The Judgement

9

Aetius had used his Batavian special forces, his superventores, exactly as they were supposed to be used, skilfully and in secrecy.

The single century of lightly armoured men had skirted the hill as soon as its possession was consolidated by the Palatine Guard, well-dug in around the summit. They had crawled along a drainage ditch, well wide of the Hun lines, running down to the river that formed Attila’s supposedly safe right flank. Safe enough from major attack or cavalry, true. But the Huns wrongly supposed their own fear of deep, strong rivers to be universal, and their focus was elsewhere.

The Batavians came across the river as swiftly as crocodiles across the serpent Nile, breathing through hollow reeds, swimming strongly. They slithered up through the sedge of the far bank, dripping like watery ghouls, duckweed stuck to their lightweight leather cuirasses. Their backpacks dripped, too, but the contents were still as dry as desert sand, triple-wrapped in oilcoth. They crept along the riverbank until they reached the baggage wagons.

The great high-wheeled Hunnish wagons were entirely unprotected by warriors, although crowded on top of them were old men, women and children, gazing southwards, munching strips of smoked meat, eagerly waiting for the battle to begin. On the nearest wagon, the superventores noted, chuckling to themselves, one old woman was even making the best use of this tedious time before the fight by doing sewing repairs to a leather jerkin.

Shock and terror would clear them off quickly enough. And then speed of retreat would be everything.

The eighty men came screaming and yelling up through the reedbeds, muddy and plastered with weed, swords whirling. The women took one horrified look at these river-demons, snatched their infants down from the wagons and fled. The superventores were at the wagons in an instant, kneeling down behind the solid wooden wheels emptying their backpacks, plastering the dry old wooden wheels with a special mix of naptha, sulphur and highly refined oil on wads of fresh lambs’ wool, sticky and murderously flammable. Right across the rear of the Hun lines the wagons stretched away, piled high with the loot of half the civilised world. There might have been a hundred, no, three or four hundred – they couldn’t possibly damage them all. But by the time word got to the nearest Hun warriors, sitting their horses in the rear battle-lines, the Batavians had fixed up over thirty wagons.

A couple of hundred horse-warriors came galloping furiously back across the grass towards them.

The commander of the superventores knelt, flipped open his tinderbox and flicked the wheel.

‘Sir, we’re in range!’

The first arrows hit the ground nearby. A junior lieutenant held out a wooden staff topped with a blob of pitch and the commander lit it.

‘Now run!’ he roared. ‘The rest of you – to the river!’

The main body sprinted for the water, crouching low, while the lieutenant dashed along the line of wagons with the flaming torch extended. Every time it brushed against a treated wheel, the wagon exploded into flames like a bone-dry hayrick.

The Huns were bewildered and indecisive, some making towards the burning wagons intending to extinguish them and save the loot, though God only knew how. That moment of confusion was the lieutenant’s chance of escape, and he took it, sprinting towards the river, dashing beneath a low-hanging alder for cover even as arrows sliced through the leaves around him, and diving headlong into the river. Horsemen arrived on the bank above, howling with fury, their horses champing, tossing their brutish heads, fighting against entering such a fast-moving current when unable to see the bottom. The riders drew back their bows and arrows slapped into the water but instantly lost trajectory, flattening out across the surface like skimmed pebbles or spinning round to face the powerful current. In any case, the Batavians were already down in the murky depths, lungs forcibly emptied, navigating only by the feel of the current dragging them back to safety, swimming like tritons with grins across their water-stretched faces.

As Aetius well knew, such flamboyant tactics had absolutely no effect on the material progress of the battle, but they could do wonders for morale. His lines cheered wildly as the black smoke billowed up into the air behind the Hun army, and they saw the Hunnish leader himself, fearsome Attila, galloping furiously back to view the damage.

‘An ostentatious little jape,’ muttered Aetus, ‘but a useful one.’

Tatullus grinned. ‘What’s he wasting his time for? He needs to get on with it.’ He jerked his head right.

Aetius nodded. The sun was indeed, as usual, coming round. With every delay, the Huns would have to fight facing more and more directly into it.

The commander of the superventores reappeared, still at the run. Well, special forces were expected to be able to cover forty miles in a day with sixty-pound packs on their backs. This was a nice day out for them.

He saluted. ‘Job done, sir.’

‘Casualties?’

‘None, sir, apart from one novice who slipped coming out of the river and bloodied his pug. Getting bandaged up right now.’

Aetius grinned. ‘Good man. To the rearguard now. There’ll be more work for you later.’

‘Sir.’

It was late morning, and still nothing. Attila’s delaying tactics were wearisome to the Romans, but they would test his own, undisciplined warriors’ patience to the limit. Sooner or later they were going to have to charge. That mile between them would tire them, especially with their horses, poorly fed for these past weeks and months. And then they would hit the earthed-up pikes of the Alans and, behind them, the Roman legionaries. That was what Aetius wanted. As for the coming arrow-storm, he had two ways to deal with that.

Meanwhile the two armies stood motionless, and the sun kept coming round. Tube-like dracones, wind-socks, droned in the wind. The Hun horses stamped restively. Occasionally there were sorties from their lines, jeered at and sharply rebuffed, the horsemen retreating in disorder. Then as the air warmed a light southerly breeze blew up.

Aetius looked sharply at his centurion.

Tatullus produced a small white feather, raised it above his head and let go. It twirled briefly, then drifted steadily towards the Hun lines.

The centurion looked around, scanned the horizon. ‘A calm summer’s day. June. Gaul. A few clouds low in the west.’ He grinned at Aetius. ‘Yep. I reckon.’

Aetius nodded, and Tatullus roared over the front rank, ‘Fire the smokescreen!’

Immediately a great sheet of flame coursed along before the Roman line, and then quickly burned down to thick smoke. The auxiliaries ran between the files and poured on oil and dead branches, sacks of leaves, commandeered haybales and, best of all, thick green summer grass. The pall of smoke thickened, rose into the air forty, fifty feet, and drifted always north towards the Hun lines. In a few minutes they’d be blinded by it. And, when they came through it, by the sun.

Sweaty hands tightened around butted pikes, men crouched low. Some used corners of grimy neckerchiefs to wipe the sweat trickling down their foreheads and stinging their eyes, then quickly returned their hands to their pikes. The sweat would have to drip, because they all felt it now. The earth was rumbling. Beyond the smoke, the Huns were charging.

The next noise was the distant, muffled strum of the torsion springs of the Lightning Boys’ arrow-firers and sling-machines. Of course. From their position they could see the Huns charging below them. Thank God they held that hill. Then there were the screams of men and horses erupting soprano above the deep rumble of the charge. First blood. Those steel-head bolts were hitting home, horses rolling forward and tripping, the charge running in behind, getting tangled.

The smokescreen had worked. The Huns weren’t firing, not through that thick curtain. They were coming through it.

‘Steady, lads!’ shouted Aetius. ‘Lean all your weight on those pikes, now. Hold the line. Here they come.’

Many of them saw it in slow and dreamlike motion. Out of that drifting, cloudy wall of smoke only thirty or forty yards in front of their pikes, first emerged those big, brutish horses’ heads, and their hooves, and legs, then the whole animals, and riding them the naked savages, spiralling their swords, hatchets and lassos above their shaven, tattooed heads, howling like demons loosed from hell.

They hit the Alans hardest, but not before the Roman legionaries had stood up behind and hurled their javelins from their jointed javelin-throwers in a ferocious volley, so perfectly aimed and timed that perhaps every other front-rank Hunnish horseman was brought down, slowing his comrades behind and tangling them up just where they didn’t want to be. Many flew to the ground and lay uninjured but stunned. Then the Alan lancers broke rank and ran out to butcher them where they lay.

‘Back into line you fools! Hold formation! Pull back now!’

But the Alans lacked the discipline. Seeing what they thought was the impotent chaos of the Huns before them, they acted as headstrong individuals, dropping their pikes and pushing forward, drawing their swords. It was madness. Though a hundred or more Huns had fallen in that first javelin volley, many more were coming on behind, and those who had lost their horses and been stunned in falls were instantly on their feet again, daggers and sharpened chekans in hand. The Alans were surrounded and cut to pieces.

Sangiban, watching from his horse, bellowed with anger. ‘Shoot them!’ he screamed. ‘Where are you, archers?’

But Aetius’ men could not shoot without hitting the disordered Alan footsoldiers, who were slaughtered before their eyes. Cornered, the Alans fought like lions, it was true, but without formation they were lost.

‘Herculians, move up. Take pike positions.’

It was a relief to know that those old hands would hold the line: hold it until they were cut down where they stood.

The milling Hun horsemen, their charge broken by the enemy javelins and by their own bloodlust as they paused to stab and scalp the bewildered and fallen Alans, came on again but without discipline, single vainglorious warriors hurling themselves on the line of pikes yelling, ‘Astur is Great and will prevail!’ only to be skewered and dashed to the ground. Time and again horses reared, screaming, their riders flung back, hooves scrabbling in the air, a pike-head buried deep in their mighty chests. The legionaries knew better than to admire their handiwork, promptly dragging their pikes free and butting them in the ground again. The next attack would soon come round.

‘Arrow-storm coming in!’ went up a cry from the wing. Instantly the rear-rank troops raised their shields above their heads and locked together. Arrows skidded off the bronze, thocked down into the leather and wood, and stuck there, quivering. Legionaries dropped their shields down in front of them and lopped off the arrow-shafts with their swords. Here and there a cry went up as a man was hit, too slow with his shield or just unlucky. But Aetius could judge immediately from the thinness of the cries that little damage had been done. Now came his new tactic, for he knew how the Huns would fight.

The front line had come in charging and was stuck on the Roman pikes. Meanwhile, lightly armed horse-archers were galloping back and forth behind them, intending to loose off their arrow-storm over the heads of their front-rank comrades and down onto the Romans’ rear ranks. That was their plan. But the moment they began, Aetius gave the nod and the heavy Visigothic cavalry rode out, visors lowered, shields hefted, mighty ashwood lances couched.

They galloped round the rear of the fighting lines in a gigantic sweep, through the smokescreen, and scythed into the Hun horse-archers from behind. Many of the archers barely had time to turn before that great gleaming metallic serpent, head diamond-shaped like a pit viper, cut through them and bowled them apart, wreaking havoc. Nor did they stop for one moment, cutting across in front of the main Hunnish army, round the hill, and back to their station on the Romans’ right wing. In their wake were the strewn and broken bodies of many hundreds.

While the triumphant Visigothic cavalry drew breath, the artillerymen on the hill piled in, loosing their arrows sidelong into any Huns crossing the field to engage the line of pikes. Attila must be cursing. That hill was proving pivotal, a permanent outflanking fixture. Once battle was messily engaged, no one could shoot close to their own. But from that accursed hill…

Each individual tactic of Aetius’ was paying off. The arrow-storm was weakened if not neutered by countercharge and good, old-fashioned shield discipline. The Hun cavalry charge, their horses tired before they started, was locked up against the legionaries and their implacable line of pikes. With the Visigothic cavalry and also the superb Augustan Horse and the Moors always ready to ride wide and sweep in from both left and right across the advancing enemy, it seemed that everything was going Aetius’ way. And so they fought on. Past noon, past mid-afternoon. Pedites ran with water. The Herculians dropped back, exhausted, and the Batavians took their place in the centre. The bodies of the enemy were piled high across the plain. The artillery from the hill worked on implacably. Yet the Huns kept coming.

Now it was a terrible battle of attrition. The Huns fought with ferocity but without imagination, without fresh tactics. Given that, Aetius knew grimly, it was just a matter of whether the Huns’ sheer weight of numbers would eventually triumph over the Romans’ exhaustion.

He rode behind the lines to see the wounded being bandaged and salved, the dead laid out for later burial. Already there were many there. He asked for numbers from only one legion, finding the primus pilus of the Herculians.

‘Over half my men, sir.’

‘Wounded?’

‘No, sir. Slain.’

He held the back of his hand to his mouth. All war was foul, but this was war at its foulest. A whole generation was being swept away in one day by the madness of one king.

An optio came running. ‘Sir, the Batavians are near exhaustion, sir.’

He nodded. ‘Pull ’em back. Send forward the frontier legions.’

‘And the Huns are launching fresh attacks on the hill, sir.’

Hell. That must not fall. ‘Send in the rest of the Palatine Guard to secure it.’

‘Sir.’

The twelfth hour from dawn? He reckoned so. Another four hours of daylight this long summer day. By nightfall it would be decided. And already they were stretched to breaking-point.

On the front line the battle was bloody, fierce and unrelenting. An ugly, stagnant stand-off, a process of the grimmest and goriest wastage. There was no room for the flamboyance of the wide-arcing cavalry charge now, no brilliant outflanking manoeuvres, nothing but the old moves of stab and slash, slogging it out knee deep in the reddening mud. In the melee, Knuckles, Arapovian and Malchus fought side by side as of old, protecting one another as well as holding back the Huns.

The Huns hated this hand-to-hand fighting. Their lassos were useless in the crush, their bows and arrows dead weight, and their swordsmanship poor and without order. Their small ponies, so rapid and sure-footed on the vast steppes of Asia, here only stumbled wearily over the heaps of the slain. The Romans gave no quarter. A few crossbowmen on the flanks picked off any Hun unhorsed and sent him reeling to hell.

King Theodoric came riding over to Aetius when two runners arrived at once.

‘Sir, the Palatine Guard are pinned down and surrounded on the hill.’

‘They must hold it – to the last man.’

‘The artillery boys are done for, sir. The Guard couldn’t save them.’

Yes, the arrow-firers had indeed fallen silent; the sling-machines worked no more.

‘And you? What happy news?’

The second runner, still gasping, said, ‘Sir, large numbers of the enemy seen drifting off north and west beyond the baggage wagons.’

‘Which people?’

‘Too far off to say, sir. But many, many deserting.’ King Thedoric punched his mighty fist into his palm. ‘This is going to be a close day of it, Roman.’

So it was. But there were no more tactical choices to be made. There weren’t enough men left for Aetius to make any new dispositions. They must just hold out.

King Theodoric shook his shaggy head, already pulling his horse round and moving back to the right wing. ‘It is time for the Visigoths to charge the enemy.’

‘You will leave our flank open!’ called Aetius. ‘You must hold it!’

Theodoric looked back. ‘With respect, old Roman friend, I am not, and never will be, under your command. But have no fear. My wolf-lords will finish the Hun with our charge. Your flank is safe.’

The sunlight was now behind them when the wolf-lords rode in, a single vast column of thousands of heavy-armoured horsemen. Ahead of them, a horde of many more, but already looking hesitant, indistinct, squinting into the sun. The Visigoths needed to ride wide indeed to avoid the piles of the slain. At their head rode their white-haired King, carrying no shield but only a two-headed battle-axe. Some in the Roman lines who saw him ride said he must have wanted to die.

Hun arrows came down onto the column as soon as their charge was spotted. But with shields raised and Spangenhelms lowered, they sustained little damage. And their huge chargers, despite having galloped all day, still had the power to gallop once more, thundering over the churned and deep-scored field, divots gouged out, manes flying, lances massed and lowered.

The Huns started to buckle and fall back as the thunderous column approached, but they could only fall back on their own rear ranks. They were packed too tightly to move, pushing and panicking and crying out when the wolf-lords slammed into them. And the Visigoths drove through with such ferocity that they were soon lost to Roman view, only the occasional banner showing above their heads.

For some minutes it was impossible to say what had happened. Meanwhile the last of the frontier legions had fought themselves to an exhausted standstill. Here and there, Hun horsemen came close enough to whip the pikes out of the ground and ride in over them. The centre, the very breastplate of the Roman force, was coming apart.

‘Send in every last man!’ roared Aetius. ‘Hold that line! Keep formation at all costs! Not a man to break or we are lost!’

The last few remnants, the Batavian special forces, the Breton volunteers, and the two hundred Celts with Lucius at their head, pushed forward through the ranks and gave their last-ditch support to the exhausted and ravaged legions. A pocket of Hun horsemen had broken through, wheeled, and were charging at the Roman front line from behind, curved swords whirling. The men looked over their shoulders and cried out, knowing they were about to be surrounded and cut down, whatever they did. It was at this moment in a battle, always always, when men broke and ran to save their skins and formation crumbled, that the day was lost.

But now the Huns themselves cried out and turned again to defend themselves. Two Roman horsemen rode into them at full pelt. One actually wielded a huge billhook from the saddle, whirling the long handle over his head and slicing through men’s chests and throats, roaring and spattered with blood.

The Hun horsemen fell apart. One tried to leap over the Roman line and flee, but a huge fellow with a weighted club knocked him clean out of his saddle, then drove his face in with a single stomp of his left boot. As the Roman turned back to regain the safety of his line, he reeled. The curved spike of a chekan sliced across his skull and he fell forward, his face a thick mask of blood. The Hun warrior, an old but muscular fellow with flying long grey hair and fine moustaches, galloped in again, swinging low off the side off his horse, thighs clamped tight, and was about to swing a second time with his chekan when a lean eastern swordsman leaped to stand over the fallen club-wielder, poised askance, sword level as the desert horizon. At the last second he ducked, stood again, whirled round and sliced his sword blade though a wide arc in a single sinuous movement. The old warrior flung his head back and howled, the chekan flying out of his hand as he clutched his thigh, cut through leather and flesh to the bone. His exhausted horse slowed to an absent-minded trot as it felt its rider’s grip loosen. The easterner sprinted after him, his sword still whirling. Then he stopped abruptly, and let the old warrior ride slowly back to the Hun lines, slumped in his wooden saddle.

The easterner looked down at the fellow with the club. He was kneeling, stunned, with a second wound in his big shoulder, where an arrowhead was buried deep.

Arapovian called to him.

He looked up and grinned slowly. ‘Fuckin’ top of the world, my lissom Parsee comrade!’ Then he was back on his feet once more, laying his club on his shoulder, turning to face the onslaught yet again.

The Roman line curved and billowed, split apart and came togther again. Men fell forwards and backwards, screaming, clutching throats and chests. Many lay in the mud, dying, and many of those, even the most battle-hardened of the legions, ended their lives as they had begun: crying for their mothers. No medics came; they were all slain. None of their comrades came, either; they were all slain or fighting. The sun was sliding down the sky, and the field was mown flat like a harvest field.

Aetius crawled out from under his third fallen horse, helmet and sword both gone, and hauled himself up onto another sagging beast standing haggard, nuzzling bloody grass, desperate to eat but sickened. He stared around. His army was almost gone.

But across the field… the enemy army was thinning out. The flanks were receding. There was a huge concave bow near the centre, and the limitless depth that the horde had shown this morning, stretching back and back into the blue distance, had shrunk away. They were stretched thin and to breaking. Away in the east there was a dust-cloud burnished gold in the setting sun, so many were retreating.

Nearer, before that haze of dust, there was a gleaming serpent of armoured horsemen: the wolf-lords curving into the scattered flank of the Hun line yet again. They rolled it up. Before Aetius’ dust-blurred eyes, the Hun line folded in on itself, collapsed. The wolf-lords drove on, too tired to gallop now, only trotting, but with lances still lowered, implacable. The Huns broke and fled.

Night seemed to fall fast on that day. The sun had seen enough.

Aetius, too, had seen enough, but it was not over. His work was not done yet. Runners were too few. He must find more. He called for a wagon to be drawn up and piled with saddles and he climbed onto it. A filthy fellow passed beneath him, knelt, cleaned his sword in a rare patch of unsullied grass.

‘You, man,’ Aetius called to him. ‘Up here. Lend me your eyes.’

The fellow came up and stared north.

‘You,’ muttered Aetius.

‘I,’ said Arapovian. After a moment he said, ‘Here is an irony. Attila is piling up a wagonload of saddles like ours.’ He glanced at Aetius. ‘How emulous he is of you in all he does.’

‘What else?’

‘They’re drawing their remaining wagons into a circle, the oldest Hun tactic. But so many have fled that the circle is small. Why does he not retreat?’

‘Because he thinks we will fall on him by night and destroy him.’

‘We would if we had any men left.’

Arapovian was immediately sorry for his cruel joke. Aetius bowed his head and raised his hand to his eyes. Arapovian said softly, ‘But the battle is over.’

Aetius looked up again and out over the carnage field. ‘The battle is indeed over,’ he said. The note in his voice wrung the Armenian’s heart. ‘And both sides have lost.’