horses were tethered. The cavalrymen resting again, seated in the dust, helmets cradled in their laps. Little campfires burning. No one spoke.
They prayed that it would come soon.
Some already harboured fantasies of hearing the sound of distant hooves and drums, and the cry going up from the south towers overlooking the road east to Ratiaria and Marcianopolis, ‘They’re coming! The field army’s coming! ’
But no such cry came.
From the walls they could see fires in the hills: villages aflame. They could hear the high calls of nightbirds, the bark of a dog-fox. But a terrible feeling of aloneness. As if they were the only living men left on earth, surrounded by darkness and by the forces of darkness.
No one else even knew. The rest of the empire slept peaceful and oblivious tonight. Not one shepherd, not one wandering tinker refugee, had got through to Naissus of the Five Roads or to Ratiaria, with its vast weapons factories, to report the incursion, it seemed. No help was coming for this fight they faced against tens of thousands of savages, streaming down again from the valleys where they had lain hidden. Under Sabinus’ command, no more than two thousand at best, many of them rustic auxiliaries. Properly armoured, equipped and trained, he had all of five hundred men.
Wisps of cloud across the moon, a thickening mist on the river, a terrible unease. Only a few hours ago he’d been sitting doing the legionary accounts. That seemed a long time ago now.
A cry in the night. The legate started, strained his ears. Sounds were getting muffled by the rising mist. Screams still coming from Margus? No, that was impossible. Margus was ten miles distant. Only the cry of a bird, a night-heron over the darkening river.
He turned to speak to Tatullus by his side and then froze.
There came the sound of drums.
There was a stir among the men on the north-west tower. They were pushing forward to see something. Sabinus strode over.
The crossbowmen and artillerymen parted for him. Tatullus trod close behind. There was that hulking brute Knuckles again, both his great bearlike arms and huge fists tightly wrapped round with bull-hide strips studded with lethal bronze studs, and dragging a crude club, like some troglodyte Hercules.
‘Where’s your pike, man?’ demanded Sabinus.
‘Down below, sir. I got an eye on it, don’t you worry. But I lost me last club back on the bridge at Margus, so I been makin’ meself a new one. I like a club, sir, when it gets up close and personal, like. It don’t rust and get caught in your scabbard, it don’t break or get stuck in somebody’s guts, it never gives up on you. You keep a firm grip on it and it won’t let you down. I always swear by a club, sir, when the fightin’ gets messy.’
Knuckles’ club had a special adaptation. Stuck on the end was a great lump of lead solder which one of the smiths had done for him earlier. Most men would have had difficulty even lifting the thing.
‘Once, sir, I had to put a mare out of her misery and me good old club did a clean job of it in one go.’
Sabinus didn’t doubt it.
A flicker of something caught his eye. He looked out over the river and something was wrong. It was on fire.
Out of the darkness still came the sound of drums. Deep, booming barbarian drums.
The night glowed, a flame-red mouth opening up in the darkness, long streaks of reflected flame licking along the surface of the slow-moving river. Then a ship came gliding out of the thin mist.
A galley, wreathed in flames. One of the galleys of the Danube Fleet, captured from God knows where. Gliding downstream like some infernal ghost-ship, sailing into dark eternity unmanned. Silent but for the crackling of the flames and the collapsing spars and showering sparks. Yet there were humans still aboard. Hanging from the masts and yardarms, strangled, dangling, obscene, as if still dancing amid the flames that licked at the soles of their feet, hung the naked bodies of massacred soldiers. They festooned the ship like hellish decorations. Fire danced from their crucified limbs. Their hair flamed. The ship came gliding past, close enough to the north wall of the fort for them to see the victims’ blistering skin, their melting faces.
Sabinus gripped the wall.
‘God’s teeth,’ muttered Knuckles, ‘that’s worthy of a show in the arena, that is.’
Tatullus had his vinestick in his hand in a flash, and struck Knuckles such a blow across the back of his head as would have cracked the skull of a lesser man. Knuckles gasped and reeled and staggered, more bow-legged than ever, his eyes rolling up to the whites before collapsing against the low battlements of the wall. Shaking, in a cold sweat, he sucked in deep lungfuls, gradually letting the pain recede and his vision return.
Tatullus never raised his voice. There was something in this iron-cold centurion that chilled even Sabinus. ‘Those were your comrades you see tortured and crucified below you, soldier. Talk of them with respect.’
Knuckles, still hanging onto the battlement as if it were a rock in rapids and he were a drowning man, pale and nearly sick with the blow, managed a slow nod. ‘Sir.’
Other soldiers gathered from along the walls to stare aghast. Some had their arms round each other’s shoulders as the torture ship passed by. Four of them stood in a line, silent witnesses to the spectacle, like gladiators summoning esprit de corps before the coming doom. Two brothers, their father and their uncle. Local boys, part-time farmers, the VIIth in all its glory. Soon they would be fighting for their lives.
Another spar on the ship came crashing down to the deck in a flurry of sparks, another piece fell free and sizzled out in the black water. But even that sound was muffled by the mist and the night.
Now they would at last be tested, perhaps beyond endurance. They would fight for themselves and each other, for their families and their farmsteads. They had never even seen Rome or Constantinople. The emperor was far away, the empire a thing of the mind. Today they would fight merely for survival. No reinforcements.
The torture ship passed on eastwards, its ghastly light dimming into the darkness. They imagined it finally drifting down through the shadowy gorge of the Iron Gates, reduced by then to a smoking, blackened wreck, to be dashed to pieces there in the whitewater narrows. Bits of peat-black timber and spar washing up on the strand at Ratiaria. Blackened bones.
Away to the west, the drums ceased.
The oldest of the four men turned to Sabinus as he passed by. ‘Are we finished?’
The legate paused, then laid a hand on the man’s shoulder – an unheard-of familiarity.
‘No, man,’ he said gently, ‘not by a long way. No barbarian force has ever taken a Roman legionary fort. Not in seven long centuries.’
‘To your stations again now, lads,’ said Tatullus behind him. ‘Storm coming.’
Another soldier came running, sweating in the torchlight.
‘Sir! Man below the west gate. I think he comes to parley.’
They hurried down to the first level and along the battlements to the west gate. Sabinus gazed out from the tower.
Under the louring walls of Viminacium sat a single man on a dusty skewbald pony. He was naked to the waist but for a purely decorative breastplate of thin bones, and wore no armour but for a close-fitting helmet that shone in the moonlight.
He must be insane.
The man looked up and fixed his glittering eyes on Sabinus, never doubting he was in command. He looked like he needed sleep. His face was deeply grooved and ashen-grey, with a wisp of an old man’s chinbeard, yet his yellowish eyes still burned. He did not seem to raise his voice, yet on the tower they heard each word distinctly.
‘I do not come to parley,’ he said. ‘I do not come for your words. I come for your lives.’
Sweat beaded down Sabinus’ spine. He felt cold. How had the Hun heard them talk of parleying? How had he known? There was something about their visitor not of this earth. Was this Attila himself?
Close behind him, Sabinus became aware, the Armenian, the one who called himself Count Arapovian, was swiftly and silently nocking an arrow to his bow. A short, powerful eastern bow, a compound bow, like the Scythians themselves used. The legate did not stop him.
It all happened in the blink of an eye. The warlord on his pony remained quite still. Arapovian stepped forward with practised swiftness took aim and loosed his bowstring. In the same instant, another arrow came out of the darkness, a single arrow. It arced through the night and struck home. The Armenian gasped and stepped
