Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  The Hun ram drivers felt the gates suddenly heavier under the blows. The gang-master galloped around lashing at them, but it was no good. Inside the city, the quick-thinking Isaurians under Zeno had realised what was happening and baulked the gates with anything and everything they could find. Barrels of sand, rocks, massive timber props and, best of all, a wagon laden with stone. The ram could hammer away all it liked; it wasn’t going to come through the Gate of St Romanus any time soon. And as long as the Huns were still trying ...

  ‘Back to the walls!’ growled Zeno, seizing one of the mattiobarbuli or weighted darts from behind his shield grip. The ram drivers would soon be targets themselves.

  The tower-head, prised open, exposed and blazing, revealed a mass of startled warriors ready to leap onto the city walls. A breeze blew, a breath of God’s mercy, and the heat from the rooftop blaze gusted away from the defenders, dark smoke drifting away west over the mass of the Hun army out on the plains beyond. Somewhere, sitting his horse, Attila would see this: one of his attack towers already burning. The first setback. Soon there would come news to him of the ram’s difficult progress, and then news of the mining operations having been shut down by an unexpected and ferocious underground attack.

  There was a momentary stillness while Tatullus and his three men stared at the twenty Huns packed inside the tower-head. Then they roared the old cry, ‘Six times brave, six times faithful!’ and charged in.

  The Huns were packed too close within the wooden walls. They were expectant, sweating, their red and black war-paint already running in greasy streaks across their faces, trembling with battle madness, fire roaring above their heads, desperate to be out and free and fighting; ready to erupt across the drop-bridge and fall on those thinly defended battlements like wolves. But they would never get that far. They were trapped in their wooden cave, backing up against tightly nailed timbers which their own slaves had built not days before. The din of battle was all around them, but immediately before them in the late afternoon sunlight stood the terrible figure of an iron-hard Roman soldier, of the kind they said no longer existed.

  Pale blue, emotionless eyes burning like hard gemstones, a tight-fitting steel helmet like a bare metal skull, a long noseguard running down between those deep-set, implacable eyes, the Roman swung a monstrous billhook left and right like a scythe through dry grass. The warriors with their short-swords couldn’t get close to him, and none of them had brought bow and arrow. They cursed and howled, caught between the blazing fire above and the murderous blades before, limbs lopped off, arteries severed, chests and bellies opened and spilling, the enclosed space an infernal abattoir, a place of fire and blood. Behind the billhook came a huge man wielding a club, and an eastern swordsman, and some civilians and a couple more hard-looking soldiers in black armour. The Huns stabbed and fought as desperately as trapped rats, and one even made a dash for the edge of the drop-bridge and hurled himself to a kind of safety forty feet below. But even as he leapt, the eastern swordsman slashed his weapon in a wide arc and cut him across the backbone, so that when he fell to earth below he was already dead. It was hopeless. Within a minute or two the Huns lay slaughtered in heaps within the tower-head. Two of the Palatine Guard lay with them.

  Along the wall the gathered Huns faced a jaw-like attack at both ends from the long spears of the wolf-lords on their left and the Palatine Guard on their right. Their own numbers were vastly superior, but they realised in panic that this would not help. They were as good as trapped along the wall, and could offer no broader line of battle than the battlement walk allowed. They had packed themselves too tight. More and more warriors were still coming up the nets behind and squeezing through the embrasures to enter the fray, but there was barely space for them to drop down the other side, let alone swing a chekan or sword. Now suddenly there were disciplined forces hitting them either side, long spears lowered to gut height, forcing them together more closely still. Then the killing began, even as the Huns were still squabbling among themselves.

  Inside the siege-tower, Arapovian thought for a moment that his centurion had gone insane for, having slain all living men before him, he was attacking the rear wooden walls of the tower, jabbing at them ferociously with his mighty billhook, splintering timbers and kicking them out into the air where they wheeled and fell free, until the protective tower-head was half destroyed.

  ‘Pile in, you idle fuckers!’ he yelled. ‘And you, blacksmith, get your hammer in there. I want this wall smashed down.’

  Still not understanding they piled in as ordered, the blood-boltered centurion still muttering about morale, eyes gleaming through a mask of other men’s gore. ‘Good for our morale, bit of a downer for them.’ And as he kicked out the last of the rear timbers and exposed the tower-head to the setting sun, Arapovian understood. Tatullus began to hurl the slathered bodies of the Hun warriors out of the tower-head to the ground a long way below.

  Knuckles booted the corpses out with his great feet, grumbling that they’d be under attack again at any moment. But it made a horrible and telling spectacle.

  From the main Hun lines across the plains, from their restless horses, the waiting warriors saw comrade after slain comrade, the bodies of fathers and brothers and sons, mutilated and hacked to death, come wheeling back out of the attack tower, a grandstand view of savagery fully visible to all. Corpses flung out and falling, spraying gore from cut and missing limbs, crashing onto the besiegers below and pulped upon the hard ground.

  Aladar rose up in his saddle on his fists and roared out at such theatrical cruelty. ‘Vengeance will rain down on them like blood!’

  Attila said nothing but the set of his face was grim.

  ‘Let them come and take their comrades home,’ growled Tatullus, throwing out the last of the slain. ‘Any come near, we destroy them.’

  It was foul and unforgiving, but it was the first hint that day that not everything might go the way of the heathen.

  The other two attack towers further down the walls had been smashed and burned before they could drop their bridges. At the same time, the packed Huns who had gained the walls by escalade had been rolled up from either end in the furious two-sided onslaught, and their bodies tossed back over the walls. The net ropes were cut and dropped down after them, and the citizen militia thought to pour boiling oil down on them and then throw flaming brands after, so that the nets couldn’t be used again without long and tricky repairs.

  At last the walls were cleared. Hundreds of Huns had died that day, as many from falling as from fighting. Not one of them made it past the Inner Walls. Their mining operations had been ruthlessly sabotaged, and none of the attack towers had made it. Aëtius collapsed at last in the shadow of the battlements, pulled his helmet off and swiped the sweat from his face. His arm was almost too tired to lift. Spread out before him was the city they had fought so desperately to defend, the sinking sun gleaming on its myriad golden cupolas and spires. The Holy City of Byzantium. He smiled.

  ‘My brother,’ said Torismond nearby, gasping. He pulled at Aëtius’ arm. Aëtius wrenched it free again with weary irritability. ‘My brother,’ cried the prince more desperately, nearly sobbing. Suddenly Aëtius was alert again, dragging himself to his feet. The princes had fought as fiercely as any today, and their wolf-lords had been crucial.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Torismond sobbed that he could not move. His arm ...

  ‘Come on,’ said Aëtius. ‘We’ll get him to the Emmanuel Hospital.’

  Theodoric’s wound was ghastly. Without analysing why, Aëtius demanded the old trickster medic, Gamaliel. The hospital was not even full, the defenders’ casualties had been so few. The old man came hurrying, shambolic grey gown gathered up round skinny white ankles. Aëtius and Torismond started talking at once, but he ordered them to be silent.

  The wounded boy lay on his back, his face white as chalk, his forehead beaded with sweat, drifting in and out of the faintest consciousness. Gamaliel gently unwrapped the filthy r
ags used as emergency bandaging, saying nothing.

  ‘He killed six or seven at least,’ said Torismond. ‘One burly fellow must have been twice as broad in the shoulder as my brother. Theo drove his sword right through him. But as the fellow died, he brought his sword down on Theo’s arm and ...’

  He broke off and buried his face in the crook of his arm. Aëtius laid his hand on the boy’s trembling shoulder.

  Gamaliel said, ‘In amputation for gangrene, the crucial thing of course is to remove more bone and leave more soft tissue for better healing.’

  Torismond looked up, eyes bright with tears.

  ‘However,’ said Gamaliel, ‘the boy is young, and God is merciful. It may not come to amputation, we cannot be sure. As the First Hippocratic Aphorism states, “Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience fallacious, and judgement difficult.”’ He smiled gently at the two exhausted soldiers and added softly, ‘I have always thought it a good guide to life in general. However,’ and his voice grew brisk again, ‘before resorting to the crude science of amputation, we shall trust to vascular ligature - unknown either to Hippocrates or that fool Galen, but widely practised among the physicians of India - as well as the liberal application of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine, and those two great healers time and hope.’

  He said to Torismond, ‘You must sleep, boy. You can sleep here. When you wake again, talk to your brother. Even if he is unconscious, talk to him. Do you play a musical instrument?’

  Torismond looked baffled. ‘A lute. Badly.’

  Gamaliel turned to Aëtius. ‘Get the lad a lute.’ And to Torismond he said, ‘Play the lute to him. Even badly.’

  There was one final chapter to this gruelling day. Tatullus had roped up the half-destroyed siege-tower with a couple of huge iron hooks, and with ropes long enough to reach the ground. A team of oxen waited in the cool of the evening shadows, nodding their heads. There was the sound of a whiplash, and the oxen were driven forward. The two mighty ropes stretched taut from the tower. The oxen bellowed under the lash, their hooves scrabbled. Dozens of citizens seized the quivering ropes as well, hauling as in a neighbourhood tug-of-war. The huge siege-tower creaked, tilted fractionally. Below it, still ramming under orders but no longer with any hope, the Huns glanced up and saw what was coming. The tower tilted further - a little further - and then the meridian was past and gravity did the rest.

  Like a monstrous tree in a forest, felled by giants, the unmanned tower fell sideways with dreamlike slowness and crashed down onto the ram tortoise, smashing both itself and the tortoise to matchwood in twin destruction. The ram team had pulled away in time and not one was injured, but for their fighting spirit it was the last straw. They retreated and ran, along with the surviving warriors around them, back over the smashed middle and lower wall, crowding together to cross the pontoons. In their desperation some even flung themselves into the water.

  In final farewell, the wolf-lords knelt calmly at the battlements, unslung their bows and took out more of the fleeing enemy, one by one, silently and without mercy. No volleys, but a lethal, individual killing. For the besiegers, now in full flight across the plain, it was the first defeat they had ever tasted. When they reached their own lines, they heard that the Lord Attila had retired to his tent.

  21

  NIGHT AND RAIN

  Aëtius was too tired to eat, but he drank water from a cup handed to him by a woman in the street. Without his helmet on, and caked with sweat and dust as he was, she didn’t recognise him and called him ‘dearie’. He drank, gave the cup back to her and thanked her politely.

  Before a few hours of uneasy sleep, he talked with Tatullus, Malchus and Andronicus, with Prince Torismond, who looked grave and sad, suddenly old for his years; and also with Zeno of the Isaurians, and one Portumnus, a plump burgher of fifty years of age who seemed to have appointed himself leader of the citizen militia. He would have to do, even though, as Aëtius reflected, those who appoint themselves leaders are rarely the best at it.

  ‘It’s been a good day,’ declared Malchus, wiping his encrusted sword and grinning. ‘They sustained a lot of losses. And not a few, I don’t mind saying’ - he held his sword upright and inspected its freshly shining blade - ‘by my own heroic hand.’

  Aëtius wasn’t impressed. ‘They can take a lot of losses,’ he growled. ‘There are a hundred thousand of them out there. Today we killed, what, two or three hundred at most? We lost maybe a dozen men. That sounds fine, but they could fight for a year like they fought today, and still not worry about losses. Could we? They still teach you maths in the cavalry, Captain Malchus?’

  Malchus refused to look chastened, but he had no reply.

  ‘Plus, two of our artillery machines are buggered, and our walls have taken a bad pounding, and we have neither the men nor the energy to rebuild any more.’

  ‘The citizen bands fought like lions, though,’ said Portumnus.

  Aëtius nodded, and even Andronicus grunted.

  ‘But if we win this one - if we survive at all - we’ll win up here.’ Aëtius tapped his head. ‘Today was the first day in Attila’s reign of terror when he didn’t get exactly the result he wanted. Not a defeat, no, but he must have seen his men streaming back across the plain, with nothing to show for their pains. He will be back again, of course. But tonight, some of his men will have begun to doubt him. He can only regain their faith in him by a crushing triumph over us, so he will come back harder than ever.’ His voice was thick with emotion, looking out over the small campfires of the Visigoths, Isaurians, Palatine Guard and citizen bands. A brave but motley crew, and not one straight Roman legion with them. So it had come to this.

  ‘But each day that his forces do not prevail against us, the Huns’ confidence wanes and their strength ebbs. It is our one hope. We certainly cannot defeat them directly. We are too few.’

  The council of war brooded in silence on his words, and then they departed to sleep.

  In his tent, Attila ground his teeth and glowered down at his fists. The day had been accursed from the start.

  He had always known that Constantinople would be no Viminacium, but he saw now that it was ten, a hundred times harder. They said this was the greatest fortified city in the world. Not even the cities of China had anything to compare with the walls of Constantinople. And now came the news that another of his beloved Chosen Men was fallen.

  Old Chanat told him. ‘It was the Lord Juchi, Great Tanjou. He fell upon the battlements, run through by the sword of one of those Gothic princes fighting with them.’

  ‘I had him,’ hissed Attila, ‘that straw-haired German puppy, I had him before me in my very tent. At Azimuntium I could have destroyed him, destroyed them all. And when they came to our camp to parley, only to assassinate me like polecats in the night. I could have killed them.’

  ‘My lord is too merciful!’ said Little Bird’s sing-song voice. ‘His heart is as tender as a young girl’s. And oh, a young girl’s heart will be the death of him!’

  ‘Our brother Juchi,’ said Chanat, ‘took the prince’s arm off as he died, or as good as - sliced it through.’

  ‘Would it had been his neck.’ Attila leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his mighty hands. ‘One by one my Chosen Men fall from me.’ His voice was low and muffled.

  Chanat hesitated a while, then departed so as not to witness this unseemly grief. Little Bird twirled his hair ribbons, like an oblivious toddler beside its weeping mother.

  Attila remained motionless on his wooden throne. Only Noyan was left of the four powerful brothers, the sons of Akal. Juchi slain by a pale-haired Visigothic boy. Bela bludgeoned and drowned at Margus Bridge. Then there was eager young Yesukai, bright-eyed, loyal and unquestioning as only the young can be - he had been the first to die. How long ago it seemed. How far to the east, unimaginably far, many months’ ride east upon the steppes into the heart of Asia, and long, long years ago. There was the time he set off a covey of partidg
es, just outside the camp of the Kutrigur Huns, and nearly got them all killed. The fool. Attila smiled though his eyes were sad and swimming with memories. Yesukai died fighting those same Kutrigur Huns, died that the Kutrigur Huns and the People might come together in glorious conquest. Attila could picture him now as he lay dying, young Yesukai, an arrow through his arm and into his chest, Chanat cradling his head.

  Let the vultures cry it among the Tien Shan, Let the winds tell it over the Plains of Plenty, Let the rains fall year long on the green grasslands in mourning for Yesukai!

  And now let the vultures cry and the skies weep for Juchi, too, and for Bela. For Csaba also, perhaps, so grievously wounded below the walls of Viminacium in his battle-madness, and half mad from that day to this. But that accursed traitor and deserter Candac, let there be no weeping for him.

  There were left only his ever-faithful Orestes, and old Chanat, and Geukchu, and lonesome Noyan. And Rome still so far away.

  Aëtius had enjoyed all of three hours’ sleep, on a rough straw pallet in the guard-room of Military Gate V, when he was awakened by wild shouts. Still exhausted, he felt he was still dreaming when he stepped out onto the dark battlements to see that another full attack was under way. Attila was using their own tiredness to destroy them. How could they fight another battle, by night, after a day such as they had just endured?