The Sword of Attila (36 page)

The quotes from Ammianus Marcellinus in
chapter 7
include phrases on the Huns translated from his
Res Gestae
(Book XXXI), and Una's comment in
chapter 8
on the prayer by Bishop Quodvultdeus of Carthage paraphrases a sentence in a sermon attributed to him called the ‘Holy Innocents'. In
chapter 9
, the inscription seen by Flavius is the actual one visible today at the base of Trajan's Column in Rome; and in
chapter 11
, the inscription carved under Trajan's orders in the cliffs of the Iron Gates on the Danube, the ‘Tabula Traiana', can be seen today on the Serbian side opposite a huge modern sculpture into the cliff of Trajan's Dacian opponent Decebalus, my inspiration for the idea that colossal carvings of two generals may have existed in the gorge in antiquity. The rise in the river level from damming that led to the Tabula Traiana being moved to its present position also inundated the island of Adekaleh, a medieval free port and smugglers' den with ‘a thousand twisting alleys' that I have imagined already having this appearance by the fifth century
AD.

At that time, in Ethiopia, on the other side of the ancient world, the extraordinary Christian kingdom of Aksum was reaching its height, much as recounted by Una in
chapter 8
; to many like her, Aksum would have seemed a haven from persecution and a place to start Christianity afresh, and it was undoubtedly a basis for the stories of a fabled Christian land in the East – including the legend of Prester John – that persisted into early modern times.

The coin illustrating the part titles of this book is an actual
solidus
of Valentinian in my possession, minted in Rome and dating from about
AD
440. For more facts behind the fiction, including my own translation of passages in Priscus on the Huns and in Jordanes on the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, as well as images of the great sword of the Huns and other artefacts and sites mentioned in the novel, go to
www.davidgibbins.com
and
www.facebook.com/DavidGibbinsAuthor
.

I am very grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi of LBA; to Rob Alexander of The Creative Assembly and Sega; to Jeremy Trevathan, Catherine Richards and the team at Pan Macmillan in the UK; to Peter Wolverton, Anne Brewer and the team at St Martin's Press in New York; to all of my other publishers and translators; and to everyone at The Creative Assembly and at Sega for their input. I am particularly grateful to Martin Fletcher for his excellent editorial work, to Al Bickham of the Creative Assembly for his comments, to Mandy Woods for her copyediting and to Ann Verrinder Gibbins for her proofreading and much useful advice along the way.

When I was at school my father encouraged me to read Robert Graves' novel
Count Belisarius
; that in turn led me to Graves' main source, Procopius, and then to Jordanes and Priscus, the historians who give such an insight into the barbarian invasions of the fifth century
AD
and the world of Attila the Hun. I first became involved in the late Roman period as an archaeologist, when I spent a summer expedition to Sicily camped in the ruins of Caucana, the site identified as the embarkation point for Belisarius' reconquest of Carthage from the Vandals in the sixth century
AD
. In Sicily we were investigating shipwrecks of the fourth and fifth centuries
AD
, an experience that gave me a close insight into the archaeology of the period; later I was able to expand that interest through excavations at Carthage, as well as in Italy, Britain and other places that figure in this novel. Some of this research was made possible through funding from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, Cambridge University Classics Faculty and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, to all of whom I'm grateful.

I owe special thanks to my daughter Molly for accompanying me on a wild winter climb in Wales past the lake of Glaslyn and up Mount Snowdon where I first had the idea for the epilogue, and to the many students who worked on an excavation I organized beside the river Dee where I once held a tile marked ‘LEG XX' just as Flavius does in the final scene in this novel.

David Gibbins is a
New York Times
and
Sunday Times
bestselling novelist whose books have sold over three million copies and are published in thirty languages. He is an archaeologist by training, and his novels reflect his extensive experience investigating ancient sites around the world, both on land and underwater. He was born in Canada and grew up there, in New Zealand and in England. He took a first-class honours degree in Ancient Mediterranean Studies from the University of Bristol and completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he was a research scholar of Corpus Christi College and a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Classics. As a university lecturer he taught Roman archaeology and art, ancient history and maritime archaeology; as well as fiction he is the author of many scholarly publications, including articles in
Antiquity, World Archaeology,
the
International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, New Scientist
and other journals, as well as monographs and edited volumes.

His archaeological fieldwork has taken him all over the Mediterranean region, including Turkey, Israel, mainland Greece and Crete, Italy and Sicily, Spain and North Africa, as well as the British Isles and North America. His projects have been supported by, among others, the British Academy, the British Schools in Rome, Jerusalem and Ankara, and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and by a Fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. He has worked at Carthage, leading an expedition to investigate the ancient harbour remains. He learned to dive at the age of fifteen and has investigated shipwreck sites all over the world, including a period as an adjunct professor of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology while he worked on an ancient Greek shipwreck off the coast of Turkey.

His fascination with military history partly stems from a longstanding interest in the involvement of his own ancestors in Victorian and earlier wars. As well as a deep interest in the weapons of antiquity, he collects and restores eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military firearms and makes reproduction American flintlock longrifles that he shoots on the wilderness tract in Canada where he does much of his writing. Military interests reflected in his previous novels include the Punic Wars (
Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage
), Roman campaigning in the East (
The Tiger Warrior
), Victorian warfare in India and the Sudan (
The Tiger Warrior, Pharaoh
), and the Second World War (
The Mask of Troy, The Gods of Atlantis
).

More information about David can be found on his website,
www.davidgibbins.com
and on
www.facebook.com/DavidGibbinsAuthor
.