west.’ He grinned at Aetius. ‘Yep. I reckon.’
Aetius nodded, and Tatullus roared over the front rank, ‘Fire the smokescreen!’
Immediately a great sheet of flame coursed along before the Roman line, and then quickly burned down to thick smoke. The auxiliaries ran between the files and poured on oil and dead branches, sacks of leaves, commandeered haybales and, best of all, thick green summer grass. The pall of smoke thickened, rose into the air forty, fifty feet, and drifted always north towards the Hun lines. In a few minutes they’d be blinded by it. And, when they came through it, by the sun.
Sweaty hands tightened around butted pikes, men crouched low. Some used corners of grimy neckerchiefs to wipe the sweat trickling down their foreheads and stinging their eyes, then quickly returned their hands to their pikes. The sweat would have to drip, because they all felt it now. The earth was rumbling. Beyond the smoke, the Huns were charging.
The next noise was the distant, muffled strum of the torsion springs of the Lightning Boys’ arrow-firers and sling-machines. Of course. From their position they could see the Huns charging below them. Thank God they held that hill. Then there were the screams of men and horses erupting soprano above the deep rumble of the charge. First blood. Those steel-head bolts were hitting home, horses rolling forward and tripping, the charge running in behind, getting tangled.
The smokescreen had worked. The Huns weren’t firing, not through that thick curtain. They were coming through it.
‘Steady, lads!’ shouted Aetius. ‘Lean all your weight on those pikes, now. Hold the line. Here they come.’
Many of them saw it in slow and dreamlike motion. Out of that drifting, cloudy wall of smoke only thirty or forty yards in front of their pikes, first emerged those big, brutish horses’ heads, and their hooves, and legs, then the whole animals, and riding them the naked savages, spiralling their swords, hatchets and lassos above their shaven, tattooed heads, howling like demons loosed from hell.
They hit the Alans hardest, but not before the Roman legionaries had stood up behind and hurled their javelins from their jointed javelin-throwers in a ferocious volley, so perfectly aimed and timed that perhaps every other front-rank Hunnish horseman was brought down, slowing his comrades behind and tangling them up just where they didn’t want to be. Many flew to the ground and lay uninjured but stunned. Then the Alan lancers broke rank and ran out to butcher them where they lay.
‘Back into line you fools! Hold formation! Pull back now!’
But the Alans lacked the discipline. Seeing what they thought was the impotent chaos of the Huns before them, they acted as headstrong individuals, dropping their pikes and pushing forward, drawing their swords. It was madness. Though a hundred or more Huns had fallen in that first javelin volley, many more were coming on behind, and those who had lost their horses and been stunned in falls were instantly on their feet again, daggers and sharpened chekans in hand. The Alans were surrounded and cut to pieces.
Sangiban, watching from his horse, bellowed with anger. ‘Shoot them!’ he screamed. ‘Where are you, archers?’
But Aetius’ men could not shoot without hitting the disordered Alan footsoldiers, who were slaughtered before their eyes. Cornered, the Alans fought like lions, it was true, but without formation they were lost.
‘Herculians, move up. Take pike positions.’
It was a relief to know that those old hands would hold the line: hold it until they were cut down where they stood.
The milling Hun horsemen, their charge broken by the enemy javelins and by their own bloodlust as they paused to stab and scalp the bewildered and fallen Alans, came on again but without discipline, single vainglorious warriors hurling themselves on the line of pikes yelling, ‘Astur is Great and will prevail!’ only to be skewered and dashed to the ground. Time and again horses reared, screaming, their riders flung back, hooves scrabbling in the air, a pike-head buried deep in their mighty chests. The legionaries knew better than to admire their handiwork, promptly dragging their pikes free and butting them in the ground again. The next attack would soon come round.
‘Arrow-storm coming in!’ went up a cry from the wing. Instantly the rear-rank troops raised their shields above their heads and locked together. Arrows skidded off the bronze, thocked down into the leather and wood, and stuck there, quivering. Legionaries dropped their shields down in front of them and lopped off the arrow-shafts with their swords. Here and there a cry went up as a man was hit, too slow with his shield or just unlucky. But Aetius could judge immediately from the thinness of the cries that little damage had been done. Now came his new tactic, for he knew how the Huns would fight.
The front line had come in charging and was stuck on the Roman pikes. Meanwhile, lightly armed horse- archers were galloping back and forth behind them, intending to loose off their arrow-storm over the heads of their front-rank comrades and down onto the Romans’ rear ranks. That was their plan. But the moment they began, Aetius gave the nod and the heavy Visigothic cavalry rode out, visors lowered, shields hefted, mighty ashwood lances couched.
They galloped round the rear of the fighting lines in a gigantic sweep, through the smokescreen, and scythed into the Hun horse-archers from behind. Many of the archers barely had time to turn before that great gleaming metallic serpent, head diamond-shaped like a pit viper, cut through them and bowled them apart, wreaking havoc. Nor did they stop for one moment, cutting across in front of the main Hunnish army, round the hill, and back to their station on the Romans’ right wing. In their wake were the strewn and broken bodies of many hundreds.
While the triumphant Visigothic cavalry drew breath, the artillerymen on the hill piled in, loosing their arrows sidelong into any Huns crossing the field to engage the line of pikes. Attila must be cursing. That hill was proving pivotal, a permanent outflanking fixture. Once battle was messily engaged, no one could shoot close to their own. But from that accursed hill…
Each individual tactic of Aetius’ was paying off. The arrow-storm was weakened if not neutered by countercharge and good, old-fashioned shield discipline. The Hun cavalry charge, their horses tired before they started, was locked up against the legionaries and their implacable line of pikes. With the Visigothic cavalry and also the superb Augustan Horse and the Moors always ready to ride wide and sweep in from both left and right across the advancing enemy, it seemed that everything was going Aetius’ way. And so they fought on. Past noon, past mid-afternoon. Pedites ran with water. The Herculians dropped back, exhausted, and the Batavians took their place in the centre. The bodies of the enemy were piled high across the plain. The artillery from the hill worked on implacably. Yet the Huns kept coming.
Now it was a terrible battle of attrition. The Huns fought with ferocity but without imagination, without fresh tactics. Given that, Aetius knew grimly, it was just a matter of whether the Huns’ sheer weight of numbers would eventually triumph over the Romans’ exhaustion.
He rode behind the lines to see the wounded being bandaged and salved, the dead laid out for later burial. Already there were many there. He asked for numbers from only one legion, finding the primus pilus of the Herculians.
‘Over half my men, sir.’
‘Wounded?’
‘No, sir. Slain.’
He held the back of his hand to his mouth. All war was foul, but this was war at its foulest. A whole generation was being swept away in one day by the madness of one king.
An optio came running. ‘Sir, the Batavians are near exhaustion, sir.’
He nodded. ‘Pull ’em back. Send forward the frontier legions.’
‘And the Huns are launching fresh attacks on the hill, sir.’
Hell. That must not fall. ‘Send in the rest of the Palatine Guard to secure it.’
‘Sir.’
The twelfth hour from dawn? He reckoned so. Another four hours of daylight this long summer day. By nightfall it would be decided. And already they were stretched to breaking-point.
On the front line the battle was bloody, fierce and unrelenting. An ugly, stagnant stand-off, a process of the grimmest and goriest wastage. There was no room for the flamboyance of the wide-arcing cavalry charge now, no brilliant outflanking manoeuvres, nothing but the old moves of stab and slash, slogging it out knee deep in the reddening mud. In the melee, Knuckles, Arapovian and Malchus fought side by side as of old, protecting one another
