DRAMATIS PERSONAE
ROMANS AND FRIENDS
Jonas Alabanda: A young Roman envoy and scribe Ilana: A captive Roman maiden
Zerco: A dwarf jester who befriends Jonas Julia: Zerco’s wife
Aetius: A Roman general
Valentinian III: Emperor of the Western Roman Empire
Galla Placidia: Valentinian’s mother Honoria: Valentinian’s sister
Hyacinth: Honoria’s eunuch
Theodosius II: Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire
Chrysaphius: His eunuch minister
Maximinus: Ambassador to Attila
Bigilas: A translator and conspirator Rusticius: A translator
Anianus: Bishop and (when it suits him) hermit
THE HUNS
Attila: King of the Huns
Skilla: A Hun warrior who loves Ilana Edeco: Uncle of Skilla and warlord of Attila Suecca: Edeco’s wife
Eudoxius: A Greek doctor who is an envoy of Attila
Hereka: Attila’s first wife
Ellac, Danziq, and Ernak: Attila’s sons
Onegesh: A Roman-born lieutenant of Attila
THE GERMANS
Guernna: A captive like Ilana
Theodoric: King of the Visigoths
Berta: Theodoric’s daughter
Gaiseric: King of the Vandals
Sangibanus: King of the Alans
Anthus: King of the Franks
Three hundred and seventy-six years after the birth of Our Savior, the world was still one. Our Roman Empire endured as it had endured for a thousand years, extending from the cold moors of Britannia to the blistering sands of Arabia, and from the headwaters of the Euphrates River to the Atlantic surf of North Africa. Rome’s boundaries had been tested countless times by Celt and German, Persian and Scythian. Yet with blood and iron, guile and gold, all invaders had been turned back. It had always been so, and in 376 it seemed it must always be so.
How I wish I had lived in such security!
But I, Jonas Alabanda-historian, diplomat, and reluctant soldier-can only imagine the old Empire’s venerable stability the way a sailor’s audience imagines a faraway and misty shore. My fate has been to exist in harder times, meeting the great and living more desperately because of it. This book is my story and those I had the fortune and misfortune to observe, but its roots are older. In that year 376, more than half a century before I was born, came the first rumor of the storm that forever changed everything.
In that year, historians recount, came the first rumor of the Huns.
Understand that I am by origin an Easterner, fluent in Greek, conversant with philosophy, and used to the dazzling sun. My home is Constantinople, the city that Constantine XIV
the Great founded on the Bosporus in order to ease the administration of our Empire by creating a second capital. At that junction of Europe and Asia, where the Black Sea and Mediterranean join, rose Nova Roma, the strategic site of ancient Byzantium. This division gave Rome two emperors, two Senates, and two cultures: the Latin West and Greek East. But Rome’s armies still marched in support of both halves and the Empire’s laws were coordinated and unified.
The Mediterranean remained a Roman lake; and Roman architecture, coinage, forums, fortresses, and churches could be found from the Nile to the Thames. Christianity eclipsed all other religions, and Latin all other tongues. The world had never before known such a long period of relative peace, stability, and unity.
It never would again.
The Danube is Europe’s greatest river, rising at the foot of the Alps and running eastward nearly eighteen hundred miles before emptying into the Black Sea. In 376 its length marked much of the Empire’s northern border. That summer, Roman garrisons at posts along the river began to hear reports of war, upheaval, and migration among the barbarian nations. Some new terror unlike any the world had ever seen was putting entire peoples to flight, stories went, each tribe colliding with the one to its west. Fugitives described an ugly, swarthy, stinking people who wore animal skins until they rotted off their backs, who were immune to hunger and thirst but drank the blood of their horses, and who ate raw meat tenderized beneath their saddles. These new invaders arrived as silently as the wind, killed with powerful bows from an unprecedented distance, massacred with swords any who still resisted, and then galloped away before cohesive retaliation could form. They disdained proper shelter, burning all they encountered and living much of the time under the sky. Their cities consisted of felt tents, their highways the trackless steppes. They rolled across the grasslands in sturdy wagons heaped with booty and trailed by slaves, and their tongue was harsh and guttural.
They called themselves the Huns.
Surely this news was exaggerated, our sentries assured each other. Surely fact had become confused by rumor.
