Sabinus stood unsteadily on the south wall above, marshalling what remaining crossbowmen he could. So much for their limitless supplies. The store of crossbow bolts was at last running low. They had never reckoned on an assault of this magnitude. In the distance he could hear a harsh, grating, goading voice above the mêlée, and guessed that it was the implacable Hun warlord ordering his men on, telling them to finish it. Sabinus grunted. Let ’em try.
He raised his hand. His last crossbowmen stepped up to the battlements. His hand dropped, and a last, terrific volley of iron-tipped bolts sliced mercilessly into the front rank of the milling and frustrated Huns. Instantly, Tatullus turned and drove his men back inside the fort, and the gates were slammed together. Even as the gatekeepers set the first oak crossbar in the huge holding-braces, a great weight slammed into the other side. The soldiers dropped their pikes and shields in the chaos and threw themselves against the gate.
‘Get the second bar in now!’ ordered Tatullus. Not loudly, but they heard him.
From the wall came a second Roman volley. The gate was now almost blocked by the heaps of the Hun dead. Yet another slamming assault on the other side, though, until the second, higher crossbar was in, and then the gate settled together, rock solid. The Huns broke against it like waves at the foot of a cliff.
Up on the walls the crossbowmen cranked their bows for one last volley, set the bolts in the grooves, held the stocks to their eyes and took aim into the clouds of dust below. But as the dust slowly settled they saw that the enemy had gone.
Arm muscles shaking and burning, they lowered their weapons and bowed their heads. Sweat ran down their filthy faces. Not one had the strength to wipe it away.
Sabinus turned from them so as to control his voice. ‘Well done, men,’ he said quietly.
But they could not go on.
He ordered a head-count.
Tatullus came up the stairs and saluted. He glanced briefly at Sabinus’ wadded side, then looked him straight in the eye. A momentary pause.
‘Sir.’
Sabinus nodded. ‘Centurion.’
‘Fit: twenty-four. Wounded: as many as two hundred. Walking wounded: perhaps fifty.’
And slain? Sabinus could do the sums. Half the legion. More.
‘How many auxiliaries still with us?’
Tatullus looked out over the fort. The auxiliaries were busy helping the limping wounded, hauling the dead, taking round water, bringing up the last of any missiles they could find. He looked back. ‘All of them, sir. None has abandoned us. Not one.’
At those words, it seemed to Sabinus that even his centurion’s hard eyes shone bright with emotion.
Wiping his bespattered club clean beside a water-butt, Knuckles came upon the cavalry captain, Malchus.
He had refused medical aid, and was sewing, swabbing and bandaging himself from a little wooden box by his side. Knuckles watched in fascination. Malchus smeared a whitish paste over his stitched wounds. Knuckles could smell it was garlic, and maybe oxide of zinc. The captain threw back his head and closed his eyes and clenched his teeth a while. Must have stung a bit. Then he bandaged his shallower cuts. There were a lot of them: on his arms, his legs, a nasty one on his thigh, and a nastier one still across his chest. One of his ears didn’t look much like an ear any more, either. Then he took out a squat bottle of watery red liquid and poured it in a thin trickle over his bandages, letting the linen soak it up.
‘Red meat, wine, garlic,’ muttered Knuckles. ‘What you doin’, makin’ a fuckin’ casserole of yourself?’
Malchus looked up and grinned painfully. ‘Very tasty dish I’d be, too.’
Knuckles grunted. ‘Ladies first.’
Across the plain, if any cared to watch, the slain cavalrymen were being stripped of their armour. And a more mysterious figure was moving against the sinking sun. A vulture seemed to keep watch over her, circling high above. She wore long dark robes, an elaborate head-dress, and seemed to hold a twisting snake in her hands. Occasionally she knelt down beside one of the fallen Roman cavalrymen like a ministering angel. Arapovian watched from the walls with his deep-set hawk-eyes, and thought he saw one of the cavalrymen stir and try to scrabble desperately out of her long shadow. The Armenian gripped his bow more tightly as he watched, but he was helpless. They were all helpless. The woman knelt beside the cavalryman, and when she rose again he moved no more.
She would be ministering to them all soon enough, if no help came.
10
LAST STAND
Sabinus visited the wounded and exhausted men seated around the whitewashed walls of the little hospital. The pallets within had all long since been filled. The air echoed with soft groans. The men, their bare skin, their clothing, their armour, all seemed only a coat of dark dust and shining redness. About them the stench of sweat and blood. A few auxiliaries tried their best to keep away the tormenting flies. Oh God for reinforcements. There would be none left to reinforce soon. Abject rescue, then. But still from the east and Ratiaria . . . nothing. They were as alone as ever.
‘Sir,’ said his last standing decurion. ‘Hun deputation at the west gate again.’
It took him time to walk back up to the gate-tower, treading very carefully, hand on his side.
Below the tower sat the stone-faced warlord, ringed by his finest, freshest warriors, a hundred of them, arrows nocked to the bow.
The warlord raised his face to him. ‘You have fought well,’ he said. ‘Almost like Huns. So much for the decadence of the West.’ He smiled a brief smile, as if at some private joke. ‘Nevertheless, your cowards of cavalrymen who rode against my innocent people are all destroyed. As are you. Now I will grant you amnesty. Those of you who still live may walk free from this fort and leave us to raze it flat. You may walk to the next frontier fort eastwards. It is called Ratiaria - you know it well enough. The Legio III Pannonia is stationed there, a full six thousand men. The legate’s name is Posthumus. He shares his bed with a whore called Statina.’ Another smile. ‘Do not think we are entirely ignorant savages, Roman. Do not underestimate us.’
‘I do not underestimate you,’ said Sabinus.
‘Very well, then,’ said the warlord. ‘Lead your survivors east to Ratiaria, and tell them there of your destruction.’
Sabinus looked around. A single exhausted legionary sat nearby in the deepening shadow of the battlements, bow resting on his knees. They exchanged looks. The legionary was too tired even to speak, but he shook his head.
Further along, one of his comrades growled, ‘Tell him to go fuck himself. Pardoning my language.’
Sabinus’ grim smile did not reflect the tangle and stir of his emotions. He looked back down at the warlord. ‘What is the name of your god?’
The Hun scowled ferociously. He had not come to bandy words, but to give orders. ‘No Roman dog speaks that holy name.’
‘Their god is called Astur,’ said another voice nearby. It was Arapovian. ‘Astur, the All-Father, Great Eagle of the Eternal Blue Sky.’
Sabinus gazed down very steadily at the warlord and said, ‘May Astur curse you. May you and all your tribe vanish from the earth.’
At those words, a shadow of preternatural darkness passed over the warlord’s face. Sabinus kept steady. A hundred arrowheads were aimed at him. Then the warlord wrenched his pony round and tore away across the plain, his men following.
The legate took a careful breath. He ordered all fit and walking to the walls once more. ‘The day is not yet done.’
And the men rose to their feet once more, the last few dozen of them. About sixty or seventy men, bearing twice as many wounds between them. Some helped others stumble forward, some used their own pikes for crutches. Some went up the narrow stone steps to the battlements on their hands and knees.
The sun was going down in the west. For a while the Huns appeared to pause in their attack.
‘Perhaps they will allow us a good night’s sleep,’ growled Tatullus. It was a joke, of sorts. Night was when t
hey would come again to finish it.
For now, there was an eerie peace. Swallows hawked low over the evening river, feeding on clouds of waterflies. A moorhen called her chicks. A muted splash among the nodding reeds - otter or watervole. The warm summer sun going down in the west. Burning orange against the great white flanks of the Alps. Setting the Rhine and the Po on fire. Casting long, cool shadows over the vineyards of Provence and Aquitania, over the ancient, lion-coloured castles and hilltowns of Spain where Hannibal once marched, and over the Immortal City itself on its seven hills. The evening shadow of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and the Colossus of Nero . . . Sabinus’ heart heaved with sorrow. This beloved empire. He had seen the future, in the implacable face of that mighty barbarian warlord who rode out of nowhere, at head of an army of horsemen that no man could number. The empire was sinking in the west, as surely as the silent sun.
Lone horsemen galloped back and forth across the plains below, stripping armour from the dead, burning them like refuse. Occasionally, through the sun-reddened dust, the watchers on the wall glimpsed a yowling figure in tribal wear but now sporting some additional decoration. A triumphal Kutrigur Hun, naked except for a tattered deerskin loincloth, bristling with bow and quiver, shaven-headed but for a single plume of limed hair, his skin half blue with tattoos, and proudly riding with a curtal red cavalry cloak fluttering round his coppery shoulders, and, slung from his saddle, a freshly severed head. He waved his sword beneath the walls of the fort and howled like a wolf in winter.
Knuckles threw a rock at him and missed. Overhead, the buzzards circled in the last of the sun. More had joined them, red kites. ‘Fuckin’ carrion birds,’ growled the hulking Rhinelander. Then he raised his head to the sky and shouted to them, ‘Plenty of carrion tonight, friends! Guzzle your cropful! Hun and Roman flesh together, it all tastes the same under the skin!’
Just after the first stars appeared in the darkening sky, Lyra and Altair high and Regulus falling, there came wearisomely familiar sounds: distant thump, then shuddering quake. They were hitting the south-west tower once more. They would be in very soon.
‘Start bagging again!’ ordered Sabinus.
And the men, who had not slept for thirty-six hours, forty, began to bag up the broken defences by torchlight. One collapsed under a sandbag. Tatullus kicked him to his feet again. ‘You can sleep when you get to Hades,’ he growled. ‘Which won’t be long now. Until then, soldier, you get on your feet and work.’
Sabinus himself re-ascended to his post on the west tower and slumped.
I had hope when violence was ceas’t . . .
The line echoed in his head. An old poet. Virgil, perhaps. His schooldays seemed an age ago. Merely lifting his head was an effort, his very neck bones aching with weariness. But he gazed heavenwards anyway and surveyed the fixed stars pinned to the canopy of night. Some said they were alchemical furnaces where new souls were forged; the pristine, superlunary abode of the gods, of mercy and justice eternal. They looked very far away. The night was so silent. Help would not come. They could not go on. They were finished.
Tatullus stood beside him.
It was unjust. The gods were unjust. They had fought all day and half the night like lions, and by the next dawn they would all lie dead. Yet how should you complain to the gods? You might as well try to reason with Etna. The world was as it was.
Tatullus glanced at him. And for some reason, at that moment, unutterably weary and foredefeated as they were, the two men smiled. As if to say, in concord with each other, Well, all men must die. We did our best - and our best was good.
The Armenian appeared. He did not wait for permission to speak. ‘I said you would not defeat them in open country.’
Tatullus turned a menacing eye on him. ‘He’s “sir” to you, soldier.’
Arapovian was apparently unaware of the glowering centurion’s presence. And he addressed no man as ‘sir’.
‘You know your only chance now: to fight them hand-to-hand and damage them. To hold them, to bloody them, to buy time until reinforcements come.’ He adjusted his sword-belt. ‘Of course, if they wish to overrun you here no matter what the cost, and no reinforcements come to your aid, we shall all die anyway.’
Another seismic onager strike.
‘A Roman legionary legate does not customarily take counsel from a common soldier,’ said Sabinus, aware even as he said it that Arapovian was no common soldier.
The Armenian continued, unabashed, ‘My ancestors fought the Huns before. Hepthalite Huns. On the high plains of Ararat, where the Euphrates rises from snowmelt off the mountains, flowing down to water the broad cornlands of Erzinjan and Erzerum, and the sweet orchards of—’
‘Forgive the interruption,’ said Sabinus, ‘but now is really not the time for poetry.’
Arapovian heard him with dignity. ‘My grandfather died fighting the Huns. They will always gallop faster than you, shoot further than you. You need to draw them in, separate them from their horses, as you did with the line of pikemen. That hurt them.’
‘Thank you for your sage military advice, my lord,’ growled the legate, one hand holding his side, one fist clenched on the wall. ‘And how do you suggest we do that, in your mysterious eastern wisdom? Send them a fucking dinner invitation?’
Another massive shock. The sound of collapsing masonry.
Arapovian inclined his head in that calamitous direction. ‘Let them into the fort. Stop reinforcing the wall and the tower, and let them fall. Meet them in the rubble, hand-to-hand, where their arrows and horsemanship are useless. That fellow Caestus, the boor, he will fight well enough face to face with them. Now he is wasted. Soon he will be shot.’
Sabinus reflected a moment. Then, ‘Get back below, soldier.’
He reflected some more. It insulted his pride to hear advice from a common soldier, Armenian naxarar of ancient lineage or no. It insulted his pride even more to put that advice into action. But . . .
The rumble of galloping hooves, a sudden shower of arrows out of the gathering gloom. Another cry from the battlements. Another fall.
The tower would collapse soon enough, anyway. They could ready themselves for it.
Along the wall, one young soldier had lost it. The boy Julianus, the one he’d tried to nerve with fine talk. But what could have prepared him for this? The boy was crawling around on his hands and knees, sobbing, howling like a dog. Another soldier dragged him off down below. He would not be back this time.
Sabinus held his breath a moment, slugged back a last mouthful of wine to kill the pain. Then he gave his runner the order.
‘Stop bagging up the south-west tower! Evacuate! Let it fall.’
The man hesitated. ‘Sir?’
He did not repeat himself. The soldier went.
Perhaps the Armenian was right. Over the chaos of rubble where the tower lay in ruins, they’d make their stand. The barbarian horsemen would find that a harder line to break. The Spartans used to boast that their walls were made of men, not stones.
It was as Sabinus had reckoned. The Hun artillerymen - the very phrase seemed an idiotic contradiction in terms for these know-nothing horse-warriors, but whoever they were, Huns or Vandals or other unknown easterners, they continued their steady onslaught into the night.
Sabinus ranged his last men with their pikes, Tatullus with his billhook, Knuckles with his club, facing the battered south-west tower and wall. It was dark. Behind them he had his auxiliaries light a row of big braziers.
Another massive hit. The walls trembled and stilled. Then as if in a dream, very slowly, reluctantly, the tower began to subside into itself, the neighbouring walls began to fold and fall. Sabinus hazed his men back. But the tower was so damaged below that it simply collapsed in on itself with a muffled subterranean music. It seemed to take for ever for the stones to reach the earth, or pile up one another at broken angles. The noise of collapse ebbed, and from far away they could hear rising cheers and ululations. The dust gradually diminished and they
saw what faced them. A rupture in the walls about fifty feet wide, blocked by a mound of stones, rubble and projecting wooden beams, about half the height of the old walls: fifteen, twenty feet.
‘To the top!’ roared Sabinus. ‘Watch for incoming fire!’
The last of the legion climbed arduously towards the top of the rubble ridge and peered over.
An army of horsemen was galloping towards them. The Romans were seen, silhouetted against the light of the braziers, and the horsemen loosed their arrows. The defenders ducked down and the arrows clattered uselessly over them.
‘Come on, you pigeon-livered savages!’ roared Knuckles, the veins like cords in his neck. He smacked his club into his hand. ‘Come and get cosy!’
The savages barely reined in as they approached, seemingly intent on galloping up the rubble mound and straight on into the fort. But no one’s horsemanship was that good. One young hothead tried it. Arapovian stepped from the shadows and shot him.
Attila: The Judgement Page 13