But fight they must.
It was like a dream for the exhausted defenders on the walls. As in a dream they saw the great siege-engines rumbling toward them through the night, and the flames of ten thousand torches, and in the torchlight came the flash of arrow and the glint of iron arrowheads in the midnight air, and the cry and fall of men to the ground below. There were distant juddering thumps of onager strikes against stonework, and the slow crack and susurrus of collapsing masonry. In reality, they could not win again. Not now. But perhaps in a dream ...
The Huns were attacking by escalade again, too, against the Palatine Guard and whatever armed citizens were still stout-hearted enough to stay and fight, strung out along three miles of walls. Though the Huns came up in their hundreds, and even their thousands, the slash of soldierly swords and the cruder bludgeon of improvised citizen weapons made their progress over the walls slow and bloody indeed. On the ground below, the bodies of Huns slain in the cruel ascent of that implacable forty-foot cliff piled up like summer flies.
From away to the south came the sound of a more resonant, wooden thump, and the defenders knew another gate was being rammed again.
‘Isaurians!’ roared a deep voice. There was the steady trot of the mountain men, and Zeno once again led them into the breech.
Everywhere there were burning torches, and out on the plain the Huns had built huge beacon fires, for no military purpose, it seemed, but to illuminate for the dispirited defenders the vast numbers of the enemy. But Master-General Aëtius was everywhere at once, striding, roaring, gesticulating, harshly joking, and seeming anything but dispirited.
Knuckles eyed the beacons balefully. ‘Very kind of them, I’m sure,’ he growled, then looked prayerfully heavenwards. ‘Come, friendly Gods, and piss their fires out.’
Nearby, the more orthodox Arapovian crossed himself and slid another arrow onto his bow.
The Huns were at every gate now, stacking up oil-soaked bundles of dry reeds and looted haybales. Soon those gates would be burned to wood-ash, and the warriors would come in at every entrance. But the citizen bands were teeming up to the walls in ever greater numbers as panic spread through the city. They poured water onto the brushfire stacks and hurled missiles onto Hunnish heads, a primitive but terrible rain. At gateway after gateway the besiegers were driven back, until finally the defenders at the Rhegium Gate, hammered into an impromptu fighting company by Malchus, leading from the front as always, were actually able to shove their own gates open and make a defensive sortie, driving the Huns away in disorder before their grimly marshalled lines, and dragging free the deadly oil-soaked stacks. They bundled them back over the middle wall onto the lower peribolos, and then flung a flaming brand onto the pyre, burning it uselessly far from their own gates. They ran home to mighty cheers from the walls, and the great wooden barriers slammed shut behind them. Not one citizen of that hardy crew was hurt.
On the walls above the Lycus the escalade was densest, and there the best of the fighters stood together through the night. Roaring defiance, Tatullus slashed his billhook across faces and throats as they appeared atop the nets, then jabbed downwards, splitting skulls, severing heads from shoulders. Arrows clattered around the defenders in the darkness but it was hard even for Hun archers to shoot the enemy and not their own, fighting in such close combat and at night. Time and again a Hun warrior screamed and fell back from a net or a ladder, a black-feathered arrow of his comrades in his back, until eventually one of the Hun generals gave the order to cease firing. The Gothic wolf-lords, meanwhile, continued to return fire into the densely packed besiegers as ruthlessly as ever.
Captain Malchus was soon back from the Rhegium Gate, anxious not to miss out on the fighting, his sword swirling and slashing, his eyes gleaming mad and white out of a mask of blood. He was even heard to yell, ‘This is the life!’ And there was Andronicus slashing and stabbing by his side - the two were like brothers - and repeating low and sonorously as if it were a dark refrain from the Byzantine liturgy. ‘You shall not take this city, you shall not have it, not one of you shall pass ...’
The stars had vanished from the sky; only sparks illuminated the black-clouded vault of heaven. From the heart of the city, even now, there came the voices of priests and deacons chanting psalms, and it was to the sound of this sublime and serene plainsong that the men of war fought on.
Near the Blachernae Walls, the Isaurian auxiliaries identified more underground tunnelling taking place. Attila was trying everything, every trick simultaneously, believing that night and numbers were on his side, and the city must be won soon.
‘You haven’t time to countermine,’ said Aëtius desperately. ‘Drop the column drums on ’em!’
The great marble cylinders that he had had stowed along the battlements at regular intervals were rolled out, craned up onto the walls, and dropped onto places where the tunnellers’ activities had been felt. The huge weights thumped down into the ground below, sank half buried, and caved in the tunnels beneath. It was crude, temporary, but effective. A group of Palatine Guard rolled one of the precious column drums down onto an approaching ram and its team, resulting in comprehensive obliteration.
Everything needed to be done lightning fast, every new variety of assault needed to be met with an instant reaction, still more ruthless and violent than the assault itself. Thanks to Aëtius’ foresight, his energy and commanding presence, again and again the Huns were met by just such savage resistance. It was last thing they had been led to expect, and already a few were voicing doubts.
Some went further. From beneath a monstrous pile of Kutrigur Huns near Military Gate IV, a survivor came crawling, slathered red in his own and his comrades’ blood. He knelt below the Walls of Constantinople, clutching his near-severed right arm to his chest, seeming oblivious to the arrows that hissed around him. Instead he raised his head and looked up to the starless sky, blinded with blood, and howled with such fury that his words carried far. ‘Astur curse you, Great Tanjou Attila! Astur damn you, Attila son of Mundzuk! Lord Widow-maker! World-ravisher! Blood-worm!’ An arrow struck him in the thigh, yet he barely stirred, continuing to gaze heavenwards open-mouthed, panting. Eventually, grim-faced old Chanat strode out from behind the middle wall and cut his head off. Yet his words had been heard, by attacker and defender alike.
Still the Huns continued to ascend the walls, fast as quicksilver, lassoing the battlements, swinging themselves up like acrobats in a circus.
‘Like Barbary apes up the cliffs of fuckin’ Gibraltar,’ as Knuckles put it, clubbing another one down.
But the pace of the battle was slowing. For each fresh wave of Hun warriors, the greatest obstacle before the walls was the slippery heaps of their own dead. This was not, as Aëtius observed, good for their morale. Another ram was smashed, the siege-engines were either burned or stuck fast amid jagged hillocks of rubble and broken walls, and the onagers, too, had fallen into dismayed silence. Aëtius leant on the battlements and checked along the ranks. His men stood firm. No arrows came in.
‘We’ve broken them,’ muttered Tatullus. Centurion and general exchanged glances, both thinking the same: for now; but they will come again. And again. And again.
With their numbers thinning, and the coherence of their command structure going, the Huns resorted to individual heroics, which only caused them greater casualties. Vainglorious adolescents came galloping wildly across the mess of rubble, breaking their horses’ legs beneath them, leaping free, yowling and flailing their whips. Most of the nets had been cut free and burned, so these last-ditch attackers tried to cast their lassos high enough to noose the battlements and swing themselves up. One of them dangled half way up the wall, a dagger between his teeth.
Aëtius rapped out an order to the nearby artillery unit. They swivelled their arrow-firer at an enfilading angle and punched two heavy bolts into the dangling warrior. One of the bolts cut him through the spine, and he hung there noosed by his own lasso, head back, mouth open, sightless.
He felt something on his bare arm.
Tatullus said, ‘It’s rain.’
Aëtius turned his face up to the cleansing waters of heaven and prayed with closed eyes. The fires of the Huns began to sizzle softly, and then the rain grew heavier and they smoked and began to die, and darkness fell over the crowded plain.
He went to inspect the walls, overseeing hurried rebuilding and blockading here and there.
Gamaliel came to find him.
‘The boy?’
Gamaliel nodded and smiled, drawing his long wet locks back from his cheeks. ‘Both he and his right arm will survive.’
Aëtius exhaled, as if he had been holding his breath all this time.
‘He will have a fine old scar to prove his manhood, though.’
In his tiredness Aëtius forgot formality and grasped the old vagabond’s scrawny hand and shook it. ‘Thank God, thank God,’ he muttered. Gamaliel laid his other hand over Aëtius’, looked into his eyes, and saw the passion burning beneath the iron control, and the gentleness beneath the soldierly steel. They parted again. There was work to do.
‘By the way,’ Gamaliel called after him, ‘this rain.’ Aëtius turned. ‘It will do the Huns in their camp no good. Standing puddles, mosquitoes, even this late in the year ...’
Aëtius frowned. ‘Mosquitoes? Annoying little buggers, sure, but I don’t think they’ll bother the Huns too much.’
‘Well,’ said Gamaliel, ‘I do have a theory ... In any case, rain and foul air and camp fever go together.’
‘Damn right. By my reckoning, our besiegers are going to need around nine thousand gallons of drinking water and thirty tons of fodder every day, and their people and livestock between them will produce about a hundred tons of shit a week. You can work it out. Such unsavoury and unheroic facts can win whole wars. They’re going to poison themselves out there. Meanwhile, I want this city kept as clean as marble. In fact,’ he added, ‘when you’re done in the hospital, you can check the streets and make sure all’s well. Organise the civilians; speak to that Portumnus. Good clean water, no refugees sleeping rough, sewers clear, all bodies burned. Any incidence of plague or dysentery, isolate the victims immediately and report back to me. Yes?’
Gamaliel was already gone.
Not long before dawn the Huns came again in another wave. They didn’t trouble with unwieldy siege-engines this time, only a vast, two-mile long escalade with nets and light cane ladders, hoping to achieve victory against the exhausted defenders through lightning speed and sheer bravado. But the Palatine Guard and the auxiliaries were as indefatigable as ever, the Gothic wolf-lords seemed to be men of iron, and the civilian bands would not even forsake the walls to allow fresh reinforcements to take their place. Already battle-bloodied, though trembling with fatigue and showing many a wound, their confidence was higher than before, their self-belief a powerful weapon in itself. When the sun rose, they had saluted it in greeting, as a brother. Heaven and earth were both with them.
The Huns surged up the walls and met a solid blockade of men and blades. Here and there they did break through, but could still not build on it and capture a single tower. In the thickest of the fighting Knuckles found himself surrounded, his club knocked from his hand, and a lean, wiry Hun pulling back his spear to drive it into him. Then the Hun reeled and arched, his back sliced open by Arapovian behind. In the space of three blows, the silent, implacable Armenian had kicked the slain Hun off the parapet, knocking one of his fellow Huns askew as he fell. Arapovian drove his sword into him as he stumbled, a light but effective stab, so as to draw the blade free again in time to parry a mighty swashing blow from a third attacker, an ugly painted Kutrigur, his teeth blood-red and filed to carnivorous points. Arapovian spun out of reach of his heavy blade, then ducked back and rose up at his side to behead him where he stood. The rest of the Hun bridgehead was taken apart from behind by six Imperial Guards working in close order, spears held low, and their bodies tossed back over the wall.
Knuckles was down on all fours, shaking his head like a wet dog. He clambered to his feet a little blearily. One side of his face was caked with blood, his thatched hair matted and shiny.
‘You need attention,’ said Arapovian, retrieving the Kutrigur Hun’s head from where it lay at his feet, staring up at him with a perplexed expression, and tossing it over the wall.
‘Not before I’ve thanked you profusely for so heroically coming to my rescue, my lissom Parsee playmate,’ rumbled Knuckles, touching a great paw to the side of his dented skull and staring down at his wet, red fingertips. ‘I do ’ope you think it’s worth it, in the long run. You must have trained as a dancer in the theatre, the way you skipped around that lot.’
Arapovian looked haughty.
‘Very noble of you anyway, I’m sure. Thought I was a goner there. And I’ve lost me club.’
‘You’ll find it down below,’ said the Armenian. ‘On your way to the hospital.’
‘All right, all right, I’m going to get myself stitched. By the way,’ he added as a parting shot, ‘there’s some more of ’em coming up behind you. Best turn round.’
And the stained eastern sword-blade flashed in the air once more.
Knuckles was back with bandaged head and rescued club within ten minutes, fighting alongside Tatullus close to the north side of Military Gate V. They fought in a relentless duet of club and billhook as of old, still fired by the memory of Viminacium and their fallen comrades. Knuckles grunted and roared and swore, raining down colourful curses.
‘You barbarous fuckin’ horse-fucker, eat that! Here, you, come and get a fuckin’ headache! I got one off one of your lot like you wouldn’t believe! You wriggling little fucker, keep still while I brain you! Now fuck off back over the wall. Gah!’ - lurching forward and caving in another skull.
Tatullus fought in silence, jaws grimly clenched, steel helmet lowered, forearms like oak and those deepset eyes even and unblinking as his billhook cut a murderous swathe through unarmoured men, a true veteran unperturbed by screams of the dying. When a stray arrow fired from an agile climber pierced the brass-studded leather guard protecting his left shoulder and stuck fast, he neither cried out nor even turned his head. Pausing only to break off the shaft and toss it clear over the wall, he pressed forward to slash and slash again, like some nightmarish iron automaton dreamed up by a Jewish cabbalist in the smoke-filled inventiveness of his hermit cell, created out of the fires of his furnace while chanting of Adonai and Jahweh and the Elohim and all the ten thousand names of God.
Suddenly they were gone.
The attack was over.
Only then were the defenders overcome by their unspeakable weariness. Men sank down behind the battlements, almost too exhausted to pull their helmets from their sweat-drenched heads. Aëtius ordered food and water to the walls.
He saw Knuckles’ bandaged head. ‘You, Rhinelander. You might get a corona obsidionalis for breaking a siege, if we all come out of this alive.’
‘Thank you, sir, but I’d rather rather have a cup of wine right now, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘I thought you didn’t drink?’
Knuckles gawped at the master-general’s astonishing memory for detail. Then he said, ‘Well, sir, I admit that there was that unfortunate incident with the fishmonger’s daughter at Carnuntum, whose sordid details I’d rather not burden you with, sir, begging your pardon, as they might put you off your dinner. Suffice it to say that, although I did then take a pledge to stay off the booze for a good while thereafter, I ...’ Knuckles tailed off.
The general was walking away, not having quite the leisure needed to hear Knuckles out when he was in full flow. But he called back over his shoulder to one of the runners, ‘Get that man a bucket of
wine. A horse bucket,’ he added with a flash of a grin.
He resumed his station on the tower of Military Gate V, and exhaustion hit him like a wall. He could barely stand. But he could not sleep. There was too much to do. He ate only dry bread and drank water. Tatullus and Captain Andronicus of the Guard came to him. Now the fighting was finished and the rush of blood had subsided, they, too, looked beyond exhaustion, and the light was gone from their eyes. He knew how they felt. This did not feel like victory, and there was no cause for wild celebration. Not yet. This felt only like temporary survival. Out there on the plains, Attila still crouched like some beast of prey ready to spring, with his vast army diminished by all of one or two thousand men.
Now it was time for Aëtius to hear their own losses.
Attila: The Judgement Page 38