The column of Visigothic wolf-lords rode uneasily nevertheless, spears held lightly under their right arms, looking silently about them. They had seen dark things, these mountains of Thrace, home to mysteries since ancient times, where Orpheus was rent apart by his screaming maenads. As they rode down the narrow defile, the horses also silent and oppressed, picking their way carefully among the boulders and the rockfalls, hooves slipping sideways on slate-grey stones, the rain began to fall from the leaden sky and make the way yet more treacherous. The sky was a great iron lid on the world, and big raindrops struck silver-bright on gleaming Spangenhelms, running in droplets down over the steep helmed sides and down noseguards and aventails, over stubbled and unshaven cheeks, brushed away, soaking into neckcloths, beading on scarlet woollen cloaks, trickling over mailed and plated shoulders. The riders sweated, despite the steely rain. Not a living creature did we glimpse. The rain came down more heavily.
Then the pass widened. We came round a broader turn and a light wind blew in our faces and there opening before us was a lake surrounded by bare rocky mountains, its pewter surface stippled with rain. The cliffs on our left broke down into massive tumbled boulders, while on our right they ran along the lake shore, the water lapping almost to the foot of the cliffs but for a narrow gravel spit. On the other side of the lake were more green hills and then crueller mountains beyond.
Aetius sat his horse and took it all in.
‘A majestic scene,’ pronounced Prince Theodoric.
Aetius smiled indulgently. ‘But I can smell horses.’ The prince looked puzzled.
‘Many horses, and not ours. The smell of them blowing over to us across the lake. Look at your own, how her nostrils flare.’
‘I thought that was at the water. It’s long since they drank.’
‘Well, don’t let them now. Time enough to drink after. Ready your lances.’
He ordered Jormunreik and Valamir to climb up to their left and scout. A few minutes later they came scrambling breathlessly down again, reaching for their armour even as they gave their report.
Yes, many horses. And many men.
‘How many?’
‘A few hundred,’ said Valamir, tying his long hair back into a ponytail and setting his tall steel Spangenhelm back on his head, ready for the fray.
Aetius rubbed his unshaven chin. He doubted Attila himself was here. One of his generals would be leading. ‘This was no ambush. A scouting party, that is all. An accident of fate.’
‘A misfortune we shall face with direst fortitude,’ said Theodoric, sitting very straight in his saddle.
The lad was becoming more ridiculous by the moment, but still Aetius did not mock him. He had been young himself once. ‘A misfortune for them,’ he said. ‘Poor, lightly-armed scouting Huns, suddenly running into a column of Gothic wolf-lords in these desolate mountains. They are doomed.’
The princes looked cheered at the thought. I was very anxious about it, myself.
‘Doubtless they were only mapping passes through the mountains. A surprise for us. But a good soldier should not be surprised at surprises.’ He ordered the two wolf-lords back on their horses, then rode out of the end of the pass and down to the lakeshore. And there, across from us to our left, was a milling horde of Huns, arrows to the bow.
Ahead of us across the lake, at the far end of the cliffs beyond the narrow gravel shore, was the second group. He looked back. Very well, then, three groups. Behind us, on the cliffs under which we had just passed, dismounted Huns lay in wait, spiky with bows. Others had rolled big boulders to the edge of the ravine and were waiting patiently for our flight. Retreat would be nothing but self-slaughter.
Aetius did not hesitate. Already the party of Huns up on the cliffs were turning their arrows towards our defenceless backs, and over to the left the second group was doing likewise. There was one way to go, with shock and force. A small figure on a skewbald pony was at the head of the group before us, below the cliff face, still, watching. Then he raised his arm and dropped it, and the Hun arrow-storm began, slicing through the rain. Arrows and rain crosshatched, making a cage in the air.
Aetius ordered me to ride in the centre, then twisted in his saddle and yelled to the column, ‘Shields on your backs! Spears couched low! Fast trot, keep formation. Full charge only when I give the order. Forward!’
The wolf-lords were no fools, and few had not strapped their shields across their backs already, seeing that the heaviest arrow-fire would come from behind. Then the column was trotting forward into the lake shallows, a Teutonic-style attack column of the kind they knew best, four abreast and twelve deep, with myself jostled unpleasantly in the middle, speechless with fright. This was not appropriate work for a Clerk-in-Consistory. No wider front was possible as we were squeezed between the steel-grey lake on the left and the black, shining cliffs on the right, the left-hand files riding their horses up to their bellies in the cold water, the right brushing their knees against the rockface. Arrows fell through the rain but to no avail: our shields were stuck like pin-cushions but our backs doubly protected by both shield and armour. We kept in tight formation.
Then Aetius rose up in his saddle and flashed his sword in the grey air and bellowed with sudden ferocity and drove his rowelled spurs into his horse’s flanks. Our disciplined trot turned into a canter, water and gravel kicking up beneath two hundred flying hooves, spurs driving into sodden flanks, chamfrons covered in silver beads of rain and misted with horses’ breath. Then we were galloping, long ashwood spears couched low like lances, braced back against the rear horns of our wooden saddles. Two hundred yards to cover and the arrow-storm thickening, a splash to the left and a cry to the right, arrowheads thocking into shieldboards, men tumbling. But most kept low and our charge was lightning-fast, and already the nearest milling Hun archers were wavering and breaking ahead of us, fingers fumbling on their bowstrings. This was not what they had expected or foreseen, this heavy cavalry charge embarked upon so lightly, so quickly, with such dash and conviction.
In a flash the last few dozen yards were covered, there was a glimpse of sun through the thick clouds, and suddenly our galloping horsemen were coming on like spangled wraiths through the rain and flying water, blinding with sunlight, and then crashing into the heart of the Hun pack and splintering them apart, their leader on his skewbald pony rearing and turning and making for higher ground.
Lost and uncertain among these alien mountains, the Huns were taken by surprise and by the ferocity of this attack from such inferior numbers. Mounted archers of the steppes, they could not gallop free and circle and come back with a low, level volley of arrows. Trapped between lakeshore and cliff, there was no room for their usual tactics. Where was the wind on the plains, where were the wide grasslands? Here there were only tall dark cliffs and steep mountain paths and jagged rocks and heavy rain, and this bludgeoning charge. There were ponies tumbling, stuck through the ribs, and lightly armoured warriors impaled on the long ashen lances of the Gothic horsemen. Cries of men and horses mingled. Where they could, stocky ponies and their riders fell back and surged away into the low green hills in bewildered retreat before that calamitous attack. But many of the Huns were too close packed, the terrain around was too steep for easy retreat and they were beaten down by this onslaught of weighty metal and ashen spear.
The clash of arms, the bell-like ring of steel on steel, warriors flecked with drops of rain and blood, aghast Asiatic faces sliced open, stocky bodies riven through, and nowhere to move or fly, not even space to pull up an arrow and draw a bow in the impacted melee. The wolf-lords rose up in the saddle, drawing their great two-handled swords from their back-scabbards and slicing down into the helpless throng. Over the water, the other two Hun war parties held their fire, unable to risk killing their own, stricken and motionless, watching the ghostly carnage across the pale lake.
At last the bloody skirmish was done, and all the Huns either dead or vanished. On a flat rock high above them, turning on his skewbald pony, one of the Hun warlords looked down on the victorious Gothic column. Aetius reined in his horse and looked up at him through the thinning rain. The warlord was expressionless, his cheeks ritually scarred, his iron-grey ponytail dripping. It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be. The warlord drew a short shining sword and levelled the point directly at Aetius. Aetius gazed back, unmoving. Then the warlord pulled his pony round, sheathed his sword and vanished into the mountains.
We rode down to the lake at last and let our horses drink. The men drank, too, leaning back in their saddles, tilting their flasks. Then they dismounted and dragged down dry brushwood from under the shelter of some trees up a nearby valley, and burned their dead upon a pyre, pagan-style, but with prayers to the Christian God. The rain slowed and stopped and the last of the day’s sun leaked through and spilled molten copper upon the placid surface of the lake, and the funeral fires reflected in the water and dark smoke drifted away over the green hills. Then the column of wolf-lords, forty-four in number, with their two princes and the fierce and now well-respected Roman
