Then came the sound of Roman trumpets and bugles giving their sharp, precise commands, and the Huns were suddenly fleeing in a drunken panic with the citizens at their heels. When the tattooed warriors emerged again from the East Gate, which they had entered not an hour or two previously, it was to see their vast host already disappearing over the low hills to the north under the threatening sky. They remounted and galloped after, but a great serpent of gleaming armour cut between them and their comrades, and the would-be sackers of Aureliana were put to the sword, one and all.
The Romans reassembled their column on the outskirts of the city, and rested and watered their horses. The citizens brought them provisions, and Bishop Ananias spoke with Aetius, and also with Theodoric.
‘“And lo, I shall smite them with the sword,”’ roared the old King, ‘“and the heathen shall flee before me into the hills!”’
Ananias nodded. ‘Thus spake the Lord of Hosts.’
‘You fought well, my lord Bishop,’ said Aetius. ‘But turn your attention from the Scriptures just for a moment. Your Majesty, did you see the banners of the enemy riders on their left flank as they fled?’
‘The banners of the heathen,’ rumbled Theodoric, ‘barbaric ensigns, covered with the runes of savagery and unbelief.’
‘Among them, the Black Boar.’
Theodoric gasped and clutched his beard.
‘Genseric’s sons are here.’ Aetius nodded coolly. ‘Frideric, Euric and Godric.’
Theodoric was already turning his horse and digging his heels in, but the princes rode in either side of him and calmed him.
A scout rode up.
‘Have your skills improved?’ snapped Aetius.
‘Sir, they ride north-east. At least some of the horses look lean and sickly.’
‘Hm. Another job for the Moorish Horse.’
Victorius appeared.
‘Centurion, spread out the map.’
Tatullus knelt on the dry ground and spread out a huge campaign map, made of the thickest rolled vellum and taller and wider than the height of a man.
‘Listen closely, Moor. Ride east and then north with fifty of your best men. Ride as fast as you ever have ridden. Overtake the Huns, but be on your guard for their outriders – they range far. Here, at Melodunum’ – he pointed with his staff – ‘and also here, at Augustabona, there are vast horrea, granaries. The locals will direct you to them. The Huns must not get to them. You understand? Burn them to the ground, then circle back and find us again. The Huns won’t catch you, not with them on their half-starved ponies and you on your fine Berber horses.’
‘And what of fodder for our fine Berber horses?’ said Victorius.
‘They’ll be well fed from our supply lines south. It’s not a problem; we’ve got it covered. You know that a full marching legion of five thousand men needs eight thousand pounds of grain a day, plus six hundred pounds of fodder for its auxiliary cavalry. A full cavalry division needs a whole lot more. And you think nomads like the Huns will have planned ahead for provisions? They’ll never find pasture enough, not in cultivated Gaul.’ The cool grey eyes scanned the horizon. ‘Sometimes military victory lies in details, not in heroics. Attila and his horde in Gaul are going to starve.’
The Mauretanian grinned, and without another word stretched out his arm and galloped forward. Fifty men surged after him, swinging east, wide of the retreating horde.
Aetius looked at the map again. ‘The nearest flatlands north-east,’ he said. ‘The valley of the Marne?’
Tatullus nodded. ‘Catalaunia.’
‘The battle of the Catalaunian Fields,’ murmured Aetius. ‘Sounds good.’
8
The Huns retreated from Aureliana, barely able to believe that they had fled before the long-awaited Roman Army. The skies darkened further and it began to rain. Their horses would not move fast enough. They hung their heads low, their flanks were tightly drawn in and their haunches jutting and bony. There was never enough grass, not even now in early summer. The winter had been bitter, and spring had been wet and overcast. At the head of the vast horde, Attila rode out in front, his head bowed, hatless, his coarse grey locks sodden and dripping, his face deep-graven and grim, speaking to no one. Orestes and Chanat rode a little way behind him.
As for the nomad horsmen themselves, the Kutrigur Huns under Sky-in-Tatters, the Hepthalite Huns under Kouridach, the Oronchans under Bayan-Kasgar, and many others, their leaders were no longer admitted to the Great Tanjou’s councils. Somewhere along the way, the Tanjou had become sole commander, and they his wordless slaves. Already they had begun to fade away from his rag-tag army. Riding cold and hungry through these rainy western lands, they had begun to feel homesick.
Here, in these prosperous, well-farmed provinces of the Western Empire, there were roads and towns and farmsteads everywhere, and no room to gallop or breathe. The fields were hedged around and enclosed, the forests fenced and owned, and an alien, man-made world it seemed to them. How their hearts ached for the wind on the treeless steppes and the white glittering mountains beyond. All the vastness of Asia was theirs for the taking. What were they doing here?
Too far we have come from our homeland, they said. In the Pastures of Heaven there is such peace and space that it is sacrilege even to shout in those high meadows, so near the home of the gods. Here men say that the world is fallen and darkened with sin and wickedness, but they have not seen the Pastures of Heaven. The world has not fallen there, on the very threshhold of heaven. There peace comes on every soft breath of the wind, whispering over the emerald grass, and how fat the horses are there. Their sad horses now could do with the green grass of those Pastures, but they were months and years away. So distant, it was pain for the heart to think of them, and the snowdrops and alpine asters and edelweiss in the passes of the mountains surrounding the plains in a giant ring, the nodding oxeye daisies and cyclamen and wild garlic and the cranes crossing the sky beneath the eye of heaven.
But still they must fight, it seemed. The Great Tanjou had decreed it. And had heaven itself not appointed him?
Aetius gave orders for his army to rest, feed the horses, do their hooves, give ’em a good brush-down, all that horse stuff. Also to feed themselves, get some sleep. No booze. ‘We’ll be on the road and fighting again tonight.’
His men groaned. He grinned. He himself appeared to need no sleep.
Towards dusk, fresh war-parties came in to join them. Not large, but good for morale. Stocky Bretons from Armorica, Burgundians from the north, noblemen from Aquitania, moustachioed Frankish fighters with their lethal franciscae or thowing-axes.
‘Rome’s a bit like your health,’ Aetius commented dryly at this sudden show of alliance.
‘Sir?’ said Tatullus.
‘You never appreciate it till it’s on the wane.’
Tatullus laughed. True enough. Suddenly every citizen of the empire, from the most indolent patrician to the near-barbarian on the fringes, with the Hun war-machine on their doorstep, seemed to have become intensely appreciative of the benefits of Roman civilisation.
They rode out at dusk under a rising summer moon and the golden globe of the planet Jupiter. The great column, lit by torchlight, was a magnificent sight, like something out of the ancient world.
By the strong moonlight they could see the devastation the Huns had wreaked: vineyards and orchards ravaged and burned; entire villages razed to mere circles of charcoal and ash; slaughtered cattle all along the road, like boulders haloed by moonlight in the darkness. If the Huns could not take them, no one else would have them, either. Already there was a bitterness in the Huns’ savageries which looked like the last retribution of a defeated army.
Aetius and his men might even have taken comfort from that thought had the atrocities they encountered not been so foul, nor the glimpses of unhoused and starving people been so frequent. Filthy, snot-nosed children scurried away from them like frightened animals, to find what shelter they could in the remnants and ruins. They were the lucky ones – luckier, at any rate, than those who had been roped and torn apart by horses, or crushed under wagon wheels, their split limbs left at the roadside for the dogs.