The Scourge of God

“Its palaces, games, and food. I dream of it like a thirsty man dreams of water.”

“Well, it’s certainly grander than what we have here: the greatest city in the world now. As for the Huns, I’ve already learned that they’re arrogant, rude, ignorant, and that you can smell one before you see one. Beyond that, I’m not sure there’s much to learn.”

“Oh, but there is! If you fancy Ilana and despise Skilla, you should come with me.” He began walking north along the riverbank, in a rocking gait that was comic and pitiable at the same time, and I hesitated. The crippled and diseased made me uncomfortable. Zerco would have none of it.

“Come, come. My stature is not contagious.” I slowed my own habitual pace to match his. Children ran after us, calling insults, but didn’t dare draw too close to the odd little monster and the tall, mysterious Roman.

“How did you come to be a jester?” I asked when he didn’t say anything more.

“What else could I be? I’m too small to be a soldier or laborer and too ill-formed to be a poet or a singer. Making fun of the great is the only way I’ve saved myself.”

“Including the noble Flavius Aetius?”

“It’s the most competent who are usually most willing to laugh at themselves.”

“Is that what you think of the famous general?”

“He actually had little use for entertainment, to tell the truth. He was not unkind or conceited, only distracted. He believes in an idea called Rome but lacks the army to restore it. So he fights one day, negotiates the next, buys the third.

He’s a remarkable man who almost alone is holding the West together, and of course his superiors despise him for it.

There is nothing incompetence hates more than virtue.

Valentinian will one day punish him for his heroism, mark my word.”

“He never marched to help the East.”

“March with what? The people tormenting your half of the Empire were the same he was hiring to keep order in his half-the Huns. They’d work for him and take from you. It sounds callous, but it was the only way he could keep the other tribes in harness.”

“What can you tell me of the Huns?”

“I don’t tell, I show. I help you to see. Learn to think for yourself, Jonas Alabanda, and you will be a hated, feared, and successful man. Now, first of all, look at this settlement along the river. It goes on and on, doesn’t it?”

“The Huns are numerous.”

“And yet are there more people here than in Constantinople?”

“Of course not.”

“More than Rome? More than Alexandria?”

“No . . .”

“Yet the man with the wooden bowl and cup, leading a people who don’t know how to sow, forge, or build-a people who prey on others to supply everything they have-

believes it’s his destiny to rule the world. Because of numbers? Or because of will?”

“They are great and terrible warriors.”

“Indeed. Look there.” We reached a point on the river opposite a meadow used for grazing and riding. Twenty Hun soldiers were practicing archery. They galloped one by one down the length of their meadow at full speed, plucked arrows from their quivers with deadly rhythm, and fired with frightening rapidity. Their target were melons, erected on poles fifty paces away, and so often did the arrows hit that the warriors roared and jeered only when one missed. Such an error was usually no more than a handsbreadth in either direction. “Imagine a thousand of them, thundering by a clumsy legion,” Zerco said.

“I don’t have to imagine. By all accounts it’s happened far too many times, and again and again we are beaten.”

“Keep watching.”

After each pass the galloping warrior rejoined the jostling, joking group and then took his turn again, hurtling across the meadow. After three or four sprints each, they sat, spent and happy.

“Watch what?”

“How many arrows do they have left?”

“None, of course.”

“How fast are their ponies now?”

“They’re tired.”

“See? I’ve showed you more than most Roman generals ever learn. That’s what I mean by thought: observation and deduction.”

“Shown what? That they can hit an enemy’s eye at full charge? That they can lope a hundred miles in a day when our armies march twenty on our best roads?”

“That in far less than an hour they are out of arrows on exhausted horses. That a cloud of arrows came from a handful of men. That their entire strategy depends on breaking the will of others quickly and without mercy because their numbers are limited and their endurance is nil. But if they have to fight not for a moment but for a day, against a unity that outnumbers them . . .”

“This was archery. They were trying to expend all their arrows.”

“As they might uselessly against determined infantry that stands its ground behind its shields. Horses are like dogs.

They will catch a fleeing man, but shy from one who stands his ground. An army that is a porcupine of spears . . .”

“What you’re talking about is the greatest of all battles.

Of fighting, after all, not just thinking.”