Attila

3

The first arrow struck Marco in his upper arm.

‘Fuck!’ he roared, looking down. The arrow had punched almost through his tricep and out again. He ordered his optio to snap off the haft, and push the arrowhead through and out the other side, while he clenched his teeth furiously on the leather strap of his reins and bit down. Another arrow whistled over his head as their horses skittered, and the optio struggled to tie the tourniquet tightly above the wound.

His lieutenant came galloping back. It was Lucius, the grey-eyed British lieutenant.

‘First blood, centurion,’ he called cheerfully. ‘Good man!’

‘Yeah, unfortunately it’s my blood, sir.’

Another arrow fell short and clattered over the rough ground at their horses’ feet. Lucius squinted up. There was nothing in the silent air but the trill of the cicadas, nothing to be seen up on the ridge but the blue sky beyond. Not a plume of dust, not a scuffle.

‘We’re being ambushed by… what? A solitary six-year-old boy? What in the Name of Light is going on?’

Marco shook his head. ‘No idea, sir. Feeblest ambush I’ve ever been in.’

The column had come to a halt, even though it was in a narrow defile. No more arrows came. There was no need to panic.

‘When you’ve finally stopped bleeding-’ said Lucius.

‘Stopped already, sir,’ interrupted Marco, patting the tourniquet. ‘Tight as a virgin’s-’

‘OK, Centurion, I get the message. Now ride on up to the Palatine vanguard and ask Count Heraclian, respectfully, what he wants us to do.’

Marco soon returned. ‘He suggests you’re in a better intelligence position than he is, sir.’

Lucius stared at him. ‘He wants me to give the orders?’

‘Seems so, sir. He also suggests that you and your Frontier Guard ride at the head of the column from now on.’

‘Jesus the Jumping Jew.’ Lucius turned away. ‘Master-General Heraclian,’ he said under his breath, ‘you are one useless pile of mule-shit.’ He turned back. ‘OK, Centurion, we ride on. At the end of this defile, when we come to that stand of cork oaks there – see? – you and me and First Squadron turn sharply back and ride round to the left and see what we can see. How’s that for a plan?’

‘Tremendously complex, sir, but it might just work.’

‘OK, you cheeky bastard. Ride on.’

As they rode, Marco gave the silent signal to the first troop of eight cavalrymen to be ready to split off from the column and climb the slope to the left. At the given moment they did so, without Lucius needing to bark a single word of command. The horses strained to get them up the steep slope, their heads held low and their nostrils flared, until at last they reached the summit, and reined in and stopped, and looked away across the blank escarpment.

Nothing. Not even a plume of dust.

‘What the fuck is going on, sir?’

Lucius squinted across the plain. At last he said softly, ‘What kind of bandit gang, Centurion, launches probing, reconnaissance attacks, to test the strength of its chosen target? Not even a volley, just a few well-aimed arrows, and then has the discipline to retreat and vanish before the enemy can counter?’

‘None that I know of, sir.’

Lucius scanned the hazy horizon again with eyes almost closed.

‘Gladiators?’ said another, younger trooper, wide-eyed Carpicius, all boyish excitement and dread. ‘Turned bandits?’

‘Gladiators,’ snorted Ops, a bull-necked Egyptian decurion in his early forties, due for retirement soon but as tough as any in the legion. His real name was Oporsenes, but Ops suited him better. ‘Don’t give me fuckin’ gladiators. Gladiators, sunshine, is a bunch of actors with swords in their hands. They’re just celebrity fuckin’ murderers, they are.’

Like any other soldier, Ops had nothing but contempt for gladiators, unemployed or not. Overpaid sex symbols, nancy-boys, showy individualist fighters who wouldn’t last five minutes on a real battlefield, where the mutual loyalty and trust between you and your men was what kept you all alive. Not fancy bladework in front of a roaring crowd of thousands.

‘OK, men,’ said Lucius, wheeling his horse round again. ‘Back to the column and ride on, eyes skinned. This isn’t over yet.’

‘What on earth is going on?’ whispered Olympian as the column rumbled forwards again. ‘We can’t be under attack, can we?’

‘Looks like it,’ said the little barbarian, settling back comfortably in his seat. ‘Pretty disciplined attack, too, I’d say.’

Olympian turned his fear into scorn. ‘Oh, so you’re a military expert, too, are you now? Closely acquainted, no doubt, with the military treatises of Aeneas Tacitus, Frontinus and Vegetius?’

The boy eyed the eunuch and nodded evenly. ‘Yes, I’ve read them,’ he said. ‘And that anonymous one, De re militari, which shows you how to drive a boat using paddles powered by oxen. Interesting idea – be good for attacking up-river. Do you know it?’

The eunuch gaped at him like a dying mullet.

Attila smiled and closed his eyes. ‘They’ll be attacking again soon,’ he promised. ‘Better say your prayers.’

They climbed out of the gully and onto a high, barren plateau. Perfect for a hit-and-run cavalry attack on a heavy, slow-moving column. But the outriders Lucius had posted – Heraclian, for some reason, hadn’t got round to it – reported no sign of life except lizards and cicadas. And the ground was far too hard and rocky to leave any decent trail signs.

They crossed the plateau in tense silence, the Frontier Guard riding in the van, the Palatine Guard in the rear. Then they began to drop down again, into a vast natural amphitheatre of grassland. The track itself curved away, round and down the flank of the hill, the terrain rising steeply to the left and falling away just as steeply to the right.

Lucius called a halt.

There was no sound but the soughing of the wind in the dry grass.

Ops growled something. Lucius told him to be quiet.

He was thinking of the day Hannibal slaughtered the Romans at Lake Trasimene, ambushing them side-on when they were in marching file, unable to turn round into battle-order, pinned against the lakeside. He was thinking how good a place this would be to launch a similar ambush. To their left a steep ascent, and to their right an even steeper descent. There was no way they could get themselves into decent formation on this slope.

Then Marco said, ‘There are horses coming. That way, over the rise.’

‘Shepherds?’ suggested Lucius. ‘Goats?’

‘No, horses. Men on horses.’

They listened. Lucius could hear nothing. The tension was unbearable. A soldier’s desire to get stuck in, as Lucius knew, often made him attack too early. There was nothing worse than waiting for the enemy – especially for an unseen, uncounted enemy.

But Marco was no novice. He nodded again. ‘They’re coming.’

‘How can you hear that?’ said Lucius.

‘I can’t. But our horses can.’

He was right. Their mounts were skittish anyway, smelling their riders’ sweat and fear. But there was something more than that on the wind. Their ears twitched back and forth, and their nostrils flared to pick up the scent of their approaching kind.

Lucius leant forward and spoke into the flicking ear of his fine grey mare. ‘What is it, Tugha Ban? Trouble ahead?’ He sat back, oblivious of his centurion’s sceptical stares. ‘I think you’re right.’

He squinted up the slope to their left. Then he signalled to Marco to give the general order to dismount. ‘And that means the Palatine, too – if Master-General Heraclian doesn’t mind. So ride back and tell them to get off their fat arses.’

‘We’re not going to ride on down?’

‘At our speed? With those wretched, overweight carriages?’ Lucius shook his head. ‘We’ll be cut to pieces if we stay mounted.’ He slid to the ground and fingered the pommel of his sword. ‘We’re going to have to fight.’ He stood and scanned the steep slope again and the shimmering heat haze above. ‘Where are those fucking outriders?’

Marco said nothing. They both knew where the outriders were by now.

And they both knew what it meant when a troop of cawing rooks took flight and arose from the oak forest below them and flew away down the valley. Rooks are clever. They don’t fly away at the approach of horses, or sheep, or goats. But they fly at the approach of men, and they can tell a man armed with a bow from a man without. When rooks take flight, trouble is coming.

Marco drew his sword and touched its edge.

Lucius had them line up two deep to the left of the column, facing uphill.

‘That’s quite a climb,’ muttered Marco.

‘Certainly is,’ said Lucius. ‘Hope you’ve been doing your exercises.’

Marco hawked and spat. ‘Yeah, yeah.’

But he knew his officer was right. His officer was generally right, he had to admit it. Lieutenant Lucius was OK. In a situation like this, if they were about to be ambushed from above – and they were – the best thing to do was, as so often in warfare, the thing the enemy would least expect: counter-attack uphill.

Marco glanced up, and there they were. He gave a low whistle. Counter-attack uphill and with a lot fewer men. Jumping Jesus.

Along the ridge above them stood perhaps four hundred men, arrows already notched to their bows. They wore motley clothing, though many would fight naked to the waist. What little armour was in evidence was no more than leather breastplates. They stood unshaven, tattered, wild-eyed. But their weapons were serious. As well as bows and arrows they bore shields, swords, and a few carried heavy pikes. This would be no picnic. They stood in orderly formation, looking down on the hapless column without expression, waiting for the order.

Then a solitary figure in a white robe stepped forward and tossed a sack down the slope. As it bounced and tumbled, the mouth of the sack opened, and out rolled two severed heads. One clunked against the wheels of a carriage and stopped. The other bounced right across the track and then on down the slope beyond. The outriders.

There was no point waiting any longer. Lucius gave the order, and they charged.

He felt his leg muscles burning and trembling with the strain as he struggled up the steep slope for twenty or thirty yards, in the front line with his men. Above their bellowing, he heard with sickening frequency the hollow thunk of arrow after arrow hitting men in the chest. At this close range armour was useless, and the wound would almost always be fatal. Five men had already gone down, ten, even twenty. And they were only eighty in all, plus the fifty Palatines over on the left flank. At last he was five yards from the line of bowmen, and he could see the surprise in their eyes. Their leader had still given no command to pull back or draw swords, and most of them were still encumbered with bows, astonished to see how quickly the soldiers had sprinted up the steep hill. Lucius looked up at the bandit who towered above him, and saw that his eyes were bloodshot, his lips cracked with the parching summer sun, his cheeks sunken and his hands shaking. These men were not in peak condition. His own men were.

Then they slammed into them. Lucius stepped up and barged his man backwards off the ridge. He stepped forward again and thrust his sword forwards with all his weight behind it. The startled bowman tried to fend off the thrust, absurdly, with his bow, but the thick steel blade plunged past and went into his guts up to the hilt. Lucius gave the blade a smart twist and pull, and the man fell at his feet, choking out his lifeblood, his intestines oozing from the ragged hole in his belly. Behind him another man came on, drawing his sword. He got no further. Lucius raised his sword in a flash to shoulder height, his shield held across his chest and belly for defence, and drove the point into the man’s throat. His blade grated against the man’s neck vertebrae, and he could feel them coming apart as he twisted the blade and pulled it free. His hand and arm were covered in blood. The man lolled lifelessly against him, and he shoved the corpse back ferociously with his shield, into the man who came on behind.

All along the line it was the same story. On the left flank, the silent, orderly Palatines were making mincemeat of their malnourished opponents. You had to hand it to them: they were tough enough soldiers when it came to it.

Though they had lost perhaps a quarter of their men on the ascent, now they were fighting in deadly, close-packed formation as only Roman soldiers knew how, offering their enemy nothing but a solid wall of shields and shining blades. There was nothing for the ragged bandit army to attack but hard steel.

Marco was fighting to Lucius’ right. Although the battle-scarred centurion would never dream of uttering a word of complaint, Lucius could see that the arrowhead wound in his left arm was bleeding afresh. He was trying to keep his shield up to cover his flank as he thrust forward with his sword-arm, but his arm was weakening steadily, his shield trembling and gradually sinking lower and lower. Any moment now the enemy was going to spot it and drive in over the top, straight into throat or lung. Lucius said nothing but made sure he kept him covered, too, fighting a little in front of Marco, covering his left. They had always made a good team.

Along the line, he saw the lad Carpicius stumble and fall. A bearded, beggarly-looking brute raised his short stabbing-spear above his head, ready to drive it into the back of the boy’s neck. Lucius turned, but it was too late. And then, even as the spearhead was coming down through the air, Ops, the burly Egyptian, flung himself forward, almost covering the boy, with his shield raised on his hefty arm. The spear went straight through the shield, of course, and from the roar Ops gave it must have gone into his arm as well. But Carpicius was saved, by the skin of his teeth, scrambling clear and sticking his sword smartly into his opponent’s side while he was still wrestling to free his spear from Ops’ shield. Lucius felt a momentary lump in his throat. He had some good men in his command. He was damned if he was going to lose any more. He fought on with mute ferocity.

The bandits were coming apart all over the place. And foolishly, they had left their horses immediately behind them. Now they were stumbling back against their whinnying mounts, trying to get past, under them, even over them, mounting up and riding chaotically away. The line of soldiers came mowing into them still, the close-packed bandits utterly outfought. At the back, Lucius glimpsed the man who had tossed down the sack containing the two severed heads. He was trying to pull his horse round by the reins so he could mount.

He punched Marco on the arm. ‘With me!’

He fell back and sprinted round the rear of the line to the left, heading for the bandit leader. Marco sprinted at his heels, roaring at the top of his voice. Lucius grinned as he ran. That was Marco all over.

In fact, Marco was roaring because his wounded arm was flaming with pain where his officer had just punched him. If Lucius didn’t keep running, Marco would be strongly tempted to deck him.

They reached the bandit leader as he swung up onto his horse and wrenched the reins round to the right. Marco didn’t muck about. He hurled himself forwards and thrust his sword into the horse’s neck. Its carotid artery was cleanly severed and blood spurted with extraordinary force into the faces and chests of the two men. The rider wrenched the reins again, trying to control his dying mount, but it was futile. The poor beast was already done for, wheeling and staggering in a circle, its great heart driving the blood gushing from the gaping wound in its neck, as its back legs crumpled and it folded into the dust. The bandit leader rolled clear and scrambled to his feet, only to thump back down into the dust again as Marco planted a hefty hobnailed boot in the small of his back. He stuck the point of his sword firmly into the back of the man’s neck and waited, panting, for Lucius.

He saw that the skirmish was already over. Perhaps two hundred bandits lay cut up on the ground. The few who were wounded were being rapidly despatched. The rest were streaming away over the plateau towards the oak forests beyond. Some of the men gave brief chase. But it was hot, and the battle had been won.

Lucius put the dying horse out of its misery, setting his sword point just behind the horse’s still twitching ear and then driving it down into its brain. He always was soft about horses. Then he went over and ordered its rider to his feet.

Their captive was dusty and emaciated, but something proud still flashed in his eyes. He was oddly dressed, too, in only a long white robe, filthy and tattered around the hem. No armour, no arrow-guard. Nothing to give him away.

‘So,’ panted Lucius, shaking his head and blinking to clear the horse-blood from his eyes. ‘Your name?’

The man lowered his head.

‘You’ve had training. That wasn’t a bad attempt at an ambush.’

The man glared up at him with hatred burning in his eyes.

Then Lucius caught sight of something. The man was trying to hide his left hand. Lucius grabbed it and pulled it towards him. A signet ring flashed on the forefinger.

He looked at him sharply. ‘So you were a soldier? Soldier turned bandit, eh? Got cross one day that you hadn’t been paid for a few months, is that it? Got a bit peevish? So you turned on the Rome that nurtured you, that you owed everything to, and went back to live in the forests like a wild animal?’

The man turned aside and spat in the dust, and then looked at Lucius again, eyes still blazing with that strange hatred. ‘I served Stilicho,’ he said.

Lucius nodded, slowly. And then at last he said, very softly, ‘I served Stilicho, too. I like to think I still do.’

The two men stared at each other a while longer.

‘Well,’ said Lucius at last, sighing and letting the man’s grimy hand drop. ‘Enough of that.’

‘String ’em up, sir?’

Lucius turned wearily away. ‘String ’em up.’

Only eight bandits, including the leader, had been captured alive. They would be used as examples, and were led away across the plateau to the edge of the forest.

At the head of a small ravine running down off the plateau stood an ancient and battered pine tree. The prisoners were taken to the foot of the tree and stripped naked. Lucius’ men were throwing ropes over the mighty lower branch of the tree and setting nooses round the prisoners’ necks, ready to haul them up and hang them, when Heraclian came riding up and assumed command.

‘I think a special lesson is needed,’ he said.

Lucius turned away. He had no desire to see the Palatine go to work. But Marco made himself watch.

The Palatine guards tied the prisoners’ hands behind their backs, made them kneel in the dust, and beat them savagely with a whip of knotted leather thongs. They beat the leader with special savagery, but, like his fellow outlaws, he made not a sound. After the beating, the leader was kicked down into the dust, and his ankles were bound tightly together. A rope was passed between his shins and knotted round his ankles, while the other end of the rope was thrown up over the lower branches of the tree, and he was hauled up with his head towards the ground. One of the guards climbed up and hammered in a nine-inch iron nail through his crossed ankles, pinning him to the branch. And there he was left, silent but conscious, trembling with exhaustion and pain. Blood ran down from his ankles and his back, and dripped from his nose and from the ends of his hair.

Marco knew what was worst about this reverse crucifixion. The nine-inch nail through the ankle-bones was bad enough, but it didn’t kill you. No, the worst thing was to be suspended upside-down like that, unable to move, until you died. It would take about three days, maybe more. The bandits were shaded by the pine, so they wouldn’t die of thirst that soon. The blood would rush to their heads, and not return. Within an hour they would have headaches worse than you could imagine. Within a day, their lips and tongues would be purple and swollen, the whites of their eyeballs would be as purple-red as ripe plums. It wasn’t unknown for a man’s eyeballs to burst open with the pressure. But that still wouldn’t kill you. A brain haemorrhage might, or dehydration. If nothing else did, within three days you would die of agonising suffocation, unable to raise your ribcage any longer to breathe. And you would die gratefully.

If you were lucky, the crows wouldn’t find you before you died. Those gallows-birds with their strong black beaks and their bright, unsmiling eyes. But if you were unlucky, they would spot you hanging there from afar off, and come and flutter on your upturned chest, and peck out your eyeballs for a dainty treat as you still lived, or rip away the soft flesh of your lips. It was no good closing your eyes to them. They would simply devour your eyelids as well, tearing them delicately away as if they were silk. No wonder crows were thought to be the wandering souls of the damned.

The Palatine Guards nailed the eight bandits upside down like this, one by one, from the creaking, bloodstained branch of the ancient pine. The tortured men groaned, and some of them pleaded, but to no avail. The guards had no time for them, only contempt.

‘Now, now, madam, do stop your whimpering,’ said one of them cheerfully as he banged in another nine-inch nail. ‘You’ll soon be in Hades with a wooden sword up your arse.’

Lucius sat on his horse and looked out across the valley to the south, towards Rome. He knew these scum deserved no better. It was perfectly just punishment for a criminal. But all the same, he didn’t have to enjoy it.

Then they rode back across the plateau and down towards the waiting carriages of the column, leaving the tall tree behind them with its ghastly decorations of living but dying men.

Some of the soldiers had dragged clumps of brushwood from the edge of the forest, and piled them up into a pyre for burning the bodies of the slain. The stench from the battlefield was already terrible: blood and sweat and the contents of ruptured bowels mingled foully on the hot air. The men covered their faces, dragged the bandits’ corpses onto the pyre and set it burning. The bodies burnt slowly, sizzling like roasting meat, a plume of black, oily smoke rising high into the air.

‘A warning signal,’ said Heraclian with approval, ‘to any other robber bands in the area.’

Molten human fat was beginning to run from under the pyre and trickle away into the crevices in the earth. Lucius moved on, ordering the Roman dead to be laid on travoises and taken down into the valley. The ground here was too hard to dig. They would be given a decent burial in the soft earth below, as befitted any who had died in the cause of Rome.

They had lost a quarter of the force. Lucius had made the right decision, to attack when he did. But it had been a victory dearly won.

More soldiers lay injured. Those who could survive were bandaged and dressed by their comrades, and mounted on their horses.

Another lay with an arrow deep in his lungs, bubbling out his lifeblood where he lay. It was Carpicius, the new young recruit. All of eighteen summers. Even Ops’ mulish heroism hadn’t saved him in the end.

Near the boy lay Ops himself. His arm had been badly cut by that spear-thrust through the shield. It had hit an artery, and the burly Egyptian had lost a lot of blood. He clutched his arm across his chest, his other hand a rusty brown where it was encrusted with dried blood. His face was ashen pale, and his breath was shallow and uneven.

‘Come on, soldier, let’s get you fixed up,’ said Lucius.

Ops ignored him. He only gazed at Carpicius.

The lieutenant well knew that they’d been bed-mates as well as messmates. It was common enough. The men might mock a comrade, give him a scornful nickname like Mincius Flabianus if they found him in bed with another, but most of them took a bedmate from time to time. Ops would have died for the boy. Now it looked as if he was going to. And they couldn’t afford to lose such good men. Not now. Lucius turned aside and cursed under his breath. If he didn’t curse, he might weep.

Marco knelt by Carpicius’ side. Why was it always the youngest who copped it first?

‘Sit up now, boy,’ said Marco gently. ‘We’ll have to get your breastplate off to get you bandaged.’

The tenderness with which soldiers cared for each other after a battle. Lucius heard but he couldn’t look.

Seeing great Hector slain, says Homer, even Lord Apollo cried out at his fellow Olympians, ‘Hardhearted you are, O you gods! You live for cruelty!’

And he thought of the words of the ancient song.

For hard is the Gods’ will,

My sorrows but increase,

And I must weep, my lover,

That wars will never cease.

Carpicius gazed up at his centurion with watery, half-closed eyes and shook his head. ‘Wait a bit,’ he whispered, blood bubbling on his lips. ‘Just a bit more.’

Marco waited a bit. The rest of the men stood near with bowed heads. After a few minutes, Marco stood and signalled, and the body of Carpicius was laid gently on another travois along with his fallen comrades.

Riding back down to the column, Lucius looked in at Olympian, who was sweating profusely in the gloom of his ornate carriage.

‘Where the hell’s the boy?’

‘The boy is not my responsibility,’ snapped the eunuch. ‘He’s gone.’

Lucius’ blood froze. ‘Gone?’

‘Here I am!’ called a voice behind him cheerfully. Looking round, Lucius saw Attila slithering down the grassy slope towards the carriage.

‘Where the hell have you been all this time?’ Lucius demanded.

The boy stopped at the carriage door and looked up at Lucius on his big horse, shielding his eyes against the sun.

‘Watching.’ He grinned, wolfishly. ‘Learning.’

Lucius was in no mood for jokes. ‘Get in the carriage,’ he said.

He dug his heels into Tugha Ban’s flanks, and the column rolled on.

They made camp that night down in the valley, after they’d buried their dead. They dug a rough square trench and mound, put up a stockade and set out staves. A defensive camp, in the heart of Italy! But times were strange.

The men were exhausted, and still they had to keep nightwatch, changing every two hours. Lucius and Marco kept the first watch with them, their eyelids almost dropping with weariness. As soon as their watch was relieved, they went down to the river with their men and bathed before they slept.

They washed the encrusted blood from their arms and faces and tunics, then took deep lungfuls of air and sank underwater for as long as they could bear, resurfacing with grateful gasps. None of them spoke in the darkness, as the river flowed coolly round them and cleansed them. They scooped up handfuls of the clear, cold water and poured it over their heads, as if anointing themselves. They prayed to their gods, to Christos, and Mithras, to Mars Ultor, and to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. They raised their eyes to the heavens and saw the wheeling stars: the Dragon coiling about the North Star, the Eagle and the Shield slowly sinking towards the western horizon; the crescent moon on her back, like the crown of Diana the Huntress; and Orion the Hunter, whom she cruelly slew, slowly rising towards dawn.

Lucius thought of his wife, and how she would see the same stars as he. Orion fading from the sky as she went outside to bring in the new-laid eggs in her white apron, and the sun rising in the early morning over that gentle Dumnonian valley. His children, Cadoc and little Ailsa, herding the chickens out into the yard with hazel twigs, their big brown eyes serious and intent, chattering to each other all the time. He smiled in the darkness, felt his beating heart. He saw the clear, trickling stream that ran down to the grey Celtic sea; the hillsides of lush meadows, full of plump white cattle, and the high ridges crested with ancient oakwoods. That country knew nothing of war and killing. His wife and children had never seen so much as a sword drawn in anger, let alone the foul aftermath of battle. It was right that it should be so. But for the future of his country, now, beyond the frontier of an enfeebled Rome, with tales of those brutal Saxon pirates drawing ever closer… He should be there, with them. He feared for everything that was.

Before he had departed from Isca Dumnoniorum to join the waiting ships at anchor in the estuary, with the last few threadbare centuries of the once mighty Legio II ‘Augusta’, he had taken her in his arms and they had sworn that they would look at the moon and the stars every evening and every morning, wherever they were, and their love would fly to each other through the night air, far apart as they were, over whatever endless plains and mountains and deserts might separate them. Whatever lands might lie between them, the same sun and moon shone down on them both. Lucius gazed up at the crescent moon, and prayed his prayer of deepest longing.

Then the soldiers returned to their camp, and slept under their blankets like newborn babes.