Death of an Empire (38 page)

Myrddion rode his horse, leading a spare mount. In addition, four other body servants accompanied the small cavalcade, taking turns on the wagons or riding the sturdy mules that made surprisingly good speed.

Concerned as he was for Cleoxenes’s comfort, Myrddion was worried at first about the state of the roads. However, the heavy traffic out of Rome, consisting of litters, horsemen, farm wagons and carriages, not to mention several centuries of foot soldiers marching northward, slowed their progress to walking pace for long enough to reassure him that his patient would not be jolted too much on the well-maintained highway even when they picked up speed.

The ancient city of Veii, originally one of the great centres of the Etruscans, the first rulers of Italia, passed quickly. One sculpture in particular caught Myrddion’s attention. Sited in a large square near the Forum, the figure appeared strange and inhuman, and seemed to stride on its plinth as if it was ready to explode out of its restraint of stone, leap to the ground and charge down the wide road. Strangely, the eyes were large and blinded, while the mouth smiled at its corners with a distant, peculiar knowledge that chilled the healer’s blood. If Ceridwen were translated into stone, she would smile in just this way. Traces of brilliant paint could still be seen in creases in the marble, so Myrddion realised that the sculpture had once been coloured in red, black, white and ochre to ape natural colours when it sat in its temple. Wind, weather and more than a thousand years had bleached the sculpture white, like a spirit or a corpse.

‘That’s the Apollo,’ one of the servants explained when he saw Myrddion’s eyes riveted on the chilling, smiling face. Something about the gentle, all-seeing smile and the curls that clustered around the face before falling in long ringlets down the neck made the Celt shudder.

Later, the Via Cassia wound close to Lake Volsiniensis, a wide, glittering blue expanse encircled by rising hills that conspired to slow their passage. Then, as they passed the city of Volsinii, Myrddion noticed that many of the buildings were marred by
empty, shutterless holes in their whitewashed walls which looked like so many blinded, black eyes. They screamed out that few occupants remained in what had once been a thriving community.

At Clusium, the party stayed in a rather smelly inn. Cleoxenes seemed much more alert, and after his dressings were changed Myrddion lingered with him to talk, in preference to joining the servants in the small, poorly ventilated space where all seven men were forced to lie on straw on the cold, unadorned floor.

‘So! Will I keep my arm, Myrddion, worker of miracles?’

‘So far, yes. The lower part of the wound is healing nicely. In fact, a scab is beginning to form. As for the place where the infection was at its worst, I won’t need to drain it any further, which is a positive sign. Incidentally, you wouldn’t be here without the salves of Isaac, so don’t give me the credit for your cure.’

Cleoxenes sipped water, for Myrddion refused to permit him to drink wine at this stage of his recovery. Like most healers, he believed that wine overheated the blood. Myrddion had long adopted the ‘better safe than sorry’ axiom, so he had personally supervised the boiling and bottling of water during their passage along the Via Cassia, in spite of being the butt of many crude jokes for his precise instructions. He was unconcerned by the laughter, for he was practised at presenting a bland, uncomprehending face when he chose to do so.

‘I’ll turn into a fish if I keep drinking this stuff,’ Cleoxenes joked. ‘I won’t complain, however. Frankly, two close encounters with death in a short period of time are two temptations of fate too many.’

‘What was the first one?’ Myrddion asked curiously.

‘The fall where I was injured. I was called to meet a messenger from Constantinople at an inn on the Via Clodia. The building wasn’t in particularly good order and some fool had failed to repair some of the rungs on the staircase. They were very loose. My foot
went right through one, and as I pulled my leg out I leaned my full weight on the railing, which then gave way. The next thing I knew, I was falling. As I said, the building wasn’t in good order, so I was lucky to save myself by hanging on to the rail as I fell, even though something slit my arm open as I slid downwards. I could just as easily have been killed.’

Myrddion wondered if Cleoxenes saw the flaw in his memory of the accident. ‘What was the message?’

‘The message?’

‘The reason you were at the inn in the first place,’ Myrddion prompted.

‘I don’t know. By the time my arm was cleaned up, the messenger had gone. I was rather annoyed, for I’d been waiting for instructions from Constantinople for days. But anyway, a scroll arrived by courier two nights later.’

Myrddion’s face was thoughtful and troubled. Cleoxenes didn’t understand the significance of the missing messenger, but Myrddion did.

After Clusium, they came to the ruins of Aquileia. Myrddion had seen the Hungvari techniques of terror at Tournai and Cambrai, but he wasn’t prepared for the scope of the wanton destruction vented on this pretty walled town on the Arnus river. The roadway through the city had been cleared to permit the movement of Aetius’s troops to the north, but otherwise it was left as Attila had last seen it from atop a nearby fortress.

All the timber structures of Aquileia had been burned to their foundations. The heat must have been ferocious, because the stone and marble had cracked and split in the maelstrom of the resultant firestorm. Here and there, a sculpture stood, headless, on its stone plinth, blackened and streaked by fire. Columns had collapsed in the heat, bringing down carved porticos and red brick roofs. In several places the heat had been so intense that the brick had
melted and puddled. Within this hell of flame, nothing could have survived.

While Cleoxenes stared out through the opened hatch of the carriage with interest, Myrddion felt his stomach roil as he surveyed the aftermath of slaughter on such a scale. He tried to imagine Rome in a comparable plight, but the vastness of the resulting loss of life beggared even Myrddion’s vivid imagination.

Ahead, the mountains were tall and rugged, inhabited on the lower slopes by hill people who eked out a precarious existence by raising sheep and goats, and tending vines and olive trees. The Roman engineers had cunningly used the natural landscape as their greatest ally, seeking out the sources of rivers and the tablelands between peaks to find a usable route for their road to cross a mountain range that looked almost impassable. And so Cleoxenes’s wagons continued their slow, inexorable journey through Rome’s greatest protection, the tall mountains that bisected Rome’s most valued ally and traitor, the Via Cassia.

When they reached the last high point before the road gently sloped down to the plains, the vast valley of the Padus river lay before them like a blanket. Far beyond, the Alpes Venetae raised their snow-crowned heads in a great encircling bowl. Even in a fierce, steamy summer, the great plain was a patchwork of green and gold, full of verdant, bursting life created by a network of tributaries that fanned out from the Padus. If Italia had a vascular system, this was it, and, from a distance at least, the signs of decay and moral dissolution that affected the body were not evident in this part of the peninsula.

Myrddion was very tired but he felt his spirits revive as they approached the end of their arduous journey. Bononia lay at the entrance to the swelling landscape of natural beauty that the rivers had carved out of the primeval mountains that enclosed and protected these ancient lands.

‘Praise to the Mother,’ Myrddion whispered, when he saw Bononia for the first time. ‘For here she has birthed a place to nourish even the poorest of her children, where the earth is always replenished from the high mountains and the water is as clean and as sweet as the first springs that She brought forth out of Her sacred earth.’

The young Celt looked down on the ravaged city that marked where two roads crossed: the Via Cassia, running from north to south, and the Via Aemilia, running from east to west. From the Mare Adriaticum to the borders of Gaul, the people of Italia could move at will across many hundreds of miles with ease, because Rome had created the fastest and most efficient communications and transport system that the world had ever seen. In pride, arrogance and hubris, Rome had birthed a strong, stable society that had been impregnable for a thousand years and was only now beginning to crumble. Ironically, the great roads had proved as advantageous to her present enemies as to Rome herself, for Attila had used them to drive a great wedge into Italia, sending the feared Hun cavalry along Rome’s arteries until her whole body was poisoned with his threat.

For the first time, Myrddion found himself imbued with the same desperate urgency that drove Cleoxenes and the rest of the delegation. Italia was an over-ripe bunch of grapes that Attila held in his mailed fist, and one by one he was smashing each bursting piece of fruit as his internal demons demanded. Rome couldn’t defeat him, because her arteries were so clogged with the flow of Hungvari cavalry that the whole body of the Empire was choking.

Across the Renus river and over the Panaris tributary, vast Roman bridges eased the journey. Myrddion stared at these structures with their elegant, curving spans, and marvelled at the simplicity of the designs. Such feats of engineering made the healer’s head spin. How could stone give the illusion of hovering
over space as if marble and granite were as insubstantial as smoke?

‘The stone is only a superficial decoration,’ Cleoxenes explained from his carriage. ‘Concrete is the secret to those great, arched spans – concrete bolstered and strengthened with rubble and iron. Roman engineers can build almost anything by pumping this mixture into wooden shells and then giving it time to harden in the open air. Stone is used to face the raw concrete to add beauty, but the real miracle is unseen – in the foundations and the structure of the framework.’

‘It’s hard for a Celtic barbarian to even imagine such building methods. In Britain, we can barely raise simple stone structures, and the Saxons only use wood. These . . .’ Myrddion’s arms embraced the whole panorama of the bridge over the Renus river, ‘these techniques are far beyond the skills of any of the peoples of the northwest.’

‘And it could all disappear like wood smoke if the barbarians succeed,’ Cleoxenes whispered.

The countryside unscrolled under the hooves of their horses with all its natural, panoramic lushness, but evidence of a vicious, one-sided war was everywhere for even untutored eyes to recognise. Farm cottages stood empty, and many of them were burned. The absence of fowl, cattle, sheep and other farm animals spoke eloquently of Hungvari pillage, but even human beings had disappeared, so that the landscape was completely empty.

By contrast, Hostilia was filled to bursting with refugees sheltering behind its inadequate walls or trudging south through the town in long, dispirited family groups, carrying all their worldly goods. The people of the Padus valley knew that Attila was primed to attack in the near future.

Finally, outside Mantua, Cleoxenes’s cavalcade reached the camp of the delegates. Their arrival caused a stir, for Flavius Aetius had informed the other patricians that the Byzantine envoy was
too ill to travel. Cleoxenes had barely enough time to settle into a snug pallet in the travelling tent brought for that purpose before his noble colleagues visited him.

Pope Leo wore the vestments of his office, liberally decorated with gilt and silver embroidery that featured fish, lambs and doves, all of which were sacred symbols of Christianity. His cloak was woven of dyed purple wool, for he was a prince of the church and, therefore, entitled to the royal purple. Myrddion had heard in Rome that this dye, called Tyrrhenum Purple, was extracted from small, toxic shellfish that poisoned the dye makers during its production. The first symptom was a form of madness, followed by blindness and a rapid deterioration in bodily functions. Death was inevitable. A cloak of Imperial Purple was grossly expensive in the human lives expended to produce it. Under his ostentatious, costly dress, Pope Leo was a narrow-faced, slender Roman, with blunt white fingers that were heavily decorated with rings of great value. His brown eyes were intense and clever, but his voice was soft and unassuming.

By comparison, Prefect Trigetius and Consul Avienus were archetypal Roman patricians. Trigetius was vigorous, middle-aged and arrogant, a trait clearly demonstrated by his treatment of Myrddion and the other servants who were snubbed as if they were invisible. A man of action, Trigetius was dressed in elaborate mail and armour, and carried a jewelled Roman sword and dagger. Even his manner towards Cleoxenes was curt and rude, as he voiced aloud his belief that a representative of the Eastern Empire had no place in such an important delegation.

‘I am instructed to represent my emperor’s interests,’ Cleoxenes informed his fellow delegates. ‘Before Italia or Gaul felt the lash of Attila’s cavalry, my master’s army met the Hun and suffered at the hands of his warriors. Flavius Ardabur Aspar met and was defeated by Attila, as you well know, your holiness. I believe your kinswoman,
Leontia, has informed you of her husband’s defeat in detail. For our burned churches, our murdered priests and nuns, and a population that has been butchered or left impoverished, Constantinople demands to be a part of this delegation. Further, we live in close proximity to the Hun homeland, so any agreements you make with Attila will have repercussions for us.’

‘You aren’t equipped to bargain with Attila,’ Consul Avienus retorted. ‘You’re not a fighting man. And you’re ill.’

Avienus was an older man who sported an elaborate wig of carrot-red hair, tortured into an exaggerated band of curls on his forehead. His purple-edged toga, a jewel of astonishing size that was used to secure his tunic and a quantity of rings and bracelets on both arms proclaimed his wealth, if not his good taste. He reeked of heavy, cloying perfume. Even Cleoxenes, who was accustomed to such epicures, wrinkled his nose at the overpowering scent.