The rope reeled back down behind the Hun warrior, and he fell to earth slowly enough to roll and then leap to his feet uninjured. Along the walls the same trick had been repeated several times, and though a few of the leading warriors had been cut down, most had not. As the acrobat besiegers almost floated back down to earth, pulled up in counterweight were giant nets, soon hanging in swags from the forty-foot walls. Defenders hacked desperately at the ropes bound around their own treacherous battlements and more were cut free. But not enough. In seconds, the surviving nets were thick with Hun warriors scaling them like lizards. Already the first were vaulting over the tops of the walls and forming small, isolated bridgeheads to protect the remaining nets, and more of their comrades came on behind.
Aetius demanded reports, but none of them was good. Then they stopped coming. Everyone was fighting.
They had to clear the walls. They had to clear them now, or they were lost.
In the darkness underground, another kind of fight was going on.
The sturdy Isaurian mountain men, accustomed to tunnels and caves, as Aetius had surmised, had moved fast down the defensive passageway running out under the Blachernae Walls, then struck left to intercept the Huns. In feeble light and Stygian gloom, they had burst through into the enemy tunnel some way behind the lead party, and immediately found themselves fighting on two flanks, fore and aft. They promptly retreated back into their own tunnel, Zeno at their head, fighting on the narrowest front – only two men wide at most. They fought at thrusting swordpoint and spearpoint, half suffocated with smoke and foul odours, slithering in pools of stagnant water, hand-to-hand in the darkness by guttering oil-light, a scene of Homeric horror. Their enemies were no Huns, for those horsemen of the steppes could never have tolerated this infernally cramped and claustrophobic underworld. They were a mix of Batavian and Saxon mercenaries, used to mining but motivated by greed for gold and loot, not by loyalty to Attila. Faced with a horde of fierce-looking fighters, squat and bearded like the dwarves of their own mythology, short-swords and axes flashing, monstrous shadows on the tunnel walls, they panicked and broke. The Isaurians followed them and cut them down ruthlessly, until the piles of corpses before them meant they could penetrate no further.
They dragged the corpses back and pressed on over them, treading them down into the swamp and ooze, the darkness foul, suffocating, the tunnels slimy mud and dripping rock, until they reached almost the beginning of the enemy mining operations. Here they moved fast, lighting a fire around some wooden pit props to smoke out any last miners and suck the air from the tunnel, then they fell back, smashing down more pit props and collapsing the earthen roof behind them so as to save their own air and their retreat. All the way back they brought down the hard-won tunnel, blocking the final exit with a rockfall, and then retreating up the Byzantine passageway within the safety of the Blachernae Walls. They emerged like bloody moles from Hades, gasping for the clear air and the sunlight, choking but triumphant.
The Huns might try to tunnel again but it was unlikely. This would have cost them too much effort for too little reward.
‘Night and day the gates of Hell stand open,’ growled Zeno with satisfaction. ‘Well, not any more they don’t.’
But there was no time for rest, let alone self-congratulation.
‘To the walls!’ came the desperate cry. ‘Every last man standing!’
Aetius signalled to Andronicus to pull his Guard back towards the St Romanus Gate and re-form his men in a phalanx of spears. Ignore the ram shuddering in below, and the siege-tower behind. Ignore the fact that they were already surrounded, outnumbered, outfought. Never admit defeat. Let the Huns come up their wretched nets and mass together on the battlements. They could take them.
Aetius himself pulled the Wolf-lords back to Military Gate V, spears lowered, waiting. At least the Hun onagers had now been silent for a while, for fear of hitting their own men.
The nets were all slung between the gates either side of the Lycus, and the Hun bridgehead thickened. There were now three or four hundred of them, technically within the city, but with no access yet to a descent. Beyond, Aetius could see the stricken, uncertain faces of the Imperial Guard, looking across to him. What was he doing?
He was waiting.
Near him, Theodoric waited, too, long-sword drawn.
‘You’ll use that to thrust.’
‘I will,’ said the prince grimly. ‘No room for cutting blows.’
‘Quite so.’ He roared down the walls to the Guard, ‘Hold it still!’
‘You want the Huns densely packed,’ murmured Theodoric.
‘You got it.’
A few more agonising moments, the Huns hardly able to believe that they had taken an entire stretch of Wall, and behind them more and more of their comrades coming up the nets unopposed. To their right, one of their rams was splintering in the gates, and the platforms of the gate-towers themselves would soon be flooded with more of their comrades from the approaching siege-tower. The city was as good as won.
Then they heard that hard-faced Roman general roar, ‘Now!’
From behind the Imperial Guard, holding the line rigid with fear, came the sound of something creaking, being winched and lowered. Andronicus told his men to brace themselves. They had their orders. Forward face.
It was Tatullus who led the rearguard attack, along with his old soldiers from the ludicrous remnant of the VIIth, Knuckles and Arapovian and Malchus, and some of the hardier of the citizen militia, including a blacksmith still in his apron and wielding his hammer for a weapon.
The Hun siege-tower was built with a high drop-bridge which would soon fall across the battlements and admit a party of ferocious warriors with squat round shields and short curved swords onto the high platform of the gate-tower, from where they would command the walls and worse, the steps leading down. Crazed with bloodlust and dreams of Byzantine gold, they were unlikely to give up their position once they had taken it.
Tatullus faced the approaching siege-tower with his billhook lowered. He bellowed for more men-at-arms up here. These bird-brained artillery novices had left it too late. This tower was going to get bloody very soon.
But the primal instinct of raw fear had finally galvanised the unwarlike artillery technicians. In a few seconds of astonishing deftness, they had raised the trajectories of their machines to face the head of the tower, not ten feet off the walls now, and let loose. Serried metal bolts shot forward out of each shivering machine, flat and lethal, at speeds of more than fifty or sixty feet a second, or so the mathematicians of the imperial workshops had calculated. Those huge, straining torsion ropes could store an astonishing power. The flight of bolts drove straight through the raised drop-bridge and anyone within. The slingballs simultaneously slammed into the side timbers, causing less damage to the occupants but at least as much terror. Rapidly assessing the situation, the slingers forsook their machines, took flaming pots and brands in their hands, and lobbed them across onto the roof of the siege-tower, where they exploded into fireballs and began to burn the overhead timbers.
Tatullus almost guffawed. The artillerymen’s initial dithering incompetence had actually drawn the Hun attack tower in too close, only to be suddenly blasted with this volley of heavy steel bolts at almost point-blank range, and then set afire to boot.
‘And again!’ he yelled, thumping his billhook furiously on the wooden deck. ‘Give ’em hell!’
Sweating with effort and dread, sweat both hot and cold running together, blinded until they wiped their faces clear with stained neckerchiefs, the artillerymen strained back on the well-oiled winches and reloaded the arrow-firers, so finely manufactured and gauged by the best engineers and technicians in the city’s Imperial workshops. They slotted in a new set of bolts, whose crossply steel heads no armour in the world could withstand, let alone mere timber walls, while Tatullus bellowed down to the citizen runners to bring more. The torsion ropes twisted and screamed, the nearest arrow-firer swivelled on its base towards the siege-tower, like some terrible steel animal with eyeless gaze, and then the bolts erupted from their ports again and drilled into the blank face of the tower. Inside there were more screams signifying carnage. The drop-bridge had paused in being lowered, barely open.