The Judgement

10

Sabinus visited the wounded and exhausted men seated around the whitewashed walls of the little hospital. The pallets within had all long since been filled. The air echoed with soft groans. The men, their bare skin, their clothing, their armour, all seemed only a coat of dark dust and shining redness. About them the stench of sweat and blood. A few auxiliaries tried their best to keep away the tormenting flies. Oh God for reinforcements. There would be none left to reinforce soon. Abject rescue, then. But still from the east and Ratiaria… nothing. They were as alone as ever.

‘Sir,’ said his last standing decurion. ‘Hun deputation at the west gate again.’

It took him time to walk back up to the gate-tower, treading very carefully, hand on his side.

Below the tower sat the stone-faced warlord, ringed by his finest, freshest warriors, a hundred of them, arrows nocked to the bow.

The warlord raised his face to him. ‘You have fought well,’ he said. ‘Almost like Huns. So much for the decadence of the West.’ He smiled a brief smile, as if at some private joke. ‘Nevertheless, your cowards of cavalrymen who rode against my innocent people are all destroyed. As are you. Now I will grant you amnesty. Those of you who still live may walk free from this fort and leave us to raze it flat. You may walk to the next frontier fort eastwards. It is called Ratiaria – you know it well enough. The Legio III Pannonia is stationed there, a full six thousand men. The legate’s name is Posthumus. He shares his bed with a whore called Statina.’ Another smile. ‘Do not think we are entirely ignorant savages, Roman. Do not underestimate us.’

‘I do not underestimate you,’ said Sabinus.

‘Very well, then,’ said the warlord. ‘Lead your survivors east to Ratiaria, and tell them there of your destruction.’

Sabinus looked around. A single exhausted legionary sat nearby in the deepening shadow of the battlements, bow resting on his knees. They exchanged looks. The legionary was too tired even to speak, but he shook his head.

Further along, one of his comrades growled, ‘Tell him to go fuck himself. Pardoning my language.’

Sabinus’ grim smile did not reflect the tangle and stir of his emotions. He looked back down at the warlord. ‘What is the name of your god?’

The Hun scowled ferociously. He had not come to bandy words, but to give orders. ‘No Roman dog speaks that holy name.’

‘Their god is called Astur,’ said another voice nearby. It was Arapovian. ‘Astur, the All-Father, Great Eagle of the Eternal Blue Sky.’

Sabinus gazed down very steadily at the warlord and said, ‘May Astur curse you. May you and all your tribe vanish from the earth.’

At those words, a shadow of preternatural darkness passed over the warlord’s face. Sabinus kept steady. A hundred arrowheads were aimed at him. Then the warlord wrenched his pony round and tore away across the plain, his men following.

The legate took a careful breath. He ordered all fit and walking to the walls once more. ‘The day is not yet done.’

And the men rose to their feet once more, the last few dozen of them. About sixty or seventy men, bearing twice as many wounds between them. Some helped others stumble forward, some used their own pikes for crutches. Some went up the narrow stone steps to the battlements on their hands and knees.

The sun was going down in the west. For a while the Huns appeared to pause in their attack.

‘Perhaps they will allow us a good night’s sleep,’ growled Tatullus. It was a joke, of sorts. Night was when they would come again to finish it.

For now, there was an eerie peace. Swallows hawked low over the evening river, feeding on clouds of waterflies. A moorhen called her chicks. A muted splash among the nodding reeds – otter or watervole. The warm summer sun going down in the west. Burning orange against the great white flanks of the Alps. Setting the Rhine and the Po on fire. Casting long, cool shadows over the vineyards of Provence and Aquitania, over the ancient, lion-coloured castles and hilltowns of Spain where Hannibal once marched, and over the Immortal City itself on its seven hills. The evening shadow of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and the Colossus of Nero… Sabinus’ heart heaved with sorrow. This beloved empire. He had seen the future, in the implacable face of that mighty barbarian warlord who rode out of nowhere, at head of an army of horsemen that no man could number. The empire was sinking in the west, as surely as the silent sun.

Lone horsemen galloped back and forth across the plains below, stripping armour from the dead, burning them like refuse. Occasionally, through the sun-reddened dust, the watchers on the wall glimpsed a yowling figure in tribal wear but now sporting some additional decoration. A triumphal Kutrigur Hun, naked except for a tattered deerskin loincloth, bristling with bow and quiver, shaven-headed but for a single plume of limed hair, his skin half blue with tattoos, and proudly riding with a curtal red cavalry cloak fluttering round his coppery shoulders, and, slung from his saddle, a freshly severed head. He waved his sword beneath the walls of the fort and howled like a wolf in winter.

Knuckles threw a rock at him and missed. Overhead, the buzzards circled in the last of the sun. More had joined them, red kites. ‘Fuckin’ carrion birds,’ growled the hulking Rhinelander. Then he raised his head to the sky and shouted to them, ‘Plenty of carrion tonight, friends! Guzzle your cropful! Hun and Roman flesh together, it all tastes the same under the skin!’

Just after the first stars appeared in the darkening sky, Lyra and Altair high and Regulus falling, there came wearisomely familiar sounds: distant thump, then shuddering quake. They were hitting the south-west tower once more. They would be in very soon.

‘Start bagging again!’ ordered Sabinus.

And the men, who had not slept for thirty-six hours, forty, began to bag up the broken defences by torchlight. One collapsed under a sandbag. Tatullus kicked him to his feet again. ‘You can sleep when you get to Hades,’ he growled. ‘Which won’t be long now. Until then, soldier, you get on your feet and work.’

Sabinus himself re-ascended to his post on the west tower and slumped.

I had hope when violence was ceas’t…

The line echoed in his head. An old poet. Virgil, perhaps. His schooldays seemed an age ago. Merely lifting his head was an effort, his very neck bones aching with weariness. But he gazed heavenwards anyway and surveyed the fixed stars pinned to the canopy of night. Some said they were alchemical furnaces where new souls were forged; the pristine, superlunary abode of the gods, of mercy and justice eternal. They looked very far away. The night was so silent. Help would not come. They could not go on. They were finished.

Tatullus stood beside him.

It was unjust. The gods were unjust. They had fought all day and half the night like lions, and by the next dawn they would all lie dead. Yet how should you complain to the gods? You might as well try to reason with Etna. The world was as it was.

Tatullus glanced at him. And for some reason, at that moment, unutterably weary and foredefeated as they were, the two men smiled. As if to say, in concord with each other, Well, all men must die. We did our best – and our best was good.

The Armenian appeared. He did not wait for permission to speak. ‘I said you would not defeat them in open country.’

Tatullus turned a menacing eye on him. ‘He’s “sir” to you, soldier.’

Arapovian was apparently unaware of the glowering centurion’s presence. And he addressed no man as ‘sir’.

‘You know your only chance now: to fight them hand-to-hand and damage them. To hold them, to bloody them, to buy time until reinforcements come.’ He adjusted his sword-belt. ‘Of course, if they wish to overrun you here no matter what the cost, and no reinforcements come to your aid, we shall all die anyway.’

Another seismic onager strike.

‘A Roman legionary legate does not customarily take counsel from a common soldier,’ said Sabinus, aware even as he said it that Arapovian was no common soldier.

The Armenian continued, unabashed, ‘My ancestors fought the Huns before. Hepthalite Huns. On the high plains of Ararat, where the Euphrates rises from snowmelt off the mountains, flowing down to water the broad cornlands of Erzinjan and Erzerum, and the sweet orchards of-’

‘Forgive the interruption,’ said Sabinus, ‘but now is really not the time for poetry.’

Arapovian heard him with dignity. ‘My grandfather died fighting the Huns. They will always gallop faster than you, shoot further than you. You need to draw them in, separate them from their horses, as you did with the line of pikemen. That hurt them.’

‘Thank you for your sage military advice, my lord,’ growled the legate, one hand holding his side, one fist clenched on the wall. ‘And how do you suggest we do that, in your mysterious eastern wisdom? Send them a fucking dinner invitation?’

Another massive shock. The sound of collapsing masonry.

Arapovian inclined his head in that calamitous direction. ‘Let them into the fort. Stop reinforcing the wall and the tower, and let them fall. Meet them in the rubble, hand-to-hand, where their arrows and horsemanship are useless. That fellow Caestus, the boor, he will fight well enough face to face with them. Now he is wasted. Soon he will be shot.’

Sabinus reflected a moment. Then, ‘Get back below, soldier.’

He reflected some more. It insulted his pride to hear advice from a common soldier, Armenian naxarar of ancient lineage or no. It insulted his pride even more to put that advice into action. But…

The rumble of galloping hooves, a sudden shower of arrows out of the gathering gloom. Another cry from the battlements. Another fall.

The tower would collapse soon enough, anyway. They could ready themselves for it.

Along the wall, one young soldier had lost it. The boy Julianus, the one he’d tried to nerve with fine talk. But what could have prepared him for this? The boy was crawling around on his hands and knees, sobbing, howling like a dog. Another soldier dragged him off down below. He would not be back this time.

Sabinus held his breath a moment, slugged back a last mouthful of wine to kill the pain. Then he gave his runner the order.

‘Stop bagging up the south-west tower! Evacuate! Let it fall.’

The man hesitated. ‘Sir?’

He did not repeat himself. The soldier went.

Perhaps the Armenian was right. Over the chaos of rubble where the tower lay in ruins, they’d make their stand. The barbarian horsemen would find that a harder line to break. The Spartans used to boast that their walls were made of men, not stones.

It was as Sabinus had reckoned. The Hun artillerymen – the very phrase seemed an idiotic contradiction in terms for these know-nothing horse-warriors, but whoever they were, Huns or Vandals or other unknown easterners, they continued their steady onslaught into the night.

Sabinus ranged his last men with their pikes, Tatullus with his billhook, Knuckles with his club, facing the battered south-west tower and wall. It was dark. Behind them he had his auxiliaries light a row of big braziers.

Another massive hit. The walls trembled and stilled. Then as if in a dream, very slowly, reluctantly, the tower began to subside into itself, the neighbouring walls began to fold and fall. Sabinus hazed his men back. But the tower was so damaged below that it simply collapsed in on itself with a muffled subterranean music. It seemed to take for ever for the stones to reach the earth, or pile up one another at broken angles. The noise of collapse ebbed, and from far away they could hear rising cheers and ululations. The dust gradually diminished and they saw what faced them. A rupture in the walls about fifty feet wide, blocked by a mound of stones, rubble and projecting wooden beams, about half the height of the old walls: fifteen, twenty feet.

‘To the top!’ roared Sabinus. ‘Watch for incoming fire!’

The last of the legion climbed arduously towards the top of the rubble ridge and peered over.

An army of horsemen was galloping towards them. The Romans were seen, silhouetted against the light of the braziers, and the horsemen loosed their arrows. The defenders ducked down and the arrows clattered uselessly over them.

‘Come on, you pigeon-livered savages!’ roared Knuckles, the veins like cords in his neck. He smacked his club into his hand. ‘Come and get cosy!’

The savages barely reined in as they approached, seemingly intent on galloping up the rubble mound and straight on into the fort. But no one’s horsemanship was that good. One young hothead tried it. Arapovian stepped from the shadows and shot him.

‘Lose your bow, soldier!’ bellowed Tatullus angrily. ‘Draw your sword! This one’s hand-to-hand!’

For once, Arapovian obeyed.

The dead Hun’s horse twisted and fell, a foreleg caught between two broken stones, and rolled back screaming. Huns milled again at the foot of the mound, bewildered.

‘Yeah, horse-fuckers!’ roared Knuckles. ‘You’ll have to leave your girlfriends behind this time!’

But not yet. The Huns wheeled away again into the night, accustomed only to their warrior arts of archery and horsemanship. They loosed more volleys of arrows in retreat. The arrows came over the barricade and clattered uselessly into the yard beyond. They did the same again and again, feeling not a single arrow in returning fire. But their attack was useless. They struck nothing. Even the Huns couldn’t keep up this wastage.

‘They’ve got to engage soon,’ murmured Arapovian. ‘It’s a matter of pride.’

One last try. A fast gallop before them, a column of horse archers firing directly into the defensive line.

‘Heads!’

Step back, duck, shields up. The arrows thumped into the big oval shields or slid over the top, again to no avail. Not a Roman was hit. They galloped away.

Tired but jubilant legionaries set their shields down in the rubble again, lopped off the jutting arrow-shafts. Took deep breaths, wiped away the sweat.

‘We’re still here, you yellow-bellied horse-fuckers!’

Now the Hun generals understood. It would have to be hand-to-hand to finish this. Their warriors rode near in the darkness, slipped from their mounts, hooked their bows onto their saddlepoints, drew their swords, and came scrambling up the rubble.

The defenders took to the top of the ridge.

‘OK, boys!’ roared Sabinus. ‘Face to face at last! No quarter!’

The Huns came up in a mass surge, without discipline now, desperate to finish it, to squeeze into the fort and have the victory – they, too, had taken plenty of casualties today. But a thousand, two thousand, were trying to squeeze through a gap held by fifty men, and their greater numbers told against them. They barely left each other room to swing their swords. And now the burning amber light of the big braziers behind the defenders showed itself of use. The defenders fought dark and silhouetted, but the attackers had to face into it. Their eyes dazzled, coppery skin shiny with sweat, arms and shoulders rippling with muscles and tattoos and elaborate hennaed runes of protection, which did nothing to protect them from those severe, pragmatical Roman pikes. Up close, the legionaries saw the barbarous magnificence of their enemies at last, magnified in the flaming darkness. Like warriors out of Homer or an even deeper past: the deep, unwritten Scythian past. The untamed warriors looked almost beautiful to them as they cut them down.

Knuckles clapped his bronze-studded forearms together round a warrior’s shaven head and split it open like a raw egg. He turned and kicked a heavy boot into another Hun. The Hun staggered and swiped at him with his dagger. Knuckles twisted, more agile than he looked. The desperate struggle was too tight-packed for him to swing his club, so he drove it into the Hun’s face like a ram. The big easterner fell back and knocked his comrade behind him flying. Arapovian leapt forward and with two sharp thrusts skewered them both where they lay stunned amid the tumbled masonry, then fell back into line.

Huns howled with fury, came on relentlessly. Tatullus worked like Knuckles, thusting his billhook in long, low stabs. Arapovian’s swordsmanship was as good as his bowmanship. Another wiry little Hun nearly had him with a swipe of his yatagan but Arapovian squatted down just in time and drove his sword into the man’s naked belly. He immediately stood again, kicked the corpse off the end of his blade, and drew back ready for the next one, who came on at once.

The Hun warriors hated this fight. Too fetid and enclosed, without space to manoeuvre, with no room for the sudden spurting gallop, the extravagant caracole, the graceful arc of lethal, streamlined arrow. This was furious and filthy stuff, bloody pummelling in the shadows of ruined and alien walls, the clean air of the steppes a thousand miles away. Their horses milled behind them, uncertain. If their father Astur should cry to them out of the night sky, they would not hear him.

Their loss of confidence showed in their expressions, their movements, and the defenders punished it without pity. Knuckles’ mastery of the blunt arts of bludgeon and punch, those straps of bull’s-hide wound round his ape-like forearms, took a terrible toll. So, too, did his quick, surprising agility, like a big cat, the way a lion can be nimble for brief bursts when hunting. He gave himself a moment of space, his huge club slewed sideways, men’s brains shot from their ruptured skulls as if spat out, grey roe slithering down their comrades’ shoulders. Stumbling in the blood and slime, the Huns were filled with enfeebling disgust, panic, even claustrophobia. Where now was the glorious Parthian flight upon the open plains, wind in your hair?

Tatullus killed two attackers with two hard thrusts, only moments apart. Knuckles cracked open another skull. A smaller Hun tried to dive in sideways and thrust his yatagan into his flank, but again Knuckles swivelled, dodged the thrust, swept his arm back and with a mighty swashing blow caught the warrior across the side of his head. The dull bronze studs thunked, the fellow saw red and dropped senseless. Knuckles moved his foot and broke his neck.

The steep and jagged outward slope of the rubble ridge was slippery with blood, and worse. Sabinus moved carefully along behind and below his men, shouting words of encouragement. Not one of the line was down yet. My God, it’s like old times, thought Sabinus: Roman soldiers doing what they do best, standing shoulder to shoulder, pitiless, immoveable, the steel mincing-machine. Meanwhile, down at the bottom of the ridge, the Hun bodies were piling up like swine in an abattoir.

Arapovian’s plan had been a good one; or the best they could come up with as things stood. Stab, thrust, slash. The defenders were beyond exhaustion, but drawing some infernal gallows energy from the terrible attrition suffered by their bewildered enemy. The Huns could not make headway, and their fury made them foolish. Wave after wave came up against the line of pikes ranged against them, cold as moonlight. And wave after wave fell back again, ruptured or slain. Even for these adamantine steppe warriors, this night was turning into nightmare.

Sabinus saw Arapovian pause and look away.

The Armenian turned back to the line, defended himself against another attack, lopped off an arm, planted his foot in the man’s chest and kicked him back down the slope. Turned his head and listened again.

Sabinus’ heart leaped. The Armenian’s sharp ears had heard… trumpets! The legate turned to listen to that sweet sound. A pause. And then…

He closed his eyes. It was not trumpets. It was a massive weight hitting the south gates.

One last time he struggled up the steps to the battlements.

They had brought one of the onagers up. It was fifty yards off, loosing boulders into the oaken south gates on a low, flat, brutal trajectory.

He went down again, tightening his bronze cuirass about his big belly as tight as he could bear. Like dying in harness. He went steadily over to the south gates. Whumpff. The gates rocked back, the big crossbeams rattled in their braces, splinters flew. The Armenian’s idea had been a good one, for a desperate last stand. But it, too, had failed.

But they, the VIIth Legion, how well they had failed! Could any legion have failed as gloriously as they had? Oh that one or two should survive, to tell their story to posterity. Such a story would live for generations. A night and a day they had stood firm against a whole army. And still they fought. That wasn’t bad. That must count as a kind of heroes’ death.

The gates beside him reeled again under impact, and unmanly tears came to his eyes as he watched the last of his men fighting and dying there upon the dark, discoloured rubble of the ruptured tower. They had still not heard the onager. Part-timers, farmers, married with wives and children. He knew what they were fighting for, with ferocity born of desperation. Not for Rome, either old or new, nor for the emperor on his gilded throne. They were fighting for the wives and children left on their farmsteads and smallholdings, or trembling down in the dungeons. The gates beside him splintered further. God have mercy on those trapped wretches down below. Only two fates possible for them now, the better of which was a life in chains amid barbarian tents.

For him, there would be no Thracian vineyard, nor sharp-tongued, ardent-hearted Domitilla. Three months to go. The luck of Cassandra. For these barbarians, who had destroyed his life and his peaceful old age, he let his hatred well up. Felt its coursing power burn in his veins. Hefted his sword, a short, old-style gladius. The fury and the mire of human veins. The distant fury of battle. But coming close now, in this last act, last scene of his battered old life. His own death was already in the past, written in the old book of the gods. He tightened his belt another notch around his bleeding belly. It wasn’t true that you felt no fear. Even old soldiers felt fear. But all men must die. The gates were nearly done. He looked up one last time. Make it glorious, my brave legionaries. Make it cost them dear.

He leaned down painfully to take the shield from one of his own dead, gently unloosing the man’s stiffened fingers from the wooden grip. Stood again. When those gates finally gave way, the Huns would find one still in their path.

The attack in the corner had slowed briefly, leaving his men standing down, stoop-shouldered with exhaustion. Ungainly stick figures lit from below by the orange brazier light. Heroes all. Beyond, the enemy had pulled back yet again, heavily bloodied, sullen, furious. And now in the stillness, the last legionaries heard what Arapovian had heard. The sound of the accursed onager hurling its rocks, and the south gates going. Soon, very soon now, they would be surrounded. Attacked from before and behind, the fort overrun through the south gate, however hard they fought here. They looked at each other, barely able to raise their heads on their shoulders. Their eyes shone. They nodded. Heroes all.

They looked back to their commander below by the wall. He could not climb up to them any more. They knew it. He leaned close to the south wall, shield on his shoulder, short-sword drawn, face plastered with cold sweat, looking up at them.

Only one of his men still had the spirit to speak. ‘It has been an honour serving with you, sir!’

Sabinus raised his hand to him. To all of them. A salute to equals. The rest of the men saluted him in reply. Some of them almost smiled.

And then the gates flew in.