He looked with intense bitterness upon the enemy host. The Frankish contingent of his own army had deserted to Clovis and Ragnachar in the night, three thousand strong. (Too late, Syagrius could guess why.) As a result, he now faced twenty thousand foes with a force of nine thousand.
The three thousand Gothic heavy cavalry Syagrius led himself would decide the battle. These were lancers in scale-armour tunics and plain round casques, their iron cheek-pieces covering the temple and reaching down to the chin. Their massive horses wore armour of boiled leather over their chests and heads.
Two thousand archers and stingers waited in ordered ranks on the hillsides above. The Gothic cavalry had been swiftly disposed on a saddleback ridge between them. To the rear, legions of armoured infantry provided backing, four thousand men all told. The foot soldier had become ever less important in Roman armies since the crushing defeat of the legions at Adrianople, and phalanx formation had returned with all its vulnerability.
Syagrius hoped not to have to commit these legions to a charge. Far rather would he have them stand their ground and let the Franks weary their strength against them. In truth, he had doubts of his foot. They were essentially limatani-border soldiers. Their purpose and training was in the main defense. Aye, and surely they must defend this day; defend the last tattered fragment of the Empire in the west!
Syagrius would gladly have exchanged them all for another thousand horsemen.
The Frankish horde now moved to the attack. They came in long, straggling columns. They wore no mail but only close-fitting trousers and leather vests. Few had so much as helmets. Their steady walk became a brisk, jolting trot… which increased to a dead run as a harsh, rolling battle-cry burst from their thousands of throats. The very earth took note-and would for all time.
The Roman archers drew their bows-to the chest merely, as their forebears had always done, an act at which Wulfhere’s Danish longbowmen would have laughed. Alongside them, slingers fitted murderously heavy leaden balls into the pouches of their weapons, and whirled them so that they hummed. Roman might, ancient and disciplined.
The Frankish rush came on. The earth quivered beneath the pounding of their feet. A few shaken spirits in the Roman lines let fly their missiles too soon, and were scathingly cursed by their officers. Closer the barbarians came, roaring, their feet drumming the earth. And closer yet. At last the order was given.
A hellish hail of arrows and leaden balls tore into the Franci. The sling-missiles were the more to be dreaded, for their shocking power was awful. Where one of those murderously heavy balls struck a man on the head, it killed him instantly; where one struck an armoured leg, it shattered that limb; where one struck the body, it smashed ribs, driving them into the lungs, or ruptured internal organs and dropped its victim writhing on the grass.
A volley. Two. A third, when the leading Frankish columns seemed almost close enow to breathe in the Romans’ faces.
Trumpets sounded the charge for the Roman horse.
The squadrons began to move, surging down over the ridge where they had waited. These big horses under such heavy burdens did not gain full speed quickly; was like an avalanche of bone and iron, slow in its beginnings and inexorably gaining momentum and power. The Roman archers and slingers retreated up the hill-slopes on either side, moving in disciplined order and leaving open lanes. Through these cavalry rushed in a mailed torrent.
The Franks bayed like wolves. A cloud of javelins and missile-axes swept with an awful hum between the horsemen and the sun, to slash down into the Roman ranks. Here a man reeled from his saddle, shrieking while he clawed at the wreckage of his face. The ax fell to cripple a companion’s horse. There a nine-barbed javelin tore at an angle into a dun war-horse’s side just behind the rib cage, and deeply pierced its guts. It screamed hideously and collapsed, rolling over on the javelin, breaking the shaft. Its rider’s leg was crushed and maimed under the animal. The horse struggled to rise, spraying bloody urine. Its terrible screams went on and on, so eerily close to human sounds.
The charge had been shaken somewhat-without being impaired. Its impetus was sufficient to pound a stone wall into rubble. The squadrons thundered onward. Hooves tore up the hillside and snapped javelins as if they’d been twigs. Clods of earth flew high from the chargers’ hooves. Black dots against the sky, spinning in air, raining earth and sod and roots. Iron-tipped lances lowered to turn the charge into an awful moving wall of teeth. Bodies braced in the saddles; horsemen’s sinewy thighs clamped.
The crash of impact rocked the sky and reverberated for miles.
Men were instantly impaled, spitted through, swept aside like winnowed grain, stamped under the war-horses’ feet while their eyes stared huge as fishes’. The cavalry of Syagrius swept on, uncheckable, a flood-tide on the plain. A threshing machine. The Frankish lines had been broken, ripped apart like rotten cloth. Arrows and sling-missiles came howling down to complete the slaughter.
Yet only the van of the Frankish host had been destroyed.
Its power scarcely abated, the charge rushed on against the remaining columns, the greater mass of the foe. Again javelins and throwing-axes shadowed the sky. That Frankish hand-artillery took hideous toll. And horses pounded on.
Fools, Syagrius thought, with part of his mind as he rode. Had they discipline, or even sense, they would ground their spears and make a solid wall of shields; spear-butts braced, points jutting out and upward that our horses might impale themselves by their own momentum. It is what the Saxons would do…
Many of the Romans had broken or lost their lances. These drew swords or lifted hideous four-bladed maces from beside their saddles. Those who still bore lances leveled them anew. Smeared and dripping. Hooves thundered. The earth shook. Birds had fled for a mile around. Ravens waited.
Again resounded that crashing awful shock that no human flesh could withstand, however massed. Again the ragged barbarian columns crumpled. Bone shattered. Bodies were riven and men vanished under the blurring fury of hooves. Blood splashed and soaked into the thirsty ground and clods pattered down upon it.
This time the charge had spent itself. Its order was broken. As for the Franks, they had possessed little in the way of order to begin with, and scarcely missed it. Their wild ranks eddied. With order failed, those unaccustomed to it grew stronger. The barbarians closed about the horsemen in a storm of angry flesh. The battle became a vast boiling howling melee.
In the cloudy skies vague shapes loomed as if exulting in the slaughter. Hugest of all was a cloaked, implacable figure on a phantom steed. Were those wolves coursing belly-down before him, or a pack of crimson-eared hounds? No man who saw them was able to say. Did wild horns wind?
King Syagrius noticed none of it. Jupiter and Mithras were far from here, and none saw Iesu, and Syagrius was consummately busy. He rode and fought with a kind of inspired madness in knowledge that the Frankish host must be shattered now or not at all. His sword rose and fell, streaming red. Rome was Soissons; Soissons was Rome; and for Rome he fought as his kind had on this soil for nigh onto six hundred years. He hacked and slashed and hacked, grunted without ever shouting or cursing. The business was to slay and Syagrius, Roman, slew. The trained warhorse under him killed as fiercely as he. Its hooves splashed into flesh and broke bones, its iron jaws caught an enemy by the upper arm, lifted him bodily from his feet and shook him, shrieking, until the biceps tore loose and he dropped in a ruined heap. Syagrius slashed and hacked and slashed.
Incredibly, the Franks were not breaking. They fought like the wild men they were. Closing in, they hacked at the hind legs of horses, hamstringing them with great strokes of axes and long, double-edged swords. They seized riders and dragged them down into the dust and blood of the battlefield. There they strove against heavily mailed men; strove with hand-ax or dagger or bared snarling teeth. Bloody madness reined under a crown of sharpened steel and iron. The screaming of maimed horses was even more horrible to hear than that of butchered men. Clanging weapons were as the anvils of a thousand pounding smiths. Men were butchered and died, and horses, and men and men and men.