Attila’s expression was violently conflicted, as if he hated his enemy more than ever because he was forced to admire him. As if he felt his coiled inner strength might begin to melt because of it.
‘Drop some arrows on them,’ he said.
Conscience prevents cruel deeds. But cruel deeds regularly practised cancel conscience. Enkhtuya stroked her twisted snakeskin torc and the arrows began to fall.
From the walls went up a feeble shout of warning as the sky behind darkened with ten thousand arrows, arcing up like a midnight rainbow. But it was too late. The arrows fell in a murderous shower and many of the stumbling refugees were struck down. Screaming broke out, panic and confusion. Some of them even began to run away from the walls again, thinking in their terror and bewilderment that the defenders of the city had shot at them. The wolf-lords immediately raised their shields and moved into a circling gallop again. A few slung their shields across their backs, nocked arrows to their bows and loosed them at the Hun lines in return. A paltry reply to such an onslaught, but it showed of what mettle they were made.
Aetius wheeled his horse round, white and speechless with rage. He galloped out past the milling refugees and drove them back towards the open gates of the city, at last managing to shout instructions at them, saying that the Walls were their refuge, and the arrows were coming from the Huns. He scooped up a fallen child, a little girl of no more than four or five, whose forehead had been sliced open by a flying arrowhead. The wound was not deep but she was blinded with blood and tears and was screaming. He slung her across his lap, laid his hand in the small of her back and told her to stop squirming. Then he pulled his horse round again and rode out in front of the circling wolf-lords and reined in and stared. He did not speak or move, not even when another iron shower came overhead. Several fell about him but he was not hit. He stared like a lost traveller on a lonely moor, staring into the rain.
Attila raised his arm and the arrow-storm ceased again. Aetius’s stillness spoke more than any enraged shouting or shaken fist could have done. Behind him came the cries and groans of wounded people, struggling to their feet, trying to make it to the city. Ahead of him across the half-mile of burned plains and abandoned farmsteads, the hundred thousand horsemen and their lord, his arm still raised. Across that half-mile the two men regarded each other.
‘Well,’ whispered Attila, ‘you Romans know all about the Massacre of the Innocents.’
His arm dropped, and the sky darkened again.
Aetius wheeled his horse, holding the terrified girl across his lap, and galloped for the Walls, arrows thocking into the ground around him. Ahead of him, the people stumbled home.
Aetius slipped from his horse as the gates were slammed shut and barred behind him. He pulled the girl down, swabbed her forehead and face with the edge of his tunic and squatted before her. She suddenly looked too shocked to cry.
‘What’s your name?’
She shook her head. He squeezed her thin shoulders.
‘Euphemia,’ she whispered, barely audible.
‘Were you with your family, Euphemia? When you were hiding out there?’
She nodded miserably. ‘My mother,’ she whispered.
‘Did you see her running into the city?’
She shook her head.
Aetius rose and handed her over to one of the other refugee women, with instructions to reunite them if she could. The wounded should go to the Emmanuel Hospital; one of his men would take them there. Then he raced back up the steps to the top of the walls, and down to the Gate of St Romanus. The enemy were coming nearer, and already Attila’s gaze, he could see, was fixed on the lowest point in the defences, where the wall ran down into the Lycus valley and up again, overlooked by Military Gate V to the north. On its summit he could see the nodding horsehair plumes of the wolf-lords, and the long spikes of their spears. They would need them soon.
Attila rode slowly across the plain beneath the noonday sun, along with his generals, gazing all the time at the Walls. It was too far to see, but Aetius liked to think his expression was one of misgiving. His spies and intelligence agents would have given him every detail of these titanic defences. Nevertheless, this was the first time that the Hun leader had set eyes on the Walls of Theodosius for himself. Surely the sight must cause him some consternation? It was no one-walled legionary fortress or cathedral city that he faced now.
Aetius summoned the Armenian. ‘Screw up your eyes, Easterner. Tell me you can see the Great Tanjou, and tell me he looks worried.’
‘I see him,’ said Arapovian. ‘We have met before, remember?’
‘And tell me he looks worried.’
Arapovian grimaced. ‘I have read more expression in the cliffs of Elbrus.’
Aetius grunted. ‘Drop an arrow on him?’
‘Too far. Besides, the last time I tried to shoot him, I got this.’ He dragged up his sleeve and showed the general the scar.
Aetius laughed. ‘You tried to shoot Attila?’
‘He rides at the front of his men, without fear. It was an order of Sabinus, the legate at Viminacium.’
Aetius looked grim again. ‘That Sabinus was a good man. Now, back to the tower.’
He remained alone and brooded a moment on the assassination attempt. Treacherous and underhand though it was, it might have worked. Even now, as the siege began, if they could but hit Attila, weaken him in any way, the faith of his myriad hordes in his god-given power would begin to falter. That was their best hope. To defeat such an army as this in open battle… It was not possible, not with what few forces were left.
The fall of everything he believed in was very close now. It gave him desperate strength. He began to tour the other towers again, to inspect the artillery units, to rally them. His exhaustion and sleeplessness meant nothing to him. There was no point in saving himself. For what? For the nothing that was to come?
20
As Attila approached the Golden City at long last, the Walls rose higher and higher before him, like a monstrous triple wave of stone. Of course, he knew the details, the measurements, and he had planned his attack minutely. But seeing the Walls in the flesh, as it were, even he fell silent for a while.
Riding beside him, Orestes observed that, whatever the earthquake damage might have been, the walls and even more crucially the towers had been fully repaired. There were no major cracks to be seen, no promising crevices running from battlements to foundations.
‘And there’ – he pointed at the brickwork around the Gate of St Romanus – ‘that tower must have fallen half away; you can see where it’s new-built. Yet it’s as strong as ever again. We should not have delayed.’
Attila stopped and turned on him. ‘You question my choices, you accuse me of delay, even of cowardice?’
Orestes was unimpressed. ‘I question our delay in attacking. We have made our task harder.’
Whatever Attila might have growled in response was lost, as Aladar abruptly pulled his horse back and it reared. ‘Arrows coming in!’
It startled them, the arrow-shower from the wolf-lords, even though it fell short. Attila ground his teeth and they fell back further. Then he wrenched his horse round in a fury, the poor beast almost rupturing its neck, its mouth cut by the bit.
It was time. The late-afternoon sun was falling behind them in the west, beginning to glare red into the eyes of the defenders on the walls.
‘Bring up the engines!’ he bellowed. ‘Either side of the valley! I want the wall there down by dark! Tonight, Byzantium burns!’
The key defensive artillery units would be on the gate-towers overlooking the low-lying Lycus valley: Military Gate V to the north and, beyond it, the Charisius Gate, which led out to the cemetery, for which reason it was also known dryly among the people of the city as the Polyandriou Gate: the Gate of Many Men. For many men passed out of it. All men, in time.