Sabinus ranged his last men with their pikes, Tatullus with his billhook, Knuckles with his club, facing the battered south-west tower and wall. It was dark. Behind them he had his auxiliaries light a row of big braziers.
Another massive hit. The walls trembled and stilled. Then as if in a dream, very slowly, reluctantly, the tower began to subside into itself, the neighbouring walls began to fold and fall. Sabinus hazed his men back. But the tower was so damaged below that it simply collapsed in on itself with a muffled subterranean music. It seemed to take for ever for the stones to reach the earth, or pile up one another at broken angles. The noise of collapse ebbed, and from far away they could hear rising cheers and ululations. The dust gradually diminished and they saw what faced them. A rupture in the walls about fifty feet wide, blocked by a mound of stones, rubble and projecting wooden beams, about half the height of the old walls: fifteen, twenty feet.
‘To the top!’ roared Sabinus. ‘Watch for incoming fire!’
The last of the legion climbed arduously towards the top of the rubble ridge and peered over.
An army of horsemen was galloping towards them. The Romans were seen, silhouetted against the light of the braziers, and the horsemen loosed their arrows. The defenders ducked down and the arrows clattered uselessly over them.
‘Come on, you pigeon-livered savages!’ roared Knuckles, the veins like cords in his neck. He smacked his club into his hand. ‘Come and get cosy!’
The savages barely reined in as they approached, seemingly intent on galloping up the rubble mound and straight on into the fort. But no one’s horsemanship was that good. One young hothead tried it. Arapovian stepped from the shadows and shot him.
‘Lose your bow, soldier!’ bellowed Tatullus angrily. ‘Draw your sword! This one’s hand-to-hand!’
For once, Arapovian obeyed.
The dead Hun’s horse twisted and fell, a foreleg caught between two broken stones, and rolled back screaming. Huns milled again at the foot of the mound, bewildered.
‘Yeah, horse-fuckers!’ roared Knuckles. ‘You’ll have to leave your girlfriends behind this time!’
But not yet. The Huns wheeled away again into the night, accustomed only to their warrior arts of archery and horsemanship. They loosed more volleys of arrows in retreat. The arrows came over the barricade and clattered uselessly into the yard beyond. They did the same again and again, feeling not a single arrow in returning fire. But their attack was useless. They struck nothing. Even the Huns couldn’t keep up this wastage.
‘They’ve got to engage soon,’ murmured Arapovian. ‘It’s a matter of pride.’
One last try. A fast gallop before them, a column of horse archers firing directly into the defensive line.
‘Heads!’
Step back, duck, shields up. The arrows thumped into the big oval shields or slid over the top, again to no avail. Not a Roman was hit. They galloped away.
Tired but jubilant legionaries set their shields down in the rubble again, lopped off the jutting arrow-shafts. Took deep breaths, wiped away the sweat.
‘We’re still here, you yellow-bellied horse-fuckers!’
Now the Hun generals understood. It would have to be hand-to-hand to finish this. Their warriors rode near in the darkness, slipped from their mounts, hooked their bows onto their saddlepoints, drew their swords, and came scrambling up the rubble.
The defenders took to the top of the ridge.
‘OK, boys!’ roared Sabinus. ‘Face to face at last! No quarter!’
The Huns came up in a mass surge, without discipline now, desperate to finish it, to squeeze into the fort and have the victory – they, too, had taken plenty of casualties today. But a thousand, two thousand, were trying to squeeze through a gap held by fifty men, and their greater numbers told against them. They barely left each other room to swing their swords. And now the burning amber light of the big braziers behind the defenders showed itself of use. The defenders fought dark and silhouetted, but the attackers had to face into it. Their eyes dazzled, coppery skin shiny with sweat, arms and shoulders rippling with muscles and tattoos and elaborate hennaed runes of protection, which did nothing to protect them from those severe, pragmatical Roman pikes. Up close, the legionaries saw the barbarous magnificence of their enemies at last, magnified in the flaming darkness. Like warriors out of Homer or an even deeper past: the deep, unwritten Scythian past. The untamed warriors looked almost beautiful to them as they cut them down.
Knuckles clapped his bronze-studded forearms together round a warrior’s shaven head and split it open like a raw egg. He turned and kicked a heavy boot into another Hun. The Hun staggered and swiped at him with his dagger. Knuckles twisted, more agile than he looked. The desperate struggle was too tight-packed for him to swing his club, so he drove it into the Hun’s face like a ram. The big easterner fell back and knocked his comrade behind him flying. Arapovian leapt forward and with two sharp thrusts skewered them both where they lay stunned amid the tumbled masonry, then fell back into line.
Huns howled with fury, came on relentlessly. Tatullus worked like Knuckles, thusting his billhook in long, low stabs. Arapovian’s swordsmanship was as good as his bowmanship. Another wiry little Hun nearly had him with a swipe of his yatagan but Arapovian squatted down just in time and drove his sword into the man’s naked belly. He immediately stood again, kicked the corpse off the end of his blade, and drew back ready for the next one, who came on at once.
The Hun warriors hated this fight. Too fetid and enclosed, without space to manoeuvre, with no room for the sudden spurting gallop, the extravagant caracole, the graceful arc of lethal, streamlined arrow. This was furious and filthy stuff, bloody pummelling in the shadows of ruined and alien walls, the clean air of the steppes a thousand miles away. Their horses milled behind them, uncertain. If their father Astur should cry to them out of the night sky, they would not hear him.
Their loss of confidence showed in their expressions, their movements, and the defenders punished it without pity. Knuckles’ mastery of the blunt arts of bludgeon and punch, those straps of bull’s-hide wound round his ape-like forearms, took a terrible toll. So, too, did his quick, surprising agility, like a big cat, the way a lion can be nimble for brief bursts when hunting. He gave himself a moment of space, his huge club slewed sideways, men’s brains shot from their ruptured skulls as if spat out, grey roe slithering down their comrades’ shoulders. Stumbling in the blood and slime, the Huns were filled with enfeebling disgust, panic, even claustrophobia. Where now was the glorious Parthian flight upon the open plains, wind in your hair?
Tatullus killed two attackers with two hard thrusts, only moments apart. Knuckles cracked open another skull. A smaller Hun tried to dive in sideways and thrust his yatagan into his flank, but again Knuckles swivelled, dodged the thrust, swept his arm back and with a mighty swashing blow caught the warrior across the side of his head. The dull bronze studs thunked, the fellow saw red and dropped senseless. Knuckles moved his foot and broke his neck.
The steep and jagged outward slope of the rubble ridge was slippery with blood, and worse. Sabinus moved carefully along behind and below his men, shouting words of encouragement. Not one of the line was down yet. My God, it’s like old times, thought Sabinus: Roman soldiers doing what they do best, standing shoulder to shoulder, pitiless, immoveable, the steel mincing-machine. Meanwhile, down at the bottom of the ridge, the Hun bodies were piling up like swine in an abattoir.
Arapovian’s plan had been a good one; or the best they could come up with as things stood. Stab, thrust, slash. The defenders were beyond exhaustion, but drawing some infernal gallows energy from the terrible attrition suffered by their bewildered enemy. The Huns could not make headway, and their fury made them foolish. Wave after wave came up against the line of pikes ranged against them, cold as moonlight. And wave after wave fell back again, ruptured or slain. Even for these adamantine steppe warriors, this night was turning into nightmare.