Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  The retreating Hun horsemen were still barely aware of the impending attack on their rear. Andronicus rose up in his saddle and gave the nod, and the column moved into an easy canter. A Hun glanced back and cried out a warning. Immediately Andronicus drove his spurs into his horse and it gave a low whinny as it moved into a full charging gallop. The column drove forwards.

  The massed ranks of retreating Huns broke loose and separated before the juggernaut of iron and bronze could slam into them, and Sabinus saw immediately, from his accursed grandstand view on the western guard-tower, that his last, desperate attempt at counter-attack would fail. What a heavy cavalry column did best was hit a hard target, but here there would be no hard target to hit. The nomad horsemen galloped away into empty space before the Roman heavy cavalry, the Pannonian plains to them much like the limitless steppes of their native Scythia. The great armoured column punched into empty air, into taunting nothingness. And then some of the Huns, those with a few arrows left in their quivers, wheeled round and came back at them from the side, deft and fast, bows already slipping from muscular, copper-skinned shoulders.

  Sabinus felt like the emperor himself in Constantinople, high up in his kathisma, his private box in the Hippodrome, watching an afternoon’s harmless entertainment. He tightened up with self-loathing. He had been to the capital, had seen the Obelisk of Theodosius the Great in the Hippodrome, triumphally erected back in 390. He had stood and surveyed the bas-reliefs of scruffy barbarians in animal skins, bowing low to the emperor and his family on high in their royal box. What arrogance. What hubris. What a hostage to fortune that haughty, self-laudatory monument would prove to be. The Emperor of the Eastern Romans, God’s Vice-Regent on Earth, perpetually victorious over the pagan hordes . . . To watch his men about to be slaughtered like this was almost more than Sabinus could bear.

  ‘Hunting the Huns on the open plain is like hunting a tiger in a dark forest,’ said a soft voice nearby. It was Arapovian. ‘At night. With a stick.’

  ‘Stow it, soldier.’

  Sabinus was ready to sound the recall already, but then Andronicus gave a seeming yell of triumph, and Sabinus hesitated. It seemed the cavalry officer believed there was still a chance they might get through to the onagers and destroy them, before they themselves were destroyed.

  Keeping his men in a tight and perfect column, essential when so vastly outnumbered, Andronicus turned them as tightly as he could and ploughed in left across the files of fleeing Hun horsemen. No, there was no satisfying hard target to splinter and demolish, but these light horsemen, out of arrows, barely armoured, indeed some barely clothed, could be cut down ruthlessly in smaller groups. And getting in amongst them like this, there was no chance their Hun comrades could reply with arrow-fire. They would only kill their own. It was a good move.

  Sabinus nodded with satisfaction. One thing that stone-faced warlord had not expected, he guessed, was any such counter-attack. Well, let him feel it now. Now those light horse-warriors would feel what it was like to have the Boiler Boys crashing into their flank.

  When a lancer drove into the flank of a Hunnish horse, the massive weight of the armoured knight tended to carry him right into and over the flailing and tumbling steppe pony. Either the rider was trapped or trampled beneath, or else, if he tried to come up again, the next lancer would be ready immediately behind to finish him off. Andronicus himself drove his lance in low, straight into a squat pony’s belly. The pony squealed and keeled over, dragging his lance from his hand as it went. Andronicus promptly pulled up and drew his spatha, his long-sword. The Hun horseman rolled and came up standing, covered in dust, half blinded, whipping round, drawing his curved sabre. The lancer behind Andronicus came past the Hun on the other side, galloping in close enough to touch him. He lowered his shield, aimed the heavy bronze boss straight for the Hun’s spinning head, and let his horse do the rest. The effect at that speed was to club the warrior headless where he stood, leaving nothing but the stump of a cadaver gouting blood from the neckhole.

  It became a rout of the arrowless, fleeing steppe warriors, torn asunder by the heavyweight lancers, who were getting closer to the onagers all the time. Once there, a few well-aimed sword-strokes could do a lot of damage and buy them useful time. But in the whirling, blinding dust, the cavalrymen took too little notice of fresh Hun horsemen coming down from the ridge, quivers packed and bristling.

  Suddenly the Roman column found itself falling behind, unable to pursue at such speed, and with some way still to go to reach the onagers. And then the Huns came back, deft and fast, lightweight gallopers as fast as swooping falcons, curling in on either side of the column, loosing off arrows on lethal flat trajectories - no elegant high arcs through the morning sky now - and angled to the column so as not to fly on and hit their own. The warriors held their small, deadly bows almost horizontal, shooting from the side, arrows barely visible as they spat from the bow from a mere hundred yards, fifty. They thocked into heavy wooden shields, each shield on each lancer’s left arm soon stuck with eight or ten arrows, weighing the rider down, tiring him. Soon even those strong arms began to drop, necks and shoulders became more exposed. The lancers were drenched in sweat within their coats of mail, eyes blinking furiously, straining to see.

  The Hunnish horses didn’t seem afraid of the big Roman mounts masked in their unearthly silver chamfrons. Perhaps their riders didn’t allow them to be afraid. More arrows skidded off shoulder-guards or steep-sided Spangenhelms, sometimes ricocheting into softer flesh - the power behind each missile was awesome. Others hit direct and passed on, barely slowed by plate or chainmail, to bore into meat and bone. Blood gleamed on polished armour, as thin as oil on water, or trickled beneath, runnels of blood and sweat commingled.

  A pair of buzzards, male and female, with two scrawny chicks to feed, circled overhead.

  Andronicus pushed back his visor and left it up, raging and oblivious of pain in the chaos of the fight. He was hit in the thigh, but time enough for it to hurt later. He bellowed another order and then tightened up again, roaring round to the right, holding his long-sword thrust straight out before him like a lance. He had realised what was happening. Although they had done good damage to the arrowless riders in retreat, they were now surrounded, like hornets in a beehive. All he could see around them, their only horizon, was one vast, extended circle of galloping riders. The Huns loosed their arrows when passing through only one quadrant of the circle, so they wouldn’t hit their own men the other side. Smart. They reloaded around the rest of the gallop.

  Andronicus’ men were going down everywhere, reeling in the bright sunshine, crying out, heads thrown back, lances trailing. He drove his wheeled spurs into his charger’s broad flanks and led his men to break out of the circle again. No Hun line could withstand that shock. But instead of withstanding it, the enemy simply melted away before it. The circle ebbed around them and re-formed and they were still surrounded. The Huns’ tactical agility was extraordinary. But how did they know when to re-form, when to hold fire, when to move? Who gave the order? It was uncanny. Even now, Andronicus could admire it. He had heard of the Huns. Now he saw them, and understood. No demons out of the wilderness, after all. Just awesome warriors. Perhaps the hardest that Rome had fought in all her long history.

  Across the plain, on the low rise, the Hun warlord sat unmoving, like some primitive votive statue cut from basalt in the desert. He gave no orders to his whirling thousands.

  Another flight of arrows came in and Andronicus crouched low in his saddle, his face buried in his horse’s coarse mane. Sometimes that rough, sweet horse-smell comforted him, in the stables at the end of a hard day’s training or, better still, a hunt. But not now. All comfort was far from him now. An arrow clanged on his shoulder and cut his neck open. His sweat stung in the wound. His linen soutane was sticky with blood.

  Too many of his men were fallen, and the column’s coherence was lost. The day, too, was lost. The sun was well past noon, and sinking, its light beginn
ing to shine from behind the stone warlord on the crest and his innumerable ranks of warriors, to burn cruelly in the eyes of the Roman lancers and their comrades on the doomed walls of Viminacium. The judgement of the sun was plain.

  From those walls came the desperate, far-away sound of the recall. Andronicus could have laughed. Some hope. ‘Come and get us, friends,’ he muttered, finding his mouth was full of blood.

  Now mere isolated individuals, some cavalrymen tried to pull their mounts round and head back to the fort, but they were picked off one by one. Others milled vacantly. Andronicus twisted in his saddle and looked around, and another arrow cut across his back. Had he been sitting straight it would have killed him. There was only one thing left to try. There would be no return to the fort for them. He gave one last, desperate order, spraying blood. ‘Free charge for the onagers!’ He gritted his teeth. Think of it as a suicide mission. Never give up hope. Die in the attack.

  The onagers stood impassively, a hundred yards off still, thickly surrounded by Hun horsemen, arrows nocked. He spurred his horse forward with a last fury. Crazy. To take out those onagers and do any lasting damage, many men would be needed, with leisure time to spare. Not like this.

  One blood-boltered fool flailing his sword in the air. It seemed to him now, out on his own, with his men trailing wounded or dead behind him, that the Huns were waiting for him, with a true warrior curiosity as to how profound his courage might be. How would he die? Like a man, after all?

  Andronicus galloped on, sword stretched out before him, arm shaking, the sun in his eyes. If it is with all dying men as they say, he saw his own family before him when he died, arms outstretched to embrace him, and not the searing sun.

  The Huns said among themselves that he died bravely, that leader of the iron horsemen. Later that night, stripped of his armour, they would lay him on a pyre with their own dead, and send him to the otherworld in the care of his gods whose names they did not even know.

  A long way back, a single Roman lancer had obeyed the recall and broken free of the Hun circle uninjured. Sabinus ordered the south gates open. But the Huns’ murderous impudence knew no bounds. A single copper-skinned warrior, clad in nothing but fur and feathers, came galloping in fast and low on a filthy little piebald, slewed in hard virtually under the heavy charger’s thundering hooves, drew his bowstring back into his chest and loosed an arrow. Travelling all of five yards, it smacked into the lancer’s face, punched through and came out the back of his helmet. The heavy horse continued to canter forwards, its dead rider lolling. The little horse warrior of the steppes pulled up to inspect his handiwork, and from his fellows an admiring cheer went up at this deed of battlefield daring. As if it was mere sport to them, even as many of their own tribe lay dead around the walls of the fort. All men must die. Why not die gloriously, in battle? War was much like a hunt over the steppes, and the best hunters always make the finest soldiers.

  Tatullus bestrode the battlements, ordering his crossbowmen to take the Hun rider out, but they couldn’t hit him. They were few now, and very tired. Their crossbows trembled in sweaty hands, their arm muscles ached atrociously, their tired eyes blurred. The rider kept galloping, turning. He even punched his fist at them. Obscenely the dead rider, the arrow stuck through his head, still lolled in his wooden saddle when his horse trotted in through the gates.

  ‘Get him down,’ said Tatullus, ‘and close up.’

  ‘Sir?’

  Tatullus glared at him. No, there would be no more coming back.

  The gates began to close.

  ‘Another man coming in!’ came a call from the walls.

  Hell.

  But not one should be lost out of fear. The gates would stand open for any who came. Tatullus sent a runner to the guard-tower.

  Sabinus was hit, but he would not have anyone know it. His side was heavily padded with linen bandages, which he hoped would soak up the blood. But every time he shouted an order, he bled more. He could feel his face whiten and sweat. His ears rang as his blood pressure dropped. Let me not faint, he prayed. He pleaded. Not for himself but for his men and the honour of Rome. Let those of us who still live and breathe, heroes every one - after this much battle, this much loss - let us not die now. Let rescue come soon. Let justice be done.

  A loose Roman horse was ambling back from the scene of the cavalry’s carnage, nodding its big head sleepily, as if returning from no more than a day in the haymeadows. As it passed a tangle of slain Hun warriors lying close to the fort, one of the dead rose up from among them, black with old blood, seized hold of the horse’s reins and saddle, and hauled himself up onto the peaceable beast. Together they rode on serenely towards the south gate.

  It was Malchus! The man was indestructible. Multiply wounded, ridden down by a horde of a thousand, taking refuge out there among the middens of the slain. Through the mask of black blood gleamed the white teeth of his smile.

  Behind him rolled a dust-cloud of numberless horsemen.

  ‘Every other unit off the walls and to the south gate!’ bellowed Sabinus.

  Men scrambled, some nearly laughing with tiredness.

  The legate clutched his side. He sent one of the few pedites still standing down to Tatullus.

  The centurion understood. For their own sake, Malchus must be saved. Such small miracles were everything now; now everything else was lost.

  ‘Take your pikes! Holding pattern at the gate - and I mean hold them!’

  Tatullus himself had taken up his beloved billhook, a fearsome weapon which combined a broad curved pike-blade and a long, thin side-spike. He would never ask his men to do what he would not. He stood out before the gate unshielded. An experimental arrow flew close by. He appeared not to notice it, settling his close-fitting helmet more firmly on his head, his deep-set eyes looking out unblinking and unafraid.

  Malchus was still a hundred yards off, trotting calmly, though a little unsteady in the saddle. And then the thundering hooves.

  ‘I want him in! Do not close the gate.’

  The exhausted and the walking wounded men formed a semi-circular pike line about the south gate, thick ashwood pike-butts jammed in the hard ground, blades ranged outwards at chest level. On their left arms, propped forward, their big oval infantry shields. No horse would charge a line of standing pikes. Only mortal men indulged in the heroics of suicide.

  The black and bloody chimera that was Malchus brushed between two parted pikes, saying never a word. But he was indeed grinning. He vanished into the courtyard and the pikes closed up. They managed to take a couple of steps backwards for the safety of the gate. Then the Huns were on them.

  Curved sabres flashed in the air. One or two horsemen, vainglorious and young, tried to hurl themselves from their saddles over the line of pikes, knives clutched in their fists, only to be battered down by embossed shields, or impaled in the air as they leaped. A pike sank down to the earth with the dead weight, and another horseman rode in close and lashed out with his bullhide whip, pulling the pikeman after him. The wretched man fell forwards, stumbling over his own shield, and a third Hun lopped his head off.

  ‘Pull back in formation! Gatekeepers, stand ready.’

  It was desperate.

  Other Huns were dismounting, comprehending quickly that horses were an encumbrance now, and instead running at the line of lowered pikes, aiming to slip between them and knife the defenders. The shields tilted further forward, the only gap between them for the pikestaffs. A billhook slashed sideways. It was Tatullus, standing at the very front of his men, as implacable as a bronze statue. A Hun warrior’s stomach opened and he sprawled in his own guts. Two of his comrades leaped back, hissing, one of them only just in time to avoid another lethal side-swipe from that billhook.

  In the very shadow of the gate-tower, a big fellow swung a club. It was Knuckles. The club was already dove-grey with spilled brains.

  ‘Hold them!’ yelled Tatullus again, stepping slowly backwards, the circle of pikemen shrinking behind him. H
e prayed there were crossbowmen left on the wall above. They were finished without a good volley.

  Suddenly the Huns fell back again and in another instant, from behind them, arrows came arcing down on the isolated pikemen in short, high trajectories. Shields were hauled up but often too late, the arrows whistling down cruelly on exposed heads and sagging shoulders. Angry shouts, screams, men clutching and staggering and falling back, losing formation.

  Yet even as those still standing stepped backwards over their fallen comrades, they lowered their pikes again and locked shields, and took another stand, now in the very arch of the gateway. Their discipline was magnificent. A Hun horseman who had blindfolded his horse rode at them screaming in fury and crashed into the immoveable shield-wall. Pikes finished him.

  More Huns milled frustratedly, dismounting and remounting aimlessly, seeing the gates standing open just before them, some even screaming insults at each other as if unable to believe that, after all the day’s punishment, this handful of dusty, dogged men were still able to hold them back, thousands of them. Truly, these Romans were no women.