Knuckles was down on all fours, shaking his head like a wet dog. He clambered to his feet a little blearily. One side of his face was caked with blood, his thatched hair matted and shiny.
‘You need attention,’ said Arapovian, retrieving the Kutrigur Hun’s head from where it lay at his feet, staring up at him with a perplexed expression, and tossing it over the wall.
‘Not before I’ve thanked you profusely for so heroically coming to my rescue, my lissom Parsee playmate,’ rumbled Knuckles, touching a great paw to the side of his dented skull and staring down at his wet, red fingertips. ‘I do ’ope you think it’s worth it, in the long run. You must have trained as a dancer in the theatre, the way you skipped around that lot.’
Arapovian looked haughty.
‘Very noble of you anyway, I’m sure. Thought I was a goner there. And I’ve lost me club.’
‘You’ll find it down below,’ said the Armenian. ‘On your way to the hospital.’
‘All right, all right, I’m going to get myself stitched. By the way,’ he added as a parting shot, ‘there’s some more of ’em coming up behind you. Best turn round.’
And the stained eastern sword-blade flashed in the air once more.
Knuckles was back with bandaged head and rescued club within ten minutes, fighting alongside Tatullus close to the north side of Military Gate V. They fought in a relentless duet of club and billhook as of old, still fired by the memory of Viminacium and their fallen comrades. Knuckles grunted and roared and swore, raining down colourful curses.
‘You barbarous fuckin’ horse-fucker, eat that! Here, you, come and get a fuckin’ headache! I got one off one of your lot like you wouldn’t believe! You wriggling little fucker, keep still while I brain you! Now fuck off back over the wall. Gah!’ – lurching forward and caving in another skull.
Tatullus fought in silence, jaws grimly clenched, steel helmet lowered, forearms like oak and those deepset eyes even and unblinking as his billhook cut a murderous swathe through unarmoured men, a true veteran unperturbed by screams of the dying. When a stray arrow fired from an agile climber pierced the brass-studded leather guard protecting his left shoulder and stuck fast, he neither cried out nor even turned his head. Pausing only to break off the shaft and toss it clear over the wall, he pressed forward to slash and slash again, like some nightmarish iron automaton dreamed up by a Jewish cabbalist in the smoke-filled inventiveness of his hermit cell, created out of the fires of his furnace while chanting of Adonai and Jahweh and the Elohim and all the ten thousand names of God.
Suddenly they were gone.
The attack was over.
Only then were the defenders overcome by their unspeakable weariness. Men sank down behind the battlements, almost too exhausted to pull their helmets from their sweat-drenched heads. Aetius ordered food and water to the walls.
He saw Knuckles’ bandaged head. ‘You, Rhinelander. You might get a corona obsidionalis for breaking a siege, if we all come out of this alive.’
‘Thank you, sir, but I’d rather rather have a cup of wine right now, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘I thought you didn’t drink?’
Knuckles gawped at the master-general’s astonishing memory for detail. Then he said, ‘Well, sir, I admit that there was that unfortunate incident with the fishmonger’s daughter at Carnuntum, whose sordid details I’d rather not burden you with, sir, begging your pardon, as they might put you off your dinner. Suffice it to say that, although I did then take a pledge to stay off the booze for a good while thereafter, I…’ Knuckles tailed off.
The general was walking away, not having quite the leisure needed to hear Knuckles out when he was in full flow. But he called back over his shoulder to one of the runners, ‘Get that man a bucket of wine. A horse bucket,’ he added with a flash of a grin.
He resumed his station on the tower of Military Gate V, and exhaustion hit him like a wall. He could barely stand. But he could not sleep. There was too much to do. He ate only dry bread and drank water. Tatullus and Captain Andronicus of the Guard came to him. Now the fighting was finished and the rush of blood had subsided, they, too, looked beyond exhaustion, and the light was gone from their eyes. He knew how they felt. This did not feel like victory, and there was no cause for wild celebration. Not yet. This felt only like temporary survival. Out there on the plains, Attila still crouched like some beast of prey ready to spring, with his vast army diminished by all of one or two thousand men.
Now it was time for Aetius to hear their own losses.
Of the two companies of Imperial Guard, one hundred and sixty men in all, over sixty were dead and another forty or so wounded beyond fighting. That ratio alone spoke volumes; and that percentage. Well over half the Palatine Guard was destroyed, and every single one of them had shed blood this last day and night. For Attila, though, those piles of Hun dead at the foot of the walls were only a fraction of his forces. Of the forty-four wolf-lords, only three were slain, and three lay in the Emmanuel Hospital. Astonishing figures, and no reflection of the bravery with which they had fought, all day and all night, unrelenting. Even Andronicus was forced to admit that they had taken so few casualties because they were such skilled and ferocious fighters. Flaxen-haired giants, they fought like lions.
As for the eighty Isaurian auxiliaries, again, more than half were dead or else wounded beyond fighting. Their active numbers were down to thirty. Of the citizens who had given their lives for their beloved Holy City – ordinary men, fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, men whose only skill in life was to bake bread, or hammer horseshoes, or even trim beards – the number slain was beyond reckoning.
Down there below them, those slaughtered heaps of feathered and tattooed wild men, who had fought virtually naked, tooth and claw, howling in a language that none but Aetius himself understood – they too were fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. It was too terrible. It was nothing but loss and waste. This was the time, when the battle ebbed and stilled awhile, that grief could overwhelm even the strongest man. What had they fought each other for, these fathers and sons? What had it all been about?
Aetius, Tatullus and Andronicus stood silently side by side on the tower, watching unarmed Huns returning under the burning midday sun to retrieve their dead and take them back for decent mourning and burial. It was a foul task which would take hours. Aetius did not need to give the order not to fire on them. None of the defenders would be so cruel. He bowed his head. His heart was like a stone with sorrow.
Behind them, one of the guards suddenly muttered, ‘Oh my God, no.’
The three exhausted men turned round.
Turning round also to look back across the city they had fought so courageously to defend, their backs to the armies of Attila, all along the walls exhausted men were sinking down to their knees, dropping their weapons, calling on the name of Christ and weeping openly. For the Holy City was lost.
The air was still, distant smoke rising into the autumnal air, the sun bright on the city’s rain-washed golden domes, starlings still wheeling about the spires, the monks still chanting the Kyrie, sweetly oblivious. Away to the east, near the Imperial Palace itself, tall flames were licking up into the pale September sky like flames going up from a pyre.