The Scourge of God

What were we looking for? We didn’t know, and scarcely spoke of it. There were a thousand depopulated farms we could have stopped at, but each seemed to hold too many memories of the families who had lived there. So we came to Aurelia and passed by its battlements, finally taking a boat down the Loire River. How lazy the summer current was, and how soothing! When we met people who wanted to share rumors of the movement of armies, we ignored them.

We didn’t want to know.

At last we stopped at a high-banked island in the river, a mile-long refuge from the tumult of the world, its grass tall and yellow and the air golden with late summer. Flowers spilled down its banks, birds flitted through the lacy trees, and insects gave a soft buzz. We walked its length, burrs of seeds clinging to our clothes.

My purse was enough to hire labor to build a house and farm, I judged. Here was the land I’d fought for, against all expectation, and here new nations were rising from the ashes of the old. The West had been saved but changed, ir-revocably. The Empire was passing. It had fought its last great battle. Something different-something we and our children would forge-was taking its place.

We walked the meadows of the island to choose a house site, eating wild apples in the sun. My initial preference was for its eastern end. “So we can look back to where we came from,” I told Ilana.

She shook her head, walking me back through the trees to the island’s western point, facing the warm afternoon sun.

“I want to look to the future,” she whispered.

So we did.

EPILOGUE

Attila was defeated at the battle of Chalons, in A.D. 451, but at Aetius’s urging was not destroyed. The balance of power that “the Last of the Romans” tried to achieve among the barbarians required that the Huns be contained but not extinguished. Had Aetius not used Hun warriors many times to chastise other tribes? Did Attila’s threat not justify the continuation of the Roman Empire? It was the grimmest kind of realpolitik, but wise in its realism. Attila would never truly recover from Chalons, and in all the centuries hence, no eastern barbarian would ever penetrate that far again. The alliance had saved Europe.

History did not stop, of course. The emperor Valentinian, who had hidden in Rome during the bitter contest, was as jealous of the great victory as he was thankful for it. He grasped at this news of peace and mercy. He also blamed Aetius for letting Attila get away.

Certainly the Hun’s ambitions were not yet sated. After licking his wounds, Attila invaded northern Italy the following year with his depleted army, hoping to rebuild his reputation by sacking Rome itself. But his weary forces entered a region suffering from famine and plague. Disease killed more Huns than swords did. When Pope Leo met Attila to plead that he spare Rome, the kagan was looking for an excuse to retreat. It was his last great campaign.

The next year Attila took another bride, a young beauty named Idilco, as if to assuage his failure. But after bringing her to his bed on his wedding night, he had a nosebleed while in a drunken stupor. In A.D. 453, he drowned in his own blood.

His bizarre death marked the end of the Hun empire.

None of his heirs had the charisma to unite the Huns as Attila had, nor to hold other tribes in thrall. The Huns tore themselves to bits, a storm that had passed.

The success of Aetius doomed him in the jealous eyes of the Western emperor, of course, who took the general by surprise by leaping from his throne and running him through with a sword just one year after Attila’s death. A year later, in 455, the general’s followers assassinated Valentinian. Just as Attila was the last great Hun to make his people a menace, Aetius was the last great Roman to hold the Empire together. With his death, disintegration of the West into new barbarian kingdoms accelerated. Within a generation, the Western Empire was no more. The vision of Romulus seemed indeed to have come to pass.

And Honoria, the vain and foolish princess who had helped start such great events? She too disappeared from history, a Pandora who haunts the fields of Chalons.

HISTORICAL NOTE