ear any more, either. Then he took out a squat bottle of watery red liquid and poured it in a thin trickle over his bandages, letting the linen soak it up.
‘Red meat, wine, garlic,’ muttered Knuckles. ‘What you doin’, makin’ a fuckin’ casserole of yourself?’
Malchus looked up and grinned painfully. ‘Very tasty dish I’d be, too.’
Knuckles grunted. ‘Ladies first.’
Across the plain, if any cared to watch, the slain cavalrymen were being stripped of their armour. And a more mysterious figure was moving against the sinking sun. A vulture seemed to keep watch over her, circling high above. She wore long dark robes, an elaborate head-dress, and seemed to hold a twisting snake in her hands. Occasionally she knelt down beside one of the fallen Roman cavalrymen like a ministering angel. Arapovian watched from the walls with his deep-set hawk-eyes, and thought he saw one of the cavalrymen stir and try to scrabble desperately out of her long shadow. The Armenian gripped his bow more tightly as he watched, but he was helpless. They were all helpless. The woman knelt beside the cavalryman, and when she rose again he moved no more.
She would be ministering to them all soon enough, if no help came.
10
Sabinus visited the wounded and exhausted men seated around the whitewashed walls of the little hospital. The pallets within had all long since been filled. The air echoed with soft groans. The men, their bare skin, their clothing, their armour, all seemed only a coat of dark dust and shining redness. About them the stench of sweat and blood. A few auxiliaries tried their best to keep away the tormenting flies. Oh God for reinforcements. There would be none left to reinforce soon. Abject rescue, then. But still from the east and Ratiaria… nothing. They were as alone as ever.
‘Sir,’ said his last standing decurion. ‘Hun deputation at the west gate again.’
It took him time to walk back up to the gate-tower, treading very carefully, hand on his side.
Below the tower sat the stone-faced warlord, ringed by his finest, freshest warriors, a hundred of them, arrows nocked to the bow.
The warlord raised his face to him. ‘You have fought well,’ he said. ‘Almost like Huns. So much for the decadence of the West.’ He smiled a brief smile, as if at some private joke. ‘Nevertheless, your cowards of cavalrymen who rode against my innocent people are all destroyed. As are you. Now I will grant you amnesty. Those of you who still live may walk free from this fort and leave us to raze it flat. You may walk to the next frontier fort eastwards. It is called Ratiaria – you know it well enough. The Legio III Pannonia is stationed there, a full six thousand men. The legate’s name is Posthumus. He shares his bed with a whore called Statina.’ Another smile. ‘Do not think we are entirely ignorant savages, Roman. Do not underestimate us.’
‘I do not underestimate you,’ said Sabinus.
‘Very well, then,’ said the warlord. ‘Lead your survivors east to Ratiaria, and tell them there of your destruction.’
Sabinus looked around. A single exhausted legionary sat nearby in the deepening shadow of the battlements, bow resting on his knees. They exchanged looks. The legionary was too tired even to speak, but he shook his head.
Further along, one of his comrades growled, ‘Tell him to go fuck himself. Pardoning my language.’
Sabinus’ grim smile did not reflect the tangle and stir of his emotions. He looked back down at the warlord. ‘What is the name of your god?’
The Hun scowled ferociously. He had not come to bandy words, but to give orders. ‘No Roman dog speaks that holy name.’
‘Their god is called Astur,’ said another voice nearby. It was Arapovian. ‘Astur, the All-Father, Great Eagle of the Eternal Blue Sky.’
Sabinus gazed down very steadily at the warlord and said, ‘May Astur curse you. May you and all your tribe vanish from the earth.’
At those words, a shadow of preternatural darkness passed over the warlord’s face. Sabinus kept steady. A hundred arrowheads were aimed at him. Then the warlord wrenched his pony round and tore away across the plain, his men following.
The legate took a careful breath. He ordered all fit and walking to the walls once more. ‘The day is not yet done.’
And the men rose to their feet once more, the last few dozen of them. About sixty or seventy men, bearing twice as many wounds between them. Some helped others stumble forward, some used their own pikes for crutches. Some went up the narrow stone steps to the battlements on their hands and knees.
The sun was going down in the west. For a while the Huns appeared to pause in their attack.
‘Perhaps they will allow us a good night’s sleep,’ growled Tatullus. It was a joke, of sorts. Night was when they would come again to finish it.
For now, there was an eerie peace. Swallows hawked low over the evening river, feeding on clouds of waterflies. A moorhen called her chicks. A muted splash among the nodding reeds – otter or watervole. The warm summer sun going down in the west. Burning orange against the great white flanks of the Alps. Setting the Rhine and the Po on fire. Casting long, cool shadows over the vineyards of Provence and Aquitania, over the ancient, lion- coloured castles and hilltowns of Spain where Hannibal once marched, and over the Immortal City itself on its seven hills. The evening shadow of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and the Colossus of Nero… Sabinus’ heart heaved with sorrow. This beloved empire. He had seen the future, in the implacable face of that mighty barbarian warlord who rode out of nowhere, at head of an army of horsemen that no man could number. The empire was sinking in the west, as surely as the silent sun.
Lone horsemen galloped back and forth across the plains below, stripping armour from the dead, burning them like refuse. Occasionally, through the sun-reddened dust, the watchers on the wall glimpsed a yowling figure in tribal wear but now sporting some additional decoration. A triumphal Kutrigur Hun, naked except for a tattered deerskin loincloth, bristling with bow and quiver, shaven-headed but for a single plume of limed hair, his skin half blue with tattoos, and proudly riding with a curtal red cavalry cloak fluttering round his coppery shoulders, and, slung from his saddle, a freshly severed head. He waved his sword beneath the walls of the fort and howled like a wolf in winter.
Knuckles threw a rock at him and missed. Overhead, the buzzards circled in the last of the sun. More had joined them, red kites. ‘Fuckin’ carrion birds,’ growled the hulking Rhinelander. Then he raised his head to the sky and shouted to them, ‘Plenty of carrion tonight, friends! Guzzle your cropful! Hun and Roman flesh together, it all tastes the same under the skin!’
Just after the first stars appeared in the darkening sky, Lyra and Altair high and Regulus falling, there came wearisomely familiar sounds: distant thump, then shuddering quake. They were hitting the south-west tower once more. They would be in very soon.
‘Start bagging again!’ ordered Sabinus.
And the men, who had not slept for thirty-six hours, forty, began to bag up the broken defences by torchlight. One collapsed under a sandbag. Tatullus kicked him to his feet again. ‘You can sleep when you get to Hades,’ he growled. ‘Which won’t be long now. Until then, soldier, you get on your feet and work.’
Sabinus himself re-ascended to his post on the west tower and slumped.
I had hope when violence was ceas’t…
The line echoed in his head. An old poet. Virgil, perhaps. His schooldays seemed an age ago. Merely lifting his head was an effort, his very neck bones aching with weariness. But he gazed heavenwards anyway and surveyed the fixed stars pinned to the canopy of night. Some said they were alchemical furnaces where new souls were forged; the pristine, superlunary abode of the gods, of mercy and justice eternal. They looked very far away. The night was so silent. Help would not come. They could not go on. They were finished.
Tatullus stood beside him.
