The Sword of Attila (15 page)

‘Aetius dug me out of retirement when he wanted a detailed new map to be made showing Attila's conquests. He gave me free rein to call in the best cartographers from Alexandria and Babylon, and I've had the copyists in my
scriptoria
working day and night to get the map ready to dispatch to the
comitatenses
and
limitanei
commanders.'

‘That's what we've come to see,' Arturus said. ‘Specifically, Illyrica and the river Danube, and the lands leading east to the Maeotic Lake.'

Uago got up, took the walking stick that one of the
fabri
had discreetly handed him, and peered at Arturus intently. ‘An unusual destination for a British
foederati
commander,' he said. ‘I am right about your origin, am I not? In my spare time I make a special study of lexicography and etymology, especially barbarian personal names.'

‘I am from the tribe of the Brigantes, from the line of Boudica, though my maternal grandmother was the Roman descendant of a legionary,' Arturus replied. ‘My name is an ancient British patronymic meaning bear-king, from the time when bears roamed the forests of my land.'

‘I thought as much,' Uago said, looking pleased. ‘I'd like to tap into your knowledge of British names. Over the years I've done the same with soldiers who have come here to consult my maps from all corners of the empire. Meanwhile, to your request.' He pointed his stick at the scroll on the wall. ‘This is the
Tabula Cursorum,
an illustrated representation of the
cursus publicus,
the official road network of the empire. It was made by the monks of Arles under Honorius. Really it's not a map at all, but a visual representation of a series of itineraries, and as an image it's full of distortions, pointless embellishments and anachronisms, the kind of things that monks enjoy but most annoying for a cartographer like me. Here, from the bottom up, you can see southern Italy, the Adriatic Sea and the Dalmatian coast, with the mountains surrounding the river Danube schematically represented further inland. But I believe this will only partly suit your purpose. It will give you the distances and staging posts for the first part of a journey, from Ravenna or Rome along the roads and across the sea to a port such as Spoleto, but there is nothing depicted beyond the official roads. The
tabula
is designed for official travel and the postal service, not for those intent on covert missions beyond the frontiers.'

‘You assume much about our purpose,' Arturus said.

Uago looked around, making sure they were out of earshot of the others. ‘I know what it means when one of Aetius' special tribunes, a man usually with a commission in the
foederati,
comes looking for maps of regions beyond the frontiers,' he said quietly. ‘But I will provide all you need with no questions asked. I may be stuck in this room while you and the others are out in the field, but my maps provide the intelligence hub of the empire, and my loyalty to Aetius is unswerving. He was once my star pupil in the
schola,
and I now am his servant.'

‘Show us the new map,' Flavius said.

Uago backed away from the wall and pointed up at a mottled vellum sheet above the
tabula
, at a map depicted on it. ‘That one you'll be familiar with, Flavius, the representation of the known world based on the
Geographia
of Ptolemy that I always had in my classroom in the
schola.
Arturus, you will of course identify your home land of Britannia to the left, with a representation of Wales and the western peninsula containing the tin lands, the place where Aetius tells me that most of the fighting is taking place between the Britons and the Saxons. As a visual representation of the world it is far more satisfactory than the
tabula,
but it lacks the precise measurements between known points, with their orientations, that would allow it to be used as an accurate tool for navigators and travellers. What we really needed was a marriage between the two, between the Ptolemaic map and the itinerary as represented in the
tabula.
That's what my
fabri
have been trying to perfect over the last months, and I believe we now have it.'

He led them to the tables, and for the first time Flavius saw the maps that the men had been copying out. In the centre was a large map, close to the Ptolemaic representation but covered with a latticework of triangular shapes; the men around it were making reduced copies using measuring tools, and others were reproducing sections of it in more detail. Uago walked along the line and stopped beside one of the men, who put down his stylus and moved out of the way. ‘Here's what you want,' he said. ‘You can see the river Danube running inland parallel to the Dalmatian coast, through the gorge known as the Iron Gates and then east towards the Black Sea. Upstream from the Iron Gates it flows from its source past the great steppe-lands of Scythia, the Hun heartland.'

‘The Hun world has always been difficult to define, and that's one of its strengths, strategically speaking,' Arturus said. ‘The borders are porous and ill-defined, really just broad swathes of grassland where few, if any, people live, and even to the west the river Danube is as much a crossing point as a boundary. I don't think Attila cares very much about borders, and that's a huge difference from the Roman strategy. Attila has a concept of homeland, and has his citadel, but the Hun empire is wherever he decides to do battle, and consequently it can change from one month to the next.'

Uago nodded. ‘It's a cartographer's nightmare. We like our boundaries and provinces. With the Huns, you can only put broad arrows on maps, slashing across all of those fixed points and delimiting lines that we hold so dear.'

Flavius put his fingers on the map, measuring distances. ‘According to the scale, the distance from the Iron Gates to the beginning of the steppes is about three thousand
stades
– say one hundred and thirty miles,' he said. ‘That would normally be a route march of a week, but we'd have to do it by river, on the Danube.'

‘Against the current,' Uago added. ‘But if you're lucky you might have a southerly wind and sail against the flow, as boatmen do on the Nile in Egypt.'

Arturus stared at the map. ‘Can we have a copy of this?'

‘You can take this one.' He unpinned and rolled up the vellum, checking first to make sure that the ink was dry. ‘Show it to nobody else, and return it here in person when you have finished with it. Soon, if Aetius approves it, this new world map will be common currency, but until then it's gold dust in the hands of a hostile strategist who might have his eyes set on conquest.'

‘Understood,' Arturus said, tucking the map inside his tunic. ‘And now we must go.'

Uago led them towards the door, and then stopped and stood for a moment in obvious pain, leaning on his stick. ‘If you do get there,' he said, ‘you couldn't bring back a Hun or two, could you? My own Goth dialect from my father's side is close to Scythian, but I'm having the devil of a time making a concordance with the Hun vocabulary. To hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, would help, though it really is the most impossible language, you know. I've been thinking of creating a universal language to get over these troubles. If everyone spoke in the same tongue then perhaps we'd have fewer wars. Another project, if Aetius ever lets me go.'

Flavius grinned and held the older man's shoulder. ‘We'll see what we can do.'

Arturus gripped Uago's hand. ‘Before we go, I'm curious. What was it that you told the young tribune candidates based on your field experience?'

Uago paused. ‘I may not have been in any battles, but I've been around long enough to know that the glories of war are transient. I've seen generations of young men I've taught go off to war, high-spirited young bloods when they set out, too often pale shadows when they return, if they return at all. As soon as one generation passes through the charnel house of battle the next one is raring to go. I told them what I learned in the desert, that war is not about glory but is about hard slog and perseverance, about looking out for your comrades. The memory of that is greater for me than any regret I might have over missed laurels and decorations, mere transient glories.'

Arturus nodded. ‘Wise advice, tribune.
Salve,
until next time.'

He and Flavius began to walk off, but Uago called after them. ‘One last thing.'

Flavius turned around. ‘What is it?'

‘I was meaning to ask. During your jaunt in Carthage, you didn't happen to pick up any of the leaves that the Berbers call
khat,
did you? I acquired something of a taste for it when I was in Mauretania. It might help to ease the pain in my back.'

‘My centurion Macrobius had some, but that's long gone. We had to leave Africa in something of a hurry.'

‘Pity. Perhaps I'll have to go there myself.'

‘There'd be the small matter of a Vandal army to deal with, and a not entirely sympathetic warlord called Gaiseric.'

Uago gestured back into the room, a twinkle in his eye. ‘You remember what I said about my men all those years ago in Mauretania? They were soldiers first,
fabri
second. My men here are of the same stock. I think a
numerus
of
fabri
could handle a small barbarian annoyance like Gaiseric.'

Flavius grinned and waved. ‘
Salve,
tribune.'

They made their way out of the building and onto the street below, the column of Trajan rearing up again in front of them. ‘Rome needs more soldiers like Uago,' Arturus said.

‘The
fabri
officers are a rare breed, my uncle Aetius says,' Flavius replied. ‘Devoted to their work, meticulous, with a keen eye for detail, and loyally quiet about the failings of their superiors. When he fields a
comitatenses
army he always has a
fabri
tribune as his senior staff officer.'

‘He's going to need to recruit the best he can for the war that lies ahead.'

‘Where are we going now?'

‘We will pay our respects to Valentinian. After that, we're going to a secret place where you will learn of our plan. By tomorrow evening, all going well, you and Macrobius and I will be heading east, about to embark on the most perilous mission that any of us has ever undertaken.'

Flavius stared ahead, his mind racing, conscious of passing the old Senate House and beginning to climb the steps towards the imperial palace. It had been almost eight years since he had last been on campaign, time usefully spent instructing at the
schola,
but he was itching to be in the field again. He began to think of everything he would need to do before leaving, of people to see and equipment to organize, of the old
gladius
that Arturus had given him after the retreat from Carthage, the blade to be sharpened and oiled. He felt his breathing quicken, and his heart pound.

He could hardly wait.

Flavius stood to attention with his back against the wall among a long line of other officers, from the
magister
of the Rome
comitatenses
to the left near the imperial throne to the most junior tribunes to the right, men newly commissioned from the
schola
who had not yet been assigned a unit. The line was mirrored on the opposite wall by officers of the
foederati,
among them Arturus, inconspicuous alongside Goths, Suebi, Saxons and other
foederati
who now made up more than half of the Roman officer corps, not counting those in the regular army like Flavius himself, who had barbarian blood in their veins. It was an image of modern Rome and her army that would have seemed inconceivable at the time when Trajan's Column was made, when the distinction between Roman and barbarian had been cut so clearly into stone; yet it was also an army arrayed more strongly than ever before against another barbarian force from beyond the frontiers, a threat that would have been understood all too well by Trajan and the other Caesars who had first taken Rome into the forests and steppes of the North.

A pair of trumpets sounded, blaring from the entrance hall, and those in the line who had been rustling and restless became silent. They were all dressed in their finest tunics, resplendent with insignia of rank and service decorations, yet by order of the eunuch Heraclius they were without sword belts or weapons, a reasonable precaution against assassination, yet somehow also deliberately demeaning, as if Heraclius were projecting his own emasculation on men he regarded with almost total contempt. The great
velarium
that covered the roof flapped in the breeze, and Flavius saw the awning tighten where the sailors who managed it were ratcheting up the retaining ropes from outside. They were within the old private hippodrome of the imperial palace on the Palatine, a space that had once been open to the heavens but was now concealed beneath the awning; at the far end, the imperial box that had once overlooked the Circus Maximus, the place where the Emperor could be seen by almost the entire population of Rome, was now walled over so that it had become yet another inward-looking throne room, a place where the emperor could preside over a world that was almost completely artificial and divorced from the people he was meant to rule. Despite his years in Ravenna and Rome and his proximity to Aetius, Flavius himself had never seen the emperor in the flesh before; realizing this only served to enhance the otherworldliness of this place, as if they were all part of a stage set in which those who were to parade in front of them were mere actors whose personas would fall away as soon as they walked out of sight.

The first in the procession appeared, the Bishop of Rome, having just been awarded draconian powers by the emperor Valentinian, his decrees now carrying supreme authority as the word of God, with no others allowed. He was a corpulent man, carrying the imperial orb and crozier, his fingers crammed with gold rings and his jewel-encrusted robe held off the ground by a dozen small boys, an image about as far removed from Jesus of Nazareth as Flavius could imagine. Behind him came a cluster of Valentinian's Egyptian catamites, slim young men naked except for loincloths, their dark skin glistening with oil, and then fifty of his ferocious Suebi bodyguard forming a square around the imperial retinue. Within the square Flavius could see the emperor himself, instantly recognizable from the image on his coins, holding his hands up high, with on either side two elaborately coiffured women whom Flavius knew must be his sister Honoria and his wife Eudoxia.