The Last of the Legions and Other Tales of Long Ago Page 4

  IV

  THE COMING OF THE HUNS

  In the middle of the fourth century the state of the Christian religionwas a scandal and a disgrace. Patient, humble, and long-suffering inadversity, it had become positive, aggressive, and unreasonable withsuccess. Paganism was not yet dead, but it was rapidly sinking, findingits most faithful supporters among the conservative aristocrats of thebest families on the one hand, and among those benighted villagers onthe other who gave their name to the expiring creed. Between these twoextremes the great majority of reasonable men had turned from theconception of many gods to that of one, and had rejected for ever thebeliefs of their forefathers. But with the vices of polytheism, they hadalso abandoned its virtues, among which toleration and religious goodhumour had been conspicuous. The strenuous earnestness of the Christianshad compelled them to examine and define every point of their owntheology; but as they had no central authority by which such definitionscould be checked, it was not long before a hundred heresies had putforward their rival views, while the same earnestness of conviction ledthe stronger bands of schismatics to endeavour, for conscience sake, toforce their views upon the weaker, and thus to cover the Eastern worldwith confusion and strife.

  Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople were centres of theologicalwarfare. The whole north of Africa, too, was rent by the strife of theDonatists, who upheld their particular schism by iron flails and thewar-cry of "Praise to the Lord!" But minor local controversies sank tonothing when compared with the huge argument of the Catholic and theArian, which rent every village in twain, and divided every householdfrom the cottage to the palace. The rival doctrines of the Homoousianand of the Homoiousian, containing metaphysical differences soattenuated that they could hardly be stated, turned bishop againstbishop and congregation against congregation. The ink of the theologiansand the blood of the fanatics were spilled in floods on either side,and gentle followers of Christ were horrified to find that their faithwas responsible for such a state of riot and bloodshed as had never yetdisgraced the religious history of the world. Many of the more earnestamong them, shocked and scandalised, slipped away to the Libyan Desert,or to the solitude of Pontus, there to await in self-denial and prayerthat second coming which was supposed to be at hand. Even in the desertsthey could not escape the echo of the distant strife, and the hermitsthemselves scowled fiercely from their dens at passing travellers whomight be contaminated by the doctrines of Athanasius or of Arius.

  Such a hermit was Simon Melas, of whom I write. A Trinitarian and aCatholic, he was shocked by the excesses of the persecution of theArians, which could be only matched by the similar outrages with whichthese same Arians in the day of their power avenged their treatment ontheir brother Christians. Weary of the whole strife, and convinced thatthe end of the world was indeed at hand, he left his home inConstantinople and travelled as far as the Gothic settlements in Dacia,beyond the Danube, in search of some spot where he might be free fromthe never-ending disputes. Still journeying to the north and east, hecrossed the river which we now call the Dniester, and there, finding arocky hill rising from an immense plain, he formed a cell near itssummit, and settled himself down to end his life in self-denial andmeditation. There were fish in the stream, the country teemed with game,and there was an abundance of wild fruits, so that his spiritualexercises were not unduly interrupted by the search of sustenance forhis mortal frame.

  In this distant retreat he expected to find absolute solitude, but thehope was in vain. Within a week of his arrival, in an hour of worldlycuriosity, he explored the edges of the high rocky hill upon which helived. Making his way up to a cleft, which was hung with olives andmyrtles, he came upon a cave in the opening of which sat an aged man,white-bearded, white-haired, and infirm--a hermit like himself. So longhad this stranger been alone that he had almost forgotten the use of histongue; but at last, words coming more freely, he was able to convey theinformation that his name was Paul of Nicopolis, that he was a Greekcitizen, and that he also had come out into the desert for the saving ofhis soul, and to escape from the contamination of heresy.

  "Little I thought, brother Simon," said he, "that I should ever find anyone else who had come so far upon the same holy errand. In all theseyears, and they are so many that I have lost count of them, I have neverseen a man, save indeed one or two wandering shepherds far out uponyonder plain."

  From where they sat, the huge steppe, covered with waving grass andgleaming with a vivid green in the sun, stretched away as level and asunbroken as the sea, to the eastern horizon. Simon Melas stared acrossit with curiosity.

  "Tell me, brother Paul," said he, "you who have lived here so long--whatlies at the further side of that plain?"

  The old man shook his head. "There is no further side to the plain,"said he. "It is the earth's boundary, and stretches away to eternity.For all these years I have sat beside it, but never once have I seenanything come across it. It is manifest that if there had been afurther side there would certainly at some time have come some travellerfrom that direction. Over the great river yonder is the Roman post ofTyras; but that is a long day's journey from here, and they have neverdisturbed my meditations."

  "On what do you meditate, brother Paul?"

  "At first I meditated on many sacred mysteries; but now, for twentyyears, I have brooded continually on the nature of the Logos. What isyour view upon that vital matter, brother Simon?"

  "Surely," said the younger man, "there can be no question as to that.The Logos is assuredly but a name used by St. John to signify theDeity."

  The old hermit gave a hoarse cry of fury, and his brown, withered facewas convulsed with anger. Seizing the huge cudgel which he kept to beatoff the wolves, he shook it murderously at his companion.

  "Out with you! Out of my cell!" he cried. "Have I lived here so long tohave it polluted by a vile Trinitarian--a follower of the rascalAthanasius? Wretched idolater, learn once for all, that the Logos is intruth an emanation from the Deity, and in no sense equal or co-eternalwith Him! Out with you, I say, or I will dash out your brains with mystaff!"

  It was useless to reason with the furious Arian, and Simon withdrew insadness and wonder, that at this extreme verge of the known earth thespirit of religious strife should still break upon the peaceful solitudeof the wilderness. With hanging head and heavy heart he made his waydown the valley, and climbed up once more to his own cell, which lay atthe crown of the hill, with the intention of never again exchangingvisits with his Arian neighbour.

  Here, for a year, dwelt Simon Melas, leading a life of solitude andprayer. There was no reason why any one should ever come to thisoutermost point of human habitation. Once a young Roman officer--CaiusCrassus--rode out a day's journey from Tyras, and climbed the hill tohave speech with the anchorite. He was of an equestrian family, andstill held his belief in the old dispensation. He looked with interestand surprise, but also with some disgust, at the ascetic arrangementsof that humble abode.

  "Whom do you please by living in such a fashion?" he asked.

  "We show that our spirit is superior to our flesh," Simon answered. "Ifwe fare badly in this world, we believe that we shall reap an advantagein the world to come."

  The centurion shrugged his shoulders. "There are philosophers among ourpeople, Stoics and others, who have the same idea. When I was in theHerulian Cohort of the Fourth Legion we were quartered in Rome itself,and I saw much of the Christians, but I could never learn anything fromthem which I had not heard from my own father, whom you, in yourarrogance, would call a Pagan. It is true that we talk of numerous gods;but for many years we have not taken them very seriously. Our thoughtsupon virtue and duty and a noble life are the same as your own."

  Simon Melas shook his head.

  "If you have not the holy books," said he, "then what guide have you todirect your steps?"

  "If you will read our philosophers, and above all the divine Plato, youwill find that there are other guides who may take you to the same end.Have you by chance read the book which w
as written by our Emperor MarcusAurelius? Do you not discover there every virtue which man could have,although he knew nothing of your creed? Have you considered, also, thewords and actions of our late Emperor Julian, with whom I served myfirst campaign when he went out against the Persians? Where could youfind a more perfect man than he?"

  "Such talk is unprofitable, and I will have no more of it," said Simonsternly. "Take heed while there is time, and embrace the true faith; forthe end of the world is at hand, and when it comes there will be nomercy for those who have shut their eyes to the light." So saying, heturned back once more to his praying-stool and to his crucifix, whilethe young Roman walked in deep thought down the hill, and mounting hishorse, rode off to his distant post. Simon watched him until his brazenhelmet was but a bead of light on the western edge of the great plain;for this was the first human face that he had seen in all this longyear, and there were times when his heart yearned for the voices and thefaces of his kind.

  So another year passed, and save for the change of weather and the slowchange of the seasons, one day was as another. Every morning when Simonopened his eyes, he saw the same grey line ripening into red in thefurthest east, until the bright rim pushed itself above that far-offhorizon across which no living creature had ever been known to come.Slowly the sun swept across the huge arch of the heavens, and as theshadows shifted from the black rocks which jutted upward from above hiscell, so did the hermit regulate his terms of prayer and meditation.There was nothing on earth to draw his eye, or to distract his mind, forthe grassy plain below was as void from month to month as the heavenabove. So the long hours passed, until the red rim slipped down on thefurther side, and the day ended in the same pearl-grey shimmer withwhich it had begun. Once two ravens circled for some days round thelonely hill, and once a white fish-eagle came from the Dniester andscreamed above the hermit's head. Sometimes red dots were seen on thegreen plain where the antelopes grazed, and often a wolf howled in thedarkness from the base of the rocks. Such was the uneventful life ofSimon Melas the anchorite, until there came the day of wrath.

  It was in the late spring of the year 375 that Simon came out from hiscell, his gourd in his hand, to draw water from the spring. Darkness hadclosed in, the sun had set, but one last glimmer of rosy light restedupon a rocky peak, which jutted forth from the hill, on the further sidefrom the hermit's dwelling. As Simon came forth from under his ledge,the gourd dropped from his hand, and he stood gazing in amazement.

  On the opposite peak a man was standing, his outline black in the fadinglight. He was a strange, almost a deformed figure, short-statured,round-backed, with a large head, no neck, and a long rod jutting outfrom between his shoulders. He stood with his face advanced, and hisbody bent, peering very intently over the plain to the westward. In amoment he was gone, and the lonely black peak showed up hard and nakedagainst the faint eastern glimmer. Then the night closed down, and allwas black once more.

  Simon Melas stood long in bewilderment, wondering who this strangercould be. He had heard, as had every Christian, of those evil spiritswhich were wont to haunt the hermits in the Thebaid and on the skirts ofthe Ethiopian waste. The strange shape of this solitary creature, itsdark outline and prowling, intent attitude, suggestive rather of afierce, rapacious beast than of a man, all helped him to believe that hehad at last encountered one of those wanderers from the pit, of whoseexistence, in those days of robust faith, he had no more doubt than ofhis own. Much of the night he spent in prayer, his eyes glancingcontinually at the low arch of his cell door, with its curtain of deeppurple wrought with stars. At any instant some crouching monster, somehorned abomination, might peer in upon him, and he clung with frenziedappeal to his crucifix, as his human weakness quailed at the thought.But at last his fatigue overcame his fears, and falling upon his couchof dried grass, he slept until the bright daylight brought him to hissenses.

  It was later than was his wont, and the sun was far above the horizon.As he came forth from his cell, he looked across at the peak of rock,but it stood there bare and silent. Already it seemed to him that thatstrange dark figure which had startled him so was some dream, somevision of the twilight. His gourd lay where it had fallen, and he pickedit up with the intention of going to the spring. But suddenly he wasaware of something new. The whole air was throbbing with sound. From allsides it came, rumbling, indefinite, an inarticulate mutter, low, butthick and strong, rising, falling, reverberating among the rocks, dyingaway into vague whispers, but always there. He looked round at the blue,cloudless sky in bewilderment. Then he scrambled up the rocky pinnacleabove him, and sheltering himself in its shadow, he stared out over theplain. In his wildest dream he had never imagined such a sight.

  The whole vast expanse was covered with horsemen, hundreds and thousandsand tens of thousands, all riding slowly and in silence, out of theunknown east. It was the multitudinous beat of their horses' hoofswhich caused that low throbbing in his ears. Some were so close to himas he looked down upon them that he could see clearly their thin, wiryhorses, and the strange humped figures of their swarthy riders, sittingforward on the withers, shapeless bundles, their short legs hangingstirrupless, their bodies balanced as firmly as though they were part ofthe beast. In those nearest he could see the bow and the quiver, thelong spear and the short sword, with the coiled lasso behind the rider,which told that this was no helpless horde of wanderers, but aformidable army upon the march. His eyes passed on from them and sweptfurther and further, but still to the very horizon, which quivered withmovement, there was no end to this monstrous cavalry. Already thevanguard was far past the island of rock upon which he dwelt, and hecould now understand that in front of this vanguard were single scoutswho guided the course of the army, and that it was one of these whom hehad seen the evening before.

  All day, held spell-bound by this wonderful sight, the hermit crouchedin the shadow of the rocks, and all day the sea of horsemen rolledonward over the plain beneath. Simon had seen the swarming quays ofAlexandria, he had watched the mob which blocked the hippodrome ofConstantinople, yet never had he imagined such a multitude as nowdefiled beneath his eyes, coming from that eastern skyline which hadbeen the end of his world. Sometimes the dense streams of horsemen werebroken by droves of brood-mares and foals, driven along by mountedguards; sometimes there were herds of cattle; sometimes there were linesof waggons with skin canopies above them; but then once more, afterevery break, came the horsemen, the horsemen, the hundreds and thethousands and the tens of thousands, slowly, ceaselessly, silentlydrifting from the east to the west. The long day passed, the lightwaned, and the shadows fell, but still the great broad stream wasflowing by.

  But the night brought a new and even stranger sight. Simon had markedbundles of faggots upon the backs of many of the led horses, and now hesaw their use. All over the great plain, red pin-points gleamed throughthe darkness, which grew and brightened into flickering columns offlame. So far as he could see both to east and west the fires extended,until they were but points of light in the furthest distance. Whitestars shone in the vast heavens above, red ones in the great plainbelow. And from every side rose the low, confused murmur of voices, withthe lowing of oxen and the neighing of horses.

  Simon had been a soldier and a man of affairs before ever he forsook theworld, and the meaning of all that he had seen was clear to him. Historytold him how the Roman world had ever been assailed by fresh swarms ofBarbarians, coming from the outer darkness, and that the eastern Empirehad already, in its fifty years of existence since Constantine had movedthe capital of the world to the shores of the Bosphorus, been tormentedin the same way. Gepidae and Heruli, Ostrogoths and Sarmatians, he wasfamiliar with them all. What the advanced sentinel of Europe had seenfrom this lonely outlying hill, was a fresh swarm breaking in upon theEmpire, distinguished only from the others by its enormous, incrediblesize and by the strange aspect of the warriors who composed it. He aloneof all civilised men knew of the approach of this dreadful shadow,sweeping like a heavy storm cloud from the unknown
depths of the east.He thought of the little Roman posts along the Dniester, of the ruinedDacian wall of Trajan behind them, and then of the scattered,defenceless villages which lay with no thought of danger over all theopen country which stretched down to the Danube. Could he but give themthe alarm! Was it not, perhaps, for that very end that God had guidedhim to the wilderness?

  Then suddenly he remembered his Arian neighbour, who dwelt in the cavebeneath him. Once or twice during the last year he had caught a glimpseof his tall, bent figure hobbling round to examine the traps which helaid for quails and partridges. On one occasion they had met at thebrook; but the old theologian waved him away as if he were a leper. Whatdid he think now of this strange happening? Surely their differencesmight be forgotten at such a moment. He stole down the side of the hill,and made his way to his fellow-hermit's cave.

  But there was a terrible silence as he approached it. His heart sank atthat deadly stillness in the little valley. No glimmer of light camefrom the cleft in the rocks. He entered and called, but no answer cameback. Then, with flint, steel, and the dry grass which he used fortinder, he struck a spark, and blew it into a blaze. The old hermit, hiswhite hair dabbled with crimson, lay sprawling across the floor. Thebroken crucifix, with which his head had been beaten in, lay insplinters across him. Simon had dropped on his knees beside him,straightening his contorted limbs, and muttering the office for thedead, when the thud of a horse's hoofs was heard ascending the littlevalley which led to the hermit's cell. The dry grass had burned down,and Simon crouched trembling in the darkness, pattering prayers to theVirgin that his strength might be upheld.

  It may have been that the new-comer had seen the gleam of the light, orit may have been that he had heard from his comrades of the old man whomthey had murdered, and that his curiosity had led him to the spot. Hestopped his horse outside the cave, and Simon, lurking in the shadowswithin, had a fair view of him in the moonlight. He slipped from hissaddle, fastened the bridle to a root, and then stood peering throughthe opening of the cell. He was a very short, thick man, with a darkface, which was gashed with three cuts upon either side. His small eyeswere sunk deep in his head, showing like black holes in the heavy, flat,hairless face. His legs were short and very bandy, so that he waddleduncouthly as he walked.

  Simon crouched in the darkest angle, and he gripped in his hand thatsame knotted cudgel which the dead theologian had once raised againsthim. As that hideous stooping head advanced into the darkness of thecell, he brought the staff down upon it with all the strength of hisright arm, and then, as the stricken savage fell forward upon his face,he struck madly again and again, until the shapeless figure lay limp andstill. One roof covered the first slain of Europe and of Asia.

  Simon's veins were throbbing and quivering with the unwonted joy ofaction. All the energy stored up in those years of repose came in aflood at this moment of need. Standing in the darkness of the cell, hesaw, as in a map of fire, the outlines of the great Barbaric host, theline of the river, the position of the settlements, the means by whichthey might be warned. Silently he waited in the shadow until the moonhad sunk. Then he flung himself upon the dead man's horse, guided itdown the gorge, and set forth at a gallop across the plain.

  There were fires on every side of him, but he kept clear of the rings oflight. Round each he could see, as he passed, the circle of sleepingwarriors, with the long lines of picketed horses. Mile after mile andleague after league stretched that huge encampment. And then, at last,he had reached the open plain which led to the river, and the fires ofthe invaders were but a dull smoulder against the black eastern sky.Ever faster and faster he sped across the steppe, like a singlefluttered leaf which whirls before the storm. Even as the dawn whitenedthe sky behind him, it gleamed also upon the broad river in front, andhe flogged his weary horse through the shallows, until he plunged intoits full yellow tide.

  * * * * *

  So it was that, as the young Roman centurion--Caius Crassus--made hismorning round in the fort of Tyras he saw a single horseman, who rodetowards him from the river. Weary and spent, drenched with water andcaked with dirt and sweat, both horse and man were at the last stage oftheir endurance. With amazement the Roman watched their progress, andrecognised in the ragged, swaying figure, with flying hair and staringeyes, the hermit of the eastern desert. He ran to meet him, and caughthim in his arms as he reeled from the saddle.

  "What is it, then?" he asked. "What is your news?"

  But the hermit could only point at the rising sun. "To arms!" hecroaked. "To arms! The day of wrath is come!" And as he looked, theRoman saw--far across the river--a great dark shadow, which moved slowlyover the distant plain.