The Judgement

20

As Attila approached the Golden City at long last, the Walls rose higher and higher before him, like a monstrous triple wave of stone. Of course, he knew the details, the measurements, and he had planned his attack minutely. But seeing the Walls in the flesh, as it were, even he fell silent for a while.

Riding beside him, Orestes observed that, whatever the earthquake damage might have been, the walls and even more crucially the towers had been fully repaired. There were no major cracks to be seen, no promising crevices running from battlements to foundations.

‘And there’ – he pointed at the brickwork around the Gate of St Romanus – ‘that tower must have fallen half away; you can see where it’s new-built. Yet it’s as strong as ever again. We should not have delayed.’

Attila stopped and turned on him. ‘You question my choices, you accuse me of delay, even of cowardice?’

Orestes was unimpressed. ‘I question our delay in attacking. We have made our task harder.’

Whatever Attila might have growled in response was lost, as Aladar abruptly pulled his horse back and it reared. ‘Arrows coming in!’

It startled them, the arrow-shower from the wolf-lords, even though it fell short. Attila ground his teeth and they fell back further. Then he wrenched his horse round in a fury, the poor beast almost rupturing its neck, its mouth cut by the bit.

It was time. The late-afternoon sun was falling behind them in the west, beginning to glare red into the eyes of the defenders on the walls.

‘Bring up the engines!’ he bellowed. ‘Either side of the valley! I want the wall there down by dark! Tonight, Byzantium burns!’

The key defensive artillery units would be on the gate-towers overlooking the low-lying Lycus valley: Military Gate V to the north and, beyond it, the Charisius Gate, which led out to the cemetery, for which reason it was also known dryly among the people of the city as the Polyandriou Gate: the Gate of Many Men. For many men passed out of it. All men, in time.

South of the valley was the Gate of St Romanus, and south of that was Military Gate IV. These would be the crucial points from which the Hun siege-towers might be attacked and destroyed as they approached, before they could do serious damage. Aetius took his stand on Military Gate V, sending the wolf-lords below to man the Walls, telling them that they would see any missiles coming in well enough. ‘So make sure you duck.’

The engines on the broad platforms of the two gate-towers were the best he could find. Less crucial towers, especially towards the Blachernae Palace, had been left without artillery. Here at the weak point of the Lycus valley was where the fighting would be fiercest. Each gate-tower had two multiple arrow-firers, two small but powerful onagers, and a finely made transverse-mounted sling which could hurl rocks, balls or even those wretched new-fangled firepots if need be.

Half a mile off, the siege-engines were coming, drawn by captured slaves. Dispensable flesh. Hun horsemen galloped around them, flailing their long whips. Attila knew how short of manpower his enemy were and so, predictably, he was attacking on as broad a front as possible. There were as many as twenty siege-towers moving slowly and inexorably towards the walls, and half-sheltered behind them, there were rams under steep, protective wooden tortoises.

A deep, coarse voice called up from the walls below: ‘Permission to speak to the master-general!’

Aetius stepped over to the battlements and glanced down. It was that brute Knuckles. He’d managed to arm himself with a club with a great lump of lead solder stuck on the end.

‘At Viminacium, sir, the enemy had fixed up their engines without wide enough skirts to protect the wheels. They might not have learned.’

Aetius squinted into the falling afternoon sun. Yes, they had learned. He nodded down to the big Rhinelander. ‘Ready with your club, man. You’re going to need it.’

He stepped back, speaking quietly to the artillerymen. They were no fighters, but they were quick and deft with their machines. The engines rolled nearer. They waited, a kind of silent screaming in their ears. A young lad wiped his upper lip. Sweat glistened there again almost immediately. Behind them, the city was eerily still, the streets and forums deserted, everyone indoors, crouching, huddled, praying. Even the emperor himself, God’s anointed, was crouched and praying, too.

On the wall in front of Aetius stood a bowl of water, calm as a millpond. The machines rumbled nearer. The horizon was dark with horsemen. The sun shone steadily, indifferently, upon all. This curious battle between these tiny creatures on the surface of the earth. And then a flash of sunlight on the bowl. Aetius glanced down, not breathing. It flashed again. Not on the bowl. Glancing off the water, as it rippled in response to some mysterious subterranean disturbance.

The artillerymen were suddenly terrified, hands shaking, mouths open, staring around wildly.

‘Oh, no, not again,’ muttered one of them, his voice low and desperate. ‘Not another quake. It will destroy us.’

But the general was eerily calm. He summoned Tatullus.

‘You see any animals panicking, Centurion? Any horses stampeding out there?’

Tatullus’ hard eyes scanned the plain below. ‘No, sir.’

‘As I thought. Relax, men. Look to your machines. Centurion, spread the word. It’s no second quake. On the other hand, don’t relax too much. It means the Huns are mining under the walls.’

Tatullus started.

‘No time for theatricals, Centurion,’ said Aetius dryly. ‘Get running now. Bowls of water all along the battlements. We need to know where the bastards are tunnelling in. These’ll tell us every time they knock out a pit prop and there’s another rockfall.’

He called a runner over. ‘To the northern Walls. Bring back half the Isaurian auxiliaries with their leader. Zeno. At all speed!’

The runner ran.

To another messager he gave orders for the heaviest weights that could be found dragged up onto the walls at intervals. Marble column drums, if possible.

One of the siege-engines was very close to them now, and another just south of the valley was approaching the moat.

‘This one,’ said Aetius, indicating the nearest. ‘Concentrate all your fire on the top. Imagine it’s the head and slice it off. Take aim.’ He glanced down the other side. The wolf-lords were ready with their bows.

The second tower nearby was behaving strangely. The entire front section seemed to be collapsing. Aetius realised that it was indeed collapsing – to crash right across the moat and form an instant drawbridge. It landed with a mighty smack and a billowing of dust. The men inside immediately abandoned the exposed remainder of the dummy tower, and from behind them a tortoise approached with a bronze ram-head shining evilly under it. Aetius leaned out over the walls. The improvised drawbridge was aligned directly to the Gate of St Romanus. So the enemy were battering, mining and scaling the walls simultaneously. It was going to be an eventful day.

‘Where are those damned mountain bandits?’

He sent word to the citizen militia to thicken up numbers within the Romanus towers. That ram had to be destroyed. If not, it would quickly take out the lower and the middle wall, then a siege-engine could roll in behind it right up to the Inner Wall, and they would be truly in cloaca maxima.

Zeno appeared. Tarasicodissa Rousoumbladeotes. He saluted smartly this time.

‘Not much happening your end?’

‘Sir. You said about mining activity. I reckon we’re getting most of it, under the Blachernae Wall.’

Aetius nodded. The ground was softest to the north, near the Horn. But how did Attila know? Ah, he knew everything.

The din of battle and the clamour of frightened men arose behind them. Aetius raised his voice. ‘You know about mining?’

‘Some.’

He coughed angrily on a lungful of dust. ‘There’s a transverse passageway running from the palace cellars out beyond the walls. The Guard will show you. From there you’ll have to countermine for yourself, left or right, depending on where you reckon they’re coming in. Got it?’

‘Sir.’

‘I don’t think the Huns know much about mining, but you never know. And we’re still not sure who their auxiliaries are these days.’ A massive punch from an onager missile struck nearby. First strike. Zeno flinched. Aetius didn’t. Dust clouded the air around them, but Aetius yelled through it, ‘Like whatever bastards are operating their onagers right now. And I don’t have to tell you what would happen if they made just one good tunnel into the city.’

Zeno nodded. ‘There’d be a hundred Huns inside within a minute.’

‘And a hundred every following minute, too. It would bring us down as surely as the biggest missile strike. So it matters. Get to it. Find the tunnel, kill everyone inside, and then bring it down behind you. Go!’

Already the first small bands of tattooed horsemen were galloping in below, yowling, turning and threading their way among the giant protective siege-towers and loosing off little, lethal arrow-storms for good measure.

It was time to fight back.

Aetius shouted to the wolf-lords and they let their arrows fly. It was a loose volley but one arrowhead struck home perfectly, a Hun warrior flying forwards over the head of his crumpling horse and rolling into the dust. One of the wolf-lords, tall Valamir, immediately strung another arrow and took aim, meaning to take out the warrior for good while he was briefly a stationary target. But before he could let fly, a second warrior galloped up and the fallen horseman vaulted to his feet, seized the back of his saddle, pulled himself up and they galloped clear. All in a single, faultless movement, almost quicker than the eye could see. Valamir slowly released his bowstring again, saving his arrow. He and the master-general exchanged glances. Christ, those horsemen moved fast.

From away to the left came the doom-laden thump of a mighty onager missile hitting the outer walls, a guff of limestone white dust rising into the air. Another hammer-blow, and even Aetius momentarily clenched his fists. How would the hurriedly improvised walls survive against such a hammering? And how the hell could the Huns have become such good artillerymen so soon? Surely they had Vandal auxiliaries, renegade Teutons? One rumour even said that deserters from the lesser Western legions had gone over to them, believing the future lay with the Huns. Aetius refused to believe it.

And then much, much worse. A concerted volley of missile strikes, huge boulders fired from machines still behind the siege-towers, barely glimpsed yet, their titanic loads arcing in high and raining down calamitously all on the same point. That was skill. Men were crushed without even the time to cry out, and when the dust slowly cleared the outer and middle walls were already flattened across a whole stretch of the Lycus valley. The siege-engines began to advance. This battle wasn’t going to last the night. To confirm Aetius’ worst fears, instantly another volley of onager missiles hit the walls further along, taking them down in a dozen blows, a ruthless pummelling. Everything would depend upon the inner walls.

From below came desperate cries at the sight of the ram approaching the St Romanus Gate. Tatullus was roaring, asses screamed as they dragged heavy loads, bringing up more ballista missiles; there was a clatter of running hobnailed feet, the rush of citizen militia with their pitiful wooden staves. In the hazy distance, a monotonous beat on a barbaric oxhide drum.

Aetius raised his hand, and the tower commanders all along the walls read the signal and did likewise.

He hesitated and sent a prayer like an arrow heavenwards.

He dropped his arm. ‘Fire!’

The artillery units initially wasted their missiles trying to take out individual galloping horsemen as they darted in across the broad terrace beneath the walls howling like animals, arched back in their saddles, grinning up at the shaken defenders behind their battlements, baring their berry-red teeth. Aetius was onto them immediately, striding over, shoving Imperial Guardsmen out of his way to reach them, roaring up at the next tower.

‘The horsemen may look frightening to you, soldiers, but they’re not coming in just yet! They’re trying to distract you. So ignore them! Take out the siege-towers, you hear? Kill the siege-towers!’

Tatullus echoed his commander’s orders all along the walls in finest centurion style, with just as much volume and some extra colour.

‘You heard the general, ladies! Hit the fucking machines! I see any unit wasting missiles on those malodorous fucking horsemen out of Scythia, I’ll break your fucking legs!’

He bore down on a single hapless artillery unit atop the Romanus Gate, and they quailed before him. They were good technicians, but they’d never felt the hot blast of a centurion’s angry breath in their faces, and it focused their minds wonderfully. As Tatullus well knew, it was essential they feared him more than the enemy. He seized one fresh-faced youngster by the scruff of his neck and flung him back against the wall with the might of his right arm alone. The youngster gasped and cowered.

‘Now get back on your fucking machine and line it up there!’ Tatullus screamed, spit flying in their startled faces. ‘You can see the target, it’s not exactly shy. There!’

Indeed, the attack tower was already looming over them, the rubble field of the collapsed lower walls already having been traversed with quick-laid planking and lightning-fast winching from the darting enemy.

Further along, more Huns were attacking without the complication of artillery. Aetius spotted them immediately.

‘Escalade!’ he yelled in warning. ‘Wolf-lords, to me!’ and he dashed southwards to the section being breached. A swarm of half-naked Hun warriors had rolled from their ponies to race across the moat on a dropped pontoon, the stretch of water proving as much of an obstacle as a broad puddle. ‘Complain about it later,’ Aetius growled to himself. ‘Shout at the devil.’

Jormunreik and Valamir ran with him, arrows already nocked to the bow.

‘Station here,’ said Aetius. ‘Hit them on the flank as they come across.’ He ran on.

The Huns came scrabbling over the collapsed lower walls, tripping and stumbling in the limestone rubble of their own creation. Immediately a short, hard volley of Gothic arrows slewed into them from the side and, close-packed as they were, found many a target. But countless more warriors came on behind, daggers clamped between their teeth as they scaled the ruined walls, using their gleaming Hunnish chekans or cruel spiked hatchets to dig into the stone like climbers.

Aetius ordered Captain Andronicus up with his century, and strung them along the battlements. ‘Escalade,’ he said by way of brief explanation. ‘Get ready to wash your spears.’

The Gothic wolf-lords kept up relentless volley after volley of long ashwood arrows, cutting into the flank of the advancing horde, but it barely slowed them. Somewhere back across the crowded plain Attila would be sitting his scruffy skewbald pony, oblivious of the deaths of individuals, his own or the enemy’s, and dreaming only of conquest.

Already the advancing Hun footsoldiers were across the exposed terrace below the Inner Walls. The defenders’ arrows and even the wild stones and improvised missiles hurled by the citizen militiamen took a terrible toll on exposed heads and bodies, but they moved in a swarm, as planned and concerted as a colony of ants. A wily old warlord was with them, Geukchu, having crossed this far on a white horse, and he rode among them giving calm orders. The defenders tried again and again to take him but he seemed under magical protection. Faster than the eye could see, some six or eight Hun marksmen stood back from the swarm and fired small grappling-hooks carrying the thinnest ropes of knotted hemp straight up into the air, only falling back when they were just across the battlements, perfectly pitched.

‘Cut ’em away!’ roared Aetius. ‘Don’t let ’em get up!’

The Palatine Guard followed his orders, but as soon as they leaned out to slash at the ropes, in came the Huns’ covering fire. It was devastating: an instant barrage of three or four hundred arrows, immaculately aimed, scything in over the top of the wall and into the chests and faces of the desperate defenders. Men screaming, flailing, faces crimson, hands clutched to eyes and throats. Andronicus himself was stuck with an arrow in the shoulder, sinking down, snapping it off gasping. ‘Bastards,’ he murmured. There had to be more of a fight than that.

‘Take them out!’ roared Aetius, desperate. ‘Kick away the hooks! Citizen militia, move down!’

But already the hooks were deeply lodged by Hun warriors coming up the ropes, not one of them cut. Knuckles saw the first Hun appear along the walls, and lumbered over to cave his skull in. But the Hun moved like a spider, vaulted over the battlements, dagger between his teeth but not even standing his ground to fight. You don’t take a fortified city with an escalade of one. Moving at blinding speed, he kicked out and loosened the tough little grappling hook from the wall where it had lodged, checked that the rope it hung from was looped only once, nice and loosely, round the back of the merlon – Knuckles was upon him, swinging his club at the half-shaven and unhelmeted skull with a blow that would have killed a horse – and the warrior was gone. Not even looking, holding onto nothing but the little hook two-handed, he vaulted back over the walls to the ground below.

Knuckles looked out after him and roared with frustration. ‘What are you, a fuckin’ circus acrobat or something?’

A clatter of arrows struck all around him and one cut his forearm badly, an ooze of blood among the long-established mess of scars. Knuckles bellowed with anger, clubbing mindlessly for a moment at the rope tightening ominously around the merlon. Then Arapovian was running over, knife drawn.

The rope reeled back down behind the Hun warrior, and he fell to earth slowly enough to roll and then leap to his feet uninjured. Along the walls the same trick had been repeated several times, and though a few of the leading warriors had been cut down, most had not. As the acrobat besiegers almost floated back down to earth, pulled up in counterweight were giant nets, soon hanging in swags from the forty-foot walls. Defenders hacked desperately at the ropes bound around their own treacherous battlements and more were cut free. But not enough. In seconds, the surviving nets were thick with Hun warriors scaling them like lizards. Already the first were vaulting over the tops of the walls and forming small, isolated bridgeheads to protect the remaining nets, and more of their comrades came on behind.

Aetius demanded reports, but none of them was good. Then they stopped coming. Everyone was fighting.

They had to clear the walls. They had to clear them now, or they were lost.

In the darkness underground, another kind of fight was going on.

The sturdy Isaurian mountain men, accustomed to tunnels and caves, as Aetius had surmised, had moved fast down the defensive passageway running out under the Blachernae Walls, then struck left to intercept the Huns. In feeble light and Stygian gloom, they had burst through into the enemy tunnel some way behind the lead party, and immediately found themselves fighting on two flanks, fore and aft. They promptly retreated back into their own tunnel, Zeno at their head, fighting on the narrowest front – only two men wide at most. They fought at thrusting swordpoint and spearpoint, half suffocated with smoke and foul odours, slithering in pools of stagnant water, hand-to-hand in the darkness by guttering oil-light, a scene of Homeric horror. Their enemies were no Huns, for those horsemen of the steppes could never have tolerated this infernally cramped and claustrophobic underworld. They were a mix of Batavian and Saxon mercenaries, used to mining but motivated by greed for gold and loot, not by loyalty to Attila. Faced with a horde of fierce-looking fighters, squat and bearded like the dwarves of their own mythology, short-swords and axes flashing, monstrous shadows on the tunnel walls, they panicked and broke. The Isaurians followed them and cut them down ruthlessly, until the piles of corpses before them meant they could penetrate no further.

They dragged the corpses back and pressed on over them, treading them down into the swamp and ooze, the darkness foul, suffocating, the tunnels slimy mud and dripping rock, until they reached almost the beginning of the enemy mining operations. Here they moved fast, lighting a fire around some wooden pit props to smoke out any last miners and suck the air from the tunnel, then they fell back, smashing down more pit props and collapsing the earthen roof behind them so as to save their own air and their retreat. All the way back they brought down the hard-won tunnel, blocking the final exit with a rockfall, and then retreating up the Byzantine passageway within the safety of the Blachernae Walls. They emerged like bloody moles from Hades, gasping for the clear air and the sunlight, choking but triumphant.

The Huns might try to tunnel again but it was unlikely. This would have cost them too much effort for too little reward.

‘Night and day the gates of Hell stand open,’ growled Zeno with satisfaction. ‘Well, not any more they don’t.’

But there was no time for rest, let alone self-congratulation.

‘To the walls!’ came the desperate cry. ‘Every last man standing!’

Aetius signalled to Andronicus to pull his Guard back towards the St Romanus Gate and re-form his men in a phalanx of spears. Ignore the ram shuddering in below, and the siege-tower behind. Ignore the fact that they were already surrounded, outnumbered, outfought. Never admit defeat. Let the Huns come up their wretched nets and mass together on the battlements. They could take them.

Aetius himself pulled the Wolf-lords back to Military Gate V, spears lowered, waiting. At least the Hun onagers had now been silent for a while, for fear of hitting their own men.

The nets were all slung between the gates either side of the Lycus, and the Hun bridgehead thickened. There were now three or four hundred of them, technically within the city, but with no access yet to a descent. Beyond, Aetius could see the stricken, uncertain faces of the Imperial Guard, looking across to him. What was he doing?

He was waiting.

Near him, Theodoric waited, too, long-sword drawn.

‘You’ll use that to thrust.’

‘I will,’ said the prince grimly. ‘No room for cutting blows.’

‘Quite so.’ He roared down the walls to the Guard, ‘Hold it still!’

‘You want the Huns densely packed,’ murmured Theodoric.

‘You got it.’

A few more agonising moments, the Huns hardly able to believe that they had taken an entire stretch of Wall, and behind them more and more of their comrades coming up the nets unopposed. To their right, one of their rams was splintering in the gates, and the platforms of the gate-towers themselves would soon be flooded with more of their comrades from the approaching siege-tower. The city was as good as won.

Then they heard that hard-faced Roman general roar, ‘Now!’

From behind the Imperial Guard, holding the line rigid with fear, came the sound of something creaking, being winched and lowered. Andronicus told his men to brace themselves. They had their orders. Forward face.

It was Tatullus who led the rearguard attack, along with his old soldiers from the ludicrous remnant of the VIIth, Knuckles and Arapovian and Malchus, and some of the hardier of the citizen militia, including a blacksmith still in his apron and wielding his hammer for a weapon.

The Hun siege-tower was built with a high drop-bridge which would soon fall across the battlements and admit a party of ferocious warriors with squat round shields and short curved swords onto the high platform of the gate-tower, from where they would command the walls and worse, the steps leading down. Crazed with bloodlust and dreams of Byzantine gold, they were unlikely to give up their position once they had taken it.

Tatullus faced the approaching siege-tower with his billhook lowered. He bellowed for more men-at-arms up here. These bird-brained artillery novices had left it too late. This tower was going to get bloody very soon.

But the primal instinct of raw fear had finally galvanised the unwarlike artillery technicians. In a few seconds of astonishing deftness, they had raised the trajectories of their machines to face the head of the tower, not ten feet off the walls now, and let loose. Serried metal bolts shot forward out of each shivering machine, flat and lethal, at speeds of more than fifty or sixty feet a second, or so the mathematicians of the imperial workshops had calculated. Those huge, straining torsion ropes could store an astonishing power. The flight of bolts drove straight through the raised drop-bridge and anyone within. The slingballs simultaneously slammed into the side timbers, causing less damage to the occupants but at least as much terror. Rapidly assessing the situation, the slingers forsook their machines, took flaming pots and brands in their hands, and lobbed them across onto the roof of the siege-tower, where they exploded into fireballs and began to burn the overhead timbers.

Tatullus almost guffawed. The artillerymen’s initial dithering incompetence had actually drawn the Hun attack tower in too close, only to be suddenly blasted with this volley of heavy steel bolts at almost point-blank range, and then set afire to boot.

‘And again!’ he yelled, thumping his billhook furiously on the wooden deck. ‘Give ’em hell!’

Sweating with effort and dread, sweat both hot and cold running together, blinded until they wiped their faces clear with stained neckerchiefs, the artillerymen strained back on the well-oiled winches and reloaded the arrow-firers, so finely manufactured and gauged by the best engineers and technicians in the city’s Imperial workshops. They slotted in a new set of bolts, whose crossply steel heads no armour in the world could withstand, let alone mere timber walls, while Tatullus bellowed down to the citizen runners to bring more. The torsion ropes twisted and screamed, the nearest arrow-firer swivelled on its base towards the siege-tower, like some terrible steel animal with eyeless gaze, and then the bolts erupted from their ports again and drilled into the blank face of the tower. Inside there were more screams signifying carnage. The drop-bridge had paused in being lowered, barely open.

‘Fuck it,’ growled Tatullus. They had only killed the operators, when they wanted to get inside and slaughter the rest of them. He sensed a crazed stratagem and an invaluable morale booster rolled into one. Off to the south, another tower was disgorging its occupants onto the undermanned Military Gate IV, with only citizen militia to oppose them; likewise a further one on the Rhegium Gate. Below came another thump from the ram. There would be more work to do elsewhere soon enough, so they needed to get this finished.

‘Let’s get that drop-bridge down now so we can cut ’em up inside! Knuckles, and you Parsee fancyman, get with me!’

Then he was up on the battlements and jumping, flying out across the gap between wall and tower, slamming into the wooden sides, clasping the rim of the drop-bridge in his left hand, his right bringing his billhook back and ramming it repeatedly though the splintered front timbers and stabbing anyone who stood inside. Then he slashed overhead at the ropes of the drop-bridge with such determined swipes that the ropes bristled and frayed in moments. The bridge fell with a mighty crash, Tatullus still hanging beneath it, forty feet above the ground and with Hun archers below gazing up, already nocking arrows to the bow. With the agility of an adolescent acrobat, this centurion of twenty years’ service was back on the bridge like a cat, even as the the arrows thumped into the timbers beneath his feet, his billhook flailing in the open mouth of the tower-head, holding the drop-bridge alone for a moment. Then Arapovian and Malchus and Knuckles were with him again, the four survivors doing what they did best, fighting shoulder to shoulder against impossible odds.

The Hun ram drivers felt the gates suddenly heavier under the blows. The gang-master galloped around lashing at them, but it was no good. Inside the city, the quick-thinking Isaurians under Zeno had realised what was happening and baulked the gates with anything and everything they could find. Barrels of sand, rocks, massive timber props and, best of all, a wagon laden with stone. The ram could hammer away all it liked; it wasn’t going to come through the Gate of St Romanus any time soon. And as long as the Huns were still trying…

‘Back to the walls!’ growled Zeno, seizing one of the mattiobarbuli or weighted darts from behind his shield grip. The ram drivers would soon be targets themselves.

The tower-head, prised open, exposed and blazing, revealed a mass of startled warriors ready to leap onto the city walls. A breeze blew, a breath of God’s mercy, and the heat from the rooftop blaze gusted away from the defenders, dark smoke drifting away west over the mass of the Hun army out on the plains beyond. Somewhere, sitting his horse, Attila would see this: one of his attack towers already burning. The first setback. Soon there would come news to him of the ram’s difficult progress, and then news of the mining operations having been shut down by an unexpected and ferocious underground attack.

There was a momentary stillness while Tatullus and his three men stared at the twenty Huns packed inside the tower-head. Then they roared the old cry, ‘Six times brave, six times faithful!’ and charged in.

The Huns were packed too close within the wooden walls. They were expectant, sweating, their red and black war-paint already running in greasy streaks across their faces, trembling with battle madness, fire roaring above their heads, desperate to be out and free and fighting; ready to erupt across the drop-bridge and fall on those thinly defended battlements like wolves. But they would never get that far. They were trapped in their wooden cave, backing up against tightly nailed timbers which their own slaves had built not days before. The din of battle was all around them, but immediately before them in the late afternoon sunlight stood the terrible figure of an iron-hard Roman soldier, of the kind they said no longer existed.

Pale blue, emotionless eyes burning like hard gemstones, a tight-fitting steel helmet like a bare metal skull, a long noseguard running down between those deep-set, implacable eyes, the Roman swung a monstrous billhook left and right like a scythe through dry grass. The warriors with their short-swords couldn’t get close to him, and none of them had brought bow and arrow. They cursed and howled, caught between the blazing fire above and the murderous blades before, limbs lopped off, arteries severed, chests and bellies opened and spilling, the enclosed space an infernal abattoir, a place of fire and blood. Behind the billhook came a huge man wielding a club, and an eastern swordsman, and some civilians and a couple more hard-looking soldiers in black armour. The Huns stabbed and fought as desperately as trapped rats, and one even made a dash for the edge of the drop-bridge and hurled himself to a kind of safety forty feet below. But even as he leapt, the eastern swordsman slashed his weapon in a wide arc and cut him across the backbone, so that when he fell to earth below he was already dead. It was hopeless. Within a minute or two the Huns lay slaughtered in heaps within the tower-head. Two of the Palatine Guard lay with them.

Along the wall the gathered Huns faced a jaw-like attack at both ends from the long spears of the wolf-lords on their left and the Palatine Guard on their right. Their own numbers were vastly superior, but they realised in panic that this would not help. They were as good as trapped along the wall, and could offer no broader line of battle than the battlement walk allowed. They had packed themselves too tight. More and more warriors were still coming up the nets behind and squeezing through the embrasures to enter the fray, but there was barely space for them to drop down the other side, let alone swing a chekan or sword. Now suddenly there were disciplined forces hitting them either side, long spears lowered to gut height, forcing them together more closely still. Then the killing began, even as the Huns were still squabbling among themselves.

Inside the siege-tower, Arapovian thought for a moment that his centurion had gone insane for, having slain all living men before him, he was attacking the rear wooden walls of the tower, jabbing at them ferociously with his mighty billhook, splintering timbers and kicking them out into the air where they wheeled and fell free, until the protective tower-head was half destroyed.

‘Pile in, you idle fuckers!’ he yelled. ‘And you, blacksmith, get your hammer in there. I want this wall smashed down.’

Still not understanding they piled in as ordered, the blood-boltered centurion still muttering about morale, eyes gleaming through a mask of other men’s gore. ‘Good for our morale, bit of a downer for them.’ And as he kicked out the last of the rear timbers and exposed the tower-head to the setting sun, Arapovian understood. Tatullus began to hurl the slathered bodies of the Hun warriors out of the tower-head to the ground a long way below.

Knuckles booted the corpses out with his great feet, grumbling that they’d be under attack again at any moment. But it made a horrible and telling spectacle.

From the main Hun lines across the plains, from their restless horses, the waiting warriors saw comrade after slain comrade, the bodies of fathers and brothers and sons, mutilated and hacked to death, come wheeling back out of the attack tower, a grandstand view of savagery fully visible to all. Corpses flung out and falling, spraying gore from cut and missing limbs, crashing onto the besiegers below and pulped upon the hard ground.

Aladar rose up in his saddle on his fists and roared out at such theatrical cruelty. ‘Vengeance will rain down on them like blood!’

Attila said nothing but the set of his face was grim.

‘Let them come and take their comrades home,’ growled Tatullus, throwing out the last of the slain. ‘Any come near, we destroy them.’

It was foul and unforgiving, but it was the first hint that day that not everything might go the way of the heathen.

The other two attack towers further down the walls had been smashed and burned before they could drop their bridges. At the same time, the packed Huns who had gained the walls by escalade had been rolled up from either end in the furious two-sided onslaught, and their bodies tossed back over the walls. The net ropes were cut and dropped down after them, and the citizen militia thought to pour boiling oil down on them and then throw flaming brands after, so that the nets couldn’t be used again without long and tricky repairs.

At last the walls were cleared. Hundreds of Huns had died that day, as many from falling as from fighting. Not one of them made it past the Inner Walls. Their mining operations had been ruthlessly sabotaged, and none of the attack towers had made it. Aetius collapsed at last in the shadow of the battlements, pulled his helmet off and swiped the sweat from his face. His arm was almost too tired to lift. Spread out before him was the city they had fought so desperately to defend, the sinking sun gleaming on its myriad golden cupolas and spires. The Holy City of Byzantium. He smiled.

‘My brother,’ said Torismond nearby, gasping. He pulled at Aetius’ arm. Aetius wrenched it free again with weary irritability. ‘My brother,’ cried the prince more desperately, nearly sobbing. Suddenly Aetius was alert again, dragging himself to his feet. The princes had fought as fiercely as any today, and their wolf-lords had been crucial.

‘Where is he?’

Torismond sobbed that he could not move. His arm…

‘Come on,’ said Aetius. ‘We’ll get him to the Emmanuel Hospital.’

Theodoric’s wound was ghastly. Without analysing why, Aetius demanded the old trickster medic, Gamaliel. The hospital was not even full, the defenders’ casualties had been so few. The old man came hurrying, shambolic grey gown gathered up round skinny white ankles. Aetius and Torismond started talking at once, but he ordered them to be silent.

The wounded boy lay on his back, his face white as chalk, his forehead beaded with sweat, drifting in and out of the faintest consciousness. Gamaliel gently unwrapped the filthy rags used as emergency bandaging, saying nothing.

‘He killed six or seven at least,’ said Torismond. ‘One burly fellow must have been twice as broad in the shoulder as my brother. Theo drove his sword right through him. But as the fellow died, he brought his sword down on Theo’s arm and…’

He broke off and buried his face in the crook of his arm. Aetius laid his hand on the boy’s trembling shoulder.

Gamaliel said, ‘In amputation for gangrene, the crucial thing of course is to remove more bone and leave more soft tissue for better healing.’

Torismond looked up, eyes bright with tears.

‘However,’ said Gamaliel, ‘the boy is young, and God is merciful. It may not come to amputation, we cannot be sure. As the First Hippocratic Aphorism states, “Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience fallacious, and judgement difficult.”’ He smiled gently at the two exhausted soldiers and added softly, ‘I have always thought it a good guide to life in general. However,’ and his voice grew brisk again, ‘before resorting to the crude science of amputation, we shall trust to vascular ligature – unknown either to Hippocrates or that fool Galen, but widely practised among the physicians of India – as well as the liberal application of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine, and those two great healers time and hope.’

He said to Torismond, ‘You must sleep, boy. You can sleep here. When you wake again, talk to your brother. Even if he is unconscious, talk to him. Do you play a musical instrument?’

Torismond looked baffled. ‘A lute. Badly.’

Gamaliel turned to Aetius. ‘Get the lad a lute.’ And to Torismond he said, ‘Play the lute to him. Even badly.’

There was one final chapter to this gruelling day. Tatullus had roped up the half-destroyed siege-tower with a couple of huge iron hooks, and with ropes long enough to reach the ground. A team of oxen waited in the cool of the evening shadows, nodding their heads. There was the sound of a whiplash, and the oxen were driven forward. The two mighty ropes stretched taut from the tower. The oxen bellowed under the lash, their hooves scrabbled. Dozens of citizens seized the quivering ropes as well, hauling as in a neighbourhood tug-of-war. The huge siege-tower creaked, tilted fractionally. Below it, still ramming under orders but no longer with any hope, the Huns glanced up and saw what was coming. The tower tilted further – a little further – and then the meridian was past and gravity did the rest.

Like a monstrous tree in a forest, felled by giants, the unmanned tower fell sideways with dreamlike slowness and crashed down onto the ram tortoise, smashing both itself and the tortoise to matchwood in twin destruction. The ram team had pulled away in time and not one was injured, but for their fighting spirit it was the last straw. They retreated and ran, along with the surviving warriors around them, back over the smashed middle and lower wall, crowding together to cross the pontoons. In their desperation some even flung themselves into the water.

In final farewell, the wolf-lords knelt calmly at the battlements, unslung their bows and took out more of the fleeing enemy, one by one, silently and without mercy. No volleys, but a lethal, individual killing. For the besiegers, now in full flight across the plain, it was the first defeat they had ever tasted. When they reached their own lines, they heard that the Lord Attila had retired to his tent.