Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  ‘To think,’ Aëtius murmured, shaking his head again, ‘to think, there were once four boys who played together on a Scythian plain. A Roman and a Hun, and Greek and Celtic slaves.’

  ‘Taken for a slave,’ growled Lucius. ‘Not slave-born.’

  ‘Not slave-born, no. Nobly born,’ said Aëtius quickly.

  Lucius harrumphed. Cadoc still smiled. Then he said, ‘The sisters who weave the web weave in many tricks and turnarounds. The Greek boy ...’

  ‘Orestes. He still rides with Attila, too. The Four Boys. Today we are all together again.’

  ‘To play together on a wide and windy plain, as of old.’

  Aëtius could feel his eyes begin to swim. How desperately sad was life. Not boyhood: boyhood was sweetly ignorant. But how sad to grow to manhood. He steadied himself by telling them once more that they were most welcome.

  Lucius’ only response was to ask where he and his knights should fight. Aëtius said that they might choose. He had no jurisdiction over men of such valour.

  ‘Very well,’ said Lucius, heeling his horse forward. ‘But first we must speak with Attila.’

  ‘You ... ?’

  Between the astonished lines of the opposing armies, two men rode out from the Roman lines across the divide between them, walking their horses slowly and unhurriedly. One was a fine old fellow with long white hair, wearing a gold fillet, and a middle-aged, mild-looking fellow followed just behind.

  Ready to greet them, the Huns drew back their bows.

  The old fellow scanned the Hun lines until he saw who he wanted, and rode straight over to him. Hun bowstrings creaked. The Great Tanjou came forward a little on his pony. The pair stopped. Eyes met fearless eyes.

  ‘I know you,’ said the King of the Huns.

  ‘Since you were a boy you have known me,’ said the old man, and his voice was strong and bitter and unafraid.

  The Great Tanjou glanced at the other man, then back at the leader.

  ‘Once I saved your life in the backstreets of Rome,’ said Lucius. ‘Once I saved your life in a vineyard. Once I saved your life on a lonely plateau in the mountains of Italy. My men died rather than hand you over to your enemies.’

  ‘Who turned out to be Romans, too.’

  ‘Who turned out to be Romans, too,’ the Celt agreed, almost with impatience. ‘Did I save a boy’s life, only to bring all this’ - he waved his arm wide - ‘this destruction down upon the world?’

  ‘Eternity’s work!’ snarled Attila. ‘Every man has his burden to bear. You have yours. I have mine.’

  Lucius’ voice shook with anger. ‘If ever you owed a man anything, you owed your life to me in those days, Attila. No more than a friendless runaway, you were then.’

  The king flinched, stormclouds moving over his ravaged face.

  Another man approached: the bald-headed Greek. He regarded the two closely, and then a smile flitted over his habitually expressionless features. ‘Well, well,’ he said softly.

  ‘This battle,’ demanded Lucius roughly. ‘How many men will die? How many widows will you make?’

  ‘Many tens of thousands!’ cried Attila. ‘Yet still far fewer than the Romans have made in their twelve hundred years of tyranny. You are a fool to be here, old Lucius. This day will be cruel beyond imagining. But I remember you. Stay here and when the battle is concluded, I may reward you with gold - though doubtless you are too noble of soul to be interested in mere gold.’

  Lucius did not honour this with a reply.

  Attila’s eyes flashed dangerously. ‘Then drop your spears and depart, you and your Celts. No one is interested in you any more, neither I nor Rome. Go back to your miserable, fog-bound island, if you have any sense. You are worthless here. What has your little island kingdom to do with Rome, or Rome with you?’

  ‘Much,’ said Lucius. ‘Britain may be an island, a sweet green island. But no man is an island.’

  Attila leaned forward and spat. ‘For myself, and my People, and this great battle before us,’ he said, ‘the die is cast.’ His lips curled at the bitter allusion, and he added in a low voice:

  ‘By a King of Kings from Palestine

  Two Empires were sown;

  By a King of Terror from the East,

  Two Empires were o’erthrown.’

  The second Celt instantly responded, his voice still quiet but his every word clear:

  ‘When the wise man keeps his counsel,

  The conqueror keeps his crown;

  One empire’s birth was Italy,

  The other was his own.’

  Attila glared at him, jerking his reins up to his chest as if for protection. ‘What is that?’ he rasped. ‘What is that you say?’

  Cadoc only smiled politely and said no more.

  Instead, Lucius said, ‘He is a remarkable one for poetry, my son. I taught him much - old rhymes, verses, even snatches of ancient prophecy, supposedly!’ He gave a curt laugh, sceptical or ironic, it was impossible to say. ‘And do you know, he remembers every word. It is a gift of my people.’ He looked Attila in the eye, and then Orestes. ‘Every word.’

  Attila’s horse was restless beneath him, side-stepping, champing at its bit, sensing his agitation. ‘Speak that verse once more. Repeat it to me,’ he rasped. ‘Speak!’ There were stormclouds over his face again, and beside him Orestes, too, seemed strangely perturbed. But father and son had already pulled their horses round and were walking back to the Roman lines.

  ‘Speak!’ Attila roared after them. ‘Damn you, brown-eyed poet!’

  All along the Hun lines, his warriors levelled arrows at the backs of the departing riders, but Attila swept down an angry arm, and their bows were lowered.

  Ahead of them, the distant Roman lines began to shimmer in the rising summer heat. Attila’s yellow, wolfish eyes seemed to shimmer, too, those ancient, glittering eyes which had seen all and known all and found no rest or contentment in all the world. Those eyes shimmered as if even he were deeply moved. The gallant Celtic war-band would soon meet its death here on these lonely Gallic plains, loyal unto death to an empire whose days were done, trampled beneath the hooves of two hundred thousand of his warriors. Had not Astur willed it long ago? ‘Yet hard is the Gods’ will, My sorrows but increase, And I must weep, beloved, That wars will never cease’: an ancient song that someone he once knew used to sing to himself. And then it came to him, who it was who used to sing that ancient song to himself, softly, by firelight, in Italy long ago.

  Then let it begin.

  Or let it all fall.

  Twenty or thirty yards off, Lucius reined in, turned sideways in his saddle, and spoke to Attila one last time.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘your baggage wagons are burning. ’

  Attila glanced back, and instantly began lashing his horse into motion, sorrow transformed into howling rage. From a mile or two behind the Hunnish horde, thick black smoke was roiling up high into the morning air.

  9

  THE HARVEST FIELD

  Aëtius had used his Batavian special forces, his superventores, exactly as they were supposed to be used, skilfully and in secrecy.

  The single century of lightly armoured men had skirted the hill as soon as its possession was consolidated by the Palatine Guard, well-dug in around the summit. They had crawled along a drainage ditch, well wide of the Hun lines, running down to the river that formed Attila’s supposedly safe right flank. Safe enough from major attack or cavalry, true. But the Huns wrongly supposed their own fear of deep, strong rivers to be universal, and their focus was elsewhere.

  The Batavians came across the river as swiftly as crocodiles across the serpent Nile, breathing through hollow reeds, swimming strongly. They slithered up through the sedge of the far bank, dripping like watery ghouls, duckweed stuck to their lightweight leather cuirasses. Their backpacks dripped, too, but the contents were still as dry as desert sand, triple-wrapped in oilcoth. They crept along the riverbank until they reached the baggage wagons.

  The
great high-wheeled Hunnish wagons were entirely unprotected by warriors, although crowded on top of them were old men, women and children, gazing southwards, munching strips of smoked meat, eagerly waiting for the battle to begin. On the nearest wagon, the superventores noted, chuckling to themselves, one old woman was even making the best use of this tedious time before the fight by doing sewing repairs to a leather jerkin.

  Shock and terror would clear them off quickly enough. And then speed of retreat would be everything.

  The eighty men came screaming and yelling up through the reedbeds, muddy and plastered with weed, swords whirling. The women took one horrified look at these river-demons, snatched their infants down from the wagons and fled. The superventores were at the wagons in an instant, kneeling down behind the solid wooden wheels emptying their backpacks, plastering the dry old wooden wheels with a special mix of naptha, sulphur and highly refined oil on wads of fresh lambs’ wool, sticky and murderously flammable. Right across the rear of the Hun lines the wagons stretched away, piled high with the loot of half the civilised world. There might have been a hundred, no, three or four hundred - they couldn’t possibly damage them all. But by the time word got to the nearest Hun warriors, sitting their horses in the rear battle-lines, the Batavians had fixed up over thirty wagons.

  A couple of hundred horse-warriors came galloping furiously back across the grass towards them.

  The commander of the superventores knelt, flipped open his tinderbox and flicked the wheel.

  ‘Sir, we’re in range!’

  The first arrows hit the ground nearby. A junior lieutenant held out a wooden staff topped with a blob of pitch and the commander lit it.

  ‘Now run!’ he roared. ‘The rest of you - to the river!’

  The main body sprinted for the water, crouching low, while the lieutenant dashed along the line of wagons with the flaming torch extended. Every time it brushed against a treated wheel, the wagon exploded into flames like a bone-dry hayrick.

  The Huns were bewildered and indecisive, some making towards the burning wagons intending to extinguish them and save the loot, though God only knew how. That moment of confusion was the lieutenant’s chance of escape, and he took it, sprinting towards the river, dashing beneath a low-hanging alder for cover even as arrows sliced through the leaves around him, and diving headlong into the river. Horsemen arrived on the bank above, howling with fury, their horses champing, tossing their brutish heads, fighting against entering such a fast-moving current when unable to see the bottom. The riders drew back their bows and arrows slapped into the water but instantly lost trajectory, flattening out across the surface like skimmed pebbles or spinning round to face the powerful current. In any case, the Batavians were already down in the murky depths, lungs forcibly emptied, navigating only by the feel of the current dragging them back to safety, swimming like tritons with grins across their water-stretched faces.

  As Aëtius well knew, such flamboyant tactics had absolutely no effect on the material progress of the battle, but they could do wonders for morale. His lines cheered wildly as the black smoke billowed up into the air behind the Hun army, and they saw the Hunnish leader himself, fearsome Attila, galloping furiously back to view the damage.

  ‘An ostentatious little jape,’ muttered Aëtus, ‘but a useful one.’

  Tatullus grinned. ‘What’s he wasting his time for? He needs to get on with it.’ He jerked his head right.

  Aëtius nodded. The sun was indeed, as usual, coming round. With every delay, the Huns would have to fight facing more and more directly into it.

  The commander of the superventores reappeared, still at the run. Well, special forces were expected to be able to cover forty miles in a day with sixty-pound packs on their backs. This was a nice day out for them.

  He saluted. ‘Job done, sir.’

  ‘Casualties?’

  ‘None, sir, apart from one novice who slipped coming out of the river and bloodied his pug. Getting bandaged up right now.’

  Aëtius grinned. ‘Good man. To the rearguard now. There’ll be more work for you later.’

  ‘Sir.’

  It was late morning, and still nothing. Attila’s delaying tactics were wearisome to the Romans, but they would test his own, undisciplined warriors’ patience to the limit. Sooner or later they were going to have to charge. That mile between them would tire them, especially with their horses, poorly fed for these past weeks and months. And then they would hit the earthed-up pikes of the Alans and, behind them, the Roman legionaries. That was what Aëtius wanted. As for the coming arrow-storm, he had two ways to deal with that.

  Meanwhile the two armies stood motionless, and the sun kept coming round. Tube-like dracones, wind-socks, droned in the wind. The Hun horses stamped restively. Occasionally there were sorties from their lines, jeered at and sharply rebuffed, the horsemen retreating in disorder. Then as the air warmed a light southerly breeze blew up.

  Aëtius looked sharply at his centurion.

  Tatullus produced a small white feather, raised it above his head and let go. It twirled briefly, then drifted steadily towards the Hun lines.

  The centurion looked around, scanned the horizon. ‘A calm summer’s day. June. Gaul. A few clouds low in the west.’ He grinned at Aëtius. ‘Yep. I reckon.’

  Aëtius nodded, and Tatullus roared over the front rank, ‘Fire the smokescreen!’

  Immediately a great sheet of flame coursed along before the Roman line, and then quickly burned down to thick smoke. The auxiliaries ran between the files and poured on oil and dead branches, sacks of leaves, commandeered haybales and, best of all, thick green summer grass. The pall of smoke thickened, rose into the air forty, fifty feet, and drifted always north towards the Hun lines. In a few minutes they’d be blinded by it. And, when they came through it, by the sun.

  Sweaty hands tightened around butted pikes, men crouched low. Some used corners of grimy neckerchiefs to wipe the sweat trickling down their foreheads and stinging their eyes, then quickly returned their hands to their pikes. The sweat would have to drip, because they all felt it now. The earth was rumbling. Beyond the smoke, the Huns were charging.

  The next noise was the distant, muffled strum of the torsion springs of the Lightning Boys’ arrow-firers and sling-machines. Of course. From their position they could see the Huns charging below them. Thank God they held that hill. Then there were the screams of men and horses erupting soprano above the deep rumble of the charge. First blood. Those steel-head bolts were hitting home, horses rolling forward and tripping, the charge running in behind, getting tangled.

  The smokescreen had worked. The Huns weren’t firing, not through that thick curtain. They were coming through it.

  ‘Steady, lads!’ shouted Aëtius. ‘Lean all your weight on those pikes, now. Hold the line. Here they come.’

  Many of them saw it in slow and dreamlike motion. Out of that drifting, cloudy wall of smoke only thirty or forty yards in front of their pikes, first emerged those big, brutish horses’ heads, and their hooves, and legs, then the whole animals, and riding them the naked savages, spiralling their swords, hatchets and lassos above their shaven, tattooed heads, howling like demons loosed from hell.

  They hit the Alans hardest, but not before the Roman legionaries had stood up behind and hurled their javelins from their jointed javelin-throwers in a ferocious volley, so perfectly aimed and timed that perhaps every other front-rank Hunnish horseman was brought down, slowing his comrades behind and tangling them up just where they didn’t want to be. Many flew to the ground and lay uninjured but stunned. Then the Alan lancers broke rank and ran out to butcher them where they lay.

  ‘Back into line you fools! Hold formation! Pull back now!’

  But the Alans lacked the discipline. Seeing what they thought was the impotent chaos of the Huns before them, they acted as headstrong individuals, dropping their pikes and pushing forward, drawing their swords. It was madness. Though a hundred or more Huns had fallen in that first javelin
volley, many more were coming on behind, and those who had lost their horses and been stunned in falls were instantly on their feet again, daggers and sharpened chekans in hand. The Alans were surrounded and cut to pieces.

  Sangiban, watching from his horse, bellowed with anger. ‘Shoot them!’ he screamed. ‘Where are you, archers?’

  But Aëtius’ men could not shoot without hitting the disordered Alan footsoldiers, who were slaughtered before their eyes. Cornered, the Alans fought like lions, it was true, but without formation they were lost.

  ‘Herculians, move up. Take pike positions.’

  It was a relief to know that those old hands would hold the line: hold it until they were cut down where they stood.