Attila

6

They came out of the forests to the east with the rising of the sun, knowing their enemies would be blinded by that sun. Their striped and serrated and many-coloured pennants fluttered proudly from their lofty ashen spears. Their long diamond-shaped shields were decorated with every kind of heraldic device, with every totemic animal that haunted the fierce imaginations of these warlike people and their measureless forests of the north. Outlined on their great shields were the shapes of bear and wolf, boar and the huge, shaggy European bison, each one circled and embossed in barbaric bronze. Long plumes of flaxen horsehair swayed from the peaks of their high, quartered helmets, and their fearsome longswords in their scabbards hung glittering from their sides. They sat tall and proud on their horses, and their horses raised their forelegs as they trotted forwards, champing eagerly at their bronze bits.

They rode in perfectly ordered array – no howling tribal charge for them. At a distance of some two hundred yards, well within bow-range, they pulled up their reins and halted. Their horses high-stepped skittishly where they stood. Their leader rode forward from their ranks. It was the warlord who had spoken to Lucius last night. He wore a bronze face-mask beneath his helm, making him appear as metallic and terrifyingly impassive as an Olympian god. Even his horse wore a chamfrain, a beaten bronze visor.

Again he said that they had no quarrel with the Romans. They wished only to take the Hun boy. And again Lucius said that the boy was in their charge, and they would not hand him over. The Gothic leader nodded, returned to the head of his ranks and wheeled about.

The soldiers within the flimsy circle clenched their teeth, gripped their spearshafts still harder and raised their jaws belligerently. They looked at each other wordlessly, for no words would suffice. These were men who had drunk together, fought together, whored together, all across the empire. They had stood back to back with shields raised under a rain of arrows, or ridden out to fight mounted against raiding parties of Attacotti pirates from Hibernia, looting the coasts of Siluria or Dumnonia for slaves. They had fought Franks on the Rhine and Vandals in Spain and Marcommans on the Danube, and not one of them lacked a scar in his flesh or a scar on his heart for a comrade who’d died in his arms in battle.

The Gothic horsemen dismounted. They were going to fight on foot. Lucius and Marco exchanged looks: unusual. They formed up in strict rank and file, three deep, curving round to cover as much as two-thirds of the circle. They moved quietly, without fuss. Two hundred? thought Lucius. More like two hundred and fifty, maybe three.

Ops leant and spat, and muttered something obscene about barbarians. Salcus, the young recruit, stood nearby, milk-white.

Crates nudged him. ‘All right, lad?’

‘All right.’

There wasn’t much more to be said by way of comfort.

‘Can’t wait to get stuck in, that’s all,’ said the lad, speaking far too rapidly.

Crates managed a sardonic grin. ‘Me too.’

It would be the last time the Eighth Century, First Cohort, Legio II ‘Augusta’ ever fought together. It would be the last time they ever got stuck in. They knew that. It would be their last stand. For reasons they did not comprehend, this was where it would all end for them. A small army of Gothic horsemen had brought them to a standstill, here in the once-peaceful heart of Italy, and demanded that they hand over one of their hostages – who was no more than a boy, and a barbarian to boot! No, it made no sense. But they would go down fighting; and then, they supposed, the Goths would take the boy for themselves anyway. But they would have to pay in blood.

It was not what they had envisaged. This was not the long and happy retirement so many of them had fondly foreseen for themselves, after twenty years’ loyal service with the legion. Pensioned off with a nice bit of farmland in the mild south country of Britain, with a plump young rose-cheeked girl for a wife, with good round hips and a willing smile. Or, now that Britain, too, had been taken from them, maybe some place in Gaul, or the rich vinelands of the Moselle.

But here they were, here because they were here, and orders were orders. Anyway, they were buggered if they were going to take orders from a Goth. So, let it be. They’d never live to see retirement, as it turned out; or know gout, or arthritic hands, or the palsy, or old man’s staggers, or creep with bent and crooked back to a cold grave. They’d die here, after all, with sword in hand. It wasn’t so bad. All men must die.

The Gothic warlord alone remained mounted. He turned to look at the small, grim circle of Roman legionaries. He glanced back to salute his father, the sun, climbing slowly up the eastern sky. Then he looked out over his ranks of men. He dropped his gauntleted hand. They broke into a run.

‘Bows at the ready,’ ordered Lucius evenly.

Forty bows were raised aloft over the stockade.

The Gothic warriors were a hundred and fifty yards away. One hundred. Closing.

‘Take aim,’ said Lucius, raising his spatha.

They were fifty yards distant now, running at full pelt, knowing that the arrows would be coming soon.

‘ Fire! ’

The volley flew out into the enclosing circle of warriors, arrowheads finding their targets, burying themselves in the chests and legs of men. A few sank to their knees clutching the arrowshafts, a few more stumbled and fell full length, tripping their comrades who came on behind. More arrows glanced off the side of heavy shields or burnished helmets, or fell short and slithered into the dust. The mass of warriors came on.

‘ Fire! ’

There was time for one more volley, then Lucius gave the order to take up arms. The bows were thrown aside and men took up swords and shields, or else their spears, and held them high over the trench below. Lucius sensed a figure at his side. He started. It was the boy. He had stripped to the waist, and daubed himself from the crown of his head downwards with mud. His slanted eyes glittered in his blackened face like some forest animal’s. He had tied his shaggy hair up in a Hun-style top-knot, bound with plaited grasses, which made him look a little taller. Still, short though he was, his tattooed torso was tightly muscled and his biceps bulged as he held his short sword two-handed.

‘Back in the middle with the horses,’ Lucius ordered curtly.

The boy shook his head. ‘You’re fighting for me. So I’m fighting for you.’

And then he was away, sprinting across the circle and hurling himself at the stockade opposite.

The Goths were upon them.

Without the trench and the stockade, the fighting would have been over in minutes. But every Gothic warrior, no matter how tall, had to fight from below, stabbing his long spear upwards, while the legionaries thrust down with their weapons in response, to deadly effect.

Lucius and Marco fought side by side as always, flanking each other, and moving readily to fill the gaps. A Goth had one leg over the stockade when Marco rushed at him, bellowing, and planted his foot in the warrior’s chest. The warrior flew backwards into the trench, and Marco leant over to thrust his spear down into his exposed midriff. Another warrior slammed up against the stockade and drove his longsword at Marco’s side. The centurion gasped and twisted, and the swordthrust grazed past him. Lucius grabbed the warrior and rammed his head down against the stockade, then despatched him with a clean thrust of his blade to the neck. The corpse rolled back into the trench.

As the trench filled with corpses, so more came on behind, treading across the bodies of their fallen comrades and approaching the stockade on the level. It was grotesque but effective. Some of the warriors crossed themselves as they trod on the dead, and Lucius had to remind himself that they, too, were Christians now, so they said.

He looked back and saw the lad Salcus curling back from the stockade and then, gently, sitting down cross-legged like a schoolboy in the dust, cradling his belly. He heard Ops roaring nearby, seizing two warriors by the throat, one in each hand, and wrenching their heads down onto his upraised knee. Then he rolled them back contemptuously into their comrades.

Attila was climbing up onto the stockade opposite. Lucius roared at him to fall back, but then he saw what had happened. A knot of warriors had thrown a grappling hook over the top and were passing the rope back to a team of horses just behind their lines, ready to pull away and tear a breach in the defences. An instant before the rope was attached to the team, Attila leant down and cut it clean through with a single swipe of his sword. He moved so fast, it was a blur, but then he wrenched the grappling hook free from the splintered wood at his feet and swung it furiously into the head of a Gothic warrior who was swinging his shield edge at the boy to knock him down. The grappling hook connected first, and the warrior’s head spun round, his unconscious body sagging across the top of the sharpened staves. The stockade was saved, at least for a time.

Then, to his horror, Lucius watched as the boy, again moving faster than any man would have been able, aimed three rapid strokes in quick succession at the comatose warrior’s neck. He kicked the warrior’s helmet from his head, grabbed a fistful of his hair and, with a fourth stroke, separated his head cleanly from his body. He gave an unearthly cry of triumph and, whirling round, flung the severed head into the crowd of Gothic warriors massing beyond the sharpened staves. The bloody head whirled through the air, a tendril of spinal column hanging obscenely loose, grey pulp and crimson gore flying from the neckhole and spattering the chests and faces of the aghast warriors. The boy howled at them again, his teeth bared like a wild animal’s, his sword held aloft, his face and chest smeared with a paste of earth, sweat and blood, and for a single, frozen moment the mob of Gothic warriors stopped dead in their tracks at this figure of nightmare. Then they braced themselves and came on, and the boy stooped low beneath the clumsy swing of a longsword, and drove his own blade deep into the man’s guts. He wrenched his sword free and fresh blood welled over him as the dying man fell against him. Attila twisted away and slashed his blade across another man’s belly. Another corpse fell into the dust.

The boy had grown up since the night in the Suburra, two years since, when he had stabbed his drunken attacker, and then shed tears of remorse for it. In the fury of battle he had found his vocation, and the voice of remorse was quickly drowned in other men’s blood.

All around Lucius, the hopelessly outnumbered men were fighting furiously, and the fighting was close-quarter, messy and chaotic. So far the defences had not been breached. But his men were tiring fast. And, with uncharacteristic control, the Gothic warlord was sending in his men in separate ranks. When one rank began to tire, they drew back and the next rank took their place. Then they gave way to the third, and so on. None need fight to the death. None need even tire. But for Lucius’ men there could be no such respite. Several lay dead already; more were wounded; and every one of them who could still stand and wield a sword did so. He saw that Crates had his left arm bandaged, at the end only a bloody stump where his hand had been. But still he fought on.

He smelt something oily burning, overlaying the denser odour of blood in the air. The Gothic archers had started firing arrows high into the bright morning air, and dropping them down into the circle. A risky strategy as they might well hit one of their own. But the arrows flew true, some wrapped in flaming cloths soaked in pitch, and soon the two great Liburnian carriages that formed so vital a part of the Roman defences were aflame. More arrows fell into the centre of the circle, where the horses were. The horses bucked and reared, straining white-eyed and terrified against their guyropes. The Goths were trying to start a stampede.

One of the horses was hit in the eye.

The sound it made was terrible. Lucius had heard horses scream before, on battlefields other than this, but the sound never ceased to wrench his heart. The agonised beast tore loose from its guyrope and reared, with its great head and its corded, muscled neck thrown back, its front legs dabbling helplessly at the empty air, its vocal chords stretched and tearing with the terrible screaming that arose from deep within. The arrow bristled from its right eye, and the animal’s screams seemed to cry out to heaven in despairing protest that anyone, anything, should feel such pain in this world. Lucius was at the horse’s side even as it reared, and as it came crashing down again he ducked beneath its neck and drove his swordpoint with all his might, two-handed, into its carotid artery, just below its jaw. The blood spurted out in a hot jet, and the horse was dead by the time it hit the dust.

But it was hopeless. The arrows came down in a cruel rain upon the wretched beasts’ backs and withers, and they began to tear loose and panic. Tugha Ban was somewhere in the centre. Lucius ran across the stockade to the eastern edge of the circle, trying to block out the sound of the horses’ screams that filled the air. He plunged into the melee with a roar, driving back a knot of Gothic warriors, seized the stockade poles and began to wrench them out of the earth. He found Ops nearby and bellowed at him to do the same. Soon they had torn a breach five or six feet wide in their own defences. Lucius returned to the milling, rearing horses, and drove them towards the gap. The stricken beasts stumbled through the breach and out across the battlefield, the boy’s stolen mule following stiff-legged after them, breaking up the lines of Gothic warriors and trampling one or two under their hooves. The Goths closed ranks, set the butts of their pikes into the earth, and drove the long iron heads into the horses as they came. Lucius could no longer watch. He hardly knew which was worse, the slaughter of men or the slaughter of horses.

He and Ops set the staves again and closed up the gap. The Gothic onrush was temporarily broken by the stampede, but it wouldn’t last. His men slumped against the wooden barrier, exhausted. Their mouths were cracked and dry with thirst, their throats as rough as sharkskin from shouting; but the water was all gone. Ops was drenched from neck to waist in blood; it was unclear whose.

Lucius felt every muscle in his body burning, and could scarcely believe he could still muster the strength to raise his sword-arm. His hands trembled uncontrollably with strain, his eyes were blurred and stinging with sweat and dust. He had long since thrown aside his heavy shield. They could only hold back one more onslaught, he knew. A second would destroy them all.

Then it came.

His men dragged themselves to their feet for the last time, uncomplaining, unsurprised and in silence, too exhausted even to give the battle-cry. They fought with astonishing ferocity, with the fury of despair, of men who know they are going to die. In such a mood, a man can take a wound which would bring him to the ground in any normal circumstances, and yet fight on. So, yet again, the Goths’ charge broke against the ranks of Roman swords and spears, what few remained, and they were forced to a standstill at the stockade; where, yet again, it came to a grim exchange of grunting blows, of wounds taken and wounds received and no quarter given on either side. Again, to the exhausted relief of the soldiers, the Gothic line fell back to regroup once more. Their retreat was slow and stumbling, the ground strewn as it was with the corpses heaped up in stark and scarecrow attitudes. A slain Gothic warrior sat in the dust bolt upright, facing the stockade where he had died. His severed head lay in the dust close by. Another lay cloven from the crown of his head to his belly, his intestines dragged out over many yards of ground where they had been caught by the hooves of passing horses. The air stank with the odour of spilt blood and of the ruptured bellies and bowels of men and horses.

An eerie silence fell over the battlefield as the dust settled between the two opposing warbands. Lucius saw to his despair that, although many Goths had fallen, many remained. They formed up three ranks deep, curving round to left and right; soon they would come again, and this time they would triumph. It would be a victory dearly bought, but it would be a victory none the less. All for the strange and glittering-eyed boy from the steppes of Scythia, who even now, to Lucius’ disgust, was sauntering round the perimeter of the stockade, whistling to himself and taking scalps.

The Gothic warlord sat mounted and still on his black horse to the far right of his ranks. He surveyed the chaos of the battlefield with apparent serenity.

Lucius looked around. Crates was on his knees in the dust, cradling his stump of an arm. Lucius called out to him, and the lithe, clever little Greek looked up at him very slowly, his mouth hanging open as if he were an idiot, all his sharp, sardonic wit drained from him with his lifeblood. And then, like a moment from a nightmare, his eyes still fixed on his commanding officer, Crates slumped sideways and fell dead into the dust.

Young Salcus lay dead nearby, a spear driven through his skinny ribs and deep into the ground below. And there lay Ops, too, Ops Invictus, Ops the Unvanquished from Caledonia to Egypt, from Syria to the banks of the Danube. But he was vanquished now, at last, in the very heart of Italy, arrows bristling from his great mound of a belly like a porcupine’s quills. Marco sat hunched, tawny with dust from head to foot as if he had been perversely anointed, his hands clutching his side. Surely not Marco, too… In a panic, Lucius called his name. Marco looked up at him and then down again. He said nothing. Slowly and painfully he clambered to his feet, one hand still clutching his side, and came to stand near his commanding officer. Marco wouldn’t be so easily beaten.

They were the only two men still standing. They and the boy. The boy, of course, the cause of all this mayhem, was still standing. Nothing could destroy him. Naked to the waist, sword in hand, top-knot tied and decorated with a plait of horsehair, his whole body thickly pasted with blood and sweat and dust – and none of that blood was his own, Lucius felt sure, not a drop of his own wild blood had been spilt. The boy eyed Lucius evenly across the corpse-strewn arena of the stockade, drew his sword-blade swiftly through the folds of his filthy, ragged tunic, which still hung from his belt, further garlanded with ragged and gory hanks of human scalp. And then he grinned.

The stockade was breached in three places, and the carriages were no more than a heap of ashes. There were three of them left to fight, and a hundred horsemen were about to ride in and slay them. They were finished. And the boy grinned.

Lucius looked at the ranks of standing men across the plateau. ‘You gods,’ he whispered, but with deep and bitter accusation. ‘ You gods.’

The Gothic warlord raised his gauntleted hand for the last time.

Here they came now. The rear, untried ranks of horsemen were mounting up. The walking wounded were retiring to the shade and coolness of the forest edge, but the rest were riding forward. They would fight on horseback now. They would simply ride in and slaughter the last remnants of this troublesome century.

Here they came.

Beside him, Marco looked up. ‘To the otherworld, sir,’ he said.

‘To the otherworld.’

The horsemen did not even break into a gallop. No more than twenty yards from the stockade, the Gothic warlord raised his hand again and they came to a halt.

‘What the hell are they playing at?’ growled Marco. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ he yelled at them. ‘Come on! What are you waiting for?’

The ranks of tall, plumed horsemen sat their horses and didn’t stir.

Then their leader heeled his horse and rode forward, just as he had only yesterday evening, many lives and deaths ago. He stopped near the stockade, turned his long ashen spear deftly in his right hand, and drove the head deep into the ground in front of him. His sword remained in his long scabbard. For a moment he bowed his helmeted head, and when he raised it again, Lucius saw to his astonishment that his eyes were bright with tears.

He spoke quietly, but they heard his every word.

‘The battle is ended. The boy is yours. We will no longer fight against those who fight so bravely. We salute you, our brothers.’

As one, the horsemen raised their right hands, empty now of weapons.

Then they turned and rode away. The dust settled behind their thundering hooves, and the plateau was silent.

In a daze, Lucius wandered out onto the battlefield, Marco close behind him.

After a while Marco called, ‘Man alive here, sir.’

Lucius went over. The warrior was badly wounded, blood bubbling from a hole in his chest. Marco stooped over him and tore off the warrior’s helmet. He had cropped dark hair and, now they looked closely, his eyes…

‘Never saw a Goth with brown eyes before.’

The man begged for water, his voice grating with thirst, but Marco said they had none. Instead he demanded, in the Gothic tongue, ‘ Hva? ata wair? an? ’

The man closed his eyes, ready to die.

‘Get off him,’ Marco growled at his unseen, immortal adversary, gliding over the battlefield in his long black robes. ‘A minute more.’ He shook the dying man roughly, and demanded again, ‘ Hva? ata wair? an? Who are you?’

The man’s eyelids fluttered and he groaned. ‘Don’t understand. Speak Latin.’

His brain reeling, Marco did so.

The soldier gasped, ‘Batavian cavalry, second ala, Roman auxiliaries, the Danube station.’

‘Not Goths?’

The soldier smiled faintly. ‘Not Goths.’ Blood frothed from between his cracked lips.

‘Why? Who sent you?’

‘We were waiting for orders… The boy…’

But the dying soldier’s mind was already dimmed, and his inner eye saw nothing but the light beyond, and the outstretched arms of his wife, standing in the sunlit fields across the wide river.

Then his head fell to one side and his breath died.

Marco laid him gently down. His enemy. His Roman brother-in-arms.

The two officers felt another presence close by, and found the boy standing behind them.

‘They were Romans,’ he said.

Lucius shook his head.

‘They were Romans,’ insisted Attila, ‘sent to kill me.’

‘They were auxiliaries, Batavians,’ muttered Lucius.

‘Same thing.’

‘I knew from how they fought,’ said Marco. ‘None of it was right.’

He looked at his commanding officer. He had never seen him sunk so low. Lucius had seen his entire, loyal, beloved century wiped out in just two bloody hours – and on the obscure and treacherous orders of Rome. The lieutenant’s head sank down upon his chest, as if burdened with a crown of lead.

Marco felt the same. There was nothing left for them here, or anywhere. Nowhere left for them to go. He said, ‘Suggestion, sir: they didn’t expect such a fight, if any. They take the Hun boy here from us. We ride on to Ravenna. We report in all good faith that a Gothic warband has seized the boy. The boy is never seen again.’ Marco looked aside at Attila. ‘Sorry, son, but I don’t think they’d have given you a hot bath and warm blankets to sleep in.’ He resumed to Lucius, struggling to hold on. ‘So word gets back to Uldin that his grandson has been captured, presumed killed, by Gothic raiders. An insult no Hun king would take lying down.’

Lucius was ominously silent.

The boy was eager, though. ‘So he turns on the Gothic army of Alaric?’ he said. ‘Attacking them from behind, as they are attacking Rome?’

Lucius shook his head and gave a deep sigh. ‘Like I’ve said before,’ he said very quietly, ‘I’m glad I’m only a dumb, bone-headed soldier, and not a politician.’

He felt unspeakably weary. And he realised that they shouldn’t be having this conversation in front of the boy.

But the boy had heard and understood it all. His slanted, leonine eyes were already burning from within. ‘I know who ordered it,’ he said softly. ‘I understand.’

Marco tried to straighten up, but instead he gave a weak groan and sank down on his knees again, his hands stretched out in the dirt, clasping at nothing.

Lucius was at his side, urgently. ‘Marco!’

Marco turned stiffly and sat down, his head dropping. He felt he had no strength left in his powerful neck.

‘Marco, not you too.’

‘It is time, sir,’ said the centurion. ‘It was time for a lot of us today.’

It was the wound in his side. He had ignored it, as he always ignored his wounds. ‘Either they go away,’ he used to say, ‘or you do.’ Until now, he had always got the better of them. But this one was different. His whole body ran cold, and his limbs trembled.

Lucius cried out his name, and ordered him to stand. ‘On your feet, soldier!’ He could almost have struck him in his sudden rage.

‘Just a few minutes more, officer,’ said Marco. Farewell, warm time. Hail, cold eternity. He could no longer see. ‘May the gods keep you,’ he whispered. ‘It has been good to serve with a man like you.’

Then he rolled onto his side and curled up on the ground, smiling gently to himself. That great muscled, battle-scarred body, curled up like a baby in the womb. As at my beginning, so at my end. He breathed almost silently now, hands clutched to his stomach, blood seeping afresh from under his tunic. Lucius stood over him, utterly at a loss, speechless with anger. Marco stopped breathing. The blood stopped seeping.

Attila turned away, puzzled at himself, unable to watch, unable to listen. He walked away over the battlefield to find his mule.

Lucius sank to his knees with a howl, and dragged at his centurion’s broad shoulders. He raised up his body, cradled his grizzled head in his lap, and wept.

Attila came back a few minutes later, leading his mule by its frayed rope. Lucius was still kneeling in the dust beside his centurion.

The boy stood near him for a while, and then he said quietly, ‘I’m going now.’

Lucius nodded.

The boy hesitated a while longer, then he said, ‘Rome’s all done, like I said before. You should get back to Britain.’

Lucius said nothing. He knew of nothing worth saying. And he suddenly felt that words of Latin, the language of Rome, would stick in his throat like fishbones.

‘Your homeland,’ said the boy with a strange urgency.

Lucius nodded. His homeland. His heartland. Then he said, in the language of his own people, ‘ Mae hiraeth arnath Britan. My heart is longing for Britain.’

The boy knew nothing of the Celtic language, but there was no need. He understood every word from the longing with which the lieutenant spoke.

Still he hesitated. Then he said, ‘I owe you my life. I will not forget.’

At last Lucius turned round. ‘Do not forget,’ he said quietly. ‘In the years to come.’ He watched the boy scramble up onto his mule, without a trace of tiredness, as if the morning’s desperate fighting had been nothing to him but a stroll in the meadows. ‘Ride safely, young one.’

Attila nodded. ‘I’ll survive.’

The ghost of a smile passed over Lucius’ face. ‘I don’t doubt it.’

The boy kicked the mule’s bony flanks and it lurched forwards stiff-legged away over the plateau, northwards and into the trees.

Lucius watched him go for a long time.