‘And you will make good corpses.’
One of the savages struck down his first victim, an old man stumbling before him, penned in by the people around him, eyes staring in blank terror.
‘Let them go!’ bellowed Pamphilus.
Their discipline was instant. Their leader gave the nod, and the encircling horsemen pulled up their bristling weapons. Every ugly little pony took several neat steps backwards on command.
The huddled people remained frozen like prey for a moment. Then the warlord said something more in his low voice, and the people, dazed and stumbling, turned and fled away south into the waiting hills.
The warlord looked back at Pamphilus.
The centurion lowered his spear, couched it under his right arm and set the butt against one of bridge planks. Leaned his weight against it.
‘Well, men,’ he said. ‘Sell yourselves dear.’
The town burned on all through the late summer afternoon and on into evening. No help came. Through the blood-red sunset, the slaughter went on. This was the beginning of vengeance, the beginning of sorrows.
Here a Kutrigur warrior rides down another victim, using a trident for a spear, jabbing it into the back of a fleeing girl.
She stumbles and falls, sinks to her knees, finally dropping the yoke of wooden pails she has carried all the long day, even in the midst of the slaughter. She reaches back to her wound before she slumps and dies. The goat’s milk runs across the hard ground, mingling with her blood. The warrior wrenches his cantering mount round almost on its hind hooves and whacks its rump with the flat of his crude and bloodied trident and grins through the orange firelight and yowls and rides on.
His fellow warriors yowl and grin, too, milling murderously among their last sacrificial victims. Men like wolves, but wolves who love chaos and firelight. Wolves in winter come in from the cold and the snow-bound steppes and from the edges of the great northern forests when the dewdrops harden into glassy unforgiving ice on the resinous needles of the firs. They come hungrily eyeing the well-fed towns and the comfortable firesides with their fathomless yellow eyes, creeping westwards across the wind-frozen plains towards the warm evening glow in the west. They slink down darkened streets, past lamplit taverns and houses where the plump merchants and bankers and well-paid bureaucrats of the empire sit at their ample dinners, joking and feasting and sipping their good Moselle wines shipped down to the Danube to these Eastern provinces of Moesia and Thrace. None knowing that the wolves are coming - indeed, are already come, a tide of grey fur sweeping across the steppes. Yellow eyes gleaming, white teeth ready for the kill.
These wolf-men have come in high summer, but their white teeth gleam in the darkness just the same. They throw back their shaggy heads and laugh to the sky, giving thanks, their copper-banded arms raised to their gods of wind and storm and sky: to Astur the Eagle, and Savash the Lord of War, and the Lady Itugen, each of them a different face of the Maker of the Universe, who loves battle and rides with them and shall remain with them always. They grin in the firelight and their yellow eyes flash with delight as the town goes up in flames, and the helpless people flee before them and fall like mown feathergrass on the steppes, and the loot piles up in one corner of the stricken and burning town as fast as the corpses pile up in another. The church bells still clang in unholy panic, but it is the alien warriors who are ringing them now, in jest and victory. The priests have long since been stripped and slain, amid wailing people and howling dogs and the screams of abandoned children.
So Margus falls.
Afterwards, drunk on wine, they rode out, still rejoicing, past the black charcoal remnants of the once colourful Margus fair and back to the grasslands. They are no townsmen, and the ruins of booths and buildings are already haunted by the ghosts of those they have slain. They retreat to their tents and wagons in the meadows.
Among the many bodies lie an old woman and a girl. The girl with the hare-shot lip, lying still among her pails. She had seen the future truly, as the old woman had said. Truly she had the gift.
3
THE VII
Viminacium: at the confluence of the Danube and the Mlava, headquarters of the VII Claudia Pia Fidelis, raised by Julius Caesar himself back in 58 BC to knock hell out of the Gauls and then do the same to their cousins over in Britain as well. An ancient legion with more than five hundred years of memories, stationed here on the Moesian Danube since Trajan’s day. Four long centuries since the crucifixion of Christ.
Gallus Sabinus, legionary legate, veteran of frontier battles and frontier boredom, with a bald bull-head, rolls of fat at the back of his neck and an impressive, solid mound of a belly, but muscles in his arms still strong enough to lift a hundredweight sandbag above his head without noticeable effort. At his rickety ink-stained wooden desk, going through the quartermaster’s monthly returns by the light of a sputtering oil-lamp. Only three times more he’d be doing this bureaucratic donkey-work. Only three more months, and then he’d be off to his Thracian vineyard, complete with neat little villa and courtyard, a fountain and everything, even a bit of mosaic floor, albeit a fairly crap one by some local shyster, featuring a dolphin which looked to him more like an overweight eel. But his Domitilla was very proud of it, out there sweeping it clean every morning at the crack of dawn. The woman he hardly knew, his wife, Domitilla: sharp of tongue, broad of behind, frosty of expression, but serviceable enough, all things considered.
He leaned forwards and his desk wobbled. One day they’d get round to giving it four equal legs.
He’d miss his men. They weren’t so bad, for a motley scrag-end of limitanei: frontier wolves. Dalmatians, Illyrians, Thracians, Teutons, a right gaggle of mongrel geese. But Sabinus looked after his own. No political appointee from a senatorial family, who disdained such Spartan frontier postings anyway nowadays, Sabinus was a soldier to the backbone and proud of the traditions of the VII. The mobile field army might be the glory boys nowadays, the generals’ gilded darlings, an élite force ready to march and fight wherever barbarian incursion threatened. But the frontier wolves were quartered out here permanently, doggedly training and arming and waiting for the day. Reduced in numbers, both rations and armour thinner than before, but still proud to call themselves a legion, with their eagle standard, plus the bull ensign common to all the Caesarian legions. Waiting for the barbarians to come.
In his years here Sabinus had done his best. He couldn’t do squat about their pay, but he’d drilled and trained them and instituted field exercises they’d grumblingly enjoyed. Both weapons and wall artillery were well up to scratch. As for the walls themselves, he just hoped they’d hold. Especially the Porta Praetoria, with its ominous ground-to-battlements crack in the left tower. One day, the prefect would stir himself off his fat arse enough to do a complete rebuild, or maybe far-off Constantinople would realise that the old fort was in need of a lick of paint or two.
Till then, three more months . . .
He looked up. ‘Well?’
The optio stood hesitantly in the gloom. ‘Margus is still burning, sir.’
Sabinus laid down his pen, sat back and pointed at his own eyes. ‘What are these, Optio?’
‘Eyes, sir.’
‘Correct. And with them I can see that Margus is still burning, in the same way I can see that you are still a useless twat. By “Well” I meant “What news?” Why is it still burning?’
‘We don’t . . . that is, the riders haven’t returned, sir.’
‘When did they ride out?’
‘About the ninth hour.’
‘What traffic on the road?’
The optio glanced nervously towards the open door.
‘Reports - unconfirmed reports - of incursion, sir. Over the river. Barbarian horsemen, so an old fellow says who crawled out of the river covered in duckweed. Said he’d floated down on driftwood from Margus itself. Babbling and half-mad.’
Sabinus kept his expressionless gaze on the hapless optio. ‘So . . . you’ve ordered th
e full legion to arms, for safety’s sake?’
‘I will, sir.’
‘Forget it. I will.’ His chair crashed backwards as he stood up. ‘And put yourself on fucking latrine duty.’
The legionary fortress of Viminacium stood square behind thick stone walls thirty feet high, battlemented and bastioned, with twin towers at each gate, north, south, east and west. From the flanks of the fortress ran a much lesser wall, flung out wide and embracing the many acres of the proud town with its churches and chapels, wide streets, richly decorated villas, splendid basilica and porticoed marketplaces and, beyond the walls, its own ten-thousand-seat hippodrome. People came from miles around to see the spectacles there. But now, thought Sabinus with a grim smile, another altogether more real kind of spectacle would drive them many more miles away.
He found a tall young decurion.
‘What’s happening in the town?’
‘People moving out already, heading for the hills.’
As he’d thought. ‘Any asking for refuge here?’
The decurion shook his head.
They both knew what that meant. The people had already judged. They were finished. He smiled again to himself. Like hell they were.
The legate’s bull roar sounded across the darkening fort from where he stood on the tower of the west gate, followed by a distant sound of stirring and then a steady crescendo of slamming doors, footsteps, the slap of leather soles on worn stone stairs, clanging weaponry, voices, heavy weights dragging, winches creaking.
His orders ricocheted around the fortress walls like missiles.
‘Tubernator, sound the recall! Every last soldier still working out in the fields, get him in. Ditto from the farmhouses. Families to the barracks. Muster rolls to be counted. Every other century on the walls! Cavalry alae armed and ready at the south gate. Artillery units on the towers. Four machines to each bastion, two for frontal bombardment, two for enfilading fire, standard set-up, do I have to tell you? All gates double-rammed! And I hope you got those holding-braces repaired on the Praetorian Gate like I ordered, Decurion!
‘Yes, sir!’
‘We’re expecting a night attack?’
‘We’re expecting the devil himself, like good soldiers should. I want wall artillery fully supplied. Pedites, move your arses! This isn’t a visit from your dear old granny we’ll be getting. Back-up supplies of all missiles up to the walls. First, fourth and seventh centuries at the south gate with the cavalry. Ditch the dice and move it, you lard-arsed layabouts! No sleep till dawn, if then. You’ve got work to do at last! Smiths, get those furnaces fired up if they’re not already. Medics, confirm your supplies to me. Quartermasters, every man on the walls supplied with water and hardtack. And see to it all roof thatch is thoroughly doused. All water butts full to the brim, though I assume for your sake they already are. Primus Pilus, report to me on the west gate. No walking, no talking. ’
‘Concentrate wall troops to the west, sir?’
‘If they’ve already taken Margus they won’t be so stupid. Space troops all round.’
Sabinus marched off down the stone steps to the lower guardroom, where he found everything in a state of wordless, impressive bustle. Except for one poor greenhorn of a boot who’d stacked up a pile of slingballs in such a poor pyramid that they collapsed the moment Sabinus walked past them. So he gave him a good belting and told him to do it again.
‘Even the Egyptians can build pyramids, boy!’ he roared in the quaking novice’s ear. ‘And they fuck their own sisters and worship cats!’
The legate took his place again on the left tower of the west gate along with his useless optio and they gazed out into the setting sun. It was too bright, too red. Just over the horizon, a mere two hours by quick march, Margus was still burning. The leaping flames mingling with the sun’s holocaust.
‘Some incursion, sir,’ said his optio.
The south gate stood open below and families of the farmer-frontiersmen streamed in: women, infants in arms, elderly parents, children running about, wide-eyed, looking more excited than scared. Into the safe brawny arms of the mighty legionary fort. God protect them.
Tatullus appeared silently on the tower. Legionary primus pilus - first spear - his senior centurion. Thank Christ for him at least. Well into his fifth decade but not an ounce of fat on him, his legs taut with sinew and muscle, his arms folded tight across his broad chest. His hard, weather-beaten face and bony nose accentuated by the plain, close-fitting helmet he wore ready for battle, the long, sinister noseguard protecting his deep-set, unblinking eyes, a chainmail aventail to save his neck. A soldier of quality to find in a neglected frontier fort in these ignominious days.
Behind Tatullus stood two more soldiers, one of them dripping copiously.
‘Who the hell are you?’ growled Sabinus, rounding on him.
‘He’s a deserter,’ said Tatullus coldly.
‘I wasn’t asking you, Centurion.’
Damp though this one was - sodden through, in fact - he didn’t tremble.
‘Anastasius, sir,’ said the soldier, his voice so deep and hoarse it sounded like he gargled with gravel. ‘But it’s never suited me, so I been told. Caestus, most people call me. Knuckles.’
Knuckles. Sabinus turned and inspected him more closely. The name suited him better than Anastasius, that was for sure. He still had his caestus, his studded bullhide strap round his meaty forearm. His knuckles were black with hairs, and not that far off the ground. Mind you, had he stood up straight he would have been six feet tall or more. A good recruit for the Legio I Italica in that respect, at least. Though Sabinus doubted Knuckles had quite the right family connections to get into that socially exclusive legion. And he’d frighten the cavalry horses, for another thing. Cause a bloody stampede.
His huge rounded shoulders, one slightly lower than the other, made him look almost like a hunchback but still as powerful as a dray horse. Hands as big as spades. A human mole, Sabinus thought, he could dig a tunnel into the bare earth with those hands. Huge splayed feet, knock knees, a sagging belly, a fifty-four-gallon barrel chest, a muscular tree stump of a neck as broad as his head, a great bony nose, multiply broken, mouth battered about and askew as well, a heavy brow sprouting bushy black eyebrows, but his eyes oddly wide and sincere, although one eyelid sagged over the eye from an old swordcut. Coarse black hair in an inelegant pudding-basin style, and no single square inch of his bare skin free of a scar.
Sabinus liked what he saw. This was what he called a proper soldier. Ugly as hell and almost as long enduring.
‘And you deserted? From Margus?’
‘No, sir. Not deserted. Just on business. But I got caught up at Margus. On unforeseen secondment, you might say.’
Sabinus scowled. ‘You’re wasting my time, soldier. Give it me straight.’
Knuckles straightened a little. ‘Sir. Legionary of the XIVth at Carnuntum. Coming downriver with shipment of wine. A private enterprise.’
‘Customs-dodging. Profiteering.’
Knuckles hurried on. ‘Boat sank at night. Got ashore at Margus. Centurion there, Pamphilus, promptly co-opted me into his guard.’
‘So what happened?’
‘We got wiped out two days later is what happened. Which is to say, this morning. All of ’em except me. They’re Huns, the centurion said.’
Sabinus brooded. What a mess. If you’re going to drive off a barbarian tribe, make sure you do it with a good hard sword-thrust, not a pinprick. Else they’ll be back. Gadfly to a horse’s arse. He blew out air. What a bloody mess.
‘Go on, soldier.’
‘Well, the centurion, he sent out riders back here for reinforcements but . . . the Huns got to them before they got to you.’
‘Evidently. And then?’
‘Total bloody slaughter.’
‘Numbers?’
‘Couldn’t say. Not that many, it didn’t look like, but organised.’
‘Organised?’
‘Organised,’ repeated Knuc
kles doggedly.
Sabinus rasped his stubble. He turned and bellowed a fresh couple of orders to his men. Then he asked, ‘And you?’
‘Well, sir, we was on the bridge, trapped and about to get wiped out frontways and backways, if you take my meaning, and we’d already lost formation and the arrows was piling in so to be honest I thought, Stuff this, and decided to take my chances overboard, but then I thought I might as well try and take one of those blue buggers with me.’
‘Blue?’
‘Tattoos. Black and blue all over. They do it with a needle and soot, apparently. Horrible. No self-respect sir, those fuckin’ barbarians. So, anyhow, I figured I could drown him and I might even get his horse up and off the other bank and away. So up I jumped and got the bugger in a neck-lock and pushed and hung on and we crashed off the side of the bridge and down into the river, the savage still sittin’ on his horse and me sittin’ on him. And by happy chance, and with the blessings of Jupiter, Lord of all Creation and whatnot, I managed to get a hold of his reins floating around in the mucky water and wrap ’em round his neck. What a rumpus, him still fighting and struggling - a real wild one he was, and no spring chicken, neither. But then there was this great pier of the bridge loomin’ at me out of the water. We was still down there with the fish and I was longin’ to get a good lungful, but business had yet to be concluded, so to speak. I had a good grip on his head with his own reins, throttlin’ ’im - the horse was long gone by this time, upped and swum for it, the brute. So I started a good swing with his head - he was in need of a lungful by this time, too, I reckoned, and not at his finest as a fighting man, it’s safe to say, so I swung ’im and yet . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to swing a man’s head round under water, sir?’
Attila: The Judgement Page 3
