From away to the left came the doom-laden thump of a mighty onager missile hitting the outer walls, a guff of limestone white dust rising into the air. Another hammer-blow, and even Aetius momentarily clenched his fists. How would the hurriedly improvised walls survive against such a hammering? And how the hell could the Huns have become such good artillerymen so soon? Surely they had Vandal auxiliaries, renegade Teutons? One rumour even said that deserters from the lesser Western legions had gone over to them, believing the future lay with the Huns. Aetius refused to believe it.
And then much, much worse. A concerted volley of missile strikes, huge boulders fired from machines still behind the siege-towers, barely glimpsed yet, their titanic loads arcing in high and raining down calamitously all on the same point. That was skill. Men were crushed without even the time to cry out, and when the dust slowly cleared the outer and middle walls were already flattened across a whole stretch of the Lycus valley. The siege-engines began to advance. This battle wasn’t going to last the night. To confirm Aetius’ worst fears, instantly another volley of onager missiles hit the walls further along, taking them down in a dozen blows, a ruthless pummelling. Everything would depend upon the inner walls.
From below came desperate cries at the sight of the ram approaching the St Romanus Gate. Tatullus was roaring, asses screamed as they dragged heavy loads, bringing up more ballista missiles; there was a clatter of running hobnailed feet, the rush of citizen militia with their pitiful wooden staves. In the hazy distance, a monotonous beat on a barbaric oxhide drum.
Aetius raised his hand, and the tower commanders all along the walls read the signal and did likewise.
He hesitated and sent a prayer like an arrow heavenwards.
He dropped his arm. ‘Fire!’
The artillery units initially wasted their missiles trying to take out individual galloping horsemen as they darted in across the broad terrace beneath the walls howling like animals, arched back in their saddles, grinning up at the shaken defenders behind their battlements, baring their berry-red teeth. Aetius was onto them immediately, striding over, shoving Imperial Guardsmen out of his way to reach them, roaring up at the next tower.
‘The horsemen may look frightening to you, soldiers, but they’re not coming in just yet! They’re trying to distract you. So ignore them! Take out the siege-towers, you hear? Kill the siege-towers!’
Tatullus echoed his commander’s orders all along the walls in finest centurion style, with just as much volume and some extra colour.
‘You heard the general, ladies! Hit the fucking machines! I see any unit wasting missiles on those malodorous fucking horsemen out of Scythia, I’ll break your fucking legs!’
He bore down on a single hapless artillery unit atop the Romanus Gate, and they quailed before him. They were good technicians, but they’d never felt the hot blast of a centurion’s angry breath in their faces, and it focused their minds wonderfully. As Tatullus well knew, it was essential they feared him more than the enemy. He seized one fresh-faced youngster by the scruff of his neck and flung him back against the wall with the might of his right arm alone. The youngster gasped and cowered.
‘Now get back on your fucking machine and line it up there!’ Tatullus screamed, spit flying in their startled faces. ‘You can see the target, it’s not exactly shy. There!’
Indeed, the attack tower was already looming over them, the rubble field of the collapsed lower walls already having been traversed with quick-laid planking and lightning-fast winching from the darting enemy.
Further along, more Huns were attacking without the complication of artillery. Aetius spotted them immediately.
‘Escalade!’ he yelled in warning. ‘Wolf-lords, to me!’ and he dashed southwards to the section being breached. A swarm of half-naked Hun warriors had rolled from their ponies to race across the moat on a dropped pontoon, the stretch of water proving as much of an obstacle as a broad puddle. ‘Complain about it later,’ Aetius growled to himself. ‘Shout at the devil.’
Jormunreik and Valamir ran with him, arrows already nocked to the bow.
‘Station here,’ said Aetius. ‘Hit them on the flank as they come across.’ He ran on.
The Huns came scrabbling over the collapsed lower walls, tripping and stumbling in the limestone rubble of their own creation. Immediately a short, hard volley of Gothic arrows slewed into them from the side and, close-packed as they were, found many a target. But countless more warriors came on behind, daggers clamped between their teeth as they scaled the ruined walls, using their gleaming Hunnish chekans or cruel spiked hatchets to dig into the stone like climbers.
Aetius ordered Captain Andronicus up with his century, and strung them along the battlements. ‘Escalade,’ he said by way of brief explanation. ‘Get ready to wash your spears.’
The Gothic wolf-lords kept up relentless volley after volley of long ashwood arrows, cutting into the flank of the advancing horde, but it barely slowed them. Somewhere back across the crowded plain Attila would be sitting his scruffy skewbald pony, oblivious of the deaths of individuals, his own or the enemy’s, and dreaming only of conquest.
Already the advancing Hun footsoldiers were across the exposed terrace below the Inner Walls. The defenders’ arrows and even the wild stones and improvised missiles hurled by the citizen militiamen took a terrible toll on exposed heads and bodies, but they moved in a swarm, as planned and concerted as a colony of ants. A wily old warlord was with them, Geukchu, having crossed this far on a white horse, and he rode among them giving calm orders. The defenders tried again and again to take him but he seemed under magical protection. Faster than the eye could see, some six or eight Hun marksmen stood back from the swarm and fired small grappling-hooks carrying the thinnest ropes of knotted hemp straight up into the air, only falling back when they were just across the battlements, perfectly pitched.
‘Cut ’em away!’ roared Aetius. ‘Don’t let ’em get up!’
The Palatine Guard followed his orders, but as soon as they leaned out to slash at the ropes, in came the Huns’ covering fire. It was devastating: an instant barrage of three or four hundred arrows, immaculately aimed, scything in over the top of the wall and into the chests and faces of the desperate defenders. Men screaming, flailing, faces crimson, hands clutched to eyes and throats. Andronicus himself was stuck with an arrow in the shoulder, sinking down, snapping it off gasping. ‘Bastards,’ he murmured. There had to be more of a fight than that.
‘Take them out!’ roared Aetius, desperate. ‘Kick away the hooks! Citizen militia, move down!’
But already the hooks were deeply lodged by Hun warriors coming up the ropes, not one of them cut. Knuckles saw the first Hun appear along the walls, and lumbered over to cave his skull in. But the Hun moved like a spider, vaulted over the battlements, dagger between his teeth but not even standing his ground to fight. You don’t take a fortified city with an escalade of one. Moving at blinding speed, he kicked out and loosened the tough little grappling hook from the wall where it had lodged, checked that the rope it hung from was looped only once, nice and loosely, round the back of the merlon – Knuckles was upon him, swinging his club at the half-shaven and unhelmeted skull with a blow that would have killed a horse – and the warrior was gone. Not even looking, holding onto nothing but the little hook two-handed, he vaulted back over the walls to the ground below.
Knuckles looked out after him and roared with frustration. ‘What are you, a fuckin’ circus acrobat or something?’
A clatter of arrows struck all around him and one cut his forearm badly, an ooze of blood among the long-established mess of scars. Knuckles bellowed with anger, clubbing mindlessly for a moment at the rope tightening ominously around the merlon. Then Arapovian was running over, knife drawn.