The legate took a careful breath. He ordered all fit and walking to the walls once more. ‘The day is not yet done.’
And the men rose to their feet once more, the last few dozen of them. About sixty or seventy men, bearing twice as many wounds between them. Some helped others stumble forward, some used their own pikes for crutches. Some went up the narrow stone steps to the battlements on their hands and knees.
The sun was going down in the west. For a while the Huns appeared to pause in their attack.
‘Perhaps they will allow us a good night’s sleep,’ growled Tatullus. It was a joke, of sorts. Night was when they would come again to finish it.
For now, there was an eerie peace. Swallows hawked low over the evening river, feeding on clouds of waterflies. A moorhen called her chicks. A muted splash among the nodding reeds – otter or watervole. The warm summer sun going down in the west. Burning orange against the great white flanks of the Alps. Setting the Rhine and the Po on fire. Casting long, cool shadows over the vineyards of Provence and Aquitania, over the ancient, lion-coloured castles and hilltowns of Spain where Hannibal once marched, and over the Immortal City itself on its seven hills. The evening shadow of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and the Colossus of Nero… Sabinus’ heart heaved with sorrow. This beloved empire. He had seen the future, in the implacable face of that mighty barbarian warlord who rode out of nowhere, at head of an army of horsemen that no man could number. The empire was sinking in the west, as surely as the silent sun.
Lone horsemen galloped back and forth across the plains below, stripping armour from the dead, burning them like refuse. Occasionally, through the sun-reddened dust, the watchers on the wall glimpsed a yowling figure in tribal wear but now sporting some additional decoration. A triumphal Kutrigur Hun, naked except for a tattered deerskin loincloth, bristling with bow and quiver, shaven-headed but for a single plume of limed hair, his skin half blue with tattoos, and proudly riding with a curtal red cavalry cloak fluttering round his coppery shoulders, and, slung from his saddle, a freshly severed head. He waved his sword beneath the walls of the fort and howled like a wolf in winter.
Knuckles threw a rock at him and missed. Overhead, the buzzards circled in the last of the sun. More had joined them, red kites. ‘Fuckin’ carrion birds,’ growled the hulking Rhinelander. Then he raised his head to the sky and shouted to them, ‘Plenty of carrion tonight, friends! Guzzle your cropful! Hun and Roman flesh together, it all tastes the same under the skin!’
Just after the first stars appeared in the darkening sky, Lyra and Altair high and Regulus falling, there came wearisomely familiar sounds: distant thump, then shuddering quake. They were hitting the south-west tower once more. They would be in very soon.
‘Start bagging again!’ ordered Sabinus.
And the men, who had not slept for thirty-six hours, forty, began to bag up the broken defences by torchlight. One collapsed under a sandbag. Tatullus kicked him to his feet again. ‘You can sleep when you get to Hades,’ he growled. ‘Which won’t be long now. Until then, soldier, you get on your feet and work.’
Sabinus himself re-ascended to his post on the west tower and slumped.
I had hope when violence was ceas’t…
The line echoed in his head. An old poet. Virgil, perhaps. His schooldays seemed an age ago. Merely lifting his head was an effort, his very neck bones aching with weariness. But he gazed heavenwards anyway and surveyed the fixed stars pinned to the canopy of night. Some said they were alchemical furnaces where new souls were forged; the pristine, superlunary abode of the gods, of mercy and justice eternal. They looked very far away. The night was so silent. Help would not come. They could not go on. They were finished.
Tatullus stood beside him.
It was unjust. The gods were unjust. They had fought all day and half the night like lions, and by the next dawn they would all lie dead. Yet how should you complain to the gods? You might as well try to reason with Etna. The world was as it was.
Tatullus glanced at him. And for some reason, at that moment, unutterably weary and foredefeated as they were, the two men smiled. As if to say, in concord with each other, Well, all men must die. We did our best – and our best was good.
The Armenian appeared. He did not wait for permission to speak. ‘I said you would not defeat them in open country.’
Tatullus turned a menacing eye on him. ‘He’s “sir” to you, soldier.’
Arapovian was apparently unaware of the glowering centurion’s presence. And he addressed no man as ‘sir’.
‘You know your only chance now: to fight them hand-to-hand and damage them. To hold them, to bloody them, to buy time until reinforcements come.’ He adjusted his sword-belt. ‘Of course, if they wish to overrun you here no matter what the cost, and no reinforcements come to your aid, we shall all die anyway.’
Another seismic onager strike.
‘A Roman legionary legate does not customarily take counsel from a common soldier,’ said Sabinus, aware even as he said it that Arapovian was no common soldier.
The Armenian continued, unabashed, ‘My ancestors fought the Huns before. Hepthalite Huns. On the high plains of Ararat, where the Euphrates rises from snowmelt off the mountains, flowing down to water the broad cornlands of Erzinjan and Erzerum, and the sweet orchards of-’
‘Forgive the interruption,’ said Sabinus, ‘but now is really not the time for poetry.’
Arapovian heard him with dignity. ‘My grandfather died fighting the Huns. They will always gallop faster than you, shoot further than you. You need to draw them in, separate them from their horses, as you did with the line of pikemen. That hurt them.’
‘Thank you for your sage military advice, my lord,’ growled the legate, one hand holding his side, one fist clenched on the wall. ‘And how do you suggest we do that, in your mysterious eastern wisdom? Send them a fucking dinner invitation?’
Another massive shock. The sound of collapsing masonry.
Arapovian inclined his head in that calamitous direction. ‘Let them into the fort. Stop reinforcing the wall and the tower, and let them fall. Meet them in the rubble, hand-to-hand, where their arrows and horsemanship are useless. That fellow Caestus, the boor, he will fight well enough face to face with them. Now he is wasted. Soon he will be shot.’
Sabinus reflected a moment. Then, ‘Get back below, soldier.’
He reflected some more. It insulted his pride to hear advice from a common soldier, Armenian naxarar of ancient lineage or no. It insulted his pride even more to put that advice into action. But…
The rumble of galloping hooves, a sudden shower of arrows out of the gathering gloom. Another cry from the battlements. Another fall.
The tower would collapse soon enough, anyway. They could ready themselves for it.
Along the wall, one young soldier had lost it. The boy Julianus, the one he’d tried to nerve with fine talk. But what could have prepared him for this? The boy was crawling around on his hands and knees, sobbing, howling like a dog. Another soldier dragged him off down below. He would not be back this time.
Sabinus held his breath a moment, slugged back a last mouthful of wine to kill the pain. Then he gave his runner the order.
‘Stop bagging up the south-west tower! Evacuate! Let it fall.’
The man hesitated. ‘Sir?’
He did not repeat himself. The soldier went.
Perhaps the Armenian was right. Over the chaos of rubble where the tower lay in ruins, they’d make their stand. The barbarian horsemen would find that a harder line to break. The Spartans used to boast that their walls were made of men, not stones.
It was as Sabinus had reckoned. The Hun artillerymen – the very phrase seemed an idiotic contradiction in terms for these know-nothing horse-warriors, but whoever they were, Huns or Vandals or other unknown easterners, they continued their steady onslaught into the night.