The Judgement

11

The last of the defenders instantly lost all formation, and broke and ran. Within moments the neat grid-pattern streets and alleyways of the fortress were overrun with screaming horsemen. They galloped in triumph, racing each other to set each barrack building alight. Cutting down any last stragglers of the destroyed legion, or lassoing them as they fled, and dragging them along behind in the dust as tortured trophies. Fires blazed up in the night, sparks and stars. The appetite for destruction seemed inexhaustible. Soon they clustered around the legionary principia. They ransacked the elegant rooms, smashed vases and glassware, dragged out tables and couches, made a huge bonfire in the centre of the colonnaded courtyard. Others roped together teams of horses to drag down the pillars and roofbeams and crash the whole building. Word had gone out from the Great Tanjou. Not a stone should be left standing. The very name of Viminacium would denote eloquent desolation for an entire empire.

Warriors still on horseback, inseparable from their mounts, some wearing embroidered Roman curtains for cloaks around their naked shoulders, rode into the chapel and collected the last of the legionary standards to add to the fire. Then word came from the leader that there was gold beneath the altar.

Behind VII Barrack stood the long, low punishment block, comprising a row of dank, evil-smelling cells without windows, and a narrow corridor with one doorway at the end. The building was heavily tiled, not thatched, for greater security. As if by instinct, Knuckles and Arapovian found themselves backing into it side by side, peering out for oncoming Huns.

‘Christ. No getting away from some people,’ said Knuckles.

‘The families,’ said Arapovian, jerking his head back.

Knuckles glanced round. Aside from four or five corpses already strewn across the stoneflagged floor behind him, in the gloom at the other end of the corridor he saw a heavy iron-bound trapdoor set into the flagstones. It must lead down to the dungeons. They could still ‘Jesus!’ Arapovian rarely swore, but suddenly the doorway was shadowed by a Hun horseman. He brought him down with single arrow and Knuckles finished him with his club. They stepped back into the shadows.

‘Brilliant,’ said Knuckles. ‘That’ll bring ’em in like flies.’

‘Bag up the trapdoor at the end,’ gasped Arapovian. ‘With those bodies.’

Knuckles scowled. ‘I don’t take orders from you, you Parsee bastard.’

Arapovian ignored him. There was a group of plumed and feathered warriors coming down the alley, stained bloody in the torchlight. They had seen the riderless horse, the dark shape on the ground.

‘Do it now. Hide the trapdoor. When they come stampeding in over our corpses, they might not find it – the families might yet survive. The dead and the living both walk free in their own way from these unbelieving savages.’

‘Christ in a crib,’ growled Knuckles. But, grumbling about being no slaughterhouse slave, he began to haul the bodies down the passageway, the flagstones slathered in gore, and stacked them over the iron door like saltfish. Thump, thump of meat. He wondered about the families, women and children and toothless ancients, down in the pitch darkness of those foul dungeons. The airless terror, the unknowing. Yet they might survive.

He surveyed the stack of bodies. ‘Can’t we hide under ’em?’ he suggested.

‘No time,’ said Arapovian, and slashed out with his sword.

The building was surrounded. The two men fought again side by side like demons in the protection of the narrow doorway. Copper faces, bodies, torchlight, bared teeth, a muscular neck before them decorated with severed ears on a thong. Arapovian beheaded him. Nearby they could hear the battering of someone trying to break through the walls, but the building was strongly built: men held for execution often try to escape. Likewise on the roof, warriors tearing off the heavy baked tiles found only more thick crossbeams beneath. The confusion was atrocious, the Huns’ desperation to be in and finish this job making them careless. Knuckles swiped one aside with his studded forearm, caved another face in with his club. Behind the milling crowd, another Hun still mounted loosed an arrow at them and succeeded only in killing one of his own in the crush. It was absurd, but they could not get at these last two. One waved a squat pickaxe, howling and almost dancing with frustration. Arapovian slashed at him, and Knuckles continued to use his club like a fist to defend the narrow doorway, punching out, smashing heads, caving in chests. Warriors howled execrations, tore at each other in their frenzy to kill these two trapped men, these standing insults to their victory.

‘Collapse the roof!’ called a Hun commander calmly from behind. He sat back on his horse, indicating his meaning with a wave of his hand. ‘Then fire it. Bring up that handcart there. The rest of you, fall back.’

Frenzied or not, the painted savages obeyed in an instant. Then they ran the flaming handcart across the doorway and tipped it inwards. Knuckles and Arapovian leaped back as blazing bales tumbled into the blocked corridor amid roiling clouds of smoke, and their lungs began to constrict, their eyes to redden and water and go blind.

Geukchu nodded with grim approval. ‘Let the fire take them. A fine cremation for two such mighty heroes of the empire. A warrior pyre.’

Arapovian squatted back, his arms held out as poor shields before his face. They were piling more blazing bales onto the roof. The timbers began to burn.

‘You know something?’ roared Knuckles. ‘Rome’s city firefighters, they never eat roast pork. Can’t stand the smell. Exactly the same as roast human.’

Arapovian shuffled in the dense smoke. ‘We need to clear the dungeon door again.’

Knuckles didn’t move.

‘Fine. Stay here and roast.’

Knuckles made a noise like frustrated bear and lumbered after the impossible Armenian.

Choking on smoke, hair singed, coursing with sweat and deafened with the roar of the flames, they recommenced the foul work. Dragging corpses from the pile was worse when you pulled an arm or a leg and the body didn’t come with it. By the time they had cleared the trapdoor the smoke was impenetrable.

‘Can’t see a fuckin’ thing,’ rasped Knuckles. ‘But I bet you need a bath.’

Silence.

‘Parsee?’

Still silence. Then the creak of the heavy iron trapdoor.

‘You did it!’ Knuckles flailed around for a moment to give the easterner a thump on the back, but Arapovian was already down the steps. Knuckles’s hair was smouldering and he couldn’t breathe, so he groped his way down – just ahead of the crash of the collapsing roof, and a ferocious through-draught which cleared the smoke from the building and set the fires roaring up like furnaces. The two men were suddenly and hellishly illuminated as they descended the narrow stone steps to the dungeons, backlit by a curtain of flame. The people below, the mothers and maidens and wide-eyed infants, gazing up in terror, saw two figures descending towards them out of the jaws of the fire, blood-red and blackened from head to toe.

They must be in hell.

Knuckles turned awkwardly on the narrow steps, slippery with algae, pulled one of the cadavers over the raised trapdoor as best he could, and then let it slam shut over his head. They were in darkness. He groped for bolts, then stopped. No bolts on the inside of a dungeon door. He grinned in the blackness. Tosser.

A small oil-lamp was lit, and the abject people viewed the two demons. One a huge brute with a club locked under his simian arm, the other tall and lean, cruel and clever. A woman about to wail had her mouth immediately stopped up by this one. His hand was sticky with fresh blood. She nearly vomited. He held a ringed finger to his thin, cruel lips.

Aside from her, there were five or six more women, young mothers, one old. Half a dozen children, blubbing and snotty, and an infant fast asleep and oblivious. One old fellow, who clutched his knobbly stick as if ready to fight them.

‘Calm down, grandad. We’re on your side.’

They huddled together in the airless cell, and not a word was spoken as the punishment block burned to cinders above them.

Above the dungeon, onager missiles were still hitting the walls of the fort. For sheer joy, a kind of victory celebration, and for practice, as the Hun warlord said laughing. He rode round the ruins of the blazing fort on his little skewbald pony, Chagelghan – he always called his horses Chagelghan, no one knew why. His gold earrings danced, his yellow eyes shone with delight in the darkness.

‘I want these walls flat,’ he said.

Later, as the first grey light of dawn was coming up, he sat his horse out on a mound to the south of the city with Orestes and Chanat beside him, stroking his grey moustaches thoughtfully. Standing before them was a captive bound in thick ropes, his hands just free enough to hold a testament.

Attila grinned. ‘Read to me,’ he said, ‘out of that fine old book of the Christians. The words of the prophet Nahum.’

He surveyed the devastated city as a different man might view some lovely fresco of Venus, or Atalanta in Corydon, while his trembling captive read.

Woe to the bloody city! The horseman lifteth up the bright sword and the glittering spear: and there is a multitude of the slain, and they stumble upon the corpses. Behold, I am against thee, saith the Lord of Hosts: the gates of thy land shall be set wide open unto thine enemies: the fire shall devour thee. Thy shepherds shall slumber, and thy nobles dwell in the dust; thy people is scattered among the mountains, and no man gathereth thee. Thy wound is grievous, and all who hear of it shall clap their hands: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness been visited continually?

Attila nodded and smiled. ‘Even the God of the Christians has spoken.’

He retrieved the precious testament from the captive and handed it to Orestes. Then he sliced his sword across the captive’s neck and the three rode on down the mound for the city. His men were already having victory horse-races in the half-ruined hippodrome. They were dressing horses in the robes of butchered priests, and carrying the crucifix itself about the circuit, Christ himself topped with a kalpak, a pointed Scythian cap. Later they would set the crucifix in the sand and make it their own totem, hanging from it severed heads, the skin peeled off and stuffed with straw. There would be feasting on slain livestock by firelight, and toasts in looted silver chalices decorated with Christian symbols, or Silenus chasing his nymphs.

In the gloom of the single sputtering clay lamp, the two soldiers discerned another iron-bound door.

‘No way out there,’ said Knuckles. ‘The execution dungeon. And I don’t think we’re ever going to find the key now, do you?’

Arapovian stepped between the women and children and knocked on the door, absurdly polite. A moment later there came an answering knock.

‘Eh, well,’ said Knuckles. ‘He was going to get chopped anyhow. This way, he’ll just starve to death instead. Comes to the same end, like all of us.’

Arapovian stood before the iron door and rattled his stiletto dagger in the big lock-hole for a moment. Then he drew his brooch-pin from his cloak and knelt down and probed. Moments later, something clicked. He dragged at the doorhandle and it grated slowly open.

Knuckles looked faintly disgusted at this showmanship. Blew a soft raspberry.

A figure slowly emerged, blinking in the lamplight, shackled hand and foot. But for the heavy black beard, he might have been Knuckles’ younger brother.

‘Water,’ he rasped.

‘You’ll get some,’ said Arapovian. ‘You are?’

‘Barabbas,’ said the prisoner in a voice suggesting he hadn’t drunk water for a week. Arapovian stood back. The man’s breath was foul.

Knuckles stepped up. ‘Don’t take the piss.’

‘S’true,’ said the prisoner.

‘So what are you, the original Wandering Jew or something? ’

The prisoner shrugged. ‘My father’s son.’

‘What you in for?’

‘Theft from the granary.’

‘Tut tut. You haven’t got a clue what’s been going on, have you?’

The prisoner shook his shaggy head miserably. ‘I thought I could smell smoke. Fire?’

‘Some.’ Knuckles turned to Arapovian. ‘You got to laugh. Everyone else gets the chop. The one prisoner due for the chop walks out just fine.’

‘As wiser men than we have previously observed,’ said Arapovian, ‘the humour of Heaven is more often ironical than benevolent.’

‘You took the words right out me gob.’

Arapovian rested the tip of his dagger against the prisoner’s neck. ‘I do not understand why, but it seems that, like your gospel namesake, you are destined live in others’ stead. You go with us. But one moment of foolishness and I will kill you. You think you are hard, but I am harder.’

‘He is, too,’ confirmed Knuckles, jerking his head. ‘He looks like some Persian Royal who’s spent his life in baths of asses’ milk. But he’s not.’

‘Armenian,’ said Arapovian.

‘Whatever,’ said Knuckles. ‘East is east.’

Something thumped onto the trapdoor above their heads. A burning beam.

‘Shit,’ said Knuckles.

‘You have more oil?’ asked Arapovian.

A woman shook her head.

‘Then snuff the lamp for now. We must wait a long time.’

The people tried to sleep. Arapovian recited softly to himself the litanies of his religion in the ancient tongue. Knuckles snored, clutching his beloved club to his chest like a child clutching its doll. The fire roared dimly above them.

After what he thought must be many hours, Arapovian crawled through the darkness and up the narrow steps to the trapdoor. There was a pause and then he gasped.

Knuckles was awake and heard him. ‘Don’t tell me. It’s hot.’

Arapovian returned.

‘Never touch an iron-bound trapdoor that’s been in the floor of a blazing building all day,’ Knuckles said helpfully, ‘even if you are Parsee fire-worshipper. You’ll give yourself a nasty burn. Even my granny could have told you that, bless her whorish old heart.’

‘Hold your tongue, you ape,’ hissed Arapovian.

‘Don’t call me an ape.’

‘Don’t call me a Parsee and I’ll think about it.’

Knuckles sighed.

Arapovian squatted, nursing his burned fingertips, feeling like a fool. An unaccustomed feeling for him, and one he did not appreciate. He looked upwards in the pitch blackness. If those bands got any hotter they’d start to glow in the dark. The wood on the upside must surely be charring down. Then the door would fall in, and they’d be done for.

The terrified families stared around sightlessly in the darkness. The old man said, ‘Have the invaders gone?’

‘No,’ said Arapovian. ‘The legion has gone. We are all that is left.’

Shock, then slow sobs as the terrible news sank in. The cell was full of widows and orphans.

The old man reached out in the dark and clutched the Armenian’s arm. ‘Will we live? Our children?’

Arapovian gently loosed his grip. There was a long silence. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘If the trapdoor holds, then… maybe.’

The fire roared louder.

Soon, in the gloom there was a dull red glow. The iron bands of the trapdoor were growing red hot. Oozing through the gaps round the edge of the trapdoor, sizzling, came runnels of melted fat. The odour of roast pork. Arapovian hoped the women and the children would not understand what it was.

‘Pray,’ he said. ‘All of you.’