Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  The milling Hun horsemen, their charge broken by the enemy javelins and by their own bloodlust as they paused to stab and scalp the bewildered and fallen Alans, came on again but without discipline, single vainglorious warriors hurling themselves on the line of pikes yelling, ‘Astur is Great and will prevail!’ only to be skewered and dashed to the ground. Time and again horses reared, screaming, their riders flung back, hooves scrabbling in the air, a pike-head buried deep in their mighty chests. The legionaries knew better than to admire their handiwork, promptly dragging their pikes free and butting them in the ground again. The next attack would soon come round.

  ‘Arrow-storm coming in!’ went up a cry from the wing. Instantly the rear-rank troops raised their shields above their heads and locked together. Arrows skidded off the bronze, thocked down into the leather and wood, and stuck there, quivering. Legionaries dropped their shields down in front of them and lopped off the arrow-shafts with their swords. Here and there a cry went up as a man was hit, too slow with his shield or just unlucky. But Aëtius could judge immediately from the thinness of the cries that little damage had been done. Now came his new tactic, for he knew how the Huns would fight.

  The front line had come in charging and was stuck on the Roman pikes. Meanwhile, lightly armed horse-archers were galloping back and forth behind them, intending to loose off their arrow-storm over the heads of their front-rank comrades and down onto the Romans’ rear ranks. That was their plan. But the moment they began, Aëtius gave the nod and the heavy Visigothic cavalry rode out, visors lowered, shields hefted, mighty ashwood lances couched.

  They galloped round the rear of the fighting lines in a gigantic sweep, through the smokescreen, and scythed into the Hun horse-archers from behind. Many of the archers barely had time to turn before that great gleaming metallic serpent, head diamond-shaped like a pit viper, cut through them and bowled them apart, wreaking havoc. Nor did they stop for one moment, cutting across in front of the main Hunnish army, round the hill, and back to their station on the Romans’ right wing. In their wake were the strewn and broken bodies of many hundreds.

  While the triumphant Visigothic cavalry drew breath, the artillerymen on the hill piled in, loosing their arrows sidelong into any Huns crossing the field to engage the line of pikes. Attila must be cursing. That hill was proving pivotal, a permanent outflanking fixture. Once battle was messily engaged, no one could shoot close to their own. But from that accursed hill ...

  Each individual tactic of Aëtius’ was paying off. The arrow-storm was weakened if not neutered by countercharge and good, old-fashioned shield discipline. The Hun cavalry charge, their horses tired before they started, was locked up against the legionaries and their implacable line of pikes. With the Visigothic cavalry and also the superb Augustan Horse and the Moors always ready to ride wide and sweep in from both left and right across the advancing enemy, it seemed that everything was going Aëtius’ way. And so they fought on. Past noon, past mid-afternoon. Pedites ran with water. The Herculians dropped back, exhausted, and the Batavians took their place in the centre. The bodies of the enemy were piled high across the plain. The artillery from the hill worked on implacably. Yet the Huns kept coming.

  Now it was a terrible battle of attrition. The Huns fought with ferocity but without imagination, without fresh tactics. Given that, Aëtius knew grimly, it was just a matter of whether the Huns’ sheer weight of numbers would eventually triumph over the Romans’ exhaustion.

  He rode behind the lines to see the wounded being bandaged and salved, the dead laid out for later burial. Already there were many there. He asked for numbers from only one legion, finding the primus pilus of the Herculians.

  ‘Over half my men, sir.’

  ‘Wounded?’

  ‘No, sir. Slain.’

  He held the back of his hand to his mouth. All war was foul, but this was war at its foulest. A whole generation was being swept away in one day by the madness of one king.

  An optio came running. ‘Sir, the Batavians are near exhaustion, sir.’

  He nodded. ‘Pull ’em back. Send forward the frontier legions.’

  ‘And the Huns are launching fresh attacks on the hill, sir.’

  Hell. That must not fall. ‘Send in the rest of the Palatine Guard to secure it.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The twelfth hour from dawn? He reckoned so. Another four hours of daylight this long summer day. By nightfall it would be decided. And already they were stretched to breaking-point.

  On the front line the battle was bloody, fierce and unrelenting. An ugly, stagnant stand-off, a process of the grimmest and goriest wastage. There was no room for the flamboyance of the wide-arcing cavalry charge now, no brilliant outflanking manoeuvres, nothing but the old moves of stab and slash, slogging it out knee deep in the reddening mud. In the mêlée, Knuckles, Arapovian and Malchus fought side by side as of old, protecting one another as well as holding back the Huns.

  The Huns hated this hand-to-hand fighting. Their lassos were useless in the crush, their bows and arrows dead weight, and their swordsmanship poor and without order. Their small ponies, so rapid and sure-footed on the vast steppes of Asia, here only stumbled wearily over the heaps of the slain. The Romans gave no quarter. A few crossbowmen on the flanks picked off any Hun unhorsed and sent him reeling to hell.

  King Theodoric came riding over to Aëtius when two runners arrived at once.

  ‘Sir, the Palatine Guard are pinned down and surrounded on the hill.’

  ‘They must hold it - to the last man.’

  ‘The artillery boys are done for, sir. The Guard couldn’t save them.’

  Yes, the arrow-firers had indeed fallen silent; the sling-machines worked no more.

  ‘And you? What happy news?’

  The second runner, still gasping, said, ‘Sir, large numbers of the enemy seen drifting off north and west beyond the baggage wagons.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘Too far off to say, sir. But many, many deserting.’ King Thedoric punched his mighty fist into his palm. ‘This is going to be a close day of it, Roman.’

  So it was. But there were no more tactical choices to be made. There weren’t enough men left for Aëtius to make any new dispositions. They must just hold out.

  King Theodoric shook his shaggy head, already pulling his horse round and moving back to the right wing. ‘It is time for the Visigoths to charge the enemy.’

  ‘You will leave our flank open!’ called Aëtius. ‘You must hold it!’

  Theodoric looked back. ‘With respect, old Roman friend, I am not, and never will be, under your command. But have no fear. My wolf-lords will finish the Hun with our charge. Your flank is safe.’

  The sunlight was now behind them when the wolf-lords rode in, a single vast column of thousands of heavy-armoured horsemen. Ahead of them, a horde of many more, but already looking hesitant, indistinct, squinting into the sun. The Visigoths needed to ride wide indeed to avoid the piles of the slain. At their head rode their white-haired King, carrying no shield but only a two-headed battle-axe. Some in the Roman lines who saw him ride said he must have wanted to die.

  Hun arrows came down onto the column as soon as their charge was spotted. But with shields raised and Spangenhelms lowered, they sustained little damage. And their huge chargers, despite having galloped all day, still had the power to gallop once more, thundering over the churned and deep-scored field, divots gouged out, manes flying, lances massed and lowered.

  The Huns started to buckle and fall back as the thunderous column approached, but they could only fall back on their own rear ranks. They were packed too tightly to move, pushing and panicking and crying out when the wolf-lords slammed into them. And the Visigoths drove through with such ferocity that they were soon lost to Roman view, only the occasional banner showing above their heads.

  For some minutes it was impossible to say what had happened. Meanwhile the last of the frontier legions had fought themselves to an exhausted standstill
. Here and there, Hun horsemen came close enough to whip the pikes out of the ground and ride in over them. The centre, the very breastplate of the Roman force, was coming apart.

  ‘Send in every last man!’ roared Aëtius. ‘Hold that line! Keep formation at all costs! Not a man to break or we are lost!’

  The last few remnants, the Batavian special forces, the Breton volunteers, and the two hundred Celts with Lucius at their head, pushed forward through the ranks and gave their last-ditch support to the exhausted and ravaged legions. A pocket of Hun horsemen had broken through, wheeled, and were charging at the Roman front line from behind, curved swords whirling. The men looked over their shoulders and cried out, knowing they were about to be surrounded and cut down, whatever they did. It was at this moment in a battle, always always, when men broke and ran to save their skins and formation crumbled, that the day was lost.

  But now the Huns themselves cried out and turned again to defend themselves. Two Roman horsemen rode into them at full pelt. One actually wielded a huge billhook from the saddle, whirling the long handle over his head and slicing through men’s chests and throats, roaring and spattered with blood.

  The Hun horsemen fell apart. One tried to leap over the Roman line and flee, but a huge fellow with a weighted club knocked him clean out of his saddle, then drove his face in with a single stomp of his left boot. As the Roman turned back to regain the safety of his line, he reeled. The curved spike of a chekan sliced across his skull and he fell forward, his face a thick mask of blood. The Hun warrior, an old but muscular fellow with flying long grey hair and fine moustaches, galloped in again, swinging low off the side off his horse, thighs clamped tight, and was about to swing a second time with his chekan when a lean eastern swordsman leaped to stand over the fallen club-wielder, poised askance, sword level as the desert horizon. At the last second he ducked, stood again, whirled round and sliced his sword blade though a wide arc in a single sinuous movement. The old warrior flung his head back and howled, the chekan flying out of his hand as he clutched his thigh, cut through leather and flesh to the bone. His exhausted horse slowed to an absent-minded trot as it felt its rider’s grip loosen. The easterner sprinted after him, his sword still whirling. Then he stopped abruptly, and let the old warrior ride slowly back to the Hun lines, slumped in his wooden saddle.

  The easterner looked down at the fellow with the club. He was kneeling, stunned, with a second wound in his big shoulder, where an arrowhead was buried deep.

  Arapovian called to him.

  He looked up and grinned slowly. ‘Fuckin’ top of the world, my lissom Parsee comrade!’ Then he was back on his feet once more, laying his club on his shoulder, turning to face the onslaught yet again.

  The Roman line curved and billowed, split apart and came togther again. Men fell forwards and backwards, screaming, clutching throats and chests. Many lay in the mud, dying, and many of those, even the most battle-hardened of the legions, ended their lives as they had begun: crying for their mothers. No medics came; they were all slain. None of their comrades came, either; they were all slain or fighting. The sun was sliding down the sky, and the field was mown flat like a harvest field.

  Aëtius crawled out from under his third fallen horse, helmet and sword both gone, and hauled himself up onto another sagging beast standing haggard, nuzzling bloody grass, desperate to eat but sickened. He stared around. His army was almost gone.

  But across the field ... the enemy army was thinning out. The flanks were receding. There was a huge concave bow near the centre, and the limitless depth that the horde had shown this morning, stretching back and back into the blue distance, had shrunk away. They were stretched thin and to breaking. Away in the east there was a dust-cloud burnished gold in the setting sun, so many were retreating.

  Nearer, before that haze of dust, there was a gleaming serpent of armoured horsemen: the wolf-lords curving into the scattered flank of the Hun line yet again. They rolled it up. Before Aëtius’ dust-blurred eyes, the Hun line folded in on itself, collapsed. The wolf-lords drove on, too tired to gallop now, only trotting, but with lances still lowered, implacable. The Huns broke and fled.

  Night seemed to fall fast on that day. The sun had seen enough.

  Aëtius, too, had seen enough, but it was not over. His work was not done yet. Runners were too few. He must find more. He called for a wagon to be drawn up and piled with saddles and he climbed onto it. A filthy fellow passed beneath him, knelt, cleaned his sword in a rare patch of unsullied grass.

  ‘You, man,’ Aëtius called to him. ‘Up here. Lend me your eyes.’

  The fellow came up and stared north.

  ‘You,’ muttered Aëtius.

  ‘I,’ said Arapovian. After a moment he said, ‘Here is an irony. Attila is piling up a wagonload of saddles like ours.’ He glanced at Aëtius. ‘How emulous he is of you in all he does.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘They’re drawing their remaining wagons into a circle, the oldest Hun tactic. But so many have fled that the circle is small. Why does he not retreat?’

  ‘Because he thinks we will fall on him by night and destroy him.’

  ‘We would if we had any men left.’

  Arapovian was immediately sorry for his cruel joke. Aëtius bowed his head and raised his hand to his eyes. Arapovian said softly, ‘But the battle is over.’

  Aëtius looked up again and out over the carnage field. ‘The battle is indeed over,’ he said. The note in his voice wrung the Armenian’s heart. ‘And both sides have lost.’

  10

  LORDS AMONG MEN

  Attila knelt in the dust beside the dying man.

  Orestes, standing behind him, said, ‘The body of the Lord Geukchu cannot be found, but he was seen fighting to the last before the Roman line. Noyan fell before the Visigothic horses.’

  Attila barely reacted. His face was ashen-grey and deep-furrowed, his cheeks sunken, his eyes flat. He reached his strong hand under the fallen warrior and raised his head a little.

  Chanat’s eyes fluttered. Blood continued to flow from the deep swordcut in his thigh, tight-bandaged though it was. He managed to lay his hand upon Attila’s arm. ‘Great Tanjou,’ he whispered.

  Attila lowered his head and his straggling grey locks brushed the back of Chanat’s hand. ‘How far we have ridden together, old friend, first of my Chosen Men. That you were the first to meet me upon the plain of my homeland when I rode out of exile. That we rode against the Kutrigur Huns together, and forged our People into a mighty brotherhood. That Chanat the Chivalrous, the Merciful, made us turn back and fight for that forsaken village in the desert, for his great heart was greatly moved. None of this will be forgotten in the songs of the People, my brother Chanat, son of Lord Subotai, proud father of the warrior Aladar, who chose his death before the walls of Constantinople.’

  Chanat’s hand tightened a little on Attila’s arm. Then he was gone.

  After a few moments Attila rose, stripped to the waist and dropped his bone jerkin to the ground like a thing of trash. He poured a handful of dust over his grey locks, unsheathed his sword, unbuckled his scabbard-belt, slashed the scabbard away from the leather belt and let it drop into the dust. He buckled the belt back round his waist and thrust the naked sword through it. Then he looked around the crude wagon laager.

  ‘We die here,’ he said. ‘Beside our brother Chanat.’

  King Theodoric’s bloodied and trampled body lay on a pyre of splintered timbers. His two sons kept vigil and wept. Some said that the King had been ridden down by the Huns, others that in the furious thick of the fight his own wolf-lords had trampled him. But that was all one now. Amalasuntha had been truly avenged. The Visigothic column, driving into the enemy again and again, had finally broken through to where the three sons of Genseric sat their white horses beneath the banner of the Black Boar, horrified to find that thousands of their own, finest Vandal horsemen had been unable to protect them. The three sons, Frideric, Euric and the idiot Godric, he who had
been so briefly married to the Princess Alamasuntha, were roped up, dragged back to the Gothic lines and beheaded. Their heads would be salted and despatched to Genseric in a sack.

  As he lay dying, Theodoric had whispered, ‘That is justice. That is Gothic justice for that tyrant among men. Now the spirit of my beloved fair-haired girl will sleep easy in the Courts of Heaven.’ Tears and blood mingled in his white beard. He closed his eyes, and his breathing slowed. Then he laid a great bloodstained hand on young Theodoric’s head. ‘This life is a sigh between two secrets, the sparrow’s flight through the mead-hall beset by night. But Gaeð a Wyrd swa hio scel - Fate goes ever as fate must. You, my son, will be a great king of my people. Rule wisely and well, as befits a Visigoth. Torismond’ - he touched his head - ‘you will be a great servant of your brother, and a great man among men. The Lord bless you and keep you. Love your mother and care for her in her last years. As I have loved you, with all my heart.’ His hand slipped down, his head sank back and his breathing stilled.