The Scourge of God

One by one the outposts of civilization became ruins. As-tura, Augustiana, Faviana, Lauriacum, Lentia, Boiodurum, Castra Batava, Castra Augusta, Castra Regina . . . all were erased from history. It was as if the earth was swallowing civilization. Ash drifted in the air instead of apple blossom, and every smashed home had the forbidding smell of burnt timber, rot, and damp decay. Dried blood spattered intricate mosaics. Wall murals were smeared with the brains and effluent of the owners who died looking at them. The prophets were right: The armies of doom were signaling the end of the world. Never in a thousand years would Europe forget this march. Evil had come on shaggy steppe ponies, and the angels had fled. It was the spring when days grew darker.

Attila was well pleased.

He paused one afternoon to eat the looted rations of a ruptured Roman fort called Sumelocenna, its garrison massacred with particular fury because it fought so uncharacteristically bravely. Attila rested his boots on the body of a tribune they said had been named Stenis, noticing that the dead man’s tunic was closed by a golden clasp in the shape of a wasp. The king bent to rip the brooch free. He had never seen its like before and would give it to Hereka. “The man who wore it stung,” he would tell her.

No officers had trained Attila in the arts of war. No courtiers had coached him in the grace of nobles. No singer had persuaded his rough fingers to touch harp or lyre. No woman had soothed his constant anger, that simmering rage from a childhood of beatings and harsh training and a manhood of treachery and war. No priest had explained to his satisfaction why he was here, and no prophet had dared suggest he could fail. He was a primeval force, sent to cleanse the world.

Huns were different from other men, he believed-so different that perhaps they weren’t men at all but gods. Or perhaps there were no fellow men but rather that his people preyed on a world inhabited by odd forms of lower beings, mud men. He didn’t know. Certainly the deaths of these Romans had no meaning to him. Their lives were too foreign, their habits inexplicable. He understood that life was struggle, and the joy that some found in simple existence utterly baffled him. One was either a killer or a meal. This belief that life was pitiless colored everything he did. Attila would lead his Huns to glory but he trusted no one. He loved no one. He relied on no one. He knew there would never be any rest, for to rest was to die. Wasn’t it when he’d slept that the Roman bitch had almost set fire to him? What a lesson that had been. He slept only in snatches now, his features aging, his dreams troubled. Yet this was how it should be. Killing was the essence of life. Destruction held the only promise of safety.

Attila was no strategist. He couldn’t envision the lands he planned to conquer. Their desirability, or lack of it, was almost immaterial. Attila understood fear, and he was con-cocting a catastrophe, but a catastrophe that was to fall on Aetius. For every Roman he killed, two or three went running to his target in Gaul. Each had to be fed. Each carried panic like a plague. In every story his horsemen grew uglier, their aim more deadly, their stench more rank, their greed more insatiable. This use of terror was necessary. His horde, vast though it was, was small compared to the millions upon millions in the Roman world. Its strength was its seeming invincibility. Huns were never defeated because no one believed they could be defeated.

He didn’t know that Aetius began to intercept tens of thousands of fugitives like a net, drafting the men into his forces and sending the women and children to help farm.

Attila had no intention of fighting Aetius if he didn’t have to; the man was too good a soldier. But if he did fight him it would be when Aetius was nearly alone, his allies fragmented and quarreling, his cities burning, his food supplies stripped by the homeless, his legionaries sick and demoralized, his emperor wavering, his lieutenants betraying. Attila had never lost a fight because he never fought fairly. Surprise, deception, treachery, superior numbers, terror, and stealth had let him win every contest, from the murder of his brother to the destruction of the eastern provinces. Only the loss of the old sword secretly troubled him. He knew it was only a talisman, shrewdly invented by himself, but his followers believed in its magic. Leadership was all about belief. Its disappearance was never spoken of, but it planted a seed of fear.