back, dropping his bow clattering to the floor and clutching his forearm. The arrowhead had punched straight between the two bones of his arm and out the other side, so neatly that he barely bled – not until the arrow-shaft was drawn, at any rate.
It had struck him just a moment before he let fly his own. A hair’s breadth of movement, compounded by distance, and Arapovian’s arrow had hit the ground beside the hooves of that motionless skewbald pony.
Arapovian fell back against the wall.
‘Get him to the medics,’ growled Tatullus.
He was helped down the steps.
‘Then get him back here,’ called Tatullus after them.
‘I will return,’ came the Armenian’s voice. ‘Don’t doubt it.’
‘And no one else try anything.’
As if in commentary on what had just occurred, having seen or foreseen everything, the unmoving man down below said, ‘Fools. The blood of my people is on your heads. I come to destroy you.’
From behind his back he drew a spear, bare but for a single black feather, and drove it into the hard ground before the fort. Then he pulled his workaday mount round and walked it away into the darkness.
Sabinus and his primus pilus exchanged looks. Tatullus rested his hand on his sword-hilt. Now they knew what manner of man their enemy was.
Until they had seen the fire-ship, and the man whose mind had dreamed up such an atrocity, Sabinus had still held out hope of imminent rescue. He had thought of ordering out the boats if all the land-routes were taken. They could have rowed downriver to Ratiaria, to Marcianopolis, have the whole thirty-thousand-strong Eastern Field Army here in a few days… But the fire-ship told them – among other things – ‘We have control of the river too. You will never get through.’
The Huns and their Attila: mastermind of panic, conjuror of hysteria. This barbarian warlord with the mind of a fox. Piling on the pressure, drawing out their deepest fears, destroying their reason and their resolve with monsters and threats both real and imaginary.
The abandoned town of Viminacium within its paltry curtain walls began to burn. No citizens fled from the flames. They had all gone already. The remnant VII Legion in their fortress were utterly alone.
Except for their sworn enemies round about. They could hear faint yowls and shrieks of triumph. In the town the savages were looting anything not yet on fire, and outside the town they were ransacking the chapel in the cemetery. They smashed apart an elaborate grave and prised open the lead sarcophagus within, to steal from the dead a gorgeous cloth threaded with gold. The corpse, the crumbling body of a young man, they left hanging grotesquely half out of the battered sarcophagus. Other corpses were strewn more widely about, so that it looked as if the dead had come back to life. As if they had awoken in the night and danced themselves to death again by moonlight, to collapse again half-putrid where they danced.
Emerging as if from the very heart of destruction, there came again the low, monotonous beat of war. The witch Enkhtuya sitting cross-legged somewhere in the outer darkness, hammering a drumskin with a bone, murmuring low.
‘Weave the crimson web of war,
Raise the bloody banners high,
Make it as it was before,
All men must fight, all men must die.
‘Horror covers all the heath,
Clouds of carnage blot the sun,
Sisters, weave the web of death,
Sisters cease, the work is done.’
Sabinus nodded to his optio, gave orders for the standard-bearers to report, and returned to his principia to put on his armour, and to take one last look around.
One last look. The phrase echoed in his thoughts, but he preferred not to analyse it.
They marched swiftly through the small but elegantly colonnaded courtyard, into the atrium, past the triclinium. Strange to glimpse the comfortable couches still ranged about in there, as if waiting for the next modest banquet with local dignitaries. But the legate’s accommodation was no longer in the best repair. Starlings had made their nests under the eaves, and frogs had colonised the cellars. Soldierly duty kept the place clean and tidy, but its neglect could not be concealed. No fashionably attired dinner guests visited now, few inhabited the frontier towns. All had migrated south towards Constantinople to make themselves and their families rich with courtly patronage. Senatorial families dreamed of imperial donatives and sinecures, ignorantly at ease in their plush villas in Naissus, Marcianopolis, Adrianople, or the gleaming golden capital itself. The old provincial dutifulness was gone. Only the poor paid taxes, they joked. And how it showed. But the rich would pay for their selfishness in time. In a currency red as blood.
As Tatullus had said: ‘Storm coming.’
7
After his optio had strapped on his armour, Sabinus took his splendid helmet with its nodding plumes, then led his standard-bearers into the chapel. There stood the central shrine, the eagle, the bull ensign and the lesser centurial banners. Beneath the shrine, beneath the altar itself, lay the fort’s strongroom, packed with stamped gold ingots from the mines of Mons Aurea.
One of centurial banner-bearers shook so badly that he nearly dropped the staff as Sabinus handed it to him. A mere lad, sixteen or seventeen, a once-weekly shaver, scarce dry from the egg. His name was Julianus. Sabinus spoke to him gravely but not unkindly. ‘Hold it steady, lad,’ he said evenly. ‘Yes, we are cut off. Yes, there are a lot of them. But this is a still a legionary fort. It’s stood for four centuries now, against barbarians just as vile as these.’ He told the lad – he told all of them – to hate their enemies. ‘Think of your families. Think of what will become of them… and swear hatred of the barbarians,’ he said. ‘Your hatred will drive out fear, and then you will fight like lions.’
As the legionary bull standard was lowered and passed out of the door of the chapel into the night, he gave it a brief, idolatrous bow.
Alone he visited the hospital and saw that all was in good order. The medics stood to attention. Only four patients in there now, one clearly dying. Another with leg sores, being cleaned up nicely by hard-working maggots collected fresh from horse-dung. Poultices, bandages and dressings, copper pots steaming on the stoves, jars of grey-green willow-leaf infusion for wounds.
He resumed his place on the west tower beside Tatullus. The centurion did not stir. A fortress of a man.
The waiting was always the worst. Oh, let it begin soon.
But they were kept waiting. They waited all night until the dawnlight came up behind them.
A low morning mist, thickest over the silent river to the north. Smoke sitting heavily over the lost town, where it had once stood proud on the green summer plain. Smoke slowly drifting eastwards towards the fort, mingling with wraiths of mist in the cold shadows of the north wall.
All night long the stars had burned, and, out on the plain around, myriad campfires like a starry floor. Their enemy, of course, but a strange feeling of company. Then towards dawn, with the temperature still dropping sharply from the warm day, the mist had risen from the river and the marshy meadows round about and thickened towards sunrise. Now it lay dense and milk-white around them, Sabinus on the tower like the captain on the deck of some ghost ship abandoned in remote uncharted seas.
‘This visibility is bad,’ he said.
‘Bad for us,’ said Tatullus pointedly. ‘Not for our attackers. ’
The attack must come soon. The soldiers on the walls stamped their feet, blew into cupped hands. How their tensed bones ached in their chill coats of mail. The mist clung to them, beaded dewdrops on cold metal.
All wore their heavy helmets through the long night so that their necks ached. Leather straps cut into throats.
