Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  And then much, much worse. A concerted volley of missile strikes, huge boulders fired from machines still behind the siege-towers, barely glimpsed yet, their titanic loads arcing in high and raining down calamitously all on the same point. That was skill. Men were crushed without even the time to cry out, and when the dust slowly cleared the outer and middle walls were already flattened across a whole stretch of the Lycus valley. The siege-engines began to advance. This battle wasn’t going to last the night. To confirm Aëtius’ worst fears, instantly another volley of onager missiles hit the walls further along, taking them down in a dozen blows, a ruthless pummelling. Everything would depend upon the inner walls.

  From below came desperate cries at the sight of the ram approaching the St Romanus Gate. Tatullus was roaring, asses screamed as they dragged heavy loads, bringing up more ballista missiles; there was a clatter of running hobnailed feet, the rush of citizen militia with their pitiful wooden staves. In the hazy distance, a monotonous beat on a barbaric oxhide drum.

  Aëtius raised his hand, and the tower commanders all along the walls read the signal and did likewise.

  He hesitated and sent a prayer like an arrow heavenwards.

  He dropped his arm. ‘Fire!’

  The artillery units initially wasted their missiles trying to take out individual galloping horsemen as they darted in across the broad terrace beneath the walls howling like animals, arched back in their saddles, grinning up at the shaken defenders behind their battlements, baring their berry-red teeth. Aëtius was onto them immediately, striding over, shoving Imperial Guardsmen out of his way to reach them, roaring up at the next tower.

  ‘The horsemen may look frightening to you, soldiers, but they’re not coming in just yet! They’re trying to distract you. So ignore them! Take out the siege-towers, you hear? Kill the siege-towers!’

  Tatullus echoed his commander’s orders all along the walls in finest centurion style, with just as much volume and some extra colour.

  ‘You heard the general, ladies! Hit the fucking machines! I see any unit wasting missiles on those malodorous fucking horsemen out of Scythia, I’ll break your fucking legs!’

  He bore down on a single hapless artillery unit atop the Romanus Gate, and they quailed before him. They were good technicians, but they’d never felt the hot blast of a centurion’s angry breath in their faces, and it focused their minds wonderfully. As Tatullus well knew, it was essential they feared him more than the enemy. He seized one fresh-faced youngster by the scruff of his neck and flung him back against the wall with the might of his right arm alone. The youngster gasped and cowered.

  ‘Now get back on your fucking machine and line it up there!’ Tatullus screamed, spit flying in their startled faces. ‘You can see the target, it’s not exactly shy. There!’

  Indeed, the attack tower was already looming over them, the rubble field of the collapsed lower walls already having been traversed with quick-laid planking and lightning-fast winching from the darting enemy.

  Further along, more Huns were attacking without the complication of artillery. Aëtius spotted them immediately.

  ‘Escalade!’ he yelled in warning. ‘Wolf-lords, to me!’ and he dashed southwards to the section being breached. A swarm of half-naked Hun warriors had rolled from their ponies to race across the moat on a dropped pontoon, the stretch of water proving as much of an obstacle as a broad puddle. ‘Complain about it later,’ Aëtius growled to himself. ‘Shout at the devil.’

  Jormunreik and Valamir ran with him, arrows already nocked to the bow.

  ‘Station here,’ said Aëtius. ‘Hit them on the flank as they come across.’ He ran on.

  The Huns came scrabbling over the collapsed lower walls, tripping and stumbling in the limestone rubble of their own creation. Immediately a short, hard volley of Gothic arrows slewed into them from the side and, close-packed as they were, found many a target. But countless more warriors came on behind, daggers clamped between their teeth as they scaled the ruined walls, using their gleaming Hunnish chekans or cruel spiked hatchets to dig into the stone like climbers.

  Aëtius ordered Captain Andronicus up with his century, and strung them along the battlements. ‘Escalade,’ he said by way of brief explanation. ‘Get ready to wash your spears.’

  The Gothic wolf-lords kept up relentless volley after volley of long ashwood arrows, cutting into the flank of the advancing horde, but it barely slowed them. Somewhere back across the crowded plain Attila would be sitting his scruffy skewbald pony, oblivious of the deaths of individuals, his own or the enemy’s, and dreaming only of conquest.

  Already the advancing Hun footsoldiers were across the exposed terrace below the Inner Walls. The defenders’ arrows and even the wild stones and improvised missiles hurled by the citizen militiamen took a terrible toll on exposed heads and bodies, but they moved in a swarm, as planned and concerted as a colony of ants. A wily old warlord was with them, Geukchu, having crossed this far on a white horse, and he rode among them giving calm orders. The defenders tried again and again to take him but he seemed under magical protection. Faster than the eye could see, some six or eight Hun marksmen stood back from the swarm and fired small grappling-hooks carrying the thinnest ropes of knotted hemp straight up into the air, only falling back when they were just across the battlements, perfectly pitched.

  ‘Cut ’em away!’ roared Aëtius. ‘Don’t let ’em get up!’

  The Palatine Guard followed his orders, but as soon as they leaned out to slash at the ropes, in came the Huns’ covering fire. It was devastating: an instant barrage of three or four hundred arrows, immaculately aimed, scything in over the top of the wall and into the chests and faces of the desperate defenders. Men screaming, flailing, faces crimson, hands clutched to eyes and throats. Andronicus himself was stuck with an arrow in the shoulder, sinking down, snapping it off gasping. ‘Bastards,’ he murmured. There had to be more of a fight than that.

  ‘Take them out!’ roared Aëtius, desperate. ‘Kick away the hooks! Citizen militia, move down!’

  But already the hooks were deeply lodged by Hun warriors coming up the ropes, not one of them cut. Knuckles saw the first Hun appear along the walls, and lumbered over to cave his skull in. But the Hun moved like a spider, vaulted over the battlements, dagger between his teeth but not even standing his ground to fight. You don’t take a fortified city with an escalade of one. Moving at blinding speed, he kicked out and loosened the tough little grappling hook from the wall where it had lodged, checked that the rope it hung from was looped only once, nice and loosely, round the back of the merlon - Knuckles was upon him, swinging his club at the half-shaven and unhelmeted skull with a blow that would have killed a horse - and the warrior was gone. Not even looking, holding onto nothing but the little hook two-handed, he vaulted back over the walls to the ground below.

  Knuckles looked out after him and roared with frustration. ‘What are you, a fuckin’ circus acrobat or something?’

  A clatter of arrows struck all around him and one cut his forearm badly, an ooze of blood among the long-established mess of scars. Knuckles bellowed with anger, clubbing mindlessly for a moment at the rope tightening ominously around the merlon. Then Arapovian was running over, knife drawn.

  The rope reeled back down behind the Hun warrior, and he fell to earth slowly enough to roll and then leap to his feet uninjured. Along the walls the same trick had been repeated several times, and though a few of the leading warriors had been cut down, most had not. As the acrobat besiegers almost floated back down to earth, pulled up in counterweight were giant nets, soon hanging in swags from the forty-foot walls. Defenders hacked desperately at the ropes bound around their own treacherous battlements and more were cut free. But not enough. In seconds, the surviving nets were thick with Hun warriors scaling them like lizards. Already the first were vaulting over the tops of the walls and forming small, isolated bridgeheads to protect the remaining nets, and more of their comrades came on behind.

  A�
�tius demanded reports, but none of them was good. Then they stopped coming. Everyone was fighting.

  They had to clear the walls. They had to clear them now, or they were lost.

  In the darkness underground, another kind of fight was going on.

  The sturdy Isaurian mountain men, accustomed to tunnels and caves, as Aëtius had surmised, had moved fast down the defensive passageway running out under the Blachernae Walls, then struck left to intercept the Huns. In feeble light and Stygian gloom, they had burst through into the enemy tunnel some way behind the lead party, and immediately found themselves fighting on two flanks, fore and aft. They promptly retreated back into their own tunnel, Zeno at their head, fighting on the narrowest front - only two men wide at most. They fought at thrusting swordpoint and spearpoint, half suffocated with smoke and foul odours, slithering in pools of stagnant water, hand-to-hand in the darkness by guttering oil-light, a scene of Homeric horror. Their enemies were no Huns, for those horsemen of the steppes could never have tolerated this infernally cramped and claustrophobic underworld. They were a mix of Batavian and Saxon mercenaries, used to mining but motivated by greed for gold and loot, not by loyalty to Attila. Faced with a horde of fierce-looking fighters, squat and bearded like the dwarves of their own mythology, short-swords and axes flashing, monstrous shadows on the tunnel walls, they panicked and broke. The Isaurians followed them and cut them down ruthlessly, until the piles of corpses before them meant they could penetrate no further.

  They dragged the corpses back and pressed on over them, treading them down into the swamp and ooze, the darkness foul, suffocating, the tunnels slimy mud and dripping rock, until they reached almost the beginning of the enemy mining operations. Here they moved fast, lighting a fire around some wooden pit props to smoke out any last miners and suck the air from the tunnel, then they fell back, smashing down more pit props and collapsing the earthen roof behind them so as to save their own air and their retreat. All the way back they brought down the hard-won tunnel, blocking the final exit with a rockfall, and then retreating up the Byzantine passageway within the safety of the Blachernae Walls. They emerged like bloody moles from Hades, gasping for the clear air and the sunlight, choking but triumphant.

  The Huns might try to tunnel again but it was unlikely. This would have cost them too much effort for too little reward.

  ‘Night and day the gates of Hell stand open,’ growled Zeno with satisfaction. ‘Well, not any more they don’t.’

  But there was no time for rest, let alone self-congratulation.

  ‘To the walls!’ came the desperate cry. ‘Every last man standing!’

  Aëtius signalled to Andronicus to pull his Guard back towards the St Romanus Gate and re-form his men in a phalanx of spears. Ignore the ram shuddering in below, and the siege-tower behind. Ignore the fact that they were already surrounded, outnumbered, outfought. Never admit defeat. Let the Huns come up their wretched nets and mass together on the battlements. They could take them.

  Aëtius himself pulled the Wolf-lords back to Military Gate V, spears lowered, waiting. At least the Hun onagers had now been silent for a while, for fear of hitting their own men.

  The nets were all slung between the gates either side of the Lycus, and the Hun bridgehead thickened. There were now three or four hundred of them, technically within the city, but with no access yet to a descent. Beyond, Aëtius could see the stricken, uncertain faces of the Imperial Guard, looking across to him. What was he doing?

  He was waiting.

  Near him, Theodoric waited, too, long-sword drawn.

  ‘You’ll use that to thrust.’

  ‘I will,’ said the prince grimly. ‘No room for cutting blows.’

  ‘Quite so.’ He roared down the walls to the Guard, ‘Hold it still!’

  ‘You want the Huns densely packed,’ murmured Theodoric.

  ‘You got it.’

  A few more agonising moments, the Huns hardly able to believe that they had taken an entire stretch of Wall, and behind them more and more of their comrades coming up the nets unopposed. To their right, one of their rams was splintering in the gates, and the platforms of the gate-towers themselves would soon be flooded with more of their comrades from the approaching siege-tower. The city was as good as won.

  Then they heard that hard-faced Roman general roar, ‘Now!’

  From behind the Imperial Guard, holding the line rigid with fear, came the sound of something creaking, being winched and lowered. Andronicus told his men to brace themselves. They had their orders. Forward face.

  It was Tatullus who led the rearguard attack, along with his old soldiers from the ludicrous remnant of the VIIth, Knuckles and Arapovian and Malchus, and some of the hardier of the citizen militia, including a blacksmith still in his apron and wielding his hammer for a weapon.

  The Hun siege-tower was built with a high drop-bridge which would soon fall across the battlements and admit a party of ferocious warriors with squat round shields and short curved swords onto the high platform of the gate-tower, from where they would command the walls and worse, the steps leading down. Crazed with bloodlust and dreams of Byzantine gold, they were unlikely to give up their position once they had taken it.

  Tatullus faced the approaching siege-tower with his billhook lowered. He bellowed for more men-at-arms up here. These bird-brained artillery novices had left it too late. This tower was going to get bloody very soon.

  But the primal instinct of raw fear had finally galvanised the unwarlike artillery technicians. In a few seconds of astonishing deftness, they had raised the trajectories of their machines to face the head of the tower, not ten feet off the walls now, and let loose. Serried metal bolts shot forward out of each shivering machine, flat and lethal, at speeds of more than fifty or sixty feet a second, or so the mathematicians of the imperial workshops had calculated. Those huge, straining torsion ropes could store an astonishing power. The flight of bolts drove straight through the raised drop-bridge and anyone within. The slingballs simultaneously slammed into the side timbers, causing less damage to the occupants but at least as much terror. Rapidly assessing the situation, the slingers forsook their machines, took flaming pots and brands in their hands, and lobbed them across onto the roof of the siege-tower, where they exploded into fireballs and began to burn the overhead timbers.

  Tatullus almost guffawed. The artillerymen’s initial dithering incompetence had actually drawn the Hun attack tower in too close, only to be suddenly blasted with this volley of heavy steel bolts at almost point-blank range, and then set afire to boot.

  ‘And again!’ he yelled, thumping his billhook furiously on the wooden deck. ‘Give ’em hell!’

  Sweating with effort and dread, sweat both hot and cold running together, blinded until they wiped their faces clear with stained neckerchiefs, the artillerymen strained back on the well-oiled winches and reloaded the arrow-firers, so finely manufactured and gauged by the best engineers and technicians in the city’s Imperial workshops. They slotted in a new set of bolts, whose crossply steel heads no armour in the world could withstand, let alone mere timber walls, while Tatullus bellowed down to the citizen runners to bring more. The torsion ropes twisted and screamed, the nearest arrow-firer swivelled on its base towards the siege-tower, like some terrible steel animal with eyeless gaze, and then the bolts erupted from their ports again and drilled into the blank face of the tower. Inside there were more screams signifying carnage. The drop-bridge had paused in being lowered, barely open.

  ‘Fuck it,’ growled Tatullus. They had only killed the operators, when they wanted to get inside and slaughter the rest of them. He sensed a crazed stratagem and an invaluable morale booster rolled into one. Off to the south, another tower was disgorging its occupants onto the undermanned Military Gate IV, with only citizen militia to oppose them; likewise a further one on the Rhegium Gate. Below came another thump from the ram. There would be more work to do elsewhere soon enough, so they needed to get this finished.

  �
�Let’s get that drop-bridge down now so we can cut ’em up inside! Knuckles, and you Parsee fancyman, get with me!’

  Then he was up on the battlements and jumping, flying out across the gap between wall and tower, slamming into the wooden sides, clasping the rim of the drop-bridge in his left hand, his right bringing his billhook back and ramming it repeatedly though the splintered front timbers and stabbing anyone who stood inside. Then he slashed overhead at the ropes of the drop-bridge with such determined swipes that the ropes bristled and frayed in moments. The bridge fell with a mighty crash, Tatullus still hanging beneath it, forty feet above the ground and with Hun archers below gazing up, already nocking arrows to the bow. With the agility of an adolescent acrobat, this centurion of twenty years’ service was back on the bridge like a cat, even as the the arrows thumped into the timbers beneath his feet, his billhook flailing in the open mouth of the tower-head, holding the drop-bridge alone for a moment. Then Arapovian and Malchus and Knuckles were with him again, the four survivors doing what they did best, fighting shoulder to shoulder against impossible odds.