The Scourge of God (4 page)

The streets were a surf of churning humanity that their own frightened little group breasted by pushing like a phalanx past groaning bodies, smashed doorways, and lurid flames. They clutched useless things: an ancestral bust, an old wedding chest, a sheaf of accounts from a business now destroyed, a frightened dog. The sacking was anarchic, one home invaded and another passed by, one group of refugees slain and another ignored as its members huddled in the shadows. Here a pagan claimed that Jupiter had saved him, there a Christian rejoiced that Jesus had saved her, and yet people of all faiths were equally butchered. Everything had become random chance, death and life as whimsical as a butterfly’s wing. The Huns galloped into sacristies and kitchens without fear of resistance, shooting arrows as if at timid game, and contemptuous of anyone slow enough to be trampled under. The only mercy was that night made impossible the identification of her friends, relatives, shopkeepers, and teachers. Death had become anonymous. The city was being snuffed without names being called out.

When Ilana and her father arrived in the forum, the church was being crammed with citizens seeking miracles from a God who seemed to have forsaken them. A cluster of Huns watched the Romans run inside the sanctuary without interfering, instead conferring on horseback with each other as if commenting on a parade. Occasionally they’d send messengers galloping down the streets with orders, suggesting there was more discipline to the sacking than the young woman had assumed. The fires were growing brighter.

“Edeco!” Simon Publius called, hoarse from the night’s shouting. “I bring you my family for protection as we agreed! We are grateful for your mercy. This slaughter is not at all necessary—we will give up whatever you require . . .”

A lieutenant, looking of Greek origin, translated. The Hun chieftain, identifiable by his fine captured Roman lorica, peered down, his features shadowed, his face scarred, his beard thin. “Who are you?”

“The merchant Publius! The one who sent word and opened the gates as your emissary demanded! Of course, we have not seen each other yet. It is I, your ally who asks only to be allowed to go downriver! We’ll take ship far away from this place.”

The Hun considered as if this were a new idea. His eye fell on Ilana. “Who is she?”

Simon winced as if struck. “My daughter. A harmless girl.”

“She is pretty.” The young woman had a high and noble carriage, her hair a dark cataract of curls, her eyes almond shaped, her cheekbones high, her ears as fine as alabaster. About to be wed, until the siege came.

“There are many beautiful women in our city. Many, many.”

Edeco belched. “Really? The ones I’ve taken look like cows.” His men laughed.

The old merchant sidled in front of his daughter, blocking her as much as possible from view. “If you could give us escort to the river, we’ll find a boat.”

The chieftain considered a moment, then looked toward the church at the end of the forum. The shadows within seethed with the pack of refugees. More people were pushing to get inside. He spoke something in Hunnish to one of his men, and several trotted their horses to the entrance, as if considering attacking it. The Romans trying to gain entry scattered like mice. Those already inside swung the great oaken doors shut and locked them. The barbarians let them.

“God will reward your mercy, Edeco,” Simon tried.

The Hun smirked. “You’ve talked to him?” He called to his men across the paving, and they dismounted to begin piling furniture and debris against the church doors. The members of Simon’s small party began to gasp and murmur in alarm.

“He talks to all who listen,” Publius assured earnestly. “Do not turn your ear away.”

Edeco had watched enemies pray in desperation to a hundred gods. All had been conquered. Romans and Huns watched the work in silence for a while, the Roman party not daring to move without permission, waiting in suspense for what must come. People in the church, packed too tightly, began to shout and plead as they realized that, having locked themselves in, they couldn’t get out.

Edeco finally turned back to the merchant. “I have decided. You can go with the cows, the ugly ones. Your daughter and the pretty ones stay with us.”

“No! That was not our agreement. You said—”

“You dare to tell me what
I
said?” His face, swarthy and slanted and puckered with those scars, darkened.

Publius blanched. “No, no, but Ilana must stay with her father. Surely you understand that.” His face had a sick sheen and his hands were trembling. “She’s my only daughter.” Torches were hurled onto the barricades blocking the church doors and held against the eaves. The wood under the tile, dry and cracked, gulped the flames with greed. They ran in rippling waves toward the peak, and the shouts inside began to turn to screams.

“No. She is pretty.”

“For God’s sake . . .”

Ilana touched his sleeve in warning, realizing what must happen. “Father, it’s all right.”

“It is
not
all right, and I’m not about to abandon you to these savages. Are you devils?” he suddenly cried. “Why are you frying people who have turned to God?”

Edeco was irritated at the man’s intransigence. “Give her to me, Roman.”

“No! No. I mean . . . please . . .” He held up his hand in supplication.

Edeco’s sword was out of its scabbard in an instant and whickered to take the hand off. The severed palm flew, bounced, and then skittered against the base of a fountain, its fingers still twitching. It happened too quickly to even elicit a scream. Publius staggered, more shocked than pained, uncertain how to bring things back under control. He looked at his own severed wrist in wonder. Then an arrow hit his breast. And another and another—a score of them thunking into his torso and limbs while he stared in disbelief— and the mounted warriors laughed, drawing and firing almost faster than the eye could see. He sat down heavily, as spiny as an urchin.

“Kill them all,” Edeco ordered.

“Not the girl,” a young Hun said. He leaned to scoop her up and throw her shrieking across the front of his saddle.

“Let me go to my father!”

He bound her hands. “Do you want to end like them?” he asked in Hunnish.

The rest of Simon’s party were shot down as they made for the corners of the forum. Any wounded were chopped as they begged. The conflagration at the church had become so fierce that its roaring finally drowned out the screams of the dying inside, and their souls seemed to waft upward with the heat, the illumination joining an eastern sky that was now lightening. As lines of stunned captives began to appear from other parts of the city, looped with line like a train of donkeys, the church’s walls caved in.

Ilana was sobbing, so choked with sorrow that she could scarcely breathe, her body splayed across the horse’s shoulders and the Hun’s muscled thighs, her hair hanging down in a curtain, exposing the nape of her neck. So why wouldn’t he kill her, too? The nightmare seemed to have no end, and her father’s treachery had been useless. Everything of her old life had been burnt and yet she, cruelly, was still alive.

“Stop crying,” the young Hun ordered in words she could not understand. “I have saved you.”

She envied the dead.

Edeco led them out of the city he had destroyed, its memories a column of smoke. The besieged always opened the gates in the end, he knew. Someone always hoped, vainly and against all history and reason, that there was a chance he might be spared if he treated with an invader. The Huns counted on it. He turned to the lieutenant who carried the trussed Ilana, a warrior named Skilla. “Attila would have enjoyed this night, nephew.”

“As I’ll enjoy the coming one.” His right hand was on the captive’s waist, pinning her as she squirmed. Her thrashings made Skilla want to take her right there. What a fetching rump she had.

“No.” His uncle shook his head. “That one is too fine. We carry her back to Attila, for judgment to be made there.” 

“But I like her.”

“She is Attila’s to assign. Yours to ask for.”

The younger man sighed and looked back. He had ridden before he had walked; fought since he was a toddler; hunted, pursued, and killed. Still, this was his first sacking, and he wasn’t used to the slaughter. “The ones in the church . . .” 

“Would make pups to rebuild the walls.” Edeco sniffed the smoke, roiling to blot out the rising sun. “This is a good thing, Skilla. Already the land breathes free.”

III

PLOTTING AN 

ASSASSINATION

CONSTANTINOPLE, A.D. 450

I
t was easier to buy a Hun than kill him, and easiest to buy those Huns who knew there are things worth a coin.

At least that was the theory of Chrysaphius, chief minister to the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Theodosius II. Chrysaphius had been urging his emperor to pay tribute to the Huns for a decade now, because the thousands of pounds of gold sent north had forestalled a final assault on Constantinople. However humiliating, submitting to extortion was cheaper than war. The government pretended its payments were for a barbarian ally, similar to what the Western emperors sent the Franks, but this fiction for the masses fooled no one in authority. Now Attila’s demands were rising, the treasury was strained, the Byzantine army was preoccupied with Persia, voices in court were muttering against the minister’s craven appeasement, and somehow the tribute had to end. Accordingly, Chrysaphius wanted to buy one Hun in particular, for a very specific purpose. He sent his minion Bigilas to begin to do it.

“Show this Edeco our great Nova Roma, translator,” the minister had said while dissecting a Galatian pear with a silver knife. “Show him our wealth and our walls and our power, and then bring our unwashed guest to my palace and show him me.”

Several months after the sack of Axiopolis, the Hun general Edeco had been sent south to Constantinople to press Attila’s demands that the terms of the Treaty of Anatolius, negotiated two years before, be fulfilled. The Byzantines were slow to pay all the gold they had promised, and the swelling Hun armies had a tireless appetite for the metal. Chrysaphius hoped to turn this new barbarian envoy from tormentor to ally.

The meeting did not begin auspiciously. Bigilas had to go to meet the Hun delegation outside the city by the Golden Gate, since the barbarians refused to venture inside without a guide. The translator found himself squinting up at the man he had been instructed to impress. Though Bigilas arrived with bodyguard, personal chamberlain, and a slave to hold his parasol, he was on foot and the Huns were mounted; and the warriors had maneuvered their beasts so their backs were to the sun that shone in the Roman’s eyes. Yet Bigilas dared not complain. The haughty barbarian was not just key to his master’s hopes but dangerous if offended. If Edeco didn’t return to Attila with satisfying answers, war might resume.

For his part, Edeco considered this mission between campaigns as an opportunity for easy profit, regardless of treaty gabble. The Romans always tried to soothe the Huns with gifts, and so this visit was a reward to Edeco for the capture of Axiopolis and an opportunity to examine the capital’s more intimidating defenses. Someday, the Hun hoped, he would do to Constantinople what he had done to Ilana’s city.

As Bigilas expected, Edeco was dusty from the long journey but far from ragged. The rabbit skins that his people had first appeared in had long been supplanted by bear, fox, and sable; and crude leather jerkins had been tossed aside for captured mail and padded tunics. Silks and linens that would adorn a Roman girl’s breast were apt to peek from behind a lorica because the Huns had a childlike fascination with finery and no knowledge of proper fashion. Nor were they at all self-conscious. It was the People of the Dawn who decided how lords should dress, and everyone else knelt before them.

Like all the Huns, Edeco looked as comfortable on horseback as a Roman at ease in a chair. He was short but powerful, with a long sword hanging from his waist, a short bow strapped to his saddle, and a quiver full of arrows on his back. Also, like all the Huns, he was ugly—at least to Roman eyes. His skin had the bronze cast of the East and the ruggedness of leather, and his cheeks were corrugated with ritual scars. Many Romans believed the common story that the Huns cut their boys at birth to teach them to endure pain before letting them suckle, but Bigilas knew the puckering was more likely the result of self-mutilation from mourning a close relative. Most adult Hun men, and many women, had such scars.

Edeco’s manner exuded menace, like a low criminal; and his expression seemed fixed in a permanent scowl, given emphasis by a thin mustache that curled downward. Yet he was a calculating brute, the translator guessed, who killed and stole with predatory intelligence. That meant he could be reasoned with. Or so master Chrysaphius hoped.

The Hun was not looking at Bigilas, who he knew was a bureaucrat of minor status, but at the triple walls of Constantinople that stretched four miles from the Sea of Marmara to the harbor known as the Golden Horn. His was a soldier’s gaze, trying to guess a way through or around the barrier. The height of the walls, one hundred feet, astounded him.