The Scourge of God

by William Dietrich

  Now more Romans were throwing javelins or firing crossbow bolts, even as Hun arrows clicked and ricocheted off the stones of the tower.

  “Who in Hades is attacking us?” Silas demanded.

  “Those Huns you said would be scurrying home by now,” I responded.

  “We have no quarrel with the Huns!”

  “It appears they have a quarrel with you.”

  “It’s you! And that prisoner, isn’t it?”

  “Him, and that rust you called an anchor.”

  “The sword?”

  “It’s magic. If Attila wins it, he will conquer the world.”

  Silas looked at me in wonder, once again not certain what to believe.

  “Julia, heat the soup!” Zerco cried, gesturing toward the pot of beef and millet broth that remained warm in an iron pot. Then the little man ran up the stairs toward the top of the tower, his boots pounding.

  Heat the soup? Then I realized what the dwarf had in mind. Julia was fanning and feeding the coals. Meanwhile I looked and waited for another target from my window. Finally a Hun made a dash for the door at the base of the tower. Reminding myself of my combat with Skilla, I waited for a covering arrow to clang off the stonework and then leaned out and threw. The weapon fell like a thunderbolt, and the Hun fell with it, dying halfway to the door.

  I felt nothing but satisfaction. I was not the boy I had been.

  The Romans were fully aroused now and the growing light was helping. But with our dead and wounded—two more had been struck by arrows—we were outnumbered more than two to one. More ominously, the Huns were dismantling the shed roof of the stable, loosing the tile covering from its posts and gathering men around it. Their intention was obvious. They would use the roof as a shield to get themselves to the gate. Other Huns were gathering straw and timber to start a fire at the door.

  With both sides fully alert now, the arrow volleys were slackening as the battling warriors became wary about exposing themselves. Our supplies of missiles needed to be hoarded. Insults in Latin, German, and Hunnish echoed back and forth across the bloody courtyard in lieu of volleys.

  “Give up our slaves!” Skilla called in Hunnish.

  None of the Roman garrison could understand his demand.

  Zerco came pounding back down the stairs, his eyes bright with excitement. Penned as he was in a fortress, he was something of an equal in this fight or even had an advantage, since he didn’t have to crouch so much to stay away from the arrows. “I lit the signal fire. Lucius and I have loosened some of the stones at the top to throw down on them when they charge the door. Is the soup hot?”

  “Beginning to bubble,” said Julia.

  “Get Jonas to help you pour. Stick that bench plank out the window to make a sluice. When their makeshift roof breaks, pour our lunch down on anyone in the wreckage.”

  “What if I get hungry?” one of the soldiers tried to joke.

  “If you can’t get to the courtyard kitchens by the time your stomach growls, you’re already dead,” the dwarf replied. Then he pounded back up the stairs.

  Outside there was a shout and a volley of arrows shot upward again, many keying accurately through the windows.

  “Keep down until our friends drop the stones!” Silas ordered. “When the Huns run back for cover, rise and use the crossbows!”

  I watched from one side of the narrow slit window. The detached stable roof suddenly rose, rocked slightly as the Huns positioned themselves better to carry it, and then began to trundle forward. Crouching toward the rear were warriors with combustibles and torches. The rhythm of Hun arrows from their archers discouraged us from trying to hit the oncoming barbarians. I couldn’t help but flinch each time a missile whizzed through the narrow windows. There was a thud as the lip of the roof struck the base of the tower, and then harsh shouts as hay, wood, and torches were passed forward.

  “Now!” came Zerco’s piping cry from above.

  I could hear the rush of wind as the parapet stones plummeted. There was a brutal crash, cries, and oaths as the stones, half the weight of a man, punched through the roof and shattered its tiles.

  “The board!” I ordered. A soldier slid the bench out the window and tilted it downward to direct the soup away from the walls. Then I and Julia, our hands wrapped in cloth, hoisted the black pot off the hearth fire, staggered with it to the window, and poured. It was clumsy, a gallon or two of good food splashing inside our chamber, but most of the hot liquid gushed outward as planned and hissed downward in a plume of steam to strike the Huns entangled in the wreckage. Now there were screams as well as curses.

  The Huns broke, running, and the aim of their companions faltered as the barbarians came streaming back. Now we Romans filled the windows to shoot or throw, and two enemies were hit in the back and fell, skidding, as they tried to flee. Two more lay insensible or dead in the roof wreckage, and a few more were limping or staggering.

  The odds were beginning to even.

  We cheered until smoke began ominously rising up the face of the tower. I risked ducking out the window to look, jerking back just in time as an arrow bounced by my ear.

  “A fire has started in the wreckage and it’s against the door,” I reported. “We need water to put it out.”

  “No water!” Silas countermanded. “We barely have enough for a day, let alone a siege.”

  “But if the door burns—”

  “We pray it doesn’t, or kill them on the stairs. We need to be able to wait for help.”

  “What help?”

  “Your little friend’s signal fire. Let’s pray that your Aetius, or God, is watching.”

  The Huns were beginning to shout and howl in excitement at the sight of the flames burning outside the tower door. One suddenly darted across the courtyard with an armful of hay and wood and hurled it into the makeshift bonfire, then dashed back before any Roman could successfully hit him. A second pulled the same trick, and then a third.

  The fourth who tried it was killed, but by that time the fire was roaring. Smoke made it hard to see from the tower windows. Silas and I ran to the ground level to see the effect. The cows penned inside the tower were lowing in panic, their eyes rolling as they pulled on their stable bridles. Smoke was filtering through every joint in the door and drifting upward, and I could hear the Roman soldiers above us beginning to cough. We could feel the heat.

  There was a howl above. Another Roman had been hit with an arrow.

  “Let me go!” cried Eudoxius from the post where he was tied. “It’s me they want! If you give me to them, I’ll tell them to spare your wretched lives!”

  “Don’t listen to him!” I shouted to no one in particular.

  “When they rush us we’ll use the cattle,” Silas muttered to me. “Julius and Lucius will be waiting with crossbows. We have to kill enough to make them tire of this game.”

  “Aim for their leader if you can,” I told the crossbowmen. “He’s the one who won’t give up.”

  The Huns were chanting now, singing a death song for us. A third of each side had been killed or wounded.

  Skilla let the fire eat at the door for a full hour while he busied his warriors with dislodging a heavy beam from the kitchen. The Huns used cleavers to sharpen a blunt point. Holes were drilled and handles hammered into each side, giving the nomads an air of industry I’d never seen before. This would be their battering ram. They were as energetic at war as they were indifferent to farming.

  Finally the fire began to die. The door was still standing, but it was a sagging, blackened hulk. A new flock of arrows soared skyward, providing cover, and the Huns charged under its shelter, holding the ram. In a rush they were across the courtyard and the beam hit the door with a crash. It burst inward.

  “Yes!” Skilla cried. The Huns hurled the beam in with it and drew swords.

  Yet suddenly the doorway filled with horn and hoof. We were beating the flanks of our cows, and cattle crashed into the grouping of surging Huns like Carthaginian elephants, k
nocking them askew. The Huns tried to drive them back the other way, but the momentum was ours. Horns twisted, goring, and hooves trampled any Hun who fell. In the moment of confusion more stones and spears rained down, and two more Huns fell in the maw of wreckage. Finally the attackers had the sense to let the cows burst outward, but all their speed had been lost. When the surviving attackers crowded through the doorway once again, determined to end things once and for all, we were ready.

  Two crossbow bolts sang and two more Huns fell, tripping those pushing behind. I cursed that Skilla wasn’t at the forefront. All the advantages the horse warriors had in normal battle had been lost in this close-quarter contest, and I knew the casualties were maddening to the enemy. If we lost, there would be no mercy.

  Silas’s soldiers were furiously cranking to recock their crossbows, backing up the stairs as they did so. But the Huns with bows pulled and shot.

  Lucius and Julius came tumbling down the stairs.

  Another charge upward and now our iron soup pot was hurled down at the Huns, knocking them backward. Spears stabbed out, one striking home and another grabbed and jerked away. The fighting on the stairs was desperate; and Skilla could see me among the Romans blocking the way, chopping with a sword in grim determination. I saw it in his eyes. Now I have you!

  Suddenly someone behind the attackers was calling in Hunnish in a familiar, irritating voice. “I am a minister of Attila and you answer to me! Fight harder! Get the sword!”

  Eudoxius!

  “How did he get loose?” I shouted in outrage.

  “A fool soldier cut the man free, thinking he could parley,” Julia answered from behind me, passing javelins we could throw. “The Greek stabbed his benefactor through the throat and leaped out the window.”

  “Burn the base beams and the tower will fall!” Eudoxius advised.

  “Another crossbow!” Silas demanded, clubbing a Hun backward with a shield. He was bleeding from wounds, and no one answered.

  Step by step, grunting as they pushed us upward, the Huns climbed. There were too few of us left. I hurled down the bench we’d used for the soup and they knocked it aside with a snarl. We gave them the first floor and tried to use furniture to block the entry to the second. Arrows thudded into it.

  “Burn them, burn them!” Eudoxius was screaming.

  And then far above I heard the dwarf’s high, piping voice. “Cavalry! Cavalry!”

  There was a distant, distinct call of a Roman lituus; and the Huns milling below us looked at one another in consternation. Reinforcements? Our survivors, recognizing the sound, began to cheer.

  Skilla was using a small trestle table to shield himself from whatever we hurled at him. Now I saw him hesitate in an agony of indecision. His enemy and Attila’s sword were so close! Yet if the Huns were penned inside this fort by a fresh force of Roman cavalry, all would be lost.

  One last attack!

  “Tatos! What’s happening!” he called anxiously.

  “Romans are coming! Many of them, on horses!”

  “We still have time to kill them!” Skilla lifted the table.

  I took a crossbow and shot. The bolt punched through its surface, narrowly missing his nose, and his head jerked backward.

  With his face turned, he saw that his men were melting. “We have to flee!”

  “The sword!The sword!” Eudoxius was pleading.

  Skilla still hesitated.

  I was cranking desperately.

  Finally he leaped downward as I fired again, the bolt missing him by inches. Then he was running out of the shattered doorway, hurtling the bloody mess. The badly wounded Huns were left to Roman justice while the rest ran for their ponies that had been picketed outside the wall. Skilla jumped from the parapet and landed neatly on his horse’s back, slashing to cut its tether. Even as we hooted in triumph, the Huns were getting away.

  I craned out a window to look. There was a flash of armor in the rising sun, and an unusually well-uniformed and well-armored company of cavalry began to round the brow of a hill to the south, where the high mountains lay. Skilla lashed his pony and rode north the other direction, back the way the Huns had come. His retreat was downhill, and no soldiers anywhere were better at melting away than the light cavalry of the People of the Dawn. By the time the Roman cavalry had thundered up to the beleaguered tower the Huns were a mile distant and galloping fast, scattering until they could regroup later.

  The battle was over as suddenly as it had begun.

  We gaped. The leader of the reinforcements was on a snow-white stallion, his cape red and his helmet crested in the old style. His breastplate bore an inlaid swirl of silver and gold, and it seemed for a moment as if Apollo were descending from the rising sun. He galloped through the fortress gate and up to the wrecked door of its central tower with a turma of cavalry behind him, reining up to stare in wonder at the havoc. We defenders staggered out to meet him, and what must he have thought: a woman whose sweaty hair hung in tendrils on her face; a grimy dwarf; and me, bearing in two arms a great old iron sword almost bigger than I was.

  The officer blinked in recognition. “Zerco?”

  The newcomer’s surprise was no more than the dwarf’s. He, too, let his mouth open in shock and then fell to one knee, displaying a humility he had never displayed to Attila. “General Aetius!”

  “Aetius?” Silas, bleeding and triumphant, stared as if he were indeed observing that rumored unicorn. “You mean this fool was telling the truth?”

  The general smiled. “I doubt it, from what I remember of his slyness. So what in Heaven and Hell are you doing here, Zerco? I got your summons, but to actually find you . . .” Aetius was a handsome and weathered man, still hard muscled in his fifth decade, his face lined with care and authority, his hair an iron gray. “We saw the signal fire. You always did have a knack for trouble.”

  “I was looking for you, lord,” the dwarf said. “I have decided to change employers again, since Attila has tired of my company. This time, I brought my wife with me.”

  Julia bowed.

  “Well, the saints know we need laughter at perilous times like these, but it doesn’t look like you’ve been joking, fool.” He looked at our bloody mess with a grim kind of satisfaction. “It appears you’ve started what I barely have hopes of finishing. I’m inspecting our alpine posts because of your warnings of war, in case Attila advances on Italy. Your message of escape caught up with me two days ago.”

  “More than warnings, general. I’ve brought you dire news from Attila’s camp. And I’ve brought you a new companion, a Roman from Constantinople who almost killed the kagan himself.” Zerco turned. “You have a gift for him, do you not, Jonas Alabanda?”

  I was happy to be rid of it. “Indeed.” I walked up to his horse with the sword.

  “You tried to kill Attila?”

  “I tried to burn him, but he has the devil’s luck. My luck was this talisman.” I raised the pitted relic. “A gift, General Aetius, from the god of war.”

  XX

  THE DRUMS OF ATTILA

  A.D. 451

  Snow came, and the world seemed to slumber. Yet from the capital of Attila on the frozen plains of Hunuguri, a hundred couriers were sent to a thousand barbarian forts, villages, and camps. No mention was made of the loss of the fabled sword. Instead, Attila evoked other magic, telling his followers that Rome’s own prophets had foretold the city’s final end. All the historic currents—the plea of Honoria, the promise of Gaiseric, the defiance of Marcian, and the petition of Cloda for help winning the throne of the Franks—made a river of destiny. In all the world, no land was sweeter, greener, richer, or more moderate than the lands still farther to the west: Gaul, Hispania, and Italy. Every Hun should ready himself for the final battle. Every ally and vassal should renew his pledge. Every enemy would be given a last chance to join the barbarians or, if they balked, utterly destroyed. In spring, Attila would unleash the most terrifying army the world had ever seen. When he did, the Old Age would come to an en
d.

  As pledges of fealty, the couriers brought back the horsehair standards, cloth banners, and sacred staffs of the subject tribes. The warlords would be allowed to retrieve them when they joined their forces with Attila. Boards were drilled and the poles that carried the tribal insignia were erected in the newly rebuilt great hall, its wood raw and green. By winter’s end, with the grass blushing green and the sun once more climbing the clear blue sky of Hunuguri, the chamber was entirely full of standards, and Attila and his chiefs were meeting outside.

  Ilana had to watch all this. She’d been let out of her wooden cage after two months of confinement and exposure threatened to kill her. She slept in a corner of the kitchen now, fed on scraps, and walked with a chain connecting her ankles. Guernna rejoiced in the haughty Roman girl’s subjugation and would have liked to give her periodic abusive kicks. The first time she tried it Ilana had slapped her back, so now Guernna kept her distance. Ilana’s burns and bruises had healed, and her heart once more held desperate hope. Skilla had come back, and with him word that Jonas was still alive.

  The Hun brought back the Greek named Eudoxius but not the sword. Skilla was uncharacteristically quiet, more mature and more somber, and he did not visit her. The rumor was that he’d fought bravely but that the young Roman had beaten him again. Despite this, Edeco treated him with new respect, promising him a finish to things in the spring. Attila, in contrast, pointedly ignored Skilla, a silent rebuke that kept him in anxious agony.

  The grass grew higher, and the first flowers appeared. Animals fattened for slaughter and fodder was plentiful. It was time when marching armies could be fed, and thus time for war. Attila signaled his intentions by ordering an assembly at the old Roman fortress of Aquincum near the great bend of the Danube. There, next to the roofless barracks and weedy arena, the Huns would prepare to strike west. Attila announced he’d been asked to be the rescuer of the princess Honoria, sister of the Roman emperor! He would marry her and become king of Rome.