The Sword of Attila by David Gibbins Read Free Book Online

swords and thrusting spears in massed formation to repel a charging enemy is all very well as long as the enemy doesn’t break through your lines, and anyway it’s not the kind of fighting that’s in my blood.’
    â€˜Which is?’ Flavius said, looking at the monk quizzically.
    The man paused, looked down the line of soldiers and then lowered his sword, holding out his right hand. ‘Gaius Arturus Prasotagus, former commander of the
Cohortes Britannicus
of the
Comites Praenesta Gallica,
the field army of the North.’
    Flavius looked the man in the eye, made his decision and then took his hand. ‘Flavius Aetius Secundus, tribune of the
protectores numerus
of the Twentieth Victrix legion, the forward scouts of the Carthage garrison.’ He swept his hand along the trench. ‘These are my men.’
    Flavius sensed Macrobius tense and saw him slide his hand down again to his sword hilt. ‘Wait a moment,’ the centurion growled. ‘Wasn’t that the unit that deserted in Gaul? That went over to the barbarians? That killed Romans?’ There was a general movement among the soldiers, their eyes fixing suspiciously on the monk, weapons being drawn. Flavius held up his hand. ‘Let him have his say. And he is now a man of the cloth.’
    â€˜Or pretends to be,’ Macrobius muttered.
    Arturus reached up and pulled down the cassock at his neck, revealing an old scar that ran from below his left ear across his neck to the opposite collar bone. ‘When I was six years old, the Saxons came across the sea and overran the shore fort where I lived, slaughtering my mother and sisters and cutting my throat, leaving me for dead. My father was the garrison commander.’
    Flavius turned to the soldier behind him, a grizzled veteran even older than Macrobius who had been kept with the unit because of his skills as an archer. ‘You were there, weren’t you, Sempronius, in Britannia at the end?’
    The man lowered his bow, leaned over and spat. ‘I was there, all right. A teenage recruit with the
classis Britannicus,
the British fleet, manning the shore fort at Dover. We were the last to leave, having overseen the withdrawal of all the troops from the northern frontier and the other shore forts. There was no glory in it. It was not even a fighting retreat. We withdrew under cover of darkness, poling off our transport barges from the very place where Caesar had landed almost five hundred years before. Those were the days when Rome was led by strong men. We were led by that weakling emperor Honorius, who abandoned Britain and left the civilians to their fate.’
    Arturus listened gravely to the man and then nodded. ‘If the garrison in Britain had been retained, things could have been very different. They wouldn’t have been able to repel the Saxons, but they might have persuaded the Saxons to reach an accommodation, to accept a land grant as the Visigoths accepted it from the emperor in Aquitaine. Britain would still have been a province of the empire, and Saxons would have been sending their sons to Rome to be educated just as the Goths do now from Gaul. Instead, the emperors depleted the British garrison to fight their own wars of succession and to bolster their own bodyguard, weakening Britain and providing a tempting target for invasion. By the time of the final withdrawal the British garrison was little more than a skeleton force. Britain was lost not through barbarian pressure but because of the obsession of the emperors with their own security and the threat of usurpers.’
    â€˜The emperor Valentinian is different,’ Flavius said. ‘He will strengthen Rome again.’
    â€˜Perhaps,’ Arturus said. ‘But I don’t see him out here standing behind a cross, leading his men against the greatest threat the empire has faced. Losing Africa with her revenue and grain would be a far greater loss than the sack of the city of Rome