The Sword of Attila (5 page)

The two soldiers jumped out of the trench followed by the dozen or so other men who had been slumbering nearby, all wide awake at the mention of food. Macrobius made his way up the trench to the
optio
of the next section. The waft of boiled and roasted meat had made Flavius salivate; he suddenly realized how famished he was. One advantage of being in a forward reconnaissance unit was that his command included a detachment of
sagittarii
like the Sarmatian Apsachos – archers were as useful for foraging as they were in battle. The previous evening in a wooded oasis they had cornered and shot three of the European deer that had been stocked there centuries before when the Romans had first taken over those lands after the Punic Wars, making them into a vast hunting preserve. Flavius had thrilled to the chase, forgetting the coming onslaught, his exuberance taking him back to his boyhood years when he learnt to hunt with his father and uncles in the forests of central Gaul. The deer would provide a hearty breakfast for all sixty of the men ranged along the hilltop, and the cook had made a hot drink from the broth.

Flavius tried to ignore the rumbling in his stomach and the knowledge that hot food would help against the cold.
Primus inter pares
or not, one thing he would not do was to go ahead of his men to the cooking fire. Despite their griping and ribald humour, these were some of the toughest men left in the African garrison, and they all knew that this meal was likely to be their last. If he were to lead them to their deaths in battle, he would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that he had fulfilled his responsibility as a commander and provided for their families and their stomachs.

He swallowed hard and looked ahead. The men not yet at breakfast were already standing to along the parapet, silent, swords loosened in their scabbards and spears ready, the archers holding their bows unslung, all of them staring at the horizon as Flavius was, looking for the first hints of what was to come. He saw one man make the sign of Christ, and he glanced back at the huge wooden cross that had been erected outside the walls of Carthage, standing there like the cross of the crucifixion that was still said to tower over the rock of Calvary in Jerusalem. The Carthage cross had been made from charred timbers found outside the walls from buildings destroyed when Scipio took the city, and it seemed to stand there now as a symbol of past glory, as a talisman against the coming evil. And yet the cross was behind them, invisible when they turned to face the enemy, as if Christ himself were fearful of straying too far forward into the jaws of hell, as if the thin line of soldiers had been thrust into a hinterland where even the power of the Lord would be swept aside by the violence of war.

He thought of what the soldier had said about the wealth of the Church and the poverty of Jesus. It had been over a hundred years since the emperor Constantine had thrown away the mantle of the old gods and embraced the cross – years that some in secret were no longer calculating
ab urbe condita,
meaning since the foundation of the city, but
anno domini nostri iesu –
in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Flavius himself had been taught Greek by the monk Dionysius from Scythia, and it was he who in secret had come up with the new dating system, the little monk whose books he used to carry while he had scurried to and fro between the Greek and Latin libraries on either side of Trajan's Column in Rome, selecting works of Christian virtue to be copied in the
scriptoria
and others to be discarded as amoral and corrupt. On hearing of his appointment to Carthage, Flavius had revisited the Greek library in order to consult the military historians, and he had been shocked by the gaps on the shelves; he had taken away Polybius' work on Carthage in order to preserve it from the monks, on the ostensible grounds that it would be needed in the field as a training manual for the fighting to come.

It was a changing world, and not just in the libraries. The old patrician families were still there, the senators and equestrians, the ancient
gens
like his mother's family, but their power was in name only; the new aristocracy consisted of the priests and the bishops. Christians for generations now had been able to worship openly, free at last from centuries of persecution; the old temples had been converted into churches, and new basilicas had been completed. Yet many eschewed those places and continued to worship privately in their houses or in secret underground rooms, in caves and catacombs. For them, the promise of Christianity had been of a religion without priests, a religion of the common people, and the Church of Rome and of Constantinople was nothing more than the old religion in a new guise, with arcane rituals and fear of divine retribution and obligatory paths to salvation that enslaved the congregation to the priesthood. And for the emperors and the generals, the peace-loving prophet of the Gospels was no longer sufficient to gird the Church for its role in the war of all wars, for the coming darkness; Christ needed now to be armoured, to be recreated in the image of Mars Ultor – the Avenger – to be placed in front of the soldiers on the battlefield to dissuade them from dropping their arms and following the path of Augustine to the City of God where the priests could hold no sway and the only emperor was the true divinity.

Flavius turned and saw the distant cloud of dust that Macrobius had spotted to the south-west, and took a deep breath. There were no priests here today, and there was no flaming cross for the soldiers to follow. What mattered now was not the smiting power of the Lord or the mercy of Christ but the small superstitions and rituals that had kept soldiers' courage up since time immemorial: snatched prayers, a lucky charm, a statuette of a loved one tucked into a pouch on a belt. He pulled out the little silver cross he wore around his neck, held it tight for a few moments and then folded it back under his chainmail. The time had passed even for that. All that mattered now was to keep his nerve, to keep fear at bay, to focus on cold steel and battle lust and the desire to kill.

Flavius pulled the last tendrils of meat off the leg of venison with his teeth and tossed the bone away, wiping the grease from his stubble with the back of his sleeve. He already felt better, and could sense the beginning of something like warmth spreading through his body. He turned away the offer of wine, fearful of becoming drowsy, and instead took the drink that Macrobius had passed him –
catha,
an infusion of leaves from the eastern desert that the frontier soldiers had learnt from the nomads to drink to keep themselves awake. He drained the wooden bowl and passed it back to Macrobius, who took a wad of the leaves and shoved them in his cheek, chewing them and spitting out the pieces of stem. He eyed Flavius, speaking with his cheek full. ‘Once you've developed a taste for this stuff, the infusion isn't enough,' he said. ‘You've no idea what it's like spending months in a desert outpost trying to keep awake.'

‘Now I think I understand why your night vision is so good,' Flavius said. Since taking the drink the light seemed sharper, clearer, as if his point of vision had been projected forward slightly. He pointed to the south-west. ‘They're coming now, up the rise. No more than two
stades
distant. Should I order the men to stand to?'

‘Your call, tribune.'

Flavius looked down the line. ‘The final section can continue eating. The rest stand to behind the parapet with helmets on and swords drawn.
Sagittarii
to be spaced at five-man intervals with an arrow ready to be drawn. They are only to shoot on my command.'

‘Ave
, tribune.' Macrobius conveyed the order to his senior
optio,
and the clunk of armour and swords could be heard down the trench on either side as the men stood at the ready. He turned back to Flavius and the two men marched up to the parapet and stood again on it, Macrobius with his feet planted firmly apart and his hand on his sword pommel, his helmet now in place over his felt cap. Flavius loosened his sword, feeling the dust of the air in his mouth again. The group of refugees came into view, three men and a mule, slowly making their way towards the parapet, the man in front holding up a cross that looked as if it had been hastily made from two branches and some cord. There was a shuffling and muttering among the soldiers behind Flavius. ‘The Vandals claim to be Christians too,' one of them said. ‘We shouldn't trust that cross. I say shoot them.'

‘Only some of them are Christian and it's a pretty strange sort. Anyway, that one in front is wearing a cassock. He's clearly a monk.'

‘Shut it,' Macrobius snarled out of the side of his mouth, ‘or I'll have both of you out there for target practice.'

The man in the cassock came to within twenty yards of them, and then passed the reins of the mule to one of his two companions, both of them Nubians wearing little more than loincloths. The man took off his hood, revealing the long hair and beard of a penitent monk. He raised his hand to shade his eyes and then scanned the parapet, spotting Flavius' helmet and advancing a few steps towards him. The archer behind Flavius drew his bow, but Flavius put out his hand and stayed him. ‘Identify yourself,' he demanded.

‘I am a man of God.'

‘We can see what you are pretending to be,' Macrobius snarled. ‘Where do you come from?'

‘I come from Hippo Regius. I am Arturus, Bishop Augustine's scribe.'

‘Arturus. That's a pretty funny kind of name,' Macrobius said suspiciously, drawing his sword half out of its scabbard. ‘Sounds Vandal to me.'

‘It's British.'

Macrobius snorted. ‘What's a British monk doing in the African desert?'

‘Unless I mistake your accent and appearance, I could equally ask what an Illyrian, possibly even a Rhaetian from the Danube with something Scythian about him, is doing out here.'

Macrobius' nostrils flared, and Flavius put out his arm to restrain him. ‘Tell us what has become of Bishop Augustine.'

Arturus paused. ‘We left Hippo Regius in secret when the Vandals appeared on the western horizon. We lived in hiding in a monastery close to the great desert, working on his final writings. When he entered his final illness he ordered me away, to preserve his books. They're here, in my saddlebags. I took a southerly route on the edge of the great desert, known to my Nubian companions, to avoid being pursued, but fortunately the Vandals lingered in the cities to pillage and burn and showed little interest in those who had escaped; they know they will get us all in the end. As for Bishop Augustine, I can only fear the worst.'

‘We hear he is dead.'

Arturus bowed his head. ‘I confirmed the rumour among the refugees that he had died in Hippo Regius. It is as Augustine himself would have willed it.'

Flavius eyed the man, trying to weigh him up. ‘What of the Vandal army?'

‘You will know that they are led by King Gaiseric. You will also know that Bonifatius,
magister
of the African field army and
comes Africae,
has gone over to the enemy, so that almost all of Roman Africa is already in Gaiseric's hands except for here at Carthage. Gaiseric went back on his word and slaughtered most of the
comitatenses
who gave themselves up to him, so there is no augmentation of his force as a result of Bonifatius' treachery, but it makes little odds as Gaiseric has more than twenty thousand Vandal warriors at his disposal, all of them drunk on blood. He also has almost a thousand Alans.'

‘
Alans
?' one of the men said, his tone hushed. ‘Out here?'

Arturus nodded, his face set grimly. ‘Gaiseric now styles himself
Dux Vandales et Alanes.
The tribal chieftains of the Alans are subordinate to him. He uses them to spearpoint his attacks. They stand feet taller than the rest – blond, blue-eyed giants. Everything and everyone has fallen before their onslaught.' He paused again, squinting at the Roman soldiers. ‘But if you're interested, I know a way to kill them. If you've got the guts for it.'

‘That's a bold assertion for a monk,' Flavius said. ‘And also a pretty astute tactical assessment. Are you one of Augustine's converts? A soldier-turned-monk?'

A gust of wind, hot and dry, lifted Arturus' cassock, and Flavius saw a glint of metal beneath, the sheath of a sword that looked like an old-fashioned
gladius.
He narrowed his eyes at the man and jerked his head towards the sword. ‘You monks engage in close-quarter fighting, then?'

Arturus stared back, his eyes cold and hard, and then swept open his cassock so that the hilt was there for all to see. ‘You weren't at Hippo Regius,' he said quietly. He pulled out the sword and placed the flat of the blade on the palm of his hand. It was an old sword, its edge irregular where dents and dings had been ground out, but the clean parts were gleaming and sharp. A smear of dried blood covered the blade near the hilt, where it had coagulated in a thick layer. ‘I haven't had a chance to clean and oil it properly,' he said. ‘We've been on the move continuously since I left Augustine, and I've had a few encounters with Vandal marauders.'

The Sarmatian Apsachos standing behind Flavius unsheathed his own blade, a much longer sword, and held it so it glinted in the haze. ‘Thrust the blade into the sand,' he said. ‘That's how we used to clean ours when we were based in the desert. It does the trick in seconds, and polishes them as well.'

Arturus jerked his head back to indicate his two companions. ‘The Nubian warriors believe that to thrust your blade into the sand is bad luck. They believe that to do so would be to pierce the skin of Mother Earth, that the wells would dry up and your enemy would be upon you. They wipe down their blades and clean them with olive oil. They may be heathen and superstitious, but out here I'm inclined to go along with them.'

Apsachos looked at his sword blade, grunted and then resheathed it. ‘Well, that's just great,' he muttered. ‘As if things aren't bad enough out here without an ill omen.'