‘Hunting the Huns on the open plain is like hunting a tiger in a dark forest,’ said a soft voice nearby. It was Arapovian. ‘At night. With a stick.’
‘Stow it, soldier.’
Sabinus was ready to sound the recall already, but then Andronicus gave a seeming yell of triumph, and Sabinus hesitated. It seemed the cavalry officer believed there was still a chance they might get through to the onagers and destroy them, before they themselves were destroyed.
Keeping his men in a tight and perfect column, essential when so vastly outnumbered, Andronicus turned them as tightly as he could and ploughed in left across the files of fleeing Hun horsemen. No, there was no satisfying hard target to splinter and demolish, but these light horsemen, out of arrows, barely armoured, indeed some barely clothed, could be cut down ruthlessly in smaller groups. And getting in amongst them like this, there was no chance their Hun comrades could reply with arrow-fire. They would only kill their own. It was a good move.
Sabinus nodded with satisfaction. One thing that stone-faced warlord had not expected, he guessed, was any such counter-attack. Well, let him feel it now. Now those light horse-warriors would feel what it was like to have the Boiler Boys crashing into their flank.
When a lancer drove into the flank of a Hunnish horse, the massive weight of the armoured knight tended to carry him right into and over the flailing and tumbling steppe pony. Either the rider was trapped or trampled beneath, or else, if he tried to come up again, the next lancer would be ready immediately behind to finish him off. Andronicus himself drove his lance in low, straight into a squat pony’s belly. The pony squealed and keeled over, dragging his lance from his hand as it went. Andronicus promptly pulled up and drew his spatha, his long-sword. The Hun horseman rolled and came up standing, covered in dust, half blinded, whipping round, drawing his curved sabre. The lancer behind Andronicus came past the Hun on the other side, galloping in close enough to touch him. He lowered his shield, aimed the heavy bronze boss straight for the Hun’s spinning head, and let his horse do the rest. The effect at that speed was to club the warrior headless where he stood, leaving nothing but the stump of a cadaver gouting blood from the neckhole.
It became a rout of the arrowless, fleeing steppe warriors, torn asunder by the heavyweight lancers, who were getting closer to the onagers all the time. Once there, a few well-aimed sword-strokes could do a lot of damage and buy them useful time. But in the whirling, blinding dust, the cavalrymen took too little notice of fresh Hun horsemen coming down from the ridge, quivers packed and bristling.
Suddenly the Roman column found itself falling behind, unable to pursue at such speed, and with some way still to go to reach the onagers. And then the Huns came back, deft and fast, lightweight gallopers as fast as swooping falcons, curling in on either side of the column, loosing off arrows on lethal flat trajectories – no elegant high arcs through the morning sky now – and angled to the column so as not to fly on and hit their own. The warriors held their small, deadly bows almost horizontal, shooting from the side, arrows barely visible as they spat from the bow from a mere hundred yards, fifty. They thocked into heavy wooden shields, each shield on each lancer’s left arm soon stuck with eight or ten arrows, weighing the rider down, tiring him. Soon even those strong arms began to drop, necks and shoulders became more exposed. The lancers were drenched in sweat within their coats of mail, eyes blinking furiously, straining to see.
The Hunnish horses didn’t seem afraid of the big Roman mounts masked in their unearthly silver chamfrons. Perhaps their riders didn’t allow them to be afraid. More arrows skidded off shoulder-guards or steep-sided Spangenhelms, sometimes ricocheting into softer flesh – the power behind each missile was awesome. Others hit direct and passed on, barely slowed by plate or chainmail, to bore into meat and bone. Blood gleamed on polished armour, as thin as oil on water, or trickled beneath, runnels of blood and sweat commingled.
A pair of buzzards, male and female, with two scrawny chicks to feed, circled overhead.
Andronicus pushed back his visor and left it up, raging and oblivious of pain in the chaos of the fight. He was hit in the thigh, but time enough for it to hurt later. He bellowed another order and then tightened up again, roaring round to the right, holding his long-sword thrust straight out before him like a lance. He had realised what was happening. Although they had done good damage to the arrowless riders in retreat, they were now surrounded, like hornets in a beehive. All he could see around them, their only horizon, was one vast, extended circle of galloping riders. The Huns loosed their arrows when passing through only one quadrant of the circle, so they wouldn’t hit their own men the other side. Smart. They reloaded around the rest of the gallop.
Andronicus’ men were going down everywhere, reeling in the bright sunshine, crying out, heads thrown back, lances trailing. He drove his wheeled spurs into his charger’s broad flanks and led his men to break out of the circle again. No Hun line could withstand that shock. But instead of withstanding it, the enemy simply melted away before it. The circle ebbed around them and re-formed and they were still surrounded. The Huns’ tactical agility was extraordinary. But how did they know when to re-form, when to hold fire, when to move? Who gave the order? It was uncanny. Even now, Andronicus could admire it. He had heard of the Huns. Now he saw them, and understood. No demons out of the wilderness, after all. Just awesome warriors. Perhaps the hardest that Rome had fought in all her long history.
Across the plain, on the low rise, the Hun warlord sat unmoving, like some primitive votive statue cut from basalt in the desert. He gave no orders to his whirling thousands.
Another flight of arrows came in and Andronicus crouched low in his saddle, his face buried in his horse’s coarse mane. Sometimes that rough, sweet horse-smell comforted him, in the stables at the end of a hard day’s training or, better still, a hunt. But not now. All comfort was far from him now. An arrow clanged on his shoulder and cut his neck open. His sweat stung in the wound. His linen soutane was sticky with blood.
Too many of his men were fallen, and the column’s coherence was lost. The day, too, was lost. The sun was well past noon, and sinking, its light beginning to shine from behind the stone warlord on the crest and his innumerable ranks of warriors, to burn cruelly in the eyes of the Roman lancers and their comrades on the doomed walls of Viminacium. The judgement of the sun was plain.
From those walls came the desperate, far-away sound of the recall. Andronicus could have laughed. Some hope. ‘Come and get us, friends,’ he muttered, finding his mouth was full of blood.
Now mere isolated individuals, some cavalrymen tried to pull their mounts round and head back to the fort, but they were picked off one by one. Others milled vacantly. Andronicus twisted in his saddle and looked around, and another arrow cut across his back. Had he been sitting straight it would have killed him. There was only one thing left to try. There would be no return to the fort for them. He gave one last, desperate order, spraying blood. ‘Free charge for the onagers!’ He gritted his teeth. Think of it as a suicide mission. Never give up hope. Die in the attack.