This was the nightmare landscape that the Huns had carved out of the most civilised and affluent of all the Western provinces. A land of vineyards and orchards, fine towns and elegant villas, rendered down to a primeval country of well-fed wolf-packs howling under the moon, dark smoke drifting across the extinguished land. Some ancient sorceress with sloughed snakeskins knotted into her hair, stirring a foul-smelling pot by a dung fire. Naked horsemen taking scalps with hand axes. History itself erased.
Lastly they came to a village where a group of naked children hung from the lower branch of a chestnut tree. They had been tied back to back and a heavy rope wound round their necks, bunched together like dried flowers. The rope had been lashed over the lower branch and they had been hauled up to hang there, turning slightly in the night breeze on that creaking rope, ghostly in the dappled moonlight through the lanceolate leaves above their heads, their naked bodies white and innocent still, but above the rope their heads black like old and withered seedheads on young flowers.
Men of war as hardened as Tatullus and Germanus and Knuckles were frozen in horror for a moment, staring up in disbelief.
‘Cut them down!’ said Aetius savagely.
To think that only lately he had entertained thoughts of noble, copper-skinned warriors on the free and windy steppes. He yanked his horse away. He was a dreaming fool. Nobility and evil mixed in the Huns, as in all men.
The battle-hardened legionaries lowered the bodies down. There was no time to bury them decently: atrocity would follow atrocity along the road ahead. But of course they did bury them decently, and set a wooden cross in the fresh-dug earth for each and every one of them. Afterwards, Knuckles was seen taking his club to the trunk of the tree itself in maddened but silent anguish.
Aetius called him over. The hulking Rhinelander stopped and wiped his brow and then came slowly over.
‘We were never going to give Attila quarter,’ said Aetius. ‘Now you see why.’ He looked away down the dark road. ‘Back on your horse now, man. It’s Huns we’re here to fight, not trees.’ Then he addressed all the men within range. ‘We catch up with them and harry them tonight. They are going slowly because their horses are starving, and because they have… amusements to practise along the way, which slow them still further. They’re defeated and out of fuel. Now it’s their turn to suffer.’
There was a terrible shout, and the column moved out at a grimly determined pace. The miles raced by beneath their horses’ hooves.
At the front of his army, Attila heard the distant hubbub. It was the Romans falling on his Gepid rearguard and taking it apart piecemeal. Others of his followers were harried bloodily away into the night, losing formation and quickly being destroyed. The vast horde was being eaten up from behind, driven east in bewilderment and terror along the dark roads.
Attila rode on regardless.
Only towards dawn did the Romans fall back and give them respite.
The day was unseasonally cold for summer, and there was a thick mist, an unseen sky. It was a country of tall poplars and slow-moving streams, tributaries of the River Matrona. The Catalaunian plain: a flat, sodden land which filled the steppe horsemen with heaviness and dread.
For three nights Aetius’ forces harried the invaders, and then let them camp, exhausted and deeply demoralised. There was a river running roughly east-west, wych elm and alder, heavy ploughland, stretches of forest, and a thick mist again. No moon.
The Romans camped, too. They would do battle in the morning.
In the night there was the sound of approaching horsemen, but it was only the returning Moorish cavalry. Mission to destroy the granaries fully accomplished.
At last the two great opposing armies faced each other in the Catalaunian Fields. Dawn broke slowly on that mist-shrouded day, and as soon it broke a shape was seen looming up on the Huns’ right, the Romans’ left. In the moonless, misty night, neither army had seen it as they drew up their lines and committed themselves to battle. Yet this could change everything. It was a hill. A solitary round-headed hill, maybe a couple of hundred feet above the plain, lightly scattered with beeches. It commanded the entire field. And it was nearer to the Hun lines than the Roman.
No sooner did the dark green bulk of the hill loom out of the thinning mist, the sun itself not visible yet, than horsemen from each side were galloping for it. From the Hunnish lines came a stream of warriors on shaggy ponies, bristling with spears and without formation. On the Roman side, Prince Torismond vaulted onto his horse bareback, seized his spear from where it stuck butt-first in the soft ground, and led his wolf-lords racing across the wet grass for the slopes.
Aetius circled his bare sword in the air and ordered his Augustan Horse round the side of the hill to hit the oncoming Huns in the flank. They rode off at all speed, their horses stretched out, ears flat and nostrils flared in a furious gallop, but it was clear that they wouldn’t make it. The Huns were already streaming up their side of the hill towards the tree-crowned summit. As the Roman cavalrymen neared the enemy lines, not one of them having had time to don helmet or cuirass, the Hun arrow-storm hit them and took a terrible toll. Aetius instantly called them back.
Both sides tensed and waited. Somewhere away to his right, Aetius heard old Theodoric bellowing at his armourer, but it would all be decided by the time he was done.
Mist still shrouded the summit of the hill. There came the sound of horses’ hooves galloping in soft turf and beechleaves, and the muffled cries of men.
Prince Torismond did not hesitate for a moment, though he had neither saddle nor armour, not even a sword, only that long ashwood spear. Grief for his sister still drove him. His forty or fifty wolf-lords were similarly light on armaments. So were their enemies, but the Huns had gained the summit and were aiming their first volley of arrows at the hated Visigothic horsemen galloping arduously uphill over wet ground towards them. Yet the timing was wrong. Some of the Huns managed to let fly, and inevitably found targets at such close range, but so ferocious and unflinching was the charge of the big horsemen that in the next instant they crashed into the Huns and sent them reeling.
Beside Torismond rode the huge Jormunreik, showing his true mettle by revealing at this late stage that he had had no time to bring any weapon at all – his burning loyalty to his prince had been everything. There was no time for consideration, and so he had galloped uphill against the Huns entirely unarmed. As his big grey mare erupted between two startled Hun archers, the best he could offer was huge back-handed swipe of his fist which sent one spinning off his pony to the ground. The next instant he had snatched the bow from the other’s hands, and lashed him across the face with it, blinding him. Then he wrapped his forearm round the Hun’s neck and broke it. He pulled the dead Hun from his pony like a thing stuffed with straw and tossed him to the leaf-strewn ground, snatching the Hun’s ten-inch yatagan from his leather belt as he did so. With this as his only weapon, he fought on.
Near Jormunreik, similarly disadvantaged by his own haste, Valamir was wielding a huge fallen tree-branch for a weapon, swiping startled Huns from their ponies to the ground and then leaning over and stoving in their skulls.
The violence and unexpectedness of the wolf-lords’ onslaught was such that the Huns were already being pushed back in disarray from the hilltop.