grown ever stronger, spreading its influence north to Egypt, south to the Horn of Africa and east across the narrows to Arabia, to the land of the Sabaeans. It controls the Erythraean Sea trade from India to Egypt, but its real strength lies in its Christianity. It is the word as taught by Jesus, spread from person to person, from village to village. There are no priests in Aksum, no bishops. All are welcome, whatever their faith, Jews, pagans, the Arabs with their desert religion, as long as they follow a path of peace.'

‘Do you wish to return, Una?' Flavius said.

She held the cross with one hand and grasped his with the other. ‘You know I can bear you no children. The whoremaster and his wife saw to that. And ahead of us now can only be long absences, campaigns and battles, and then one day you won't return. Everyone in Rome knows what the future holds. Mothers are doting on their sons, knowing they will soon be drawn away to war. At night the stands of the Circus Maximus next to our quarters are full of lovers not willing to wait any longer for marriage. Fathers of military age who fear conscription are taking their children around the monuments of Rome, teaching them everything they know while they still have time. And it's not only the men whose lives may be foreshortened. If darkness falls on the city of Rome itself, if Attila arrives, if the Vandals sweep up from the sea, then all of our lives are at risk. There is more and more talk of the biblical apocalypse, of a coming doomsday, spread by the monks of Arles and now taken up by others who have descended on the city in droves, real monks and charlatans, persuading people to give up all of their gold and silver in return for a special prayer to the Lord.'

‘The army will prevail,' Flavius said, emotion in his voice. ‘We
will
defeat Attila.'

Una shook her head and looked at him, gripping his hand hard. ‘It makes no difference for us. I've made up my mind.' She was crying, but there was a fervour in her eyes he had never seen before. She wiped them, and carried on. ‘I listen when you talk, you and Arturus and the other officers who share your views, followers of your uncle Aetius. Just as you wish to break away from the emperor and take the war yourselves to the barbarians at the frontiers, so we wish to wrest Christianity from the hold of the Church and take it to places beyond the empire, beyond the reach of the priests and the bishops. Some will go north, Pelagius himself, to try to establish a new Christian foothold in Britain. But others among us are planning to go south to Aksum. Already monks of the East who have turned from the Church in Constantinople are going there, and they will soon be followed by others from the West. There are some who believe Aksum is the promised land, that it could become the kingdom of Heaven on earth.'

‘Do you feel that God is calling you?' Flavius said, his voice wavering.

‘All I know is that I was able to bring the words of Jesus to the other girls enslaved with me in the desert, and it gave them hope. If I can do the same to the distant people in the mountains of my own land, then I will have found purpose in life. And I want to run again, not along these sands that lead only south to Neapolis and persecution or north to war, but between the villages of my home in the Ethiopian highlands, bringing messages only of peace. I have had enough of Rome and her wars.'

She turned and drew something else out of the folds of her robe, handing it to him. It was a small stone, black and polished smooth, suspended from a thin leather thong that had been threaded through a hole in the centre. ‘I found this piece of jet outside my village when I was a child, and have worn it smooth by handling it. Take it, and remember me.'

Behind them Flavius' horse whinnied and stomped, moving down from the grassy knoll in the dunes where they had left it grazing while they went swimming. Flavius picked up the nosebag he had prepared and got up to feed it, stroking its nose and whispering into its ear, and then slapping it on its haunches as it cantered over to the river for a drink. He felt suddenly alone, standing behind Una as she stared out to the horizon, watching his horse dip its head into the waters where the Tiber flowed into the sea. He had expected to be the one breaking the news to her of his imminent departure, but instead she had turned the tables on him. He had felt thrown by it, confused, unable to reply. Yet standing here, poised between her and the restless horse, he knew where his future lay. The free will preached by Pelagius and his followers was all very well, but in a world on the verge of imploding, the lives of men were as constrained as those of the gladiators of old in the Colosseum. He was as locked into war as Una was into her vision of peace.

He heard a distant noise, a drumbeat, and stared out to sea. Beneath the light of the moon a galley came into view, a single-banked
liburnian,
one of the patrols they had seen leave the mouth of the Tiber shortly after they had arrived. Even here on the beach under the stars the sense of peace was an illusion. For months now Gaiseric's Vandal navy from Carthage had been raiding and pillaging its way along the coast, using the Roman ships that he had seen abandoned in the harbour of Carthage before its fall. Arturus had been right in his prediction that day: the warriors of the forest had become warriors of the desert, and now of the sea. Gaiseric had not been content to rest on his laurels at Carthage but had taken his men on the only route of campaign open from there, out onto the Mediterranean. All of the strategists in Rome knew it was only a matter of time before raiding and pillaging became a seaborne assault. The Roman navy was too weak to confront Gaiseric in a full-scale naval battle, so the only hope was a victory for the army, not against the Vandals but against the Huns, a victory that would allow troops to redeploy along this shore to counter an invasion. Yet even that strategy was riddled with uncertainty: any victory against Attila was likely to be one of attrition, leaving the Roman army too weak to redeploy effectively. Everything was on a knife-edge. All that seemed certain was that one day soon these beaches, like the shore before Troy, would run red with blood, that those left to defend Rome would make the invaders pay a dear price among the dunes and hollows of this shore.

The horse returned and kicked at the sand. Una got up and Flavius quickly rolled the blanket, leaving the grapes and the empty flagon in the sand. He leapt on the horse, reining it in as it reared into the air, whinnying and stomping again, and then he put out a hand, pulling Una up behind him. She held him tight, her breasts warm against his back, and they rode hard for Rome.

Early the following morning Flavius led Arturus out of the
schola,
over the exercise yard and onto the street in front of the emperor Trajan's great column, its white marble drums soaring a hundred feet into the air between the Greek and Latin libraries. As a boy, between lessons with his teacher Dionysius, Flavius had spent hours staring from the upper floors of the libraries at the column, scrutinizing each scene on the spiral frieze until it was etched in his memory: scenes of war and conquest, of weapons and fortifications and river crossings, of defeated barbarians and victorious Romans, of the emperor himself commanding his men from the front and leading them on. He saw the inscription at the base of the column, the place where the ashes of the emperor lay in a casket of Dacian gold, and read the first line: SENATVS POPVLVSQVE ROMANVS, remembering the rest by heart:
The Senate and the people of Rome give this to the emperor Caesar, son of the divine Nerva, Nerva Trajanus Augustus Germanicus Dacicus, Pontifex Maximus, in his seventeenth year in the office of Tribune, having been acclaimed six times as imperator, six times consul, pater patriae.

He looked up and saw a scene featuring the vanquished King Decebalus and another of the Romans crossing the river Danube, the image that had most fired his imagination as a boy, and he felt the excitement course through him. He could hardly believe that he would soon be going to the same place, that he and Macrobius and Arturus would be crossing the river where the legionaries had gone three hundred and fifty years before, treading where his revered hero Trajan has taken his army on a war of conquest that would reach the limits of Parthia and see the Roman Empire expand to its greatest extent ever.

They left the column behind and climbed up a winding road on the north side of Trajan's forum into the adjoining market complex, a huge brick structure that had been converted under Aetius' orders into the Rome headquarters of the
fabri,
the corps of military engineers. They passed several buxom slave girls carrying baskets behind an overweight cleric and flashing smiles at them, and he thought of Una, wondering when he was going to see her again. Just before leaving the
schola
he had called Macrobius back and asked him to tell Una to leave, to take her belongings to his sister's house in Cosa up the coast and await his return. It was just a niggle, but he had a sudden feeling that it was not worth taking chances, that if Heraclius was on to Arturus then he might also have agents who had seen the two of them together, who might be following them now. He had little else to lose in this world, but if anything happened to Una he knew he would have to exact vengeance on those who had perpetrated it, something that could start a terrible bloodbath that might bring down all of those around him and destroy Aetius' plans. Not knowing when he might see her again was a small price to pay for avoiding that, though it was one he knew he was going find hard to bear in the days and weeks ahead.

After passing inspection by the guards Flavius and Arturus went along a corridor and through a door into a hall almost as large as a law court, the wide windows letting in sunlight that lit up a row of tables in the centre. Around the walls below the windows were pinned-up charts and maps, one of them a continuous scroll that extended over two walls, and at the tables several dozen men were copying maps and annotating illustrations on large sheets of vellum and papyrus.

One of the men saw them, waved and quickly made his way over – a white-bearded man in late middle age wearing the insignia of a senior
fabri
tribune. He slapped Flavius on the shoulder and immediately doubled over in pain, his hand on his back. ‘It doesn't get any better,' he exclaimed, letting the two men ease him onto a seat. ‘Too much time hunched over maps, not enough fresh air. It's far too long since I saw active service.'

‘When was that?' Arturus said.

‘Flavius can tell you. No decorations, no glory. But it taught me a thing or two about soldiering, something I tried to pass on in my years teaching the boys in the
schola.
'

‘Go on, Uago,' Flavius said. ‘Arturus was given his commission as a
foederati
tribune in the field, so he never had the benefit of the
schola
and your experience.'

Uago stared into the middle distance, his brows furrowed. ‘It was during the Berber rebellion in the fifteenth year of Honorius' reign, nearly forty years ago now. I'd been among the first batch of tribunes to graduate from the
schola
, set up only the year before in the wake of Alaric's sack of Rome. My first job with the
fabri
had been to help clear the rubble created by the Goths on the Capitoline Hill, when they had tried to pull down the ruins of the old temple. After that I volunteered for frontier service, and was posted as second-in-command of a
fabri numerus
on the edge of the desert in Mauretania Tingitana. The
limitanei
garrison had been depleted to make up numbers in the Africa
comitatenses,
and when the rebellion started we were remustered as infantry
milites
. It was hard campaigning, with many men falling to disease and exhaustion, and there were no battles, only brief violent skirmishes and chasing shadows in the dark. Towards the end we reverted to our role as
fabri
and were used to make roads, improve fortifications and dig wells, much more to my liking than hunting down rebels and burning villages. I discovered a fascination for survey and mapmaking, and that's been my calling ever since.'

‘Forty years is a long time to be in the army,' Arturus said.