Like Jesus among the poor; like Jesus feeding the five thousand. His smile grew fiercer.
Enkhtuya purred beside him. ‘See how his heart is sorrowful. How he has compassion upon the destitute and wretched of the earth.’
Attila’s expression was violently conflicted, as if he hated his enemy more than ever because he was forced to admire him. As if he felt his coiled inner strength might begin to melt because of it.
‘Drop some arrows on them,’ he said.
Conscience prevents cruel deeds. But cruel deeds regularly practised cancel conscience. Enkhtuya stroked her twisted snakeskin torc and the arrows began to fall.
From the walls went up a feeble shout of warning as the sky behind darkened with ten thousand arrows, arcing up like a midnight rainbow. But it was too late. The arrows fell in a murderous shower and many of the stumbling refugees were struck down. Screaming broke out, panic and confusion. Some of them even began to run away from the walls again, thinking in their terror and bewilderment that the defenders of the city had shot at them. The wolf-lords immediately raised their shields and moved into a circling gallop again. A few slung their shields across their backs, nocked arrows to their bows and loosed them at the Hun lines in return. A paltry reply to such an onslaught, but it showed of what mettle they were made.
Aëtius wheeled his horse round, white and speechless with rage. He galloped out past the milling refugees and drove them back towards the open gates of the city, at last managing to shout instructions at them, saying that the Walls were their refuge, and the arrows were coming from the Huns. He scooped up a fallen child, a little girl of no more than four or five, whose forehead had been sliced open by a flying arrowhead. The wound was not deep but she was blinded with blood and tears and was screaming. He slung her across his lap, laid his hand in the small of her back and told her to stop squirming. Then he pulled his horse round again and rode out in front of the circling wolf-lords and reined in and stared. He did not speak or move, not even when another iron shower came overhead. Several fell about him but he was not hit. He stared like a lost traveller on a lonely moor, staring into the rain.
Attila raised his arm and the arrow-storm ceased again. Aëtius’s stillness spoke more than any enraged shouting or shaken fist could have done. Behind him came the cries and groans of wounded people, struggling to their feet, trying to make it to the city. Ahead of him across the half-mile of burned plains and abandoned farmsteads, the hundred thousand horsemen and their lord, his arm still raised. Across that half-mile the two men regarded each other.
‘Well,’ whispered Attila, ‘you Romans know all about the Massacre of the Innocents.’
His arm dropped, and the sky darkened again.
Aëtius wheeled his horse, holding the terrified girl across his lap, and galloped for the Walls, arrows thocking into the ground around him. Ahead of him, the people stumbled home.
Aëtius slipped from his horse as the gates were slammed shut and barred behind him. He pulled the girl down, swabbed her forehead and face with the edge of his tunic and squatted before her. She suddenly looked too shocked to cry.
‘What’s your name?’
She shook her head. He squeezed her thin shoulders.
‘Euphemia,’ she whispered, barely audible.
‘Were you with your family, Euphemia? When you were hiding out there?’
She nodded miserably. ‘My mother,’ she whispered.
‘Did you see her running into the city?’
She shook her head.
Aëtius rose and handed her over to one of the other refugee women, with instructions to reunite them if she could. The wounded should go to the Emmanuel Hospital; one of his men would take them there. Then he raced back up the steps to the top of the walls, and down to the Gate of St Romanus. The enemy were coming nearer, and already Attila’s gaze, he could see, was fixed on the lowest point in the defences, where the wall ran down into the Lycus valley and up again, overlooked by Military Gate V to the north. On its summit he could see the nodding horsehair plumes of the wolf-lords, and the long spikes of their spears. They would need them soon.
Attila rode slowly across the plain beneath the noonday sun, along with his generals, gazing all the time at the Walls. It was too far to see, but Aëtius liked to think his expression was one of misgiving. His spies and intelligence agents would have given him every detail of these titanic defences. Nevertheless, this was the first time that the Hun leader had set eyes on the Walls of Theodosius for himself. Surely the sight must cause him some consternation? It was no one-walled legionary fortress or cathedral city that he faced now.
Aëtius summoned the Armenian. ‘Screw up your eyes, Easterner. Tell me you can see the Great Tanjou, and tell me he looks worried.’
‘I see him,’ said Arapovian. ‘We have met before, remember?’
‘And tell me he looks worried.’
Arapovian grimaced. ‘I have read more expression in the cliffs of Elbrus.’
Aëtius grunted. ‘Drop an arrow on him?’
‘Too far. Besides, the last time I tried to shoot him, I got this.’ He dragged up his sleeve and showed the general the scar.
Aëtius laughed. ‘You tried to shoot Attila?’
‘He rides at the front of his men, without fear. It was an order of Sabinus, the legate at Viminacium.’
Aëtius looked grim again. ‘That Sabinus was a good man. Now, back to the tower.’
He remained alone and brooded a moment on the assassination attempt. Treacherous and underhand though it was, it might have worked. Even now, as the siege began, if they could but hit Attila, weaken him in any way, the faith of his myriad hordes in his god-given power would begin to falter. That was their best hope. To defeat such an army as this in open battle ... It was not possible, not with what few forces were left.
The fall of everything he believed in was very close now. It gave him desperate strength. He began to tour the other towers again, to inspect the artillery units, to rally them. His exhaustion and sleeplessness meant nothing to him. There was no point in saving himself. For what? For the nothing that was to come?
20
THE GREAT SIEGE
As Attila approached the Golden City at long last, the Walls rose higher and higher before him, like a monstrous triple wave of stone. Of course, he knew the details, the measurements, and he had planned his attack minutely. But seeing the Walls in the flesh, as it were, even he fell silent for a while.
Riding beside him, Orestes observed that, whatever the earthquake damage might have been, the walls and even more crucially the towers had been fully repaired. There were no major cracks to be seen, no promising crevices running from battlements to foundations.
‘And there’ - he pointed at the brickwork around the Gate of St Romanus - ‘that tower must have fallen half away; you can see where it’s new-built. Yet it’s as strong as ever again. We should not have delayed.’
Attila stopped and turned on him. ‘You question my choices, you accuse me of delay, even of cowardice?’
Orestes was unimpressed. ‘I question our delay in attacking. We have made our task harder.’
Whatever Attila might have growled in response was lost, as Aladar abruptly pulled his horse back and it reared. ‘Arrows coming in!’
It startled them, the arrow-shower from the wolf-lords, even though it fell short. Attila ground his teeth and they fell back further. Then he wrenched his horse round in a fury, the poor beast almost rupturing its neck, its mouth cut by the bit.
It was time. The late-afternoon sun was falling behind them in the west, beginning to glare red into the eyes of the defenders on the walls.
‘Bring up the engines!’ he bellowed. ‘Either side of the valley! I want the wall there down by dark! Tonight, Byzantium burns!’
The key defensive artillery units would be on the gate-towers overlooking the low-lying Lycus valley: Military Gate V to the north and, beyond it, the Charisius Gate, which led out to the cemetery, for which reas
on it was also known dryly among the people of the city as the Polyandriou Gate: the Gate of Many Men. For many men passed out of it. All men, in time.
South of the valley was the Gate of St Romanus, and south of that was Military Gate IV. These would be the crucial points from which the Hun siege-towers might be attacked and destroyed as they approached, before they could do serious damage. Aëtius took his stand on Military Gate V, sending the wolf-lords below to man the Walls, telling them that they would see any missiles coming in well enough. ‘So make sure you duck.’
The engines on the broad platforms of the two gate-towers were the best he could find. Less crucial towers, especially towards the Blachernae Palace, had been left without artillery. Here at the weak point of the Lycus valley was where the fighting would be fiercest. Each gate-tower had two multiple arrow-firers, two small but powerful onagers, and a finely made transverse-mounted sling which could hurl rocks, balls or even those wretched new-fangled firepots if need be.
Half a mile off, the siege-engines were coming, drawn by captured slaves. Dispensable flesh. Hun horsemen galloped around them, flailing their long whips. Attila knew how short of manpower his enemy were and so, predictably, he was attacking on as broad a front as possible. There were as many as twenty siege-towers moving slowly and inexorably towards the walls, and half-sheltered behind them, there were rams under steep, protective wooden tortoises.
A deep, coarse voice called up from the walls below: ‘Permission to speak to the master-general!’
Aëtius stepped over to the battlements and glanced down. It was that brute Knuckles. He’d managed to arm himself with a club with a great lump of lead solder stuck on the end.
‘At Viminacium, sir, the enemy had fixed up their engines without wide enough skirts to protect the wheels. They might not have learned.’
Aëtius squinted into the falling afternoon sun. Yes, they had learned. He nodded down to the big Rhinelander. ‘Ready with your club, man. You’re going to need it.’
He stepped back, speaking quietly to the artillerymen. They were no fighters, but they were quick and deft with their machines. The engines rolled nearer. They waited, a kind of silent screaming in their ears. A young lad wiped his upper lip. Sweat glistened there again almost immediately. Behind them, the city was eerily still, the streets and forums deserted, everyone indoors, crouching, huddled, praying. Even the emperor himself, God’s anointed, was crouched and praying, too.
On the wall in front of Aëtius stood a bowl of water, calm as a millpond. The machines rumbled nearer. The horizon was dark with horsemen. The sun shone steadily, indifferently, upon all. This curious battle between these tiny creatures on the surface of the earth. And then a flash of sunlight on the bowl. Aëtius glanced down, not breathing. It flashed again. Not on the bowl. Glancing off the water, as it rippled in response to some mysterious subterranean disturbance.
The artillerymen were suddenly terrified, hands shaking, mouths open, staring around wildly.
‘Oh, no, not again,’ muttered one of them, his voice low and desperate. ‘Not another quake. It will destroy us.’
But the general was eerily calm. He summoned Tatullus.
‘You see any animals panicking, Centurion? Any horses stampeding out there?’
Tatullus’ hard eyes scanned the plain below. ‘No, sir.’
‘As I thought. Relax, men. Look to your machines. Centurion, spread the word. It’s no second quake. On the other hand, don’t relax too much. It means the Huns are mining under the walls.’
Tatullus started.
‘No time for theatricals, Centurion,’ said Aëtius dryly. ‘Get running now. Bowls of water all along the battlements. We need to know where the bastards are tunnelling in. These’ll tell us every time they knock out a pit prop and there’s another rockfall.’
He called a runner over. ‘To the northern Walls. Bring back half the Isaurian auxiliaries with their leader. Zeno. At all speed!’
The runner ran.
To another messager he gave orders for the heaviest weights that could be found dragged up onto the walls at intervals. Marble column drums, if possible.
One of the siege-engines was very close to them now, and another just south of the valley was approaching the moat.
‘This one,’ said Aëtius, indicating the nearest. ‘Concentrate all your fire on the top. Imagine it’s the head and slice it off. Take aim.’ He glanced down the other side. The wolf-lords were ready with their bows.
The second tower nearby was behaving strangely. The entire front section seemed to be collapsing. Aëtius realised that it was indeed collapsing - to crash right across the moat and form an instant drawbridge. It landed with a mighty smack and a billowing of dust. The men inside immediately abandoned the exposed remainder of the dummy tower, and from behind them a tortoise approached with a bronze ram-head shining evilly under it. Aëtius leaned out over the walls. The improvised drawbridge was aligned directly to the Gate of St Romanus. So the enemy were battering, mining and scaling the walls simultaneously. It was going to be an eventful day.
‘Where are those damned mountain bandits?’
He sent word to the citizen militia to thicken up numbers within the Romanus towers. That ram had to be destroyed. If not, it would quickly take out the lower and the middle wall, then a siege-engine could roll in behind it right up to the Inner Wall, and they would be truly in cloaca maxima.
Zeno appeared. Tarasicodissa Rousoumbladeotes. He saluted smartly this time.
‘Not much happening your end?’
‘Sir. You said about mining activity. I reckon we’re getting most of it, under the Blachernae Wall.’
Aëtius nodded. The ground was softest to the north, near the Horn. But how did Attila know? Ah, he knew everything.
The din of battle and the clamour of frightened men arose behind them. Aëtius raised his voice. ‘You know about mining?’
‘Some.’
He coughed angrily on a lungful of dust. ‘There’s a transverse passageway running from the palace cellars out beyond the walls. The Guard will show you. From there you’ll have to countermine for yourself, left or right, depending on where you reckon they’re coming in. Got it?’
‘Sir.’
‘I don’t think the Huns know much about mining, but you never know. And we’re still not sure who their auxiliaries are these days.’ A massive punch from an onager missile struck nearby. First strike. Zeno flinched. Aëtius didn’t. Dust clouded the air around them, but Aëtius yelled through it, ‘Like whatever bastards are operating their onagers right now. And I don’t have to tell you what would happen if they made just one good tunnel into the city.’
Zeno nodded. ‘There’d be a hundred Huns inside within a minute.’
‘And a hundred every following minute, too. It would bring us down as surely as the biggest missile strike. So it matters. Get to it. Find the tunnel, kill everyone inside, and then bring it down behind you. Go!’
Already the first small bands of tattooed horsemen were galloping in below, yowling, turning and threading their way among the giant protective siege-towers and loosing off little, lethal arrow-storms for good measure.
It was time to fight back.
Aëtius shouted to the wolf-lords and they let their arrows fly. It was a loose volley but one arrowhead struck home perfectly, a Hun warrior flying forwards over the head of his crumpling horse and rolling into the dust. One of the wolf-lords, tall Valamir, immediately strung another arrow and took aim, meaning to take out the warrior for good while he was briefly a stationary target. But before he could let fly, a second warrior galloped up and the fallen horseman vaulted to his feet, seized the back of his saddle, pulled himself up and they galloped clear. All in a single, faultless movement, almost quicker than the eye could see. Valamir slowly released his bowstring again, saving his arrow. He and the master-general exchanged glances. Christ, those horsemen moved fast.
From away to the left came the doom-laden thump of a mighty onager miss
ile hitting the outer walls, a guff of limestone white dust rising into the air. Another hammer-blow, and even Aëtius momentarily clenched his fists. How would the hurriedly improvised walls survive against such a hammering? And how the hell could the Huns have become such good artillerymen so soon? Surely they had Vandal auxiliaries, renegade Teutons? One rumour even said that deserters from the lesser Western legions had gone over to them, believing the future lay with the Huns. Aëtius refused to believe it.
Attila: The Judgement Page 35