Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  2

  MARGUS FALLS

  Never would the people - those few who survived, stumbling away through the blood-soaked grass to cry their story into horror-stricken ears - never would they forget that day, nor their first sight of the horsemen from the east.

  They rode muscular little ponies with big, ungainly heads, brutish and monstrous, like the heads of bulls. Shaggy even at the fetlock, with deep chests and haunches betraying their massive strength and stamina. Hooves and manes were dyed blood-red with crushed insects or dried berries from last autumn, boiled up again in water and fat. The riders had long arms and barrel chests, short legs and narrow, slanting eyes of cunning and glittering cruelty. Some of them, disdaining to wear helmets as they rode down upon the near defenceless fair, seemed to have skulls deformed and domed by some evil practice in infancy. Others wore pointed Scythian caps of leather, kalpaks, fringed with grey wolf ’s fur. Wolves falling on the stricken townspeople not in lean winter but in fat high summer, driven not by the stark necessity of hunger but by the love of destruction for its own sake.

  Some had the sides of their heads scarred with burns to kill the hair there, others were crudely shaven, and almost all had their cheeks and the sides of their heads cut and deep dyed with tattoos. The thin, sparse beards on their chins were further garlanded and beribboned, or twisted into little plaits, and in their ears they wore heavy hoops of gold. Some rode barefoot and some wore leather leggings, gripping the sides of their mounts so surely that they seemed one with their horses. They wore barbarian breeches but most rode naked to the waist but for jangling bone jerkins, their dark chests and backs tattooed with snakes and grotesque faces. Their wrists and sinewy arms were wrapped with iron bands, gold bracelets, cloths and strips of leather, and they wore beaded silver torcs and the teeth of wolves and jackals on thongs around their dirty muscular throats. They rode with their reins hung with the flensed skulls of slaughtered enemies, with human scalps or hanks of blood-dried hair.

  Each warrior bristled with the tips and points of a multitude of weapons. Short stabbing spears, long steel knives, curved swords slung across squat, powerful backs, curved spiked hatchets, and, clutched in the right fist, the deadly recurved bow of the steppes, with a bunch of arrows clutched alongside. Arrows strung and shot and falling interminably onto the stricken fair.

  The people turned and ran among the falling tents and the already blazing stalls, but there was no escape. Already a column of the murderous horde had ridden round and taken the hills to the south, and cut the people off from flight that way. To the north there was only the river. Some fugitives threw themselves in and tried to swim for it, and of these a few survived, carried downstream and crawling back onto the southern shore miles away like half-drowned animals to tell their tale.

  Singled out from among the wailing masses was the half-century of bewildered soldiers from Viminacium. The first were cut down where they stood, whirling on the spot in a spray of blood, unable to believe that this little light guard duty at a summer fair had suddenly turned into massacre, and this bright sunshine day to nightmare.

  The captain of the guard, a centurion named Pamphilus, registered the numbers of the barbarian horde and immediately bellowed orders to a couple of his riders to head east, straight to Viminacium to call the full legion to arms. As an added precaution he despatched another squadron, an eight-man contubernium, to requisition a boat and make for Viminacium by river, just in case his riders were cut down on the road. Though he doubted very much that barbarians would have the foresight for such things.

  But how had they got across the river? What had happened to the Danube lookouts? And the signalling stations that stretched all the way along the imperial frontier from the Euxine to the mouth of the Rhine? How could this have happened without warning? Where was the intelligence? Why hadn’t the exploratores reported back in advance? Raiding parties like this didn’t erupt out of nowhere.

  None of it made any sense. All he could do now was drag his men back to the town bridge and form ranks. It was a hard decision.

  His optio stared at him.

  Pamphilus shook his head. ‘It’s not a general massacre. Most of them will be taken as slaves.’

  ‘A nice fate.’

  ‘Button your lip, Optio. We fall back to the town if we can. Otherwise we hold this damn bridge till the legion arrives.’

  Whoever this horde might be, however many in number, he still had full confidence in the VII Legion, Claudia Pia Fidelis. ‘Six times brave, six times faithful’ was the legion’s motto. Stationed here for four long centuries on this far northern border, looking out over the Danube and into the wastes of Scythia. Waiting for the barbarians. And meanwhile building the imposing fortress of Viminacium, with wide roads south, east and west, and six miles of fine aqueduct. Good builders like all Roman soldiers, shovel in hand more than sword. The VII wasn’t the force it had been, true enough. None of the legions was. Numbers were down, the best drawn back to the field army based at Marcianopolis, the remainder derided nowadays as no more than an ‘hereditary peasant militia’. Some militia. Holding some fortress.

  Still fifteen hundred of them, all told, though half of them would be out at their farms or in their workshops at any one time. Who could blame them? There wasn’t much to do back in the fort but drill and wait, under the stern eyes of the legionary legate. Otherwise they drank, they diced, gambling with the meagre pay too rarely received on time. But a legion was still a legion, or a rump of it, with a legion’s proud memories. And the legate of the VIIth, that big-bellied Gallus Sabinus, was no fool.

  Pamphilus set up his men in ranks across the narrow bridge.

  ‘Barbarians out of the wilderness like these, opportunist raiders, they may be fast but they’ve got no staying power, and no siegecraft.’ Pamphilus was talking to his optio again, knowing he was only trying to reassure himself. ‘And no horse will ever charge a line of pikemen four ranks deep.

  ‘We hold them here for as long as possible. Fall back on the town if and when we can. They can’t outflank us on this bridge. And we wait for the legion and the cataphracts. We want as many heavy cavalry as possible. See how those naked devils take to being cut up by a line of charging lancers in full armour. Plus mounted archers. And then the good old mincing machine of the infantry. I don’t care how many of them there are, numbers are nothing. Till then, we hold out. It’s no great problem.’

  You could see the milling, murderous horde for what they were: common criminals, taking easy pickings from a thinly defended frontier town, before their flight back over the river and into the wastes of Scythia. Terrifying they might look at first sight, but that was all this was: a terror raid. The odd killing, more slave-taking. But they would melt away soon enough when the VIIth came marching down the road.

  Pamphilus wondered briefly who this latest horde might be. Gepids? Sarmatians? Alans? All plains curs in breeches. Ex Scythia semper aliquid novi. He smiled grimly to himself. Some tatterdemalion column of looters and plunderers, eaters of raw meat, some vainglorious gang of slavers, rapists and arsonists who fancied themselves great warriors. Rome had encountered such before. Filling the vacuum left by the retreating Huns, he presumed, after the Western Emperor sent out that order to the VIIth for a punitive expedition over the river. Not in His Divine Majesty’s jurisdiction, of course, but the prefect of Pannonia agreed to his request. Ill-advisedly, in Pamphilus’ humble opinion; but it wasn’t for a junior centurion like him to decide on foreign policy, thank the Crucified Christ.

  So a couple of cavalry alae from Viminacium had been ferried over by the Danube Fleet and descended on some outlying Hun encampment. Orders were to take prisoners for ingenious execution later, in a vivid and educational tableau or playlet staged back in the arena in Constantinople or Ravenna, featuring stern-eyed and remorseless legionaries slaughtering chained and submissive barbarians, their necks obediently bowed to the Roman blades. A playlet complete with real deaths. People liked that sort of th
ing: it reassured them in these edgy days.

  But the half-naked savages in the encampment had erupted from their tents and attacked the cavalrymen. On foot, barely armed and taken by surprise, they had still put up quite a fight. Clearly not the force they had once been back in old Uldin’s day, when they’d fought as auxiliaries for the great Stilicho. But a fierce remnant of a people all the same. They’d dragged a couple of cavalrymen from their horses and broken their necks with their bare hands, stabbed a couple more. After that the cavalry commander had given the general order of execution. And two days later the rest of the Hun people, so imperial spies reported, upped sticks, folded tents, burned the newly built wooden palace of their king to the ground, and slouched away north and east into the unknown wastes of Scythia, suitably chastened and humiliated.

  A messy business, but the price of freedom.

  The two troopers from Margus reined in their furious gallop on the hot and dusty road.

  The dust slowly cleared, and there ahead of them were the barbarians. Sitting their squat horses in a neat column, six abreast, as orderly as a legion. Arrows strung lightly to their bows. At their head sat a round-faced man on a grubby little pony.

  ‘Viminacium?’ he asked. And shook his head, smiling, his gold earrings dancing. ‘Alas. Not today.’

  The arrow-strings hummed.

  The eight-man squadron found the lightest boat they could, a skiff with a tattered sail. They dragged it down to the foreshore, waded out and then set to rowing furiously with the current. They hadn’t gone more than half a mile when their coxwain stopped his bellowing and fell silent. The rowers looked up, saw his expression and stopped rowing. The boat drifted a little and they looked round, blinking the sweat from their eyes.

  Being towed into the far bank by a small rowing-boat was one of the hefty barges of the Danube Fleet. From Viminacium. Hanging over the sides where they had been slain were the bodies of the marines, stuck with arrows.

  Beyond that, almost incomprehensible at first sight, were countless more barges and flat-bottomed horse-transporters, captured from God knew where, crossing and re-crossing, bringing innumerable men and horses across from the north. A little further down on the southern bank, the black and smoking remains of a wooden observation tower.

  The horde of a thousand or two at Margus: that was just a bridgehead. This was no hit and run terror raid. This was a full-scale invasion.

  In terror the eight men tried to turn the skiff round, still being carried forward on the strong current of the Danube. But in their scrabbling panic they were deaf to their coxwain’s orders to coordinate their strokes, portside forwards, starboard back. From downriver, rowing strongly upstream, another boat was coming towards them, long and lean, and dimly they were aware of more of the tattooed warriors appearing on the bank to their right, looming up through the reeds, startling little water-fowl into flight. The soldiers thrashed and beat the bright sunlit water so violently that they never heard the bowstrings hum, and their terror ceased only when the fine iron arrowheads hit home.

  In the meadows to the west, Margus fair was collapsing into burning chaos, the people harried and driven before the yowling, tattooed horse-warriors. On the single town bridge, little wider than a haywain, stood Pamphilus and his thirty men. Like Horatius of old, as the schoolboy ballad told it: three of them, then two, then just Horatius himself, keeping the bridge single-handed against the entire army of Lars Porsena. As if. War stories for school-boys.

  Behind them, the trembling town of Margus. The frontier had already been redrawn.

  Slowly the barbarians started pressing the people back up against the bridge. Now and again they jabbed with their spears, treating the trapped and terrified populace like cattle.

  Pamphilus watched grimly.

  ‘Sir,’ said his optio.

  He tightened his grip on his spear.

  ‘Sir,’ repeated the optio. ‘Behind us, sir.’

  Pamphilus glanced back and cried out.

  The barbarians had already broken down the gates and were in the town. Margus was ablaze. Behind its walls, the red-tiled rooftops were smoking, and flames licked up round the narrow tower of St Peter and St Paul. The iron bell would already be glowing red. Pamphilus thought he could hear distant screams.

  They must have moved like lightning. How had they crossed the river? Apart from the town bridge, there was no crossing until miles upstream. Was it possible that this howling horde of barbarians was in fact highly organised? That behind this film of blood and chaos, there was some keen, all-commanding mind at work?

  Idiot barbarians, though. The keen-eyed watchmen on the walls of Viminacium would have seen the smoke, and already be sending out riders to ascertain the cause. An idle Margus housewife not minding her hearthfire, a street of wooden houses going up in flames? Or something worse? Then one of his riders or one of the refugees would get through, and the legion would be called to arms.

  It was good to know that reinforcements were on their way. Meanwhile, they must try to hold their position and survive. Surrounded.

  ‘Two rear ranks - about face!’

  Then on the far ridge of the hills, a mile distant or more, he thought he saw him: the barbarian leader. A group of men gathered closely around him, but that was the king. He held a sword above his head and moved it in precise strokes downwards, left and right and before him. And on the plain before him, his horse-warriors wheeled to order, as disciplined as columns of imperial cavalry. More so. More agile. They wheeled as a flock of starlings wheels in the sky, as one body.

  Now gradually they were closing in, herding rather than killing, crushing the people back against the bridge.

  Pamphilus cursed.

  He would have fought like Horatius on this bridge, along with his men, against these contemptible horsemen. His blood was up now. Too many of those he had been sent to guard had fallen already. They had watched the savages riding through the fair, whipping and lassoing, destroying and burning, picking off selected victims for sport and target practice. Usually men of fighting age, fools who came at them with pitchfork or stake. But sometimes they had cut down anyone in their path, fleeing girls, infants, and those nursing infants. Those broad-cheeked faces expressionless, those yellow eyes unmoved.

  But how could Pamphilus and his men fight back, with this human tide around them? That of course was the plan of this warlord, this king.

  He looked again and the warlord had galloped down from the ridge and in among the press of his warriors. Soon the trapped legionaries could see him approaching with his little band of captains, and then reining in. Pamphilus observed him across the heads of the trapped and huddled people, through the haze of drifting smoke. The stony face of the barbarian warlord. Iron-grey hair bound up in a topknot, blue weals on his face, a gold torc round his strong, grimy neck. Dusty leather breeches, deerskin boots. Nothing fancy. Naked to the waist but for spiralling tattoos, quiver and bow and scabbard across his back. No great king, then. Still fighting in the line with his fellow warriors. Beside him, a man with lighter skin, very close-shaven or bald, blue-eyed. Very still, assured and silent.

  A hush fell over the people.

  Glittering yellow eyes fixed on him.

  ‘Your name?’ called the warlord.

  He gave it.

  ‘From Viminacium?’

  Pamphilus nodded.

  The warlord stroked his wispy beard. ‘It was forces from Viminacium that executed my people. You would call it a punitive expedition.’ He spoke faultless Latin, with perfect, rather aristocratic pronunciation.

  Pamphilus’ head whirled and he glanced sideways at his optio. These were the Huns. Not vanished after that bloody foray at all, as the intelligence had said, but making only a feigned, a Parthian retreat. The cunning devils. For the first time Pamphilus sensed that they were here not for a bit of light raiding and enslaving after all, but for some more memorable act of vengeance. He steeled himself against fear, stemmed his rising panic, gripped the sp
earshaft tighter in his sweating hand and put from his mind as best he could all rumours of barbarian tortures. Crucifixion, excoriation, impalement . . .

  Beside him his optio was shaking. His men were backing into each other. Behind them, the burning town was beginning to roar under the noonday sun. Where was the VIIth, O Jupiter, Mithras, Christ? They must have seen the fires by now. If they could just hold out for a while longer, the first of the cavalry might yet arrive. He prayed for them to come soon.

  The warlord was speaking again, his voice low and harsh and grating as old steel. Pamphilus shook his head at what he heard, so the warlord repeated it. ‘Either we kill all these people before you,’ he said, ‘or we kill you.’

  He shouted back, ‘The price your people pay then will be terrible.’

  The warlord grinned, a horrible, wolfish grin, and his men raised their swords.

  ‘They will make good slaves!’ blurted out his optio.