Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  Arapovian, clinging to the top of the net with one arm, stopped and looked back. He was as crazed as that Hun poet, this Armenian. More orders roared in his ears. He drew his dagger from its sheath again, and hazed the bright little blade out over the army of horseman until he found his target. He pointed the point of the dagger straight at the stone-faced warlord and smiled a rare smile. Then he clamped his teeth on the blade again and was up and over the battlements, pulling the weighty hemp net up behind him. Knuckles seized the other end, then more men came to help. One acrobatic Hun vaulted and clung to it, so they hauled him up to the top, where Knuckles leaned over and cuffed him off again with a massive blow to the head, as you might swipe away a fly. The warrior cartwheeled back to the ground. The net came safely up over the battlements, and the rest of the horsemen faced blank fortress walls again.

  In a surge of victorious energy, arrows, ballista bolts, slingballs, even rocks hurled by hand, struck the Hun horsemen in a single, brutal volley. From the unit again operating at full capacity on the half-burned north-west tower, there came a pummelling onslaught from the well-drilled artillerymen. Two big ballista bolts and two medium-weight slingshots were fired hard and almost horizontal, arcing down fast into the fleeing horsemen. The four missiles took out four riders, sending them tumbling to the earth at breakneck speed. You could hear the vertebrae snap. The riders behind tumbled into them, and more fell. Some lay stunned beneath their whinnying horses or entangled in their reins. Arrows sang from the battlements, and each arrow told. The rest of the horsemen fled.

  Arapovian sank down behind the low wall and sheathed his dagger. He removed his helmet, swept back the long black hair plastered to his brow and bowed his head in grief for a brave lost comrade.

  Knuckles handed him back his bow. ‘Nutter,’ he said.

  ‘Hero, surely?’ said Arapovian bitterly.

  ‘Same thing,’ said Knuckles.

  Below them, the great structure of the burning tortoise gave one last groan, like some primeval animal in its last throes, then leaned, tottered, and collapsed in a huge eruption of soot and sparks. Hot iron plates clanged down on each other, and amid the smoke and flame, and the acrid stench of burning rope, was the worse stench of bodies roasting. The bronze head of the great ram, half buried, shone dimly up through the flames. One last wounded warrior crawled out of the chaos, arms flailing as if he was trying to swim through sand. He got to his knees and made a grab for a riderless horse which milled around and snorted with surprise.

  ‘Finish it,’ said Tatullus irritably.

  A bolt stilled him. The dust settled. The men breathed again.

  It was not yet noon. The pedites brought round water.

  Sabinus was coming along the battlements. Arapovian got to his feet.

  Tatullus saluted. ‘Sir. Ram out of action.’

  Sabinus would have smiled, but Malchus was gone, and he couldn’t afford to lose men like that. He nodded and went back to the west tower.

  There was a brief respite in the Hun onslaught. The horsemen were pulled way back against the crest of hills to the west. Their onagers fell silent. A feeling of temporary hesitation. This undermanned and isolated fortress wouldn’t be so easy a nut to crack after all. But Sabinus and his officers remembered well enough the demeanour of that grim-faced, tattooed warlord on his grubby little skewbald pony. He would be back. Any respite would be short.

  He ordered Tatullus to make a discreet head-count, and the answer was a shock. They were down to fewer than four hundred front-rank soldiers: already a fifth of his men were casualties, wounded or slain. The pedites and medical orderlies had taken it even worse. There was no shelter from those bitter arrow-storms, and the Huns would soon come again. Many thousands of them.

  If the gods were just, and rewarded ordinary men who fought like heroes, then surely reinforcements must come soon. Or perhaps some goddess, the grey-eyed Pallas Athena, as she came down from Olympus to the windy plains of Troy to protect her beloved Odysseus. Sabinus’ lip curled sardonically. Fat chance. The old gods were dead. The emperor and his bishops had declared it so, and the Altar of Victory no longer stood in the Senate House. From now on, men must fight on their own, with only a symbolic fish or a wooden cross for succour.

  There were six thousand men under arms at Ratiaria. Another thirty or forty thousand at Marcianopolis: the Eastern Field Army in all its glory. But the horizon all around was empty and still.

  The summer sun burned down. In the blue sky overhead, swifts and martins wheeled and hawked through the mild air as if this was a day like any other. From the river the men on the walls could hear the distant cry of a heron. Here they died, while life went dumbly on.

  The Romans drank water with a dash of vinegary wine, gnawed barley-flour biscuits and salt-pork, rested in the shade of the towers or barrack blocks. Tatullus paced around tirelessly, inspecting weapons and wounds, giving quiet orders. He made sure his men’s shields were properly stowed with a full complement of mattiobarbuli, lead-weighted darts which were the perfect weapon for defending heights against attackers below. He paused to watch one young slinger carefully carving insults onto his slingballs, one by one, sitting cross-legged, tongue out between his teeth, concentrating like the finest goldsmith on his craft.

  Tatullus peered over his shoulder. ‘Hoc ede, equifutuor,’ read the lyrical inscription. ‘Eat this, horse-fucker.’

  ‘Very witty, soldier,’ growled the centurion. The slinger jumped to his feet and saluted. ‘And if you come out of this in one piece, I’m sure you could get a nice job as a stonemason inscribing fancy headstones with lies for rich dead people. But until then, do some useful fucking work!’

  ‘Sir!’

  The next soldier to arouse his centurion’s wrath owned a shield that was all wrong. Tatullus plucked it out of the man’s hand and twirled it round to stare at the back.

  ‘A Roman shield has a sturdy central handgrip behind the boss,’ he said. ‘So what’s this? An armstrap, with a handgrip near the edge. What use is that, shit-for-brains?’

  The soldier stared dumbly.

  ‘Is your shield offensive or defensive?’

  ‘Defensive, sir.’

  ‘Balls! It’s both. Take incoming arrow-fire, sure, and then close in and knock your man off the battlements with a good blow from the boss. But what are you going to do to a man with a feeble side-swipe? Tickle him? Strip that armstrap off right now, soldier. Refix the handgrip alone, right behind the boss. Decurion! See to it that none of the other men have shields with armstraps. They’re for pansies. You get tired holding it, you rest the rim on the ground and squat. Look to it.’

  He reported back to Sabinus, showing a sympathy for his men he’d never dream of showing to their faces.

  ‘They’re dog-tired. Only mortal. No man can fight for ever. They’ve fought for five, six hours already now, after a night without sleep.’

  Sabinus knew what he was suggesting, his iron-hearted centurion: rest for half, duty for half. But the walls could not be manned with just two hundred men. Even four hundred was ludicrously inadequate. And in truth, his primus pilus knew it as well as he. All four hundred must rise to fight again. The legate’s anger and weariness made him brutal.

  ‘They can kip on Charon’s ferry.’

  Some of them were almost asleep with exhaustion, when there came a distant thunk and, two or three seconds later, another terrific shudder from the south-west tower. Bang on target yet again.

  ‘To your stations, on the double!’

  Dry, sleepless, dust-filled eyes once more flared wide. Men once more dragged grimy, exhausted limbs up stone steps and along battlemented walls to their places of thankless duty.

  9

  THE BOILER BOYS

  This time, the Hun warlord was in cold control. He held his numberless horsemen back out of range and did not use them. For half an hour or more, there was merely the screech and ratchet of the gigantic torsion springs, the juddering release of beam against padded cro
ssbeam, and the south-west tower and its surrounding walls, weakened if not brought down by the ram, continued their slow-motion fall.

  Thus began the long afternoon of attrition.

  The VII Legion had triumphed over the siege-towers and the ram, yes. Helped by the fact that the Huns had started wrong, attacking piecemeal instead of along a single, concerted front. Had they brought up the siege-towers and ram together, against different walls, while giving the machines full, coordinated covering fire from horseback, Viminacium might have already fallen, and the legionaries would all be on Charon’s ferry across the Styx by now. But over the onagers the VIIth could not triumph. They were hopelessly out of range. Even the Romans’ best ballistas and sling-machines were nothing like the size and power of the besiegers’.

  The tension of waiting could drive a man mad.

  ‘Pennants!’ a young voice screamed. ‘I see pennants! Windsocks and dragon banners!’

  It was a signifer, the young boy Sabinus had tried to steady in the legionary chapel. He sat astride the battlements like a sunstruck fool, gesticulating wildly. ‘I think it might be the Ioviani Seniores. Or the Cornuti. Look, to the east! From Ratiaria!’

  The boy had imagination, certainly.

  Tatullus strode over, dragged him back from the battlements, looked into his eyes and saw the frantic, burning light in them. The boy continued to gibber, so he cuffed him senseless and ordered him lugged down to the hospital.

  The centurion scanned the eastern horizon.

  There were no pennants.

  Whumpff. Another hundredweight ball hit the south-west tower. Plumes of dust rose high into the still summer air.

  And then out of the west, the tide of horse-warriors came surging in.

  Knuckles came slouching by, a stubby little crossbow clutched in his huge paw.

  ‘You look like a bear trying to peel a grape,’ said Sabinus.

  Knuckles stopped and wiped his brow. ‘If only I could get at ’em with me club, sir, I could do a power of good for Rome and the Lord Jesus Christ, sir.’

  ‘You’ll have your chance for a bit of face-to-face yet, soldier. Don’t doubt it.’

  There came a blizzard of arrows arcing in high.

  ‘Take cover!’

  ‘You need to get off the wall, sir, under the canopy.’

  Sabinus moved. Around him, cries of stricken men. The clatter of arrows, sometimes the soft thock as they hit flesh. Outlandish screams. They couldn’t afford to lose any. But they were. The walls had to be manned.

  They couldn’t just wait and be picked off by those lethal arrow-storms. Somehow they would have to attack.

  He gave the order to pull the men back off the east wall, manning only the south and west. The attack remained concentrated there, and Sabinus reckoned it would stay that way.

  They must counter-attack soon. They must do something.

  Down in the yard, the heavy cavalry stirred.

  From the artillery units still working on the southern gate-towers, ballista bolts cut through Hunnish warriors and their horses alike. A perpendicular hit could go through three men in a line, it was said. Sabinus called up every last crossbow unit to the battlements. Densely packed volleys proved murderous to the ranks of the unarmoured horse-warriors, however loosely spaced and fast. They died by the dozen. Eventually they pulled back out range again.

  ‘They’re not invincible,’ said Tatullus quietly.

  ‘I never thought they were,’ said Sabinus.

  ‘Mad as fuckin’ badgers, though,’ said Knuckles.

  Arapovian sat and rebandaged his arm, then took up his bow again.

  Centurion and legate departed.

  ‘Tell me about Armenia, then,’ said Knuckles. ‘I could do with a laugh.’

  ‘Armenia?’ The look in Arapovian’s eyes gave even Knuckles pause. ‘One day I will tell you about Armenia. For now, I kill Huns.’

  The onagers started up once more. And with them, looping round wide, came the horse-archers. You could almost hear the collective sigh of exhausted men stumbling to their feet again, cranking back their bows, hefting their shields, stowing a new row of lead darts.

  The onslaught recommenced.

  Soon a decurion came running. ‘First-floor guardroom, sir. Stone came straight through the wall. Tower still holding but roof’s beginning to pitch badly.’

  ‘Bag it up. Give ’em covering fire.’

  ‘No archers, sir.’

  ‘What do you mean, “No archers”? They’re your unit; where are they?’

  ‘My unit’s gone, sir. In heaven or hell, wouldn’t like to say. Enemy arrows are coming in like rain.’ He gasped for breath, waving his empty hands. ‘Their cavalry below the walls. Continuous stream of them. Every man on the open roof was caught out. Lying up there like sticklebacks, sir.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Tatullus reviewed the situation for his commanding officer. ‘The siege-towers weren’t a problem. Light cavalry, obviously not, however many arrows they drop on us. The ram’s finished. It’s the onagers that we have to take out, and fast. The south-west tower won’t take a lot more, then we’re fighting hand-to-hand over the rubble.’ He grimaced. ‘Outnumbered a hundred to one.’

  He was right, and Sabinus knew it. The big onagers back there, half a mile off, bucking in the dust, spewing out their massive loads, kicking back like the wild asses they were named after, they were the enemy. And they were going to break in. It was only a matter of time. Another shuddering thunk, the whole west wall trembling, bruised and battered, a fresh crack running to the foundation stones, men reeling back from the battlements choking on dust. The onagers relentless, kicking up again, and again. No, they could not just sit here and let it all fall. Not now. Not after so many years of patient endurance . . .

  Once a single gap was breached, once the barbarians were inside the fort, the hand-to-hand fighting would be brief indeed. His auxiliaries would flee. His runners would do what they did best, and run. And his last three hundred would fight like Leonidas’ Spartans to the bitter, bloody end. So he truly believed. Perhaps take twice as many of the enemy with them as they went, screaming blue murder, down to hell. Six hundred of the enemy slain would make no difference. Life was cheap to them. Tens of thousands more would ride straight on down the imperial trunk road to Naissus. Then Sardica? Adrianople? And then the capital itself? It would be like a monstrous wave, a bristling, shaggy wave of savages armed to the teeth, sweeping across Europe without end.

  At last the onagers paused in their onslaught. The galloping horsemen below pulled back again to regroup, and replenish their quivers from the Hun supply wagons back on the crest.

  Now.

  ‘Tubernator! Sound the cavalry charge!’

  Down at the south gate there was a disciplined frenzy of activity. The cavalrymen, already armoured up by assistants, hauled themselves onto their huge, shaggy-hooved mounts, settled themselves into their high-fronted saddles with a bronze brace at each corner, rock-solid, massy, inhuman. Their leader was Andronicus. No fool: but, alas, no Malchus either. They checked their long cavalry swords, hefted their emblazoned shields, couched their long ashen lances, and formed up at the gate in a long Teutonic column, four abreast. It was they who had carried out the original punitive attack on the Hun people north of the Danube, which had brought down this terrible vengeance. Inexorable orders from the Highest Authority, it was true; a grim but necessary task. Now they rode out against the enemy with real anger in their blood.

  Sabinus raised his hand, glanced out once more across the plain. The Hun horsemen were vanishing away, ghostly figures glimpsed through clouds of ochre dust. His hand dropped. The gatekeepers hauled back the mighty oak timbers, the two iron-bound gates groaned open, and the column moved out at a steely trot. A great glittering serpent gliding out from its lair into the waiting world beyond.

  The men on the battlements gave a cheer to see them. The majesty and power of the Schola Scutariorum Clibanariorum. Less majestically, the Boi
ler Boys, since they would bake inside their weighty armour on days like this. But they deliberately trained in the hottest weather, sometimes wearing extra clothing beneath the armour. They were used to it.

  They pulled their horses’ heads in low and continued to trot steadily to maintain formation till the last. Their mounts wore shining silver chamfrons, masks of armour, of little practical use against arrows but highly effective in scaring the enemy horse. Horses were scared by everything: camels, elephants, other horses in masks. Sabinus had even heard that horses would turn back from attack at the merest scent of lion dung. Sadly he had no sacks of lion dung available just now.