The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  ‘Now I think I understand why your night vision is so good,’ Flavius said. Since taking the drink the light seemed sharper, clearer, as if his point of vision had been projected forward slightly. He pointed to the south-west. ‘They’re coming now, up the rise. No more than two stades distant. Should I order the men to stand to?’

  ‘Your call, tribune.’

  Flavius looked down the line. ‘The final section can continue eating. The rest stand to behind the parapet with helmets on and swords drawn. Sagittarii to be spaced at five-man intervals with an arrow ready to be drawn. They are only to shoot on my command.’

  ‘Ave, tribune.’ Macrobius conveyed the order to his senior optio, and the clunk of armour and swords could be heard down the trench on either side as the men stood at the ready. He turned back to Flavius and the two men marched up to the parapet and stood again on it, Macrobius with his feet planted firmly apart and his hand on his sword pommel, his helmet now in place over his felt cap. Flavius loosened his sword, feeling the dust of the air in his mouth again. The group of refugees came into view, three men and a mule, slowly making their way towards the parapet, the man in front holding up a cross that looked as if it had been hastily made from two branches and some cord. There was a shuffling and muttering among the soldiers behind Flavius. ‘The Vandals claim to be Christians too,’ one of them said. ‘We shouldn’t trust that cross. I say shoot them.’

  ‘Only some of them are Christian and it’s a pretty strange sort. Anyway, that one in front is wearing a cassock. He’s clearly a monk.’

  ‘Shut it,’ Macrobius snarled out of the side of his mouth, ‘or I’ll have both of you out there for target practice.’

  The man in the cassock came to within twenty yards of them, and then passed the reins of the mule to one of his two companions, both of them Nubians wearing little more than loincloths. The man took off his hood, revealing the long hair and beard of a penitent monk. He raised his hand to shade his eyes and then scanned the parapet, spotting Flavius’ helmet and advancing a few steps towards him. The archer behind Flavius drew his bow, but Flavius put out his hand and stayed him. ‘Identify yourself,’ he demanded.

  ‘I am a man of God.’

  ‘We can see what you are pretending to be,’ Macrobius snarled. ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘I come from Hippo Regius. I am Arturus, Bishop Augustine’s scribe.’

  ‘Arturus. That’s a pretty funny kind of name,’ Macrobius said suspiciously, drawing his sword half out of its scabbard. ‘Sounds Vandal to me.’

  ‘It’s British.’

  Macrobius snorted. ‘What’s a British monk doing in the African desert?’

  ‘Unless I mistake your accent and appearance, I could equally ask what an Illyrian, possibly even a Rhaetian from the Danube with something Scythian about him, is doing out here.’

  Macrobius’ nostrils flared, and Flavius put out his arm to restrain him. ‘Tell us what has become of Bishop Augustine.’

  Arturus paused. ‘We left Hippo Regius in secret when the Vandals appeared on the western horizon. We lived in hiding in a monastery close to the great desert, working on his final writings. When he entered his final illness he ordered me away, to preserve his books. They’re here, in my saddlebags. I took a southerly route on the edge of the great desert, known to my Nubian companions, to avoid being pursued, but fortunately the Vandals lingered in the cities to pillage and burn and showed little interest in those who had escaped; they know they will get us all in the end. As for Bishop Augustine, I can only fear the worst.’

  ‘We hear he is dead.’

  Arturus bowed his head. ‘I confirmed the rumour among the refugees that he had died in Hippo Regius. It is as Augustine himself would have willed it.’

  Flavius eyed the man, trying to weigh him up. ‘What of the Vandal army?’

  ‘You will know that they are led by King Gaiseric. You will also know that Bonifatius, magister of the African field army and comes Africae, has gone over to the enemy, so that almost all of Roman Africa is already in Gaiseric’s hands except for here at Carthage. Gaiseric went back on his word and slaughtered most of the comitatenses who gave themselves up to him, so there is no augmentation of his force as a result of Bonifatius’ treachery, but it makes little odds as Gaiseric has more than twenty thousand Vandal warriors at his disposal, all of them drunk on blood. He also has almost a thousand Alans.’

  ‘Alans?’ one of the men said, his tone hushed. ‘Out here?’

  Arturus nodded, his face set grimly. ‘Gaiseric now styles himself Dux Vandales et Alanes. The tribal chieftains of the Alans are subordinate to him. He uses them to spearpoint his attacks. They stand feet taller than the rest – blond, blue-eyed giants. Everything and everyone has fallen before their onslaught.’ He paused again, squinting at the Roman soldiers. ‘But if you’re interested, I know a way to kill them. If you’ve got the guts for it.’

  ‘That’s a bold assertion for a monk,’ Flavius said. ‘And also a pretty astute tactical assessment. Are you one of Augustine’s converts? A soldier-turned-monk?’

  A gust of wind, hot and dry, lifted Arturus’ cassock, and Flavius saw a glint of metal beneath, the sheath of a sword that looked like an old-fashioned gladius. He narrowed his eyes at the man and jerked his head towards the sword. ‘You monks engage in close-quarter fighting, then?’

  Arturus stared back, his eyes cold and hard, and then swept open his cassock so that the hilt was there for all to see. ‘You weren’t at Hippo Regius,’ he said quietly. He pulled out the sword and placed the flat of the blade on the palm of his hand. It was an old sword, its edge irregular where dents and dings had been ground out, but the clean parts were gleaming and sharp. A smear of dried blood covered the blade near the hilt, where it had coagulated in a thick layer. ‘I haven’t had a chance to clean and oil it properly,’ he said. ‘We’ve been on the move continuously since I left Augustine, and I’ve had a few encounters with Vandal marauders.’

  The Sarmatian Apsachos standing behind Flavius unsheathed his own blade, a much longer sword, and held it so it glinted in the haze. ‘Thrust the blade into the sand,’ he said. ‘That’s how we used to clean ours when we were based in the desert. It does the trick in seconds, and polishes them as well.’

  Arturus jerked his head back to indicate his two companions. ‘The Nubian warriors believe that to thrust your blade into the sand is bad luck. They believe that to do so would be to pierce the skin of Mother Earth, that the wells would dry up and your enemy would be upon you. They wipe down their blades and clean them with olive oil. They may be heathen and superstitious, but out here I’m inclined to go along with them.’

  Apsachos looked at his sword blade, grunted and then resheathed it. ‘Well, that’s just great,’ he muttered. ‘As if things aren’t bad enough out here without an ill omen.’

  The shadow of a smile passed across the monk’s lips and he turned to Flavius. ‘In answer to your question, I’ve always favoured close-quarter fighting over the arm’s-length tactics taught to Roman infantrymen these days. Using those long swords and thrusting spears in massed formation to repel a charging enemy is all very well as long as the enemy doesn’t break through your lines, and anyway it’s not the kind of fighting that’s in my blood.’

  ‘Which is?’ Flavius said, looking at the monk quizzically.

  The man paused, looked down the line of soldiers and then lowered his sword, holding out his right hand. ‘Gaius Arturus Prasotagus, former commander of the Cohortes Britannicus of the Comites Praenesta Gallica, the field army of the North.’

  Flavius looked the man in the eye, made his decision and then took his hand. ‘Flavius Aetius Secundus, tribune of the protectores numerus of the Twentieth Victrix legion, the forward scouts of the Carthage garrison.’ He swept his hand along the trench. ‘These are my men.’

  Flavius sensed Macrobius tense and saw him slide his hand down again to his sword hilt. ‘Wait a moment,’ the centurion growled. ‘Wasn’t that t
he unit that deserted in Gaul? That went over to the barbarians? That killed Romans?’ There was a general movement among the soldiers, their eyes fixing suspiciously on the monk, weapons being drawn. Flavius held up his hand. ‘Let him have his say. And he is now a man of the cloth.’

  ‘Or pretends to be,’ Macrobius muttered.

  Arturus reached up and pulled down the cassock at his neck, revealing an old scar that ran from below his left ear across his neck to the opposite collar bone. ‘When I was six years old, the Saxons came across the sea and overran the shore fort where I lived, slaughtering my mother and sisters and cutting my throat, leaving me for dead. My father was the garrison commander.’

  Flavius turned to the soldier behind him, a grizzled veteran even older than Macrobius who had been kept with the unit because of his skills as an archer. ‘You were there, weren’t you, Sempronius, in Britannia at the end?’

  The man lowered his bow, leaned over and spat. ‘I was there, all right. A teenage recruit with the classis Britannicus, the British fleet, manning the shore fort at Dover. We were the last to leave, having overseen the withdrawal of all the troops from the northern frontier and the other shore forts. There was no glory in it. It was not even a fighting retreat. We withdrew under cover of darkness, poling off our transport barges from the very place where Caesar had landed almost five hundred years before. Those were the days when Rome was led by strong men. We were led by that weakling emperor Honorius, who abandoned Britain and left the civilians to their fate.’

  Arturus listened gravely to the man and then nodded. ‘If the garrison in Britain had been retained, things could have been very different. They wouldn’t have been able to repel the Saxons, but they might have persuaded the Saxons to reach an accommodation, to accept a land grant as the Visigoths accepted it from the emperor in Aquitaine. Britain would still have been a province of the empire, and Saxons would have been sending their sons to Rome to be educated just as the Goths do now from Gaul. Instead, the emperors depleted the British garrison to fight their own wars of succession and to bolster their own bodyguard, weakening Britain and providing a tempting target for invasion. By the time of the final withdrawal the British garrison was little more than a skeleton force. Britain was lost not through barbarian pressure but because of the obsession of the emperors with their own security and the threat of usurpers.’

  ‘The emperor Valentinian is different,’ Flavius said. ‘He will strengthen Rome again.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Arturus said. ‘But I don’t see him out here standing behind a cross, leading his men against the greatest threat the empire has faced. Losing Africa with her revenue and grain would be a far greater loss than the sack of the city of Rome itself. Yet the emperor sits with his court in Milan, and all I see before me now is a young tribune, a centurion and sixty-odd men of a limitanei numerus, a pebble to hold back a raging torrent.’

  ‘That’s us,’ one of the men muttered. ‘The last-ditch limitanei.’

  ‘Rome needs generals like Gaiseric,’ Arturus asserted. ‘Men who are both kings and war leaders, men like Julius Caesar or Trajan of old. Without them, Rome may win battles, but she will never win wars. And the Vandals are not the worst of it. Behind their northern homeland, in the forests and on the steppes of the East, lies a greater force of darkness than anyone here could imagine, building up strength for a confrontation that will test the empire to its very limit.’

  Flavius gestured at the weapon Arturus carried. ‘That sword? A legacy from the past?’

  ‘My father was left for dead too that day when I had my throat cut, the Saxon dead piled around him,’ said Arturus. ‘I managed to crawl over to him and in his dying breath he gave me this sword. He had told me that as long as the sword was carried by a soldier who was descended from its original owner, Britain would resist invasion. I became the boy follower of a comitatenses unit, and then was adopted by the soldiers, and two years later, when I left Britain with them, I still had the sword with me. Its original owner was a soldier of the Ninth Legion who had been among the first to step ashore with the invasion force of the emperor Claudius, over three hundred and fifty years before.’

  ‘So you are a Roman,’ Macrobius snarled. ‘That makes the crime of desertion even worse.’

  ‘What does it mean to be Roman?’ Arturus said, looking around. ‘Who of you here is Roman, truly? Yes, you fight for a Roman army, against barbarians. But you are also Sarmatians, Goths, Illyrians. I have Roman ancestry, but my father’s family were mainly from the British kingdom of the Iceni, my mother from the Brigantes. And after Honorius had forsaken us, we no longer called ourselves Roman. We called ourselves British.’

  ‘So why the cassock?’ Flavius asked. ‘Why aren’t you back in Britain, fighting the invaders? There are rumours of continuing resistance in the mountains in the west of the island.’

  Arturus re-sheathed his sword and closed his cassock. He put his hands up to his face, sweeping them down his cheeks and over his beard, and remained still for a moment. Flavius saw for the first time how weather-beaten and filthy he was, and how tired he looked. He let his hands drop to the crude wooden cross that hung around his neck. Macrobius remained unmoved, his hand still resting on his sword pommel. Arturus raised the cross and kissed it, and then looked again at Flavius. ‘When I left Britain I was determined to return, to take up my father’s sword against the Saxons. My mission for Bishop Augustine is not yet finished. I must take his books to a place of safety, to a monastery in Italy. But I will not flee Carthage without facing the enemy in battle. I offer my sword to you.’

  ‘You still have to tell us how to kill the Alans,’ one of the men muttered.

  Flavius looked at Arturus. They did not know the full story yet, the story of how he had come to leave his unit in Gaul, but there was little time for that now. ‘Your offer is accepted.’

  Arturus nodded in acknowledgement, and then gave Flavius a steely look. ‘And now, if we are to fight for you, my men and our mule need water.’

  Flavius watched Macrobius lead the group towards the watering hole, dropping down into the trench and leaping up the other side, his hand on his sword hilt, still clearly not giving Arturus the benefit of the doubt. He turned back towards the west, pondering what Arturus had said. He remembered as a boy in Rome being overawed by Augustine, the hell-raiser they had all wished to emulate, and being as perplexed as everyone else when he suddenly gave up wine and women for the cassock. Some came to see it as a strength, as evidence that he had the willpower to do away with worldly vices, but others viewed it as a weakness, as a sign that the cloth itself was a temptation that men of action should resist in order to do God’s proper work on earth – leading the armies of Christ against the barbarian enemy.

  Flavius cocked his ear. He was sure he had heard it again, the sound that had haunted him as he had lain there a few hours before, battling the cold, drifting in and out of consciousness, a sound from the west that had risen and undulated above the snoring and grunting around him. Noises had seemed louder, more acute, since he had drunk the infusion of the catha leaf that Macrobius had given him, and he wondered whether this was that same heightened awareness experienced by those who cannot sleep, whether his imagination and the memory of that sound in the night were playing tricks on him. And then he heard it again, and saw others stop what they were doing and listen, as a wave of tension seemed to rustle down the trench. It was a dog baying, and then others, echoing from one end of the western horizon to the other, the noise a lot closer now than it had been when he had heard it earlier. This was not just the yipping and howling of wild dogs – it was something different, more orchestrated, and it sent the same shiver down his spine that he had felt less than an hour before.

  He tried to ignore it, and focused his mind on the tactical plan that he had worked up with Macrobius over the past two days. Everything depended on the men of the numerus keeping their nerve, and letting the enemy get as close as possible. Concealed among the hillocks behind the t
rench were five onager catapults loaded with fireballs, tensed and weighted so that the balls would burst on the sloping ground less than a hundred yards in front of the trench. They would only have time to fire once, and the artillerymen had doused the machines with naphtha to ensure that the fireballs, as they were lit, would ignite the catapults as well and prevent them from falling into enemy hands. A team of fabri from the Carthage garrison had also dug a ditch in front of the catapults and filled it with pots of naphtha, ready to pour out and ignite after the fireballs had exploded, to protect any surviving men of the numerus who had fallen back towards the walls of Carthage.

  For a line defended by fewer than a hundred men it promised to be an extravagant show of force, more impressive than anything the Vandals would have encountered as the depleted garrisons of the western African shore had fallen one by one to their advance. But Flavius and Macrobius were under no illusions about its effectiveness. Once the Vandals realized the puny size of the force set against them, the momentary check caused by the fireballs would only redouble their fury, and the only chance for those of the numerus who could get back to the walls of Carthage would be to escape with the rest of the garrison by sea. But Flavius knew that putting up a planned defence was not merely a heroic gesture; what was at stake was the tattered remains of Roman military prestige. That had already taken a battering with the betrayal of the comitatenses commander in the West, and it would suffer a further blow if word spread to the other enemies of Rome that her army could not even be bothered to put up a token resistance against an assault on Carthage, a city whose conquest by Rome six hundred years before had launched the empire. Flavius felt that if he and Macrobius and every last man of the numerus fell taking a Vandal or an Alan warrior with him, then he would have upheld his pledge to his uncle Aetius when he was appointed as tribune always to maintain the honour of Rome and that of the soldiers under his command, to ensure that his actions were remembered by history not as the dying gasps of an army, but as a final act of valour and fury.