pattern streets and alleyways of the fortress were overrun with screaming horsemen. They galloped in triumph, racing each other to set each barrack building alight. Cutting down any last stragglers of the destroyed legion, or lassoing them as they fled, and dragging them along behind in the dust as tortured trophies. Fires blazed up in the night, sparks and stars. The appetite for destruction seemed inexhaustible. Soon they clustered around the legionary principia. They ransacked the elegant rooms, smashed vases and glassware, dragged out tables and couches, made a huge bonfire in the centre of the colonnaded courtyard. Others roped together teams of horses to drag down the pillars and roofbeams and crash the whole building. Word had gone out from the Great Tanjou. Not a stone should be left standing. The very name of Viminacium would denote eloquent desolation for an entire empire.
Warriors still on horseback, inseparable from their mounts, some wearing embroidered Roman curtains for cloaks around their naked shoulders, rode into the chapel and collected the last of the legionary standards to add to the fire. Then word came from the leader that there was gold beneath the altar.
Behind VII Barrack stood the long, low punishment block, comprising a row of dank, evil-smelling cells without windows, and a narrow corridor with one doorway at the end. The building was heavily tiled, not thatched, for greater security. As if by instinct, Knuckles and Arapovian found themselves backing into it side by side, peering out for oncoming Huns.
‘Christ. No getting away from some people,’ said Knuckles.
‘The families,’ said Arapovian, jerking his head back.
Knuckles glanced round. Aside from four or five corpses already strewn across the stoneflagged floor behind him, in the gloom at the other end of the corridor he saw a heavy iron-bound trapdoor set into the flagstones. It must lead down to the dungeons. They could still ‘Jesus!’ Arapovian rarely swore, but suddenly the doorway was shadowed by a Hun horseman. He brought him down with single arrow and Knuckles finished him with his club. They stepped back into the shadows.
‘Brilliant,’ said Knuckles. ‘That’ll bring ’em in like flies.’
‘Bag up the trapdoor at the end,’ gasped Arapovian. ‘With those bodies.’
Knuckles scowled. ‘I don’t take orders from you, you Parsee bastard.’
Arapovian ignored him. There was a group of plumed and feathered warriors coming down the alley, stained bloody in the torchlight. They had seen the riderless horse, the dark shape on the ground.
‘Do it now. Hide the trapdoor. When they come stampeding in over our corpses, they might not find it – the families might yet survive. The dead and the living both walk free in their own way from these unbelieving savages.’
‘Christ in a crib,’ growled Knuckles. But, grumbling about being no slaughterhouse slave, he began to haul the bodies down the passageway, the flagstones slathered in gore, and stacked them over the iron door like saltfish. Thump, thump of meat. He wondered about the families, women and children and toothless ancients, down in the pitch darkness of those foul dungeons. The airless terror, the unknowing. Yet they might survive.
He surveyed the stack of bodies. ‘Can’t we hide under ’em?’ he suggested.
‘No time,’ said Arapovian, and slashed out with his sword.
The building was surrounded. The two men fought again side by side like demons in the protection of the narrow doorway. Copper faces, bodies, torchlight, bared teeth, a muscular neck before them decorated with severed ears on a thong. Arapovian beheaded him. Nearby they could hear the battering of someone trying to break through the walls, but the building was strongly built: men held for execution often try to escape. Likewise on the roof, warriors tearing off the heavy baked tiles found only more thick crossbeams beneath. The confusion was atrocious, the Huns’ desperation to be in and finish this job making them careless. Knuckles swiped one aside with his studded forearm, caved another face in with his club. Behind the milling crowd, another Hun still mounted loosed an arrow at them and succeeded only in killing one of his own in the crush. It was absurd, but they could not get at these last two. One waved a squat pickaxe, howling and almost dancing with frustration. Arapovian slashed at him, and Knuckles continued to use his club like a fist to defend the narrow doorway, punching out, smashing heads, caving in chests. Warriors howled execrations, tore at each other in their frenzy to kill these two trapped men, these standing insults to their victory.
‘Collapse the roof!’ called a Hun commander calmly from behind. He sat back on his horse, indicating his meaning with a wave of his hand. ‘Then fire it. Bring up that handcart there. The rest of you, fall back.’
Frenzied or not, the painted savages obeyed in an instant. Then they ran the flaming handcart across the doorway and tipped it inwards. Knuckles and Arapovian leaped back as blazing bales tumbled into the blocked corridor amid roiling clouds of smoke, and their lungs began to constrict, their eyes to redden and water and go blind.
Geukchu nodded with grim approval. ‘Let the fire take them. A fine cremation for two such mighty heroes of the empire. A warrior pyre.’
Arapovian squatted back, his arms held out as poor shields before his face. They were piling more blazing bales onto the roof. The timbers began to burn.
‘You know something?’ roared Knuckles. ‘Rome’s city firefighters, they never eat roast pork. Can’t stand the smell. Exactly the same as roast human.’
Arapovian shuffled in the dense smoke. ‘We need to clear the dungeon door again.’
Knuckles didn’t move.
‘Fine. Stay here and roast.’
Knuckles made a noise like frustrated bear and lumbered after the impossible Armenian.
Choking on smoke, hair singed, coursing with sweat and deafened with the roar of the flames, they recommenced the foul work. Dragging corpses from the pile was worse when you pulled an arm or a leg and the body didn’t come with it. By the time they had cleared the trapdoor the smoke was impenetrable.
‘Can’t see a fuckin’ thing,’ rasped Knuckles. ‘But I bet you need a bath.’
Silence.
‘Parsee?’
Still silence. Then the creak of the heavy iron trapdoor.
‘You did it!’ Knuckles flailed around for a moment to give the easterner a thump on the back, but Arapovian was already down the steps. Knuckles’s hair was smouldering and he couldn’t breathe, so he groped his way down – just ahead of the crash of the collapsing roof, and a ferocious through-draught which cleared the smoke from the building and set the fires roaring up like furnaces. The two men were suddenly and hellishly illuminated as they descended the narrow stone steps to the dungeons, backlit by a curtain of flame. The people below, the mothers and maidens and wide-eyed infants, gazing up in terror, saw two figures descending towards them out of the jaws of the fire, blood-red and blackened from head to toe.
They must be in hell.
Knuckles turned awkwardly on the narrow steps, slippery with algae, pulled one of the cadavers over the raised trapdoor as best he could, and then let it slam shut over his head. They were in darkness. He groped for bolts, then stopped. No bolts on the inside of a dungeon door. He grinned in the blackness. Tosser.
A small oil-lamp was lit, and the abject people viewed the two demons. One a huge brute with a club locked under his simian arm, the other tall and lean, cruel and clever. A woman about to wail had her mouth immediately stopped up by this one. His hand was sticky with fresh blood. She nearly vomited. He held a ringed finger to his thin, cruel lips.
Aside from her, there were five or six more women, young mothers, one old. Half a dozen children, blubbing and snotty, and an infant fast asleep and oblivious. One old fellow, who clutched his knobbly stick as if ready to fight them.
‘Calm down, grandad. We’re on your side.’
They huddled together in the airless cell, and not a word was spoken as the punishment block burned to cinders above them.
Above the dungeon, onager missiles were still hitting the walls of the fort. For sheer joy, a kind of victory celebration, and for practice, as the Hun warlord said laughing. He rode round the ruins of the blazing fort on his little skewbald pony, Chagelghan – he always called his horses Chagelghan, no one knew why. His gold earrings danced, his yellow eyes shone with delight in the darkness.
‘I want these walls flat,’ he said.
Later, as the first grey light of dawn was coming up, he sat his horse out on a mound to the south of the city
