The Judgement

21

Aetius was too tired to eat, but he drank water from a cup handed to him by a woman in the street. Without his helmet on, and caked with sweat and dust as he was, she didn’t recognise him and called him ‘dearie’. He drank, gave the cup back to her and thanked her politely.

Before a few hours of uneasy sleep, he talked with Tatullus, Malchus and Andronicus, with Prince Torismond, who looked grave and sad, suddenly old for his years; and also with Zeno of the Isaurians, and one Portumnus, a plump burgher of fifty years of age who seemed to have appointed himself leader of the citizen militia. He would have to do, even though, as Aetius reflected, those who appoint themselves leaders are rarely the best at it.

‘It’s been a good day,’ declared Malchus, wiping his encrusted sword and grinning. ‘They sustained a lot of losses. And not a few, I don’t mind saying’ – he held his sword upright and inspected its freshly shining blade – ‘by my own heroic hand.’

Aetius wasn’t impressed. ‘They can take a lot of losses,’ he growled. ‘There are a hundred thousand of them out there. Today we killed, what, two or three hundred at most? We lost maybe a dozen men. That sounds fine, but they could fight for a year like they fought today, and still not worry about losses. Could we? They still teach you maths in the cavalry, Captain Malchus?’

Malchus refused to look chastened, but he had no reply.

‘Plus, two of our artillery machines are buggered, and our walls have taken a bad pounding, and we have neither the men nor the energy to rebuild any more.’

‘The citizen bands fought like lions, though,’ said Portumnus.

Aetius nodded, and even Andronicus grunted.

‘But if we win this one – if we survive at all – we’ll win up here.’ Aetius tapped his head. ‘Today was the first day in Attila’s reign of terror when he didn’t get exactly the result he wanted. Not a defeat, no, but he must have seen his men streaming back across the plain, with nothing to show for their pains. He will be back again, of course. But tonight, some of his men will have begun to doubt him. He can only regain their faith in him by a crushing triumph over us, so he will come back harder than ever.’ His voice was thick with emotion, looking out over the small campfires of the Visigoths, Isaurians, Palatine Guard and citizen bands. A brave but motley crew, and not one straight Roman legion with them. So it had come to this.

‘But each day that his forces do not prevail against us, the Huns’ confidence wanes and their strength ebbs. It is our one hope. We certainly cannot defeat them directly. We are too few.’

The council of war brooded in silence on his words, and then they departed to sleep.

In his tent, Attila ground his teeth and glowered down at his fists. The day had been accursed from the start.

He had always known that Constantinople would be no Viminacium, but he saw now that it was ten, a hundred times harder. They said this was the greatest fortified city in the world. Not even the cities of China had anything to compare with the walls of Constantinople. And now came the news that another of his beloved Chosen Men was fallen.

Old Chanat told him. ‘It was the Lord Juchi, Great Tanjou. He fell upon the battlements, run through by the sword of one of those Gothic princes fighting with them.’

‘I had him,’ hissed Attila, ‘that straw-haired German puppy, I had him before me in my very tent. At Azimuntium I could have destroyed him, destroyed them all. And when they came to our camp to parley, only to assassinate me like polecats in the night. I could have killed them.’

‘My lord is too merciful!’ said Little Bird’s sing-song voice. ‘His heart is as tender as a young girl’s. And oh, a young girl’s heart will be the death of him!’

‘Our brother Juchi,’ said Chanat, ‘took the prince’s arm off as he died, or as good as – sliced it through.’

‘Would it had been his neck.’ Attila leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his mighty hands. ‘One by one my Chosen Men fall from me.’ His voice was low and muffled.

Chanat hesitated a while, then departed so as not to witness this unseemly grief. Little Bird twirled his hair ribbons, like an oblivious toddler beside its weeping mother.

Attila remained motionless on his wooden throne. Only Noyan was left of the four powerful brothers, the sons of Akal. Juchi slain by a pale-haired Visigothic boy. Bela bludgeoned and drowned at Margus Bridge. Then there was eager young Yesukai, bright-eyed, loyal and unquestioning as only the young can be – he had been the first to die. How long ago it seemed. How far to the east, unimaginably far, many months’ ride east upon the steppes into the heart of Asia, and long, long years ago. There was the time he set off a covey of partidges, just outside the camp of the Kutrigur Huns, and nearly got them all killed. The fool. Attila smiled though his eyes were sad and swimming with memories. Yesukai died fighting those same Kutrigur Huns, died that the Kutrigur Huns and the People might come together in glorious conquest. Attila could picture him now as he lay dying, young Yesukai, an arrow through his arm and into his chest, Chanat cradling his head.

Let the vultures cry it among the Tien Shan, Let the winds tell it over the Plains of Plenty, Let the rains fall year long on the green grasslands in mourning for Yesukai!

And now let the vultures cry and the skies weep for Juchi, too, and for Bela. For Csaba also, perhaps, so grievously wounded below the walls of Viminacium in his battle-madness, and half mad from that day to this. But that accursed traitor and deserter Candac, let there be no weeping for him.

There were left only his ever-faithful Orestes, and old Chanat, and Geukchu, and lonesome Noyan. And Rome still so far away.

Aetius had enjoyed all of three hours’ sleep, on a rough straw pallet in the guard-room of Military Gate V, when he was awakened by wild shouts. Still exhausted, he felt he was still dreaming when he stepped out onto the dark battlements to see that another full attack was under way. Attila was using their own tiredness to destroy them. How could they fight another battle, by night, after a day such as they had just endured?

But fight they must.

It was like a dream for the exhausted defenders on the walls. As in a dream they saw the great siege-engines rumbling toward them through the night, and the flames of ten thousand torches, and in the torchlight came the flash of arrow and the glint of iron arrowheads in the midnight air, and the cry and fall of men to the ground below. There were distant juddering thumps of onager strikes against stonework, and the slow crack and susurrus of collapsing masonry. In reality, they could not win again. Not now. But perhaps in a dream…

The Huns were attacking by escalade again, too, against the Palatine Guard and whatever armed citizens were still stout-hearted enough to stay and fight, strung out along three miles of walls. Though the Huns came up in their hundreds, and even their thousands, the slash of soldierly swords and the cruder bludgeon of improvised citizen weapons made their progress over the walls slow and bloody indeed. On the ground below, the bodies of Huns slain in the cruel ascent of that implacable forty-foot cliff piled up like summer flies.

From away to the south came the sound of a more resonant, wooden thump, and the defenders knew another gate was being rammed again.

‘Isaurians!’ roared a deep voice. There was the steady trot of the mountain men, and Zeno once again led them into the breech.

Everywhere there were burning torches, and out on the plain the Huns had built huge beacon fires, for no military purpose, it seemed, but to illuminate for the dispirited defenders the vast numbers of the enemy. But Master-General Aetius was everywhere at once, striding, roaring, gesticulating, harshly joking, and seeming anything but dispirited.

Knuckles eyed the beacons balefully. ‘Very kind of them, I’m sure,’ he growled, then looked prayerfully heavenwards. ‘Come, friendly Gods, and piss their fires out.’

Nearby, the more orthodox Arapovian crossed himself and slid another arrow onto his bow.

The Huns were at every gate now, stacking up oil-soaked bundles of dry reeds and looted haybales. Soon those gates would be burned to wood-ash, and the warriors would come in at every entrance. But the citizen bands were teeming up to the walls in ever greater numbers as panic spread through the city. They poured water onto the brushfire stacks and hurled missiles onto Hunnish heads, a primitive but terrible rain. At gateway after gateway the besiegers were driven back, until finally the defenders at the Rhegium Gate, hammered into an impromptu fighting company by Malchus, leading from the front as always, were actually able to shove their own gates open and make a defensive sortie, driving the Huns away in disorder before their grimly marshalled lines, and dragging free the deadly oil-soaked stacks. They bundled them back over the middle wall onto the lower peribolos, and then flung a flaming brand onto the pyre, burning it uselessly far from their own gates. They ran home to mighty cheers from the walls, and the great wooden barriers slammed shut behind them. Not one citizen of that hardy crew was hurt.

On the walls above the Lycus the escalade was densest, and there the best of the fighters stood together through the night. Roaring defiance, Tatullus slashed his billhook across faces and throats as they appeared atop the nets, then jabbed downwards, splitting skulls, severing heads from shoulders. Arrows clattered around the defenders in the darkness but it was hard even for Hun archers to shoot the enemy and not their own, fighting in such close combat and at night. Time and again a Hun warrior screamed and fell back from a net or a ladder, a black-feathered arrow of his comrades in his back, until eventually one of the Hun generals gave the order to cease firing. The Gothic wolf-lords, meanwhile, continued to return fire into the densely packed besiegers as ruthlessly as ever.

Captain Malchus was soon back from the Rhegium Gate, anxious not to miss out on the fighting, his sword swirling and slashing, his eyes gleaming mad and white out of a mask of blood. He was even heard to yell, ‘This is the life!’ And there was Andronicus slashing and stabbing by his side – the two were like brothers – and repeating low and sonorously as if it were a dark refrain from the Byzantine liturgy. ‘You shall not take this city, you shall not have it, not one of you shall pass…’

The stars had vanished from the sky; only sparks illuminated the black-clouded vault of heaven. From the heart of the city, even now, there came the voices of priests and deacons chanting psalms, and it was to the sound of this sublime and serene plainsong that the men of war fought on.

Near the Blachernae Walls, the Isaurian auxiliaries identified more underground tunnelling taking place. Attila was trying everything, every trick simultaneously, believing that night and numbers were on his side, and the city must be won soon.

‘You haven’t time to countermine,’ said Aetius desperately. ‘Drop the column drums on ’em!’

The great marble cylinders that he had had stowed along the battlements at regular intervals were rolled out, craned up onto the walls, and dropped onto places where the tunnellers’ activities had been felt. The huge weights thumped down into the ground below, sank half buried, and caved in the tunnels beneath. It was crude, temporary, but effective. A group of Palatine Guard rolled one of the precious column drums down onto an approaching ram and its team, resulting in comprehensive obliteration.

Everything needed to be done lightning fast, every new variety of assault needed to be met with an instant reaction, still more ruthless and violent than the assault itself. Thanks to Aetius’ foresight, his energy and commanding presence, again and again the Huns were met by just such savage resistance. It was last thing they had been led to expect, and already a few were voicing doubts.

Some went further. From beneath a monstrous pile of Kutrigur Huns near Military Gate IV, a survivor came crawling, slathered red in his own and his comrades’ blood. He knelt below the Walls of Constantinople, clutching his near-severed right arm to his chest, seeming oblivious to the arrows that hissed around him. Instead he raised his head and looked up to the starless sky, blinded with blood, and howled with such fury that his words carried far. ‘Astur curse you, Great Tanjou Attila! Astur damn you, Attila son of Mundzuk! Lord Widow-maker! World-ravisher! Blood-worm!’ An arrow struck him in the thigh, yet he barely stirred, continuing to gaze heavenwards open-mouthed, panting. Eventually, grim-faced old Chanat strode out from behind the middle wall and cut his head off. Yet his words had been heard, by attacker and defender alike.

Still the Huns continued to ascend the walls, fast as quicksilver, lassoing the battlements, swinging themselves up like acrobats in a circus.

‘Like Barbary apes up the cliffs of fuckin’ Gibraltar,’ as Knuckles put it, clubbing another one down.

But the pace of the battle was slowing. For each fresh wave of Hun warriors, the greatest obstacle before the walls was the slippery heaps of their own dead. This was not, as Aetius observed, good for their morale. Another ram was smashed, the siege-engines were either burned or stuck fast amid jagged hillocks of rubble and broken walls, and the onagers, too, had fallen into dismayed silence. Aetius leant on the battlements and checked along the ranks. His men stood firm. No arrows came in.

‘We’ve broken them,’ muttered Tatullus. Centurion and general exchanged glances, both thinking the same: for now; but they will come again. And again. And again.

With their numbers thinning, and the coherence of their command structure going, the Huns resorted to individual heroics, which only caused them greater casualties. Vainglorious adolescents came galloping wildly across the mess of rubble, breaking their horses’ legs beneath them, leaping free, yowling and flailing their whips. Most of the nets had been cut free and burned, so these last-ditch attackers tried to cast their lassos high enough to noose the battlements and swing themselves up. One of them dangled half way up the wall, a dagger between his teeth.

Aetius rapped out an order to the nearby artillery unit. They swivelled their arrow-firer at an enfilading angle and punched two heavy bolts into the dangling warrior. One of the bolts cut him through the spine, and he hung there noosed by his own lasso, head back, mouth open, sightless.

Aetius went over and cut him down himself. The youth, perhaps fifteen or sixteen summers old, slithered back and lay splayed almost shapeless on the stones below, no longer in the shape of man or youth or any thing. Aetius turned away. How foul was war.

He felt something on his bare arm.

Tatullus said, ‘It’s rain.’

Aetius turned his face up to the cleansing waters of heaven and prayed with closed eyes. The fires of the Huns began to sizzle softly, and then the rain grew heavier and they smoked and began to die, and darkness fell over the crowded plain.

He went to inspect the walls, overseeing hurried rebuilding and blockading here and there.

Gamaliel came to find him.

‘The boy?’

Gamaliel nodded and smiled, drawing his long wet locks back from his cheeks. ‘Both he and his right arm will survive.’

Aetius exhaled, as if he had been holding his breath all this time.

‘He will have a fine old scar to prove his manhood, though.’

In his tiredness Aetius forgot formality and grasped the old vagabond’s scrawny hand and shook it. ‘Thank God, thank God,’ he muttered. Gamaliel laid his other hand over Aetius’, looked into his eyes, and saw the passion burning beneath the iron control, and the gentleness beneath the soldierly steel. They parted again. There was work to do.

‘By the way,’ Gamaliel called after him, ‘this rain.’ Aetius turned. ‘It will do the Huns in their camp no good. Standing puddles, mosquitoes, even this late in the year…’

Aetius frowned. ‘Mosquitoes? Annoying little buggers, sure, but I don’t think they’ll bother the Huns too much.’

‘Well,’ said Gamaliel, ‘I do have a theory… In any case, rain and foul air and camp fever go together.’

‘Damn right. By my reckoning, our besiegers are going to need around nine thousand gallons of drinking water and thirty tons of fodder every day, and their people and livestock between them will produce about a hundred tons of shit a week. You can work it out. Such unsavoury and unheroic facts can win whole wars. They’re going to poison themselves out there. Meanwhile, I want this city kept as clean as marble. In fact,’ he added, ‘when you’re done in the hospital, you can check the streets and make sure all’s well. Organise the civilians; speak to that Portumnus. Good clean water, no refugees sleeping rough, sewers clear, all bodies burned. Any incidence of plague or dysentery, isolate the victims immediately and report back to me. Yes?’

Gamaliel was already gone.

Not long before dawn the Huns came again in another wave. They didn’t trouble with unwieldy siege-engines this time, only a vast, two-mile long escalade with nets and light cane ladders, hoping to achieve victory against the exhausted defenders through lightning speed and sheer bravado. But the Palatine Guard and the auxiliaries were as indefatigable as ever, the Gothic wolf-lords seemed to be men of iron, and the civilian bands would not even forsake the walls to allow fresh reinforcements to take their place. Already battle-bloodied, though trembling with fatigue and showing many a wound, their confidence was higher than before, their self-belief a powerful weapon in itself. When the sun rose, they had saluted it in greeting, as a brother. Heaven and earth were both with them.

The Huns surged up the walls and met a solid blockade of men and blades. Here and there they did break through, but could still not build on it and capture a single tower. In the thickest of the fighting Knuckles found himself surrounded, his club knocked from his hand, and a lean, wiry Hun pulling back his spear to drive it into him. Then the Hun reeled and arched, his back sliced open by Arapovian behind. In the space of three blows, the silent, implacable Armenian had kicked the slain Hun off the parapet, knocking one of his fellow Huns askew as he fell. Arapovian drove his sword into him as he stumbled, a light but effective stab, so as to draw the blade free again in time to parry a mighty swashing blow from a third attacker, an ugly painted Kutrigur, his teeth blood-red and filed to carnivorous points. Arapovian spun out of reach of his heavy blade, then ducked back and rose up at his side to behead him where he stood. The rest of the Hun bridgehead was taken apart from behind by six Imperial Guards working in close order, spears held low, and their bodies tossed back over the wall.

Knuckles was down on all fours, shaking his head like a wet dog. He clambered to his feet a little blearily. One side of his face was caked with blood, his thatched hair matted and shiny.

‘You need attention,’ said Arapovian, retrieving the Kutrigur Hun’s head from where it lay at his feet, staring up at him with a perplexed expression, and tossing it over the wall.

‘Not before I’ve thanked you profusely for so heroically coming to my rescue, my lissom Parsee playmate,’ rumbled Knuckles, touching a great paw to the side of his dented skull and staring down at his wet, red fingertips. ‘I do ’ope you think it’s worth it, in the long run. You must have trained as a dancer in the theatre, the way you skipped around that lot.’

Arapovian looked haughty.

‘Very noble of you anyway, I’m sure. Thought I was a goner there. And I’ve lost me club.’

‘You’ll find it down below,’ said the Armenian. ‘On your way to the hospital.’

‘All right, all right, I’m going to get myself stitched. By the way,’ he added as a parting shot, ‘there’s some more of ’em coming up behind you. Best turn round.’

And the stained eastern sword-blade flashed in the air once more.

Knuckles was back with bandaged head and rescued club within ten minutes, fighting alongside Tatullus close to the north side of Military Gate V. They fought in a relentless duet of club and billhook as of old, still fired by the memory of Viminacium and their fallen comrades. Knuckles grunted and roared and swore, raining down colourful curses.

‘You barbarous fuckin’ horse-fucker, eat that! Here, you, come and get a fuckin’ headache! I got one off one of your lot like you wouldn’t believe! You wriggling little fucker, keep still while I brain you! Now fuck off back over the wall. Gah!’ – lurching forward and caving in another skull.

Tatullus fought in silence, jaws grimly clenched, steel helmet lowered, forearms like oak and those deepset eyes even and unblinking as his billhook cut a murderous swathe through unarmoured men, a true veteran unperturbed by screams of the dying. When a stray arrow fired from an agile climber pierced the brass-studded leather guard protecting his left shoulder and stuck fast, he neither cried out nor even turned his head. Pausing only to break off the shaft and toss it clear over the wall, he pressed forward to slash and slash again, like some nightmarish iron automaton dreamed up by a Jewish cabbalist in the smoke-filled inventiveness of his hermit cell, created out of the fires of his furnace while chanting of Adonai and Jahweh and the Elohim and all the ten thousand names of God.

Suddenly they were gone.

The attack was over.

Only then were the defenders overcome by their unspeakable weariness. Men sank down behind the battlements, almost too exhausted to pull their helmets from their sweat-drenched heads. Aetius ordered food and water to the walls.

He saw Knuckles’ bandaged head. ‘You, Rhinelander. You might get a corona obsidionalis for breaking a siege, if we all come out of this alive.’

‘Thank you, sir, but I’d rather rather have a cup of wine right now, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘I thought you didn’t drink?’

Knuckles gawped at the master-general’s astonishing memory for detail. Then he said, ‘Well, sir, I admit that there was that unfortunate incident with the fishmonger’s daughter at Carnuntum, whose sordid details I’d rather not burden you with, sir, begging your pardon, as they might put you off your dinner. Suffice it to say that, although I did then take a pledge to stay off the booze for a good while thereafter, I…’ Knuckles tailed off.

The general was walking away, not having quite the leisure needed to hear Knuckles out when he was in full flow. But he called back over his shoulder to one of the runners, ‘Get that man a bucket of wine. A horse bucket,’ he added with a flash of a grin.

He resumed his station on the tower of Military Gate V, and exhaustion hit him like a wall. He could barely stand. But he could not sleep. There was too much to do. He ate only dry bread and drank water. Tatullus and Captain Andronicus of the Guard came to him. Now the fighting was finished and the rush of blood had subsided, they, too, looked beyond exhaustion, and the light was gone from their eyes. He knew how they felt. This did not feel like victory, and there was no cause for wild celebration. Not yet. This felt only like temporary survival. Out there on the plains, Attila still crouched like some beast of prey ready to spring, with his vast army diminished by all of one or two thousand men.

Now it was time for Aetius to hear their own losses.

Of the two companies of Imperial Guard, one hundred and sixty men in all, over sixty were dead and another forty or so wounded beyond fighting. That ratio alone spoke volumes; and that percentage. Well over half the Palatine Guard was destroyed, and every single one of them had shed blood this last day and night. For Attila, though, those piles of Hun dead at the foot of the walls were only a fraction of his forces. Of the forty-four wolf-lords, only three were slain, and three lay in the Emmanuel Hospital. Astonishing figures, and no reflection of the bravery with which they had fought, all day and all night, unrelenting. Even Andronicus was forced to admit that they had taken so few casualties because they were such skilled and ferocious fighters. Flaxen-haired giants, they fought like lions.

As for the eighty Isaurian auxiliaries, again, more than half were dead or else wounded beyond fighting. Their active numbers were down to thirty. Of the citizens who had given their lives for their beloved Holy City – ordinary men, fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, men whose only skill in life was to bake bread, or hammer horseshoes, or even trim beards – the number slain was beyond reckoning.

Down there below them, those slaughtered heaps of feathered and tattooed wild men, who had fought virtually naked, tooth and claw, howling in a language that none but Aetius himself understood – they too were fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. It was too terrible. It was nothing but loss and waste. This was the time, when the battle ebbed and stilled awhile, that grief could overwhelm even the strongest man. What had they fought each other for, these fathers and sons? What had it all been about?

Aetius, Tatullus and Andronicus stood silently side by side on the tower, watching unarmed Huns returning under the burning midday sun to retrieve their dead and take them back for decent mourning and burial. It was a foul task which would take hours. Aetius did not need to give the order not to fire on them. None of the defenders would be so cruel. He bowed his head. His heart was like a stone with sorrow.

Behind them, one of the guards suddenly muttered, ‘Oh my God, no.’

The three exhausted men turned round.

Turning round also to look back across the city they had fought so courageously to defend, their backs to the armies of Attila, all along the walls exhausted men were sinking down to their knees, dropping their weapons, calling on the name of Christ and weeping openly. For the Holy City was lost.

The air was still, distant smoke rising into the autumnal air, the sun bright on the city’s rain-washed golden domes, starlings still wheeling about the spires, the monks still chanting the Kyrie, sweetly oblivious. Away to the east, near the Imperial Palace itself, tall flames were licking up into the pale September sky like flames going up from a pyre.