The deranged rider was stuck by two more bolts, his horse likewise. He was a madman. One bolt glanced off his round iron helmet. He shook his head. His long black hair flew and scattered drops of bright red blood – Sabinus thought of Medusa. Then he flung down his whip and drew his long curved sabre. To the horror of the watchers on the wall, in his blood-madness he rode in and began to slaughter the captives tethered beneath the now-blazing tortoise. They fell apart, crying, hands held over their sliced heads. Arapovian found himself trapped between the captives roped to the ram and the insane Hun, trying to protect them as the rider tried to kill them. Arapovian cut free what captives he could who were still alive, only for the warrior to wheel round and scythe through them as they fled, riding them down. Arapovian gritted his teeth in a white fury and launched himself at another Hun driver, driving his blade straight through him. Then he was up on the beam again, slashing at the suspension ropes. At last one of the great ropes frayed and twisted and snapped, and the ram thumped down into the dust, the heavy ramshead half buried where it hit. Arapovian was thrown off the end as from an unbroken horse. He rolled smoothly, picked himself up and grimaced.
‘It’s done!’ roared Sabinus. ‘Tubernator, get the men back! Blow your guts out, man!’
He turned the other way. ‘Every tar barrel over the wall. I want to see that tortoise melt down!’
The Hun warrior was maddened still further by the defeat, dying, flailing his sabre. He rode into the walls, spurring his bloody horse. The creature turned alongside, the warrior slashed at the stonework, rode through his own shower of sparks. Someone dropped a stone on him. He reeled and stared upwards sightlessly through a mask of blood, eyes rolling back to the whites. He tottered forwards again, still in the high-fronted wooden saddle, and spurred and pulled away. An adolescent boy emerged, blackened, from under the tortoise: the last of the enslaved captives, hoping to make his escape. The warrior cut him down as he passed by without a second thought, and galloped away across the plain back to his army, still alive somehow, his body lolling, his head to one side, sabre hanging down from his left hand.
The men on the walls fell silent.
‘God’s teeth,’ growled Sabinus.
‘By St Peter’s holy Jewish foreskin,’ agreed Knuckles.
Tatullus and Arapovian were back on the walls by the time the tortoise, smouldering and half wrecked, tottered and sank down useless into the dust. The ram beneath it blazed. Then they realised to their horror that Malchus had not followed them. Tatullus roared an order to the young cavalry officer, who stood dazed and bloodied near the smoking wreckage, but he appeared not to hear.
The horsemen came galloping in. Malchus had left it too late. He could barely walk. He grinned. He had lost too much blood to climb past the savaged remnants of the tortoise and vault back over the battlements.
Arapovian reached down a futile arm, crying out to him, his face angry and already sorrowful. ‘Move yourself, man!’
Malchus turned his head and smiled dimly up at him through a mist of blood. He raised a red forearm, and touched the flat of his sword to his bare forehead. He turned away from them and looked out across the plain.
A barked order sounded in Arapovian’s ears, the voice of the legate, but he did not hear or understand. He was up over the wall and down the net like a cat. Malchus was oblivious. He stood alone before the fortress. No, he walked away from it. Tottering, he walked towards the oncoming horde of thousands, barely able to lift his sword.
Arapovian dodged round the ruined tortoise and ran to him, but the horsemen were coming in faster. It was impossible.
Malchus settled his helmet more firmly on his head and waited. He would have liked to end by running towards them. Even walking purposefully would be something. But he was too tired, so he simply stood his ground. At least he was still on his feet. He took a deep breath and raised his sword above his head one last time. Then the horde came down upon him and he was gone.
Arapovian skidded to a halt. Another few breaths and they would be on him, too, but incredibly, he seemed to pause and consider for a moment or two. He hefted his sword in his right hand, and with his left drew his fine dagger with its jewelled handle. Eyed the horde. Then he re-sheathed both, turned and dashed for the wall. The instant he did so, some of the horsemen sheathed their swords and swept their bows from their shoulders, nocked arrows and fired, faster than the eye could see. Arrows clattered into the stonework. Arapovian crawled up the net as best he could with his lanced leg. The crossbowmen above stepped forward and hit the nearest horsemen. Men howled with rage and pain, horses tumbled.
Arapovian, clinging to the top of the net with one arm, stopped and looked back. He was as crazed as that Hun poet, this Armenian. More orders roared in his ears. He drew his dagger from its sheath again, and hazed the bright little blade out over the army of horseman until he found his target. He pointed the point of the dagger straight at the stone-faced warlord and smiled a rare smile. Then he clamped his teeth on the blade again and was up and over the battlements, pulling the weighty hemp net up behind him. Knuckles seized the other end, then more men came to help. One acrobatic Hun vaulted and clung to it, so they hauled him up to the top, where Knuckles leaned over and cuffed him off again with a massive blow to the head, as you might swipe away a fly. The warrior cartwheeled back to the ground. The net came safely up over the battlements, and the rest of the horsemen faced blank fortress walls again.
In a surge of victorious energy, arrows, ballista bolts, slingballs, even rocks hurled by hand, struck the Hun horsemen in a single, brutal volley. From the unit again operating at full capacity on the half-burned north-west tower, there came a pummelling onslaught from the well-drilled artillerymen. Two big ballista bolts and two medium-weight slingshots were fired hard and almost horizontal, arcing down fast into the fleeing horsemen. The four missiles took out four riders, sending them tumbling to the earth at breakneck speed. You could hear the vertebrae snap. The riders behind tumbled into them, and more fell. Some lay stunned beneath their whinnying horses or entangled in their reins. Arrows sang from the battlements, and each arrow told. The rest of the horsemen fled.
Arapovian sank down behind the low wall and sheathed his dagger. He removed his helmet, swept back the long black hair plastered to his brow and bowed his head in grief for a brave lost comrade.
Knuckles handed him back his bow. ‘Nutter,’ he said.
‘Hero, surely?’ said Arapovian bitterly.
‘Same thing,’ said Knuckles.
Below them, the great structure of the burning tortoise gave one last groan, like some primeval animal in its last throes, then leaned, tottered, and collapsed in a huge eruption of soot and sparks. Hot iron plates clanged down on each other, and amid the smoke and flame, and the acrid stench of burning rope, was the worse stench of bodies roasting. The bronze head of the great ram, half buried, shone dimly up through the flames. One last wounded warrior crawled out of the chaos, arms flailing as if he was trying to swim through sand. He got to his knees and made a grab for a riderless horse which milled around and snorted with surprise.
‘Finish it,’ said Tatullus irritably.
A bolt stilled him. The dust settled. The men breathed again.
It was not yet noon. The pedites brought round water.
Sabinus was coming along the battlements. Arapovian got to his feet.
Tatullus saluted. ‘Sir. Ram out of action.’
Sabinus would have smiled, but Malchus was gone, and he couldn’t afford to lose men like that. He nodded and went back to the west tower.
There was a brief respite in the Hun onslaught. The horsemen were pulled way back against the crest of hills to the west. Their onagers fell silent. A feeling of temporary hesitation. This undermanned and isolated fortress wouldn’t be so easy a nut to crack after all. But Sabinus and his officers remembered well enough the demeanour of that grim-faced, tattooed warlord on his grubby little skewbald pony. He would be back. Any respite would be short.
He ordered Tatullus to make a discreet head-count, and the answer was a shock. They were down to fewer than four hundred front-rank soldiers: already a fifth of his men were casualties, wounded or slain. The pedites and medical orderlies had taken it even worse. There was no shelter from those bitter arrow-storms, and the Huns would soon come again. Many thousands of them.
If the gods were just, and rewarded ordinary men who fought like heroes, then surely reinforcements must come soon. Or perhaps some goddess, the grey-eyed Pallas Athena, as she came down from Olympus to the windy plains of Troy to protect her beloved Odysseus. Sabinus’ lip curled sardonically. Fat chance. The old gods were
