Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Emerging as if from the very heart of destruction, there came again the low, monotonous beat of war. The witch Enkhtuya sitting cross-legged somewhere in the outer darkness, hammering a drumskin with a bone, murmuring low.

  ‘Weave the crimson web of war,

  Raise the bloody banners high,

  Make it as it was before,

  All men must fight, all men must die.

  ‘Horror covers all the heath,

  Clouds of carnage blot the sun,

  Sisters, weave the web of death,

  Sisters cease, the work is done.’

  Sabinus nodded to his optio, gave orders for the standard-bearers to report, and returned to his principia to put on his armour, and to take one last look around.

  One last look. The phrase echoed in his thoughts, but he preferred not to analyse it.

  They marched swiftly through the small but elegantly colonnaded courtyard, into the atrium, past the triclinium. Strange to glimpse the comfortable couches still ranged about in there, as if waiting for the next modest banquet with local dignitaries. But the legate’s accommodation was no longer in the best repair. Starlings had made their nests under the eaves, and frogs had colonised the cellars. Soldierly duty kept the place clean and tidy, but its neglect could not be concealed. No fashionably attired dinner guests visited now, few inhabited the frontier towns. All had migrated south towards Constantinople to make themselves and their families rich with courtly patronage. Senatorial families dreamed of imperial donatives and sinecures, ignorantly at ease in their plush villas in Naissus, Marcianopolis, Adrianople, or the gleaming golden capital itself. The old provincial dutifulness was gone. Only the poor paid taxes, they joked. And how it showed. But the rich would pay for their selfishness in time. In a currency red as blood.

  As Tatullus had said: ‘Storm coming.’

  7

  THE TOWERS

  After his optio had strapped on his armour, Sabinus took his splendid helmet with its nodding plumes, then led his standard-bearers into the chapel. There stood the central shrine, the eagle, the bull ensign and the lesser centurial banners. Beneath the shrine, beneath the altar itself, lay the fort’s strongroom, packed with stamped gold ingots from the mines of Mons Aurea.

  One of centurial banner-bearers shook so badly that he nearly dropped the staff as Sabinus handed it to him. A mere lad, sixteen or seventeen, a once-weekly shaver, scarce dry from the egg. His name was Julianus. Sabinus spoke to him gravely but not unkindly. ‘Hold it steady, lad,’ he said evenly. ‘Yes, we are cut off. Yes, there are a lot of them. But this is a still a legionary fort. It’s stood for four centuries now, against barbarians just as vile as these.’ He told the lad - he told all of them - to hate their enemies. ‘Think of your families. Think of what will become of them . . . and swear hatred of the barbarians,’ he said. ‘Your hatred will drive out fear, and then you will fight like lions.’

  As the legionary bull standard was lowered and passed out of the door of the chapel into the night, he gave it a brief, idolatrous bow.

  Alone he visited the hospital and saw that all was in good order. The medics stood to attention. Only four patients in there now, one clearly dying. Another with leg sores, being cleaned up nicely by hard-working maggots collected fresh from horse-dung. Poultices, bandages and dressings, copper pots steaming on the stoves, jars of grey-green willow-leaf infusion for wounds.

  He resumed his place on the west tower beside Tatullus. The centurion did not stir. A fortress of a man.

  The waiting was always the worst. Oh, let it begin soon.

  But they were kept waiting. They waited all night until the dawnlight came up behind them.

  A low morning mist, thickest over the silent river to the north. Smoke sitting heavily over the lost town, where it had once stood proud on the green summer plain. Smoke slowly drifting eastwards towards the fort, mingling with wraiths of mist in the cold shadows of the north wall.

  All night long the stars had burned, and, out on the plain around, myriad campfires like a starry floor. Their enemy, of course, but a strange feeling of company. Then towards dawn, with the temperature still dropping sharply from the warm day, the mist had risen from the river and the marshy meadows round about and thickened towards sunrise. Now it lay dense and milk-white around them, Sabinus on the tower like the captain on the deck of some ghost ship abandoned in remote uncharted seas.

  ‘This visibility is bad,’ he said.

  ‘Bad for us,’ said Tatullus pointedly. ‘Not for our attackers. ’

  The attack must come soon. The soldiers on the walls stamped their feet, blew into cupped hands. How their tensed bones ached in their chill coats of mail. The mist clung to them, beaded dewdrops on cold metal.

  All wore their heavy helmets through the long night so that their necks ached. Leather straps cut into throats. Feet were white cold. The wall artillery was primed and loaded. The swords were ground sharp. The world was silent around them. No birds sang.

  On the north-west tower, a legionary gazed out towards the river, trying to judge whether the mist was thinning in the rising sun, and how fast. Still no sight of the opposite bank. Then he frowned. Something was wrong. The mist was darkening, close to. Shadows moving within it. Over the tributary channel, just along the wall. Something was happening. Coming nearer.

  The chain was across the entrance back by the river watchtowers, wasn’t it? They’d talked about the waterways last night. Apparently, the refugees had reported the invaders using horse-transporters of some sort: rafts. But if any bone-headed barbarians seriously tried attacking downriver they’d get in a right bloody mess. The emperor-chain would be across the Iron Gorge, with auxiliaries stationed on the cliffs above, and the marines of the Danube Fleet ready to row out of Ratiaria if necessary and finish them off. There was no chance there.

  But presumably their plan, assuming they had a plan, was to take Viminacium and then head on south down the imperial trunk road to Naissus and the rich pickings of Sardica. Like they’d ever get that far. Not with a legionary fortress in the way, and their knowledge of missile technology extending as far as an arrow dipped in flaming tar. The walls of Viminacium should be able to withstand a few of those.

  But now . . .

  ‘Sir?’ he said to his decurion.

  ‘Hm?’ The junior officer had his helmet off, resting it on the top of the battlements, polishing it with his woollen neckerchief, so that the first arrow punched straight into his head. His helmet rolled over the wall and fell silently and he slumped forwards across the wall.

  The soldier opened his mouth to shout in terror but instead gargled blood as another arrow passed up through his throat and into his skull. Still scrabbling at his throat, he stumbled and rolled down the stone steps to the battlements.

  The artillerymen stared around, bewildered.

  Then one of them saw what was happening. Out of the mist were coming high-sided boats, drifting slowly down the tributary channel. No, not the Danube Fleet from Ratiaria, come to the rescue. These were other boats entirely, captured from God knows where, moving slow and serene as great swans in the white summer mist. Each one was filled with archers, ready to rain down arrows on the fortress walls.

  ‘Enemy at the north wall!’

  But along the west wall they already had their own concerns.

  Sabinus heard his centurion grunt. He himself took a step forward in fascinated horror, his whole body trembling. He saw but did not immediately understand. He reached out to steady himself.

  The barbarians had no siegecraft. He said it to himself again. The barbarians had no siegecraft.

  Tatullus spoke for him. ‘What the hell is this, civil war?’ Then ducked and took cover as a single arrow clattered into the stone beside him. Covering fire for the—

  Sabinus did not duck. He stamped his heavy sandals, the hobnails thudding on the thick wooden planks. This was no dream.

  This was real. And this was the day he would die.

  The mis
t cleared a little more. There was the lone horseman’s spear from last night, decorated with the single black feather, still stuck in the ground before the west gate. A cool, light wind blew, a very light wind, and the mist drifted away off the wet meadows towards the river. Except they could not see the wet meadows. They were covered in horsemen.

  At their head sat a group of long-haired, half-naked, tattooed Hun noblemen, generals, perhaps, gold gleaming around their arms and necks; and another man of different race, fair with close-cropped or thinning hair. At the head of them in turn, gazing up at the walls of Viminacium, smiling cheerfully, sword dangling loosely in his right hand as if ready to ride up and attack the fortress with bare steel, was their leader. The one from the night before. Attila.

  ‘Sir, boats passing along the north wall. Men taking fire.’

  Sabinus ignored him. What was emerging before their horror-stricken eyes out of the mist to the west was everything now. For it was not the vast horde of savagely armed and decorated horse-warriors standing before them that chilled the blood, so much as the weaponry they brought with them. Against all intelligence and expectation. Among the horde, still half veiled in thin mist, stood two huge wooden siege-towers on great solid wheels, two mighty torsion-spring onagers with boulders already set back in their basins, a bronze-headed battering ram expertly protected under a moveable steep-sided tortoise of strong wooden planks and iron plates, and, scattered among the horsemen, a number of other smaller artillery pieces, sling-machines and ballistas. Things that barbarians should not have.

  Around the onagers was a busy commerce of men and oxen and wagons, and the distant creaking of ropes and winches and leather slings. Soon would come the nerve-shredding, ascending screech of twisted torsion springs tuned to screaming pitch, and then the snap and thud of release, the loosed beam flying up and hitting the padded crossbeam, and the boulder hurtling through the air towards the walls of Viminacium.

  ‘Now we’ve got a fight on our hands,’ murmured Tatullus.

  Sabinus shook off his trance of horror. ‘Turn the catapults! ’ he roared. ‘Wall artillery! Every unit on the towers. Do it now!’

  Suddenly the U-shaped bastions were alive with panic and the noise of the light wall-artillery, the ballistas and the crossbow machines, being scraped round on their solid iron frames and ranged for the initial shots. Windlasses winding up a ferocious amount of energy in the thick reels of sinew, cranked back with mighty force on a long wooden lever and ratchet, men’s arms bulging, the sinew stretching tighter and tighter still, the high-pitched creak as it was wound back and back more, the bowstring drawn back and a heavy iron-headed bolt laid in the groove before it. When the trigger was released, all that pent-up energy discharged the bolt with lethal force. One bolt was good, but a whole bank of such machines discharging their bolts in a volley could bring down an entire line of cavalry, dragging down those in the rear in a bewildered jumble. The Huns would not have encountered such a thing before.

  ‘Long fire-bolts loaded! Buckets of tar on every bastion. Light ’em up!’

  The pedites, the military runners, ran.

  ‘And bales, rocks, overturned wagons, anything, stacked up inside the west gate. We won’t be using it for a while.’

  There weren’t enough men.

  ‘The question is,’ said Sabinus, looking out again, ‘those onagers: do they know how to use them?’

  And then out of the mist, unrangeable, unreachable, the onagers started firing. They heard the muffled shock of massive beam clunking up into padded crossbeam, and the eerie, almost inaudibly low hum of the great missiles gliding in low, expertly aimed for the foundation stones of the fort. Each of the two machines required precisely one ranging shot. A big boulder fell short and slewed to a halt in the dust, its weight and force such that the ground creased up in wavelets before it. Sabinus waited, barely breathing. The second boulder hit the south-west tower a minute later. The sound seemed to come out of the bowels of the earth, like subterranean thunder. Men staggered atop, clutching their spears.

  ‘Question answered,’ said Tatullus stonily. ‘Yes, they know how to use them.’

  The onagers halted. Out on the plain the vast Hun war-machine was beginning to roll forward again. And the Huns, ignorant and unlettered barbarians though they were, their very language no more than a series of unwriteable growls and grunts, knew better than to try and use onagers at the same time as their own lines were advancing in front of them. Yes, they knew exactly what they were doing. They must have formed an alliance with some power skilled in siegecraft. Who? Could it be treachery? Master-General Aëtius had been close to the Huns as a boy. Could he have allied with his old friends, to conquer the Eastern Empire for himself?

  But no. Not Aëtius. Then who?

  Huge solid wooden wheels creaked and groaned under the inertia of their giant loads. Oxen were lashed beneath their wooden canopies. Squeals and rumbles of animal, man and machine horribly commingled. And coming to the fore the two siege-towers. The braying of war trumpets, thunderous mounted kettle-drums, each blow with a bone drumstick like a punch in the guts, the crashing of Hunnish zils or cymbals, the earth itself trembling.

  Sabinus bellowed another order: ‘All non-combatants to the dungeons, all current prisoners to the execution dungeon.’

  A soldier blanched. ‘Families, sir? Children?’

  Sabinus looked at him. ‘You have family?’

  ‘A sister, sir, in VI Barrack, and her two young ones.’

  ‘Then believe me, man, you’ll thank me soon enough.’ He looked back over the plain. ‘The dungeons are the best place for them.’

  On the battlements just below, an archer drew back his bowstring, though the oncoming horde were still far out of range. It was Arapovian again, the impossible, indefatigable Armenian, his self-possession absolute amid the noise and panic of the artillery. His left arm, his bow-arm, had been tightly bandaged by the medics, but there still showed through on his forearm a small circle of deep dark blood. The man’s olive-skinned aquiline face was beaded with droplets of sweat but expressionless. No order had been given to fire, but Arapovian was clearly a kind of free-lance in his own estimation, and not subject to the orders of ordinary mortals. Sabinus watched, intrigued despite himself. Even as Arapovian pulled back his bowstring, Sabinus thought he could see that small circle of blood spreading. What it must have cost him. His biceps bunched as he drew back the sinew string of that lethal eastern bow, sinuously curved and then recurved at each end. The arrowhead was ablaze with a blob of pitch. He sighted along the arrow and fired.

  Other soldiers turned in surprise to watch its arc.

  The arrow struck the ground at the foot of the Hunnish spear, which still stood like an insult and a judgement before the west gate, its black feather bobbing in the light breeze. Then it went out. There was wisp of smoke, then nothing. He had fired too hard, the burning arrowhead had buried itself in the dusty ground and been snuffed out. An unfortunate omen. But there came another wisp of smoke and the pitch blazed again. A lean tongue of flame licked up the Hun spearshaft and it began to burn.

  On the towers, the relentless activity of the ballistas and sling-machines faltered as men paused to watch. Let ’em, thought Sabinus. Moments like this were worth an extra cohort.

  It was an astonishing shot, first time.

  Now arrow-shaft and spearshaft burned together. After only a few seconds the tar-fuelled flames reached the long black feather dancing on top and reduced it to a few motes of ash. What had seemed like so powerful a symbol of intimidation had vanished in a lick of flame, a puff of wind.

  He was an impossible one, this Armenian. But not altogether stupid. A great cheer went up from the ramparts. Arapovian neither turned, acknowledged it nor reacted in any way.

  ‘Stuck-up son of a bitch,’ growled Knuckles nearby.

  He deserved a decoration for that flamboyant act. Sabinus called over to him, ‘When this is over, you’ll walk away with a corona obsidionalis.’


  ‘When this is over,’ said Arapovian, never shifting his gaze from the approaching horde, ‘I’ll be glad to walk away with my life.’

  He nocked another arrow to his bow and rested his injured arm on the battlements and waited.

  The enemy rolled nearer.

  They could see now that the Hun siege-towers were serious constructions, frontages padded with huge sewn bolsters of rawhide, stuffed with riverweed and horsehair and thoroughly soaked against fire-arrows. They rolled in unison towards the west wall, one to the left and one to the right. Good dispositon. The supporting lines of horse-warriors slowed and stopped, still out of effective range.