Free Attila by Ross Laidlaw

one a native woman, the other a huge, fair-haired man. Both sat up and blinked at the intruder.
    Boniface rapped, ‘Soldier, she came with you under duress did she not?’ The man shrugged but made no attempt to deny it. To the woman, the general said gently, ‘Tomorrow, you will return with your child to your village, and rejoin your husband. I will arrange an escort.’ To the soldier he said, ‘Get dressed and say farewell. I’ll wait for you outside.’
    In silence, Boniface and the soldier marched to a cypress grove a little way beyond the village. Admiring the man’s stoic courage in the calm acceptance of his fate, Boniface drew his sword . . .
    Attempting to return through the Seldja Gorge in darkness would have been tantamount to suicide, so Boniface took the safe but much longer route round the mountains. Dawn was breaking as he approached camp, and a ghostly radiance shimmered over the pale expanse of the Shott. As the sun’s disc lifted above the horizon, he gazed in wonder as an extraordinary phenomenon developed: an apparent second sun beginning to detach itself from the other. The two orbs separated; the upper rose aloft, the lower wobbled, sank, and deliquesced into the Shott.
    An hour later, bathed and shaved, imposing in his parade armour (a splendid though antique suit dating from the time of Alexander Severus, and handed down from father to son through seven generations), Boniface was seated in his command tent, ready to hold tribunal.
    First in line was the cuckolded Blemmye.
    â€˜Today, your wife and child return to you,’ the general informed the peasant.
    â€˜And . . . the other, lord?’
    â€˜Fear not, my friend, he’ll trouble you no more.’ And with a grim smile, Boniface emptied at the man’s feet the contents of a sack – a severed human head.
    Titus’ ship docked in Carthage’s commercial harbour (warships had their own), overlooked by the capitol on Byrsa Hill. Regretting that time did not permit him to explore the great city, Titus showed his travel warrant at the central post station, and pressed on at a gallop straightway for Bulla Regia as instructed. His route took him south-west along the beautiful valley of the Majerda river wide and flat with extensive vineyards for the first twenty-five miles, after which the terrain became gradually more hilly, terraced vines giving way to olive groves, with broom and terebinth covering slopes too steep for cultivation.
    Titus had been born and raised near the border with Gaul, in what had once been the non-Roman territory of Cisalpine Gaul, where his family had been settled for over four hundred years. To Titus Italia proper had always seemed in some ways like a foreign country. Apart from changing horses at a post-station outside the city on his journey to Africa, he had never even been to Rome!
    After the flat, misty reclaimed land and small provincial towns of the Po basin, Africa came as a revelation. The brilliant light in which even distant objects stood out sharp and clear; the teeming, cosmopolitan city of Carthage, full of impressive monuments and huge public buildings which seemed almost to be the work of superhuman beings; the staggering fertility – the wheatfields, vineyards and olive groves: all this made a great and lasting impression on the young man. Such evidence (much of it admittedly at least two centuries old) of Rome’s power and far-flung influence almost convinced Titus that the Western Empire was not in serious jeopardy. The barbarians could surely never overthrow a race capable of producing such mighty works. Could they?
    After an overnight stop at Tichilla, 10 a small town with a postal
mansio
catering for travellers, Titus pushed on at first light, pleased at having covered eighty miles the previous day – almost half the distance to Bulla Regia. Woods of cork oak, red kites flashing in the air above their glades, stippled the valley’s