The Scourge of God

by William Dietrich

  Zerco rode with me on his own short pony, saying he wanted to see the finish of what we had started. We trailed Aetius like loyal hounds. Accompanying us, strapped to a staff like a standard and carried as a talisman by a veteran decurion, was Attila’s iron sword. Its presence was proof, Aetius told his officers, that God was with us, not them.

  We gained a slight rise and paused to see the progress of our alliance. It was thrilling to see so many marching under the old Roman standards, rank after rank on road after road, to the left and right as far as I could see. “It looks like veins on a forearm,” I remarked.

  “I’ve seen boys of twelve and old men of sixty in the ranks,” Zerco said quietly. “Armor that was an heirloom. Weapons that a few days before were being used to turn soil, not kill men. Wives carrying hatchets. Grandmothers with daggers to still the wounded. And a thousand fires that mark where Attila has been. This is a fight of revenge and survival, not a test of kings.”

  He was proud, this little and ugly man, that we’d had some small role in this. “Don’t get lost in the battle, doughty warrior,” I advised him.

  His seriousness retreated. “You’re the one who is going to cut his way through the entire Hun army. I’m going to stay on Aetius’s shoulders, like I said.”

  The landscape we traversed was rich and rolling, fat with lush pastures, ripening fields, and once-tidy villas. In many ways it was the loveliest land I’d ever seen, greener and more watered than my native Byzantium. If my body was to fall in Gaul, it would not be such a bad place to stay. And if I were to survive . . .

  That night I stood in the background of the headquarters’ tent as Aetius received reports of each contingent and its direction. “There’s a crossroads called Maurica,” Aetius told his officers, pointing to a map. “Any armies crossing between the Seine and the Marne will pass there, both the Huns and us. That’s where we’ll find Attila.”

  “Anthus and his Franks are drawing near that place already,” a general said. “He’s as anxious to find his traitorous brother as that boy there is to find his woman.”

  “Which means the Franks may stumble on Attila before we’re ready. I want them reined in. Jonas?”

  “Yes, general.”

  “Exercise your own impatience and go find impatient King Anthus. Warn him that he may be about to collide with the Huns. Tell the Franks to wait for our support.”

  “And if he won’t wait, general?” I asked.

  Aetius shrugged. “Then tell him to take the enemy straight into Hell.”

  I rode all night, half lost and nervous about being accidentally shot or stabbed, and it was mid-morning before I found Anthus. I had snatched only a little sleep, and felt I needed hardly that. Never had I been so anxious and excited. Lightning flashed without rain, leaving a metallic scent, and when I dismounted to rest my horse I could feel the ground quivering from so many tramping feet.

  The Frankish king, helmet off as the day’s heat rose, listened politely to my cautious message and laughed. “Aetius doesn’t have to tell me where the enemy is! I’ve run into some already, and my men bear the wounds to prove it! If we strike while the Huns are still strung out, we can destroy them.”

  “Aetius wants our forces collected.”

  “Which gives time for the Huns to do the same. Where is Aetius? Are the Romans mounted on donkeys? He’s slower than an ore wagon!”

  “He’s trying to spare the men’s horses for the battle.” Anthus put his helmet back on. “The battle is here, now, if he would just come to it! I’ve got the enemy’s butt in my face! Not Huns, but other vermin.”

  “Gepids, lord,” one of his lieutenants said. “Hun vassals.”

  “Yes, King Ardaric, a worm of a man hoping for a scrap of Hun favor. His troops look like they’ve crawled from under a rock. I’m going to put them back.”

  “Aetius would prefer that you wait,” I repeated.

  “And Aetius is not a Frank! It isn’t his homes that are being burned! It isn’t his brother who has gone over to Attila! We wait for no man and fear none. This is our land now. Half my men have lost families to these invaders, and they starve for vengeance.”

  “If Attila turns—”

  “Then I and my Franks will kill him, too! What about it, Roman? Do you want to wait another day and yet another, hoping the enemy will go away? Or do you want to fight him this afternoon, with the sun at our backs and the grass as high as the bellies of our horses? I heard you boast you’d cut your way to your woman! Let’s see it!”

  “Aetius knew you wouldn’t listen to me,” I confessed. “Which means he was sending you to battle!” He grinned, his eyes glinting beside his nose guard. “You’re lucky, Alabanda, to taste war as a Frank.”

  Ram’s horns were lifted to begin the call. Heavy Frankish cavalry trotted forward, each kite-shaped shield bearing a different design and color, their lances thick as axles and tall as saplings. The knights’ hands were gloved in dark leather, and their mail had the leaden color of a winter pond. Their helmets were peaked, and the cheek guards were tied so tightly against chins that those who shaved in the Roman fashion had white lines pressed into their faces. Barbarian long hair and beards, I realized, served as padding.

  As I joined them a hundred smells assaulted me—of horseflesh and droppings, dust and sweat, high hay and timothy, honed metal and hardwood shafts. War is a stink of sweat and oil. It was noisy in a cavalry formation, too, a vast clanking and clumping as the big horses moved forward, men shouting to each other or boasting of their prowess in war or with women. Many of the words had the high, clipped sound of men under tension, afraid and yet mastering their fear, waiting for the charge they’d trained their whole lives for. They were as different from the Huns and Gepids as a bull from a wolf: tall, thick-limbed men as pale as cream.

  Only a minority of the Franks could afford the expense of horse and heavier armor. Thousands more were paralleling the wedge of horsemen by loping on foot across tall grain. Their mail shirts ended at thigh instead of calf and their scabbards rocked and banged against their hips. These would take the Gepids on the ground.

  Our foe was an undifferentiated mass of brown ahead, bunched against a slow but deep pastoral stream at which they’d paused to drink. Half had already waded the chest-high water to join Attila’s main force to the east. Half were on the near bank closest to us. I saw that Anthus was not just hotheaded but a tactician, whose scouts had told him of this opportunity. The enemy formation was divided by deep water.

  “See?” the king said to himself as much as to anyone. “Their cursed bowmen won’t want to risk crossing to our side. Their distance will give us an edge.”

  Now the enemy seemed to be milling with indecision like a disturbed ants’ nest, some urging a quick retreat across the creek, which would turn it into a protective moat, and others a braver fight with the oncoming Franks. Attila’s orders to regroup had been obeyed with bitterness by warriors used to driving all before them. And now their foes had come to them: not the rumored vast army of Aetius but just a wing of eager and reckless Franks who’d pushed too far ahead!

  We watched King Ardaric, marked by his banners of royalty, ride off looking for Attila, apparently wanting the Hun to tell him what to do.

  It was just as Anthus hoped. “Charge!”

  I had expected more fear, but what drunken pleasure to join them! The sheer power and momentum of the Frankish cavalry was intoxicating, and never had I felt more alive than when galloping ahead with this stampede of knights. The ground shook as we pounded, and there was a great cry on both sides as the distance closed, the Frankish horse and the more numerous Gepid infantry hurriedly forming a line.

  When we neared, they shot and threw, a heave of javelins meant to swerve our charge. There was a curling wave as some of our foremost horsemen collided with this bristle and fell, skidding into the Gepid ranks. Then the rest of us crashed over and past them, shredding the enemy line, the Franks spearing and hacking all the way to the bank of the river
before turning to take the survivors from behind. The violence of the attack was a shock to the Gepids, who had become used to having their victims flee. The big Frankish swords cleaved enemy spears and helmets in two, even as Gepid infantry desperately speared the flanks of Anthus’s horses, spilling some of his knights on the ground where they could be overwhelmed. For a perilous moment the Gepids vastly outnumbered us, but then Frankish foot began swarming in support, pouring into the edges of the fight with great cries amid a cacophonous beating of drums.

  For long minutes it was pitched battle that could have gone either way. I used my horse to butt and unbalance the Gepid infantry, striking down with my sword, but I also saw Frankish nobles swallowed by the maelstrom. Then the fury of the Franks began to tell, Gepid courage began to break, and the enemy was pushed to the water. There they realized their peril. The bank was steep and if they slid down it they couldn’t properly fight, so their choice was either to abandon their comrades and swim for safety or be speared or shot by Frankish bows where they stood. They began shouting for help to their comrades on the far bank. Some plunged in to come to their aid while others called for withdrawal before it was too late. It was chaos, and the Gepid generals, accustomed to being under the domineering thrall of Hun warlords, seemed at a loss whether to counterattack or withdraw. As more and more Franks came up to the battle, the beleaguered Gepid troops became packed and they panicked.

  A regiment of Huns rode up on the far side and began firing arrows in support, but, as Anthus had hoped, distance and the melee of combat made the volleys ineffective. The Hun archers killed as many Gepids as they did Franks. Had the horsemen crossed upstream and circled to the Frankish rear, they would have had better effect, but they were loathe to be cut off from Attila.

  Yet the Gepids on the far shore were equally reluctant to abandon their kinsmen by retreating. They fed themselves piecemeal into the fray, plunging into the water and wading or thrashing slowly across, some picked off by arrows, some simply drowning. The survivors clambered up the Frankish side to try to stiffen the barbarian line even as it was dissolving. This prolonged the fight but did not change it. Our cavalry chewed huge gaps in the Gepid formations, swords and axes hewing down at the tangled footmen and grinding them under hoof. Meanwhile, Frankish infantry exploited the gaps to take the Gepids from the side and rear. The fight began turning to a rout, and then the rout into slaughter. Attila’s henchmen broke to plunge back into the river, desperately pushing, and Frankish archers tormented them from the bank. As each invader tried to save his own life, most died in a waterway that had turned red.

  Our victory won on the western shore, a few of Anthus’s cavalry splashed across to continue the pursuit; but now the enemy had the advantage of a high bank and greater numbers, and these impetuous Franks either died or were forced to a quick retreat. Finally the Gepids themselves drew back farther, both sides temporarily disengaging from the embattled river, and this preliminary battle died. Raggedly forming, the shattered rear guard of Attila’s army shambled up and over the far hill. The supporting Huns, mustered from Attila’s main force, rode back and forth on the crest as if to continue the fight, but finally thought better of it. The day’s shadows were long, the western sun was in their eyes to blind bow aim, and they could see the shine of other Roman formations coming up in support of the Franks. Better to wait for the morrow, when Attila could bring his full might to bear.

  They turned, and vanished from the crest.

  I caught my breath. My arm ached from the shock of striking shield, helmet, and yielding flesh. My sword was red and myself, miraculously, unhurt. I looked back at the carpet of bodies, thousands of them, and was appalled to realize that this was only a beginning. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen battle corpses, of course, but the sheer number sobered me. The bodies lay still and strangely deflated. There was no mistaking the dead.

  At the same time I felt exhilarated by my survival, as if infused by the glow of the storm’s earlier lightning. Was it a sign that no missile or blade had touched me? We’d crushed the rear guard as the Frankish king had predicted, and for a briefly insane moment my greatest fear was that the Huns would keep running before I could get to Ilana.

  Anthus hauled off his helmet again, his sweaty hair in strings and his eyes bright with triumph. “Come, let’s get a look at the rest of them before we lose all the light!” he roared. “This battlefield is mine, and I want to claim that hill!”

  A thousand Frankish cavalry foamed across the stream in a body, now that the enemy was gone, and rumbled to the crest of the ridge that the enemy had just left. We reined in, the ground pockmarked with hoofprints, and looked eastward in awe.

  The dying sun emphasized the darkness of the clouds to the east, turning them jet-black, while bathing in gold the panoply before us. The effect was dazzling, and the panorama was one I will never forget. We were seeing, it seemed, every person born east of the Rhine.

  A few miles away the lines of the Hun camp began, great swaths of men settling in for the night. There was an enormous double-laager of wagons beyond, canvas hoop tops and yurts blossoming like gray mushrooms. We could see the crossroads of Maurica in the far distance and tens of thousands—nay, hundreds of thousands—of Attila’s warriors around it like a vast browsing herd. There were also chains of ponies, flocks of bleating sheep, and pens of oxen. The very ground seemed to move and twitch like an animal’s skin. The smoke of ten thousand cooking fires created a purple haze, and the metal of countless stacked spearheads sparkled with menace. It was as if every man from every place was at last coming here, to settle world supremacy once and for all.

  “Look and look well, my brothers, for no man has seen such a sight in a thousand years,” Anthus solemnly said. “Does it look like a fight worth fighting?”

  “It looks like every nation on Earth,” a Frankish captain said in awe. “My hands ache from swinging my sword, lord, and yet we’ve barely begun.”

  “Aye, but the Romans and the Visigoths and the rest of them are coming up now, so they’ll help finish what we started. We’ve shown them how to do it.” We turned and saw tramping columns of our allies converging from all directions, swallowing the last few miles before Attila’s camp. Their dust had turned the setting sun bloodred, and their armor looked like an advancing tide of water.

  “Look at this sight and hope to remember it for your children,” Anthus murmured. “Look and never forget.” He nodded, as if to himself. “Not only has no such gathering ever happened but never will it happen again.”

  “Never?” the captain asked.

  The king shook his head. “No. Because by nightfall tomorrow, many of them—and us—will be dead.”

  XXVII

  THE BATTLE OF NATIONS

  What I remember of the night before the great battle is not fear and not sleep but song. The Germans were great singers, much louder and more demonstrative than we quiet and methodical Romans; and as regiment upon regiment, division upon division, and army upon army marched up to take the places that Aetius assigned them, settling down to a restless night on the grassy plain, they sang of a misty and legendary past: great monsters and greater heroes, of golden treasure and bewitching maidens, and of the need for each man to convince himself that on this night, of all the nights of his life, it was necessary to conquer or die. If dead they would pass to an afterworld, a jumbled mixture of the pagan great hall and Christian Heaven, and take their places in a pantheon of heroes and saints. If they survived, they’d live free of fear. As the words lifted to summer’s great starry night, the air warm and still humid from the thunderstorms that had dissipated, song built on song into vast resolve, giving our soldiers courage.

  The Huns sang as well. In the aftermath of their invasions they have been remembered as virtually inhuman, I know: an Eastern plague of such unworldly ferocity that they seemed to belong to Satan or older, darker gods. Or, as Attila called himself, the Scourge of God. Yet while I knew they had to be defeated, I also knew them as
people: proud, free, arrogant, and secretly fearful of the civilized world they had hurled themselves against. Their words were hard to catch from such a distance—overladen as the songs were by the Germans’ singing nearby—but its hum was strangely softer and sadder, sung from deep within their squat frames. The Hun songs were of a home they had long left, of the freedom of the steppes, and of a simplicity they could not regain no matter how hard and far they rode. They sang for a time already gone, no matter who won this battle.

  The Romans were quieter at first, trying to sleep or, giving up on that, sharpening their weapons and wheeling into place hundreds of ballistae that would hurl bolts capable of cutting down a dozen enemies at a time. Their habitual discipline was silence. But near dawn of this shortest of the year’s nights, the mood caught some of them as well. They finally sang, too, choosing new Christian hymns. Bishop Anianus had followed us from Aurelia; and now I watched him walk among these rude soldiers, dressed like a simple pilgrim, blessing and confessing the believers and offering encouragement even to those who had not yet been won by the Church.

  The sun rose as it had set, red through smoldering cloud. It glinted in our eyes, and Aetius ordered his generals and kings to brace our disorganized ranks in case the Huns used the light at their backs to charge while we were relatively blinded. But the enemy was no more ready for combat than we were. Such numbers had never been assembled for a battle; and there was considerable confusion on both sides as men were moved first here, then there, grumbling about the anxious waiting as the sun climbed higher and hotter. There was a small stream that tantalizingly ran between the armies, but it was within bowshot of either side so none dared venture there. Instead, women passed down the ranks with skins and jars of water drawn from the captured river in our rear.