The Sword of Attila Read Online Free Page A

humic, on one side suffused with the tang of the sea, on the other side with the gritty reek of the desert. Polybius more than five hundred years before had written of the taste in the air before Carthage, a taste like blood, and Flavius thought he could sense it now, an acrid coppery odour that seemed to rise with the dust above the hills. They were wedged between the two worlds, between the sea and the desert, defending a narrow corridor in which would soon flow a torrent of death, as if the floodwaters of a great river were building up in the hills and ravines to the west, about to come rushing down upon them, unassailable, impossible to resist.
    He picked up his sword, buckled it on under his cloak and then raised his helmet, seeing where the gold leaf of a tribune’s rank that he had ordered in the workshop in Milan had already become dislodged and soiled, even before he had seen any action. He stooped over, spat on it and began rubbing it with a corner of his cloak, and then looked around as someone came up from the direction of the cooking fire behind the ridge. ‘You don’t want to do that, Flavius Aetius,’ the man said, speaking Latin with the rough accent of the Danube frontier. ‘Unless, that is, you want to make yourself conspicuous for the first barbarian spear-thrust.’
    â€˜The men should see my rank and know who to follow,’ Flavius replied, trying to sound stern.
    The other man snorted. ‘In this man’s army, everyone leads from the front,’ he said. ‘It’s not like the army of your revered ancestors of the time of Scipio and Caesar, full of feathered helmets and polished breastplates like those you see in the sculptures in the forum of Rome. In this man’s army, if a tribune wants the respect of his men, he leads
primus inter pares –
first among many. That way, if he gets killed his unit doesn’t falter, as those around him fill the gap and another takes his place. And if you want to show your men who to respect, you should smear that gold leaf with dirt and sweat from digging the trenches and then with sticky gore from the bowels of your enemies. I bet they didn’t teach you that in the
schola militarum
in Rome. Think about it, and then get some food. I’m going to inspect the men’s weapons.’
    Flavius looked thoughtfully at his helmet, and then at the other man as he left. Macrobius Vipsanius was heavily muscled, shorter than the usual Illyrian, the almond shape of his eyes betraying some distant lineage from beyond the Scythian steppes. As a centurion he seemed as Roman as they came, yet in his blood he was a barbarian. Flavius himself was hardly much different, being descended on his mother’s side from the ancient
gens
Julia, but on his father’s side from a Goth warlord. Many of the soldiers were like that now, a result of integration and intermarriage, of appeasement and land settlement inside the frontiers, of the need to recruit more and more barbarian warriors to keep the Roman army up to strength. Barbarian chieftains such as Flavius’ grandfather had admired the Roman martial tradition and sent their sons to military school in Milan and Rome, but there was always something that set those men apart, some kind of edge, something that Flavius had seen in his father and uncle and hoped he had himself. It was a restlessness that had driven other barbarians who had not sent their sons to Rome, who had not admired her ways, to burn and ravage their way across the empire, to do what some thought impossible and make the sea voyage across the Pillars of Hercules from Spain to Africa, transforming and adapting like some great shape-shifting beast, to begin their relentless march along the African shore towards Carthage. And everyone knew that the march of the Vandals was merely a portent of things to come, that for every tribe that Rome appeased, for every warrior band integrated, there was another more belligerent