‘I never thought they were,’ said Sabinus.
‘Mad as fuckin’ badgers, though,’ said Knuckles.
Arapovian sat and rebandaged his arm, then took up his bow again.
Centurion and legate departed.
‘Tell me about Armenia, then,’ said Knuckles. ‘I could do with a laugh.’
‘Armenia?’ The look in Arapovian’s eyes gave even Knuckles pause. ‘One day I will tell you about Armenia. For now, I kill Huns.’
The onagers started up once more. And with them, looping round wide, came the horse-archers. You could almost hear the collective sigh of exhausted men stumbling to their feet again, cranking back their bows, hefting their shields, stowing a new row of lead darts.
The onslaught recommenced.
Soon a decurion came running. ‘First-floor guardroom, sir. Stone came straight through the wall. Tower still holding but roof’s beginning to pitch badly.’
‘Bag it up. Give ’em covering fire.’
‘No archers, sir.’
‘What do you mean, “No archers”? They’re your unit; where are they?’
‘My unit’s gone, sir. In heaven or hell, wouldn’t like to say. Enemy arrows are coming in like rain.’ He gasped for breath, waving his empty hands. ‘Their cavalry below the walls. Continuous stream of them. Every man on the open roof was caught out. Lying up there like sticklebacks, sir.’
‘Jesus.’
Tatullus reviewed the situation for his commanding officer. ‘The siege-towers weren’t a problem. Light cavalry, obviously not, however many arrows they drop on us. The ram’s finished. It’s the onagers that we have to take out, and fast. The south-west tower won’t take a lot more, then we’re fighting hand-to-hand over the rubble.’ He grimaced. ‘Outnumbered a hundred to one.’
He was right, and Sabinus knew it. The big onagers back there, half a mile off, bucking in the dust, spewing out their massive loads, kicking back like the wild asses they were named after, they were the enemy. And they were going to break in. It was only a matter of time. Another shuddering thunk, the whole west wall trembling, bruised and battered, a fresh crack running to the foundation stones, men reeling back from the battlements choking on dust. The onagers relentless, kicking up again, and again. No, they could not just sit here and let it all fall. Not now. Not after so many years of patient endurance.. .
Once a single gap was breached, once the barbarians were inside the fort, the hand-to-hand fighting would be brief indeed. His auxiliaries would flee. His runners would do what they did best, and run. And his last three hundred would fight like Leonidas’ Spartans to the bitter, bloody end. So he truly believed. Perhaps take twice as many of the enemy with them as they went, screaming blue murder, down to hell. Six hundred of the enemy slain would make no difference. Life was cheap to them. Tens of thousands more would ride straight on down the imperial trunk road to Naissus. Then Sardica? Adrianople? And then the capital itself? It would be like a monstrous wave, a bristling, shaggy wave of savages armed to the teeth, sweeping across Europe without end.
At last the onagers paused in their onslaught. The galloping horsemen below pulled back again to regroup, and replenish their quivers from the Hun supply wagons back on the crest.
Now.
‘Tubernator! Sound the cavalry charge!’
Down at the south gate there was a disciplined frenzy of activity. The cavalrymen, already armoured up by assistants, hauled themselves onto their huge, shaggy-hooved mounts, settled themselves into their high-fronted saddles with a bronze brace at each corner, rock-solid, massy, inhuman. Their leader was Andronicus. No fool: but, alas, no Malchus either. They checked their long cavalry swords, hefted their emblazoned shields, couched their long ashen lances, and formed up at the gate in a long Teutonic column, four abreast. It was they who had carried out the original punitive attack on the Hun people north of the Danube, which had brought down this terrible vengeance. Inexorable orders from the Highest Authority, it was true; a grim but necessary task. Now they rode out against the enemy with real anger in their blood.
Sabinus raised his hand, glanced out once more across the plain. The Hun horsemen were vanishing away, ghostly figures glimpsed through clouds of ochre dust. His hand dropped. The gatekeepers hauled back the mighty oak timbers, the two iron-bound gates groaned open, and the column moved out at a steely trot. A great glittering serpent gliding out from its lair into the waiting world beyond.
The men on the battlements gave a cheer to see them. The majesty and power of the Schola Scutariorum Clibanariorum. Less majestically, the Boiler Boys, since they would bake inside their weighty armour on days like this. But they deliberately trained in the hottest weather, sometimes wearing extra clothing beneath the armour. They were used to it.
They pulled their horses’ heads in low and continued to trot steadily to maintain formation till the last. Their mounts wore shining silver chamfrons, masks of armour, of little practical use against arrows but highly effective in scaring the enemy horse. Horses were scared by everything: camels, elephants, other horses in masks. Sabinus had even heard that horses would turn back from attack at the merest scent of lion dung. Sadly he had no sacks of lion dung available just now.
The retreating Hun horsemen were still barely aware of the impending attack on their rear. Andronicus rose up in his saddle and gave the nod, and the column moved into an easy canter. A Hun glanced back and cried out a warning. Immediately Andronicus drove his spurs into his horse and it gave a low whinny as it moved into a full charging gallop. The column drove forwards.
The massed ranks of retreating Huns broke loose and separated before the juggernaut of iron and bronze could slam into them, and Sabinus saw immediately, from his accursed grandstand view on the western guard- tower, that his last, desperate attempt at counter-attack would fail. What a heavy cavalry column did best was hit a hard target, but here there would be no hard target to hit. The nomad horsemen galloped away into empty space before the Roman heavy cavalry, the Pannonian plains to them much like the limitless steppes of their native Scythia. The great armoured column punched into empty air, into taunting nothingness. And then some of the Huns, those with a few arrows left in their quivers, wheeled round and came back at them from the side, deft and fast, bows already slipping from muscular, copper-skinned shoulders.
Sabinus felt like the emperor himself in Constantinople, high up in his kathisma, his private box in the Hippodrome, watching an afternoon’s harmless entertainment. He tightened up with self-loathing. He had been to the capital, had seen the Obelisk of Theodosius the Great in the Hippodrome, triumphally erected back in 390. He had stood and surveyed the bas-reliefs of scruffy barbarians in animal skins, bowing low to the emperor and his family on high in their royal box. What arrogance. What hubris. What a hostage to fortune that haughty, self- laudatory monument would prove to be. The Emperor of the Eastern Romans, God’s Vice-Regent on Earth, perpetually victorious over the pagan hordes… To watch his men about to be slaughtered like this was almost more than Sabinus could bear.
‘Hunting the Huns on the open plain is like hunting a tiger in a dark forest,’ said a soft voice nearby. It was Arapovian. ‘At night. With a stick.’
‘Stow it, soldier.’
Sabinus was ready to sound the recall already, but then Andronicus gave a seeming yell of triumph, and Sabinus hesitated. It seemed the cavalry officer believed there was still a chance they might get through to the onagers and destroy them, before they themselves were destroyed.
Keeping his men in a tight and perfect column, essential when so vastly outnumbered, Andronicus turned them as tightly as he could and ploughed in left across the files of fleeing Hun horsemen. No, there was no satisfying hard target to splinter and demolish, but these light horsemen, out of arrows, barely armoured, indeed some barely clothed, could be cut down ruthlessly in smaller groups. And getting in amongst them like this, there was no chance their Hun comrades could reply with arrow-fire. They would only kill their own. It was a good move.
Sabinus nodded with satisfaction. One thing that stone-faced warlord had not expected, he guessed, was any such counter-attack. Well, let him feel it now. Now those light horse-warriors would feel what it was like to have the Boiler Boys crashing into their flank.
When a lancer drove into the flank of a Hunnish horse, the massive weight of the armoured knight tended to carry him right into and over the flailing and tumbling steppe pony. Either the rider was trapped or trampled
