Attila gazed at the messenger. First eager Yesukai, doomed to die young. Now Bela, one of the four steadfast brothers.
The king said not a word, made not a sound, but in a single, explosive movement smashed his wooden cup to the ground. Little Bird whimpered. No one else moved.
‘His body?’
‘Never found.’
Attila’s eyes searched the ground splashed with koumiss, muttering. ‘Drowned. What an end for my warrior Bela.’
Bela of the bull-neck and the bull-torso. The strong and silent, slow-witted, immovable Bela. Loyal unto death, like all his Chosen Men.
Chanat said, ‘The brothers will have their revenge, my lord.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ growled Attila.
Aladar took a deep breath. ‘And Candac is also gone.’
Clever, cautious, round-faced Candac.
‘Then find him. Find his body. He will be given full and honourable—’
‘No, Great Tanjou. He is gone. I saw him go.’
Attila’s scowl was ferocious. Two deep vertical grooves between his brows, his forehead furrowed deep and dark. Three ancient parallel scars just visible, fine and white. His traitor’s mark. His voice was soft and low, always the worst.
‘Not deserted,’ he said. ‘Not my Candac, not my Chosen Man. He would not desert me.’
‘I saw him ride, too, my master,’ said Little Bird, nodding furiously. ‘He rode away north and gone, all wordless into the wilderness.’
Attila’s bewilderment erupted into violence.
Little Bird yelped and scuttled to the darkest side of the tent, where he squatted down and wrapped his arms over his head like a monkey.
Orestes ducked under the wooden stool that the king was flailing wildly, smashing to splinters against the shuddering tentpost. He seized his arm. It was not seemly for a great man to show such passion. Attila froze and looked at Orestes as if unable to recognise him. His blazing eyes were filled with madness. Orestes returned his gaze steadily. Attila gradually grew calm again, dropped the remains of the stool at his feet and turned away.
‘Explain,’ he said eventually. His shoulders seemed to sag. ‘Explain to me the desertion of my Chosen Man, my beloved Candac.’
‘My lord,’ said Aladar gravely, ‘I cannot. Except that . . .’
‘I heard him speak,’ said Chanat.
Attila looked back.
The old warrior regarded his king gravely. ‘I saw him surveying the killing-field of Margus, and the mounds of dead bodies, and the deeds of the Kutrigur Huns, our brothers-in-arms: taking scalps, debauching the slain, having their usual enjoyments.’
The Kutrigur warrior, messenger of Bela’s death, remained impassive at the tent door.
‘Terror is a fine weapon,’ said Attila. ‘And very cheap.’
Chanat did not argue. ‘Our brothers-in-arms,’ he repeated boldly and bitterly. ‘Our comrades riding with us in the great and glorious conquest of this mighty Empire of Rome. I saw Candac standing among the flames, and I saw him drop his bow to the ground and not retrieve it. He watched them, the Kutrigurs, about their business, their exotic deeds and their violations, with the chieftain of the Kutrigurs, Sky-in-Tatters himself, among them. And I heard the Lord Candac say - I thought to me, though he did not turn his head - I heard him say, “This is not the treasure I fought for.”’
There was a moment of silence. Then, ‘Why did you not tell me this earlier?’
‘You would not have heard this earlier.’
Old Chanat.
‘Ach,’ murmured Attila. One soft, sad syllable. There was no more to be said.
After a while his warriors rose and retired from his tent. Even Orestes stepped after them, leaving him to his dreams.
Proud tempers breed sad sorrows for themselves.
Orestes searched for Little Bird but he was nowhere to be found. Like Candac, he had gone into the wilderness, though not for ever, only for a little while. He would never desert his master, come what may. He would always go with him through the storm and to the very gates of Hell, joking as he went.
In the hills to the south, looking out over the smouldering ashes of Margus, seated cross-legged upon an outcrop of pale moonlit limestone among the yellow rockroses, was an outlandish, beribboned creature. He wore a string decorated with tiny bird and animal skulls around his neck, and a torn goatskin shirt decorated with little black stick men.
A solitary girl fleeing south, a shepherdess, stumbled on him and gave a cry of terror but he never stirred, never even noticed. She fled onward.
For all his years he still had the face of a child, the colour high and hectic in his broad cheeks. A small fire of sticks burned at his feet and he threw strange seeds into it and leaned forwards to inhale the smoke.
His attention was fixed far beyond the ruined town. He saw turning stars and balefire and black night, and he felt afraid. He rocked back and forth and stirred his hands in the air. He saw his noble master, Lord Widow-Maker, Great Tanjou, Khan of Khans, drawing black night down over the world like a tent to cover and smother all. Not only the hated empire of Rome but the Hun people, too, would be caught in it, would suffocate and die under that dark sky heavy with hatred. He whimpered. The tent of the world twisted and became a monster made up of blood-red flame and black night, which would turn and devour them all.
6
THE TORTURE SHIP
Sabinus took a cup of wine after all. It wouldn’t make him slow on a night like this, only steady his nerves.
His palms sweated. He calmed his breathing.
Around the battlements he could see the white, strained faces of his men. Down below, the restless cavalry horses were tethered. The cavalrymen resting again, seated in the dust, helmets cradled in their laps. Little campfires burning. No one spoke.
They prayed that it would come soon.
Some already harboured fantasies of hearing the sound of distant hooves and drums, and the cry going up from the south towers overlooking the road east to Ratiaria and Marcianopolis, ‘They’re coming! The field army’s coming! ’
But no such cry came.
From the walls they could see fires in the hills: villages aflame. They could hear the high calls of nightbirds, the bark of a dog-fox. But a terrible feeling of aloneness. As if they were the only living men left on earth, surrounded by darkness and by the forces of darkness.
No one else even knew. The rest of the empire slept peaceful and oblivious tonight. Not one shepherd, not one wandering tinker refugee, had got through to Naissus of the Five Roads or to Ratiaria, with its vast weapons factories, to report the incursion, it seemed. No help was coming for this fight they faced against tens of thousands of savages, streaming down again from the valleys where they had lain hidden. Under Sabinus’ command, no more than two thousand at best, many of them rustic auxiliaries. Properly armoured, equipped and trained, he had all of five hundred men.
Wisps of cloud across the moon, a thickening mist on the river, a terrible unease. Only a few hours ago he’d been sitting doing the legionary accounts. That seemed a long time ago now.
A cry in the night. The legate started, strained his ears. Sounds were getting muffled by the rising mist. Screams still coming from Margus? No, that was impossible. Margus was ten miles distant. Only the cry of a bird, a night-heron over the darkening river.
He turned to speak to Tatullus by his side and then froze.
There came the sound of drums.
There was a stir among the men on the north-west tower. They were pushing forward to see something. Sabinus strode over.
The crossbowmen and artillerymen parted for him. Tatullus trod close behind. There was that hulking brute Knuckles again, both his great bearlike arms and huge fists tightly wrapped round with bull-hide strips studded with lethal bronze studs, and dragging a crude club, like some troglodyte Hercules.
‘Where’s your pike, man?’ demanded Sabinus.
‘Down below, sir. I got an eye on it, don’t you worry. Bu
t I lost me last club back on the bridge at Margus, so I been makin’ meself a new one. I like a club, sir, when it gets up close and personal, like. It don’t rust and get caught in your scabbard, it don’t break or get stuck in somebody’s guts, it never gives up on you. You keep a firm grip on it and it won’t let you down. I always swear by a club, sir, when the fightin’ gets messy.’
Knuckles’ club had a special adaptation. Stuck on the end was a great lump of lead solder which one of the smiths had done for him earlier. Most men would have had difficulty even lifting the thing.
‘Once, sir, I had to put a mare out of her misery and me good old club did a clean job of it in one go.’
Sabinus didn’t doubt it.
A flicker of something caught his eye. He looked out over the river and something was wrong. It was on fire.
Out of the darkness still came the sound of drums. Deep, booming barbarian drums.
The night glowed, a flame-red mouth opening up in the darkness, long streaks of reflected flame licking along the surface of the slow-moving river. Then a ship came gliding out of the thin mist.
A galley, wreathed in flames. One of the galleys of the Danube Fleet, captured from God knows where. Gliding downstream like some infernal ghost-ship, sailing into dark eternity unmanned. Silent but for the crackling of the flames and the collapsing spars and showering sparks. Yet there were humans still aboard. Hanging from the masts and yardarms, strangled, dangling, obscene, as if still dancing amid the flames that licked at the soles of their feet, hung the naked bodies of massacred soldiers. They festooned the ship like hellish decorations. Fire danced from their crucified limbs. Their hair flamed. The ship came gliding past, close enough to the north wall of the fort for them to see the victims’ blistering skin, their melting faces.
Sabinus gripped the wall.
‘God’s teeth,’ muttered Knuckles, ‘that’s worthy of a show in the arena, that is.’
Tatullus had his vinestick in his hand in a flash, and struck Knuckles such a blow across the back of his head as would have cracked the skull of a lesser man. Knuckles gasped and reeled and staggered, more bow-legged than ever, his eyes rolling up to the whites before collapsing against the low battlements of the wall. Shaking, in a cold sweat, he sucked in deep lungfuls, gradually letting the pain recede and his vision return.
Tatullus never raised his voice. There was something in this iron-cold centurion that chilled even Sabinus. ‘Those were your comrades you see tortured and crucified below you, soldier. Talk of them with respect.’
Knuckles, still hanging onto the battlement as if it were a rock in rapids and he were a drowning man, pale and nearly sick with the blow, managed a slow nod. ‘Sir.’
Other soldiers gathered from along the walls to stare aghast. Some had their arms round each other’s shoulders as the torture ship passed by. Four of them stood in a line, silent witnesses to the spectacle, like gladiators summoning ésprit de corps before the coming doom. Two brothers, their father and their uncle. Local boys, part-time farmers, the VIIth in all its glory. Soon they would be fighting for their lives.
Another spar on the ship came crashing down to the deck in a flurry of sparks, another piece fell free and sizzled out in the black water. But even that sound was muffled by the mist and the night.
Now they would at last be tested, perhaps beyond endurance. They would fight for themselves and each other, for their families and their farmsteads. They had never even seen Rome or Constantinople. The emperor was far away, the empire a thing of the mind. Today they would fight merely for survival. No reinforcements.
The torture ship passed on eastwards, its ghastly light dimming into the darkness. They imagined it finally drifting down through the shadowy gorge of the Iron Gates, reduced by then to a smoking, blackened wreck, to be dashed to pieces there in the whitewater narrows. Bits of peat-black timber and spar washing up on the strand at Ratiaria. Blackened bones.
Away to the west, the drums ceased.
The oldest of the four men turned to Sabinus as he passed by. ‘Are we finished?’
The legate paused, then laid a hand on the man’s shoulder - an unheard-of familiarity.
‘No, man,’ he said gently, ‘not by a long way. No barbarian force has ever taken a Roman legionary fort. Not in seven long centuries.’
‘To your stations again now, lads,’ said Tatullus behind him. ‘Storm coming.’
Another soldier came running, sweating in the torchlight.
‘Sir! Man below the west gate. I think he comes to parley.’
They hurried down to the first level and along the battlements to the west gate. Sabinus gazed out from the tower.
Under the louring walls of Viminacium sat a single man on a dusty skewbald pony. He was naked to the waist but for a purely decorative breastplate of thin bones, and wore no armour but for a close-fitting helmet that shone in the moonlight.
He must be insane.
The man looked up and fixed his glittering eyes on Sabinus, never doubting he was in command. He looked like he needed sleep. His face was deeply grooved and ashen-grey, with a wisp of an old man’s chinbeard, yet his yellowish eyes still burned. He did not seem to raise his voice, yet on the tower they heard each word distinctly.
‘I do not come to parley,’ he said. ‘I do not come for your words. I come for your lives.’
Sweat beaded down Sabinus’ spine. He felt cold. How had the Hun heard them talk of parleying? How had he known? There was something about their visitor not of this earth. Was this Attila himself?
Close behind him, Sabinus became aware, the Armenian, the one who called himself Count Arapovian, was swiftly and silently nocking an arrow to his bow. A short, powerful eastern bow, a compound bow, like the Scythians themselves used. The legate did not stop him.
It all happened in the blink of an eye. The warlord on his pony remained quite still. Arapovian stepped forward with practised swiftness took aim and loosed his bowstring. In the same instant, another arrow came out of the darkness, a single arrow. It arced through the night and struck home. The Armenian gasped and stepped back, dropping his bow clattering to the floor and clutching his forearm. The arrowhead had punched straight between the two bones of his arm and out the other side, so neatly that he barely bled - not until the arrow-shaft was drawn, at any rate.
It had struck him just a moment before he let fly his own. A hair’s breadth of movement, compounded by distance, and Arapovian’s arrow had hit the ground beside the hooves of that motionless skewbald pony.
Arapovian fell back against the wall.
‘Get him to the medics,’ growled Tatullus.
He was helped down the steps.
‘Then get him back here,’ called Tatullus after them.
‘I will return,’ came the Armenian’s voice. ‘Don’t doubt it.’
‘And no one else try anything.’
As if in commentary on what had just occurred, having seen or foreseen everything, the unmoving man down below said, ‘Fools. The blood of my people is on your heads. I come to destroy you.’
From behind his back he drew a spear, bare but for a single black feather, and drove it into the hard ground before the fort. Then he pulled his workaday mount round and walked it away into the darkness.
Sabinus and his primus pilus exchanged looks. Tatullus rested his hand on his sword-hilt. Now they knew what manner of man their enemy was.
Until they had seen the fire-ship, and the man whose mind had dreamed up such an atrocity, Sabinus had still held out hope of imminent rescue. He had thought of ordering out the boats if all the land-routes were taken. They could have rowed downriver to Ratiaria, to Marcianopolis, have the whole thirty-thousand-strong Eastern Field Army here in a few days . . . But the fire-ship told them - among other things - ‘We have control of the river too. You will never get through.’
The Huns and their Attila: mastermind of panic, conjuror of hysteria. This barbarian warlord with the mind of a fox. Piling on the pressure, drawing
out their deepest fears, destroying their reason and their resolve with monsters and threats both real and imaginary.
The abandoned town of Viminacium within its paltry curtain walls began to burn. No citizens fled from the flames. They had all gone already. The remnant VII Legion in their fortress were utterly alone.
Except for their sworn enemies round about. They could hear faint yowls and shrieks of triumph. In the town the savages were looting anything not yet on fire, and outside the town they were ransacking the chapel in the cemetery. They smashed apart an elaborate grave and prised open the lead sarcophagus within, to steal from the dead a gorgeous cloth threaded with gold. The corpse, the crumbling body of a young man, they left hanging grotesquely half out of the battered sarcophagus. Other corpses were strewn more widely about, so that it looked as if the dead had come back to life. As if they had awoken in the night and danced themselves to death again by moonlight, to collapse again half-putrid where they danced.
Attila: The Judgement Page 6