‘This one,’ said Aetius, indicating the nearest. ‘Concentrate all your fire on the top. Imagine it’s the head and slice it off. Take aim.’ He glanced down the other side. The wolf-lords were ready with their bows.
The second tower nearby was behaving strangely. The entire front section seemed to be collapsing. Aetius realised that it was indeed collapsing – to crash right across the moat and form an instant drawbridge. It landed with a mighty smack and a billowing of dust. The men inside immediately abandoned the exposed remainder of the dummy tower, and from behind them a tortoise approached with a bronze ram-head shining evilly under it. Aetius leaned out over the walls. The improvised drawbridge was aligned directly to the Gate of St Romanus. So the enemy were battering, mining and scaling the walls simultaneously. It was going to be an eventful day.
‘Where are those damned mountain bandits?’
He sent word to the citizen militia to thicken up numbers within the Romanus towers. That ram had to be destroyed. If not, it would quickly take out the lower and the middle wall, then a siege-engine could roll in behind it right up to the Inner Wall, and they would be truly in cloaca maxima.
Zeno appeared. Tarasicodissa Rousoumbladeotes. He saluted smartly this time.
‘Not much happening your end?’
‘Sir. You said about mining activity. I reckon we’re getting most of it, under the Blachernae Wall.’
Aetius nodded. The ground was softest to the north, near the Horn. But how did Attila know? Ah, he knew everything.
The din of battle and the clamour of frightened men arose behind them. Aetius raised his voice. ‘You know about mining?’
‘Some.’
He coughed angrily on a lungful of dust. ‘There’s a transverse passageway running from the palace cellars out beyond the walls. The Guard will show you. From there you’ll have to countermine for yourself, left or right, depending on where you reckon they’re coming in. Got it?’
‘Sir.’
‘I don’t think the Huns know much about mining, but you never know. And we’re still not sure who their auxiliaries are these days.’ A massive punch from an onager missile struck nearby. First strike. Zeno flinched. Aetius didn’t. Dust clouded the air around them, but Aetius yelled through it, ‘Like whatever bastards are operating their onagers right now. And I don’t have to tell you what would happen if they made just one good tunnel into the city.’
Zeno nodded. ‘There’d be a hundred Huns inside within a minute.’
‘And a hundred every following minute, too. It would bring us down as surely as the biggest missile strike. So it matters. Get to it. Find the tunnel, kill everyone inside, and then bring it down behind you. Go!’
Already the first small bands of tattooed horsemen were galloping in below, yowling, turning and threading their way among the giant protective siege-towers and loosing off little, lethal arrow-storms for good measure.
It was time to fight back.
Aetius shouted to the wolf-lords and they let their arrows fly. It was a loose volley but one arrowhead struck home perfectly, a Hun warrior flying forwards over the head of his crumpling horse and rolling into the dust. One of the wolf-lords, tall Valamir, immediately strung another arrow and took aim, meaning to take out the warrior for good while he was briefly a stationary target. But before he could let fly, a second warrior galloped up and the fallen horseman vaulted to his feet, seized the back of his saddle, pulled himself up and they galloped clear. All in a single, faultless movement, almost quicker than the eye could see. Valamir slowly released his bowstring again, saving his arrow. He and the master-general exchanged glances. Christ, those horsemen moved fast.
From away to the left came the doom-laden thump of a mighty onager missile hitting the outer walls, a guff of limestone white dust rising into the air. Another hammer-blow, and even Aetius momentarily clenched his fists. How would the hurriedly improvised walls survive against such a hammering? And how the hell could the Huns have become such good artillerymen so soon? Surely they had Vandal auxiliaries, renegade Teutons? One rumour even said that deserters from the lesser Western legions had gone over to them, believing the future lay with the Huns. Aetius refused to believe it.
And then much, much worse. A concerted volley of missile strikes, huge boulders fired from machines still behind the siege-towers, barely glimpsed yet, their titanic loads arcing in high and raining down calamitously all on the same point. That was skill. Men were crushed without even the time to cry out, and when the dust slowly cleared the outer and middle walls were already flattened across a whole stretch of the Lycus valley. The siege- engines began to advance. This battle wasn’t going to last the night. To confirm Aetius’ worst fears, instantly another volley of onager missiles hit the walls further along, taking them down in a dozen blows, a ruthless pummelling. Everything would depend upon the inner walls.
From below came desperate cries at the sight of the ram approaching the St Romanus Gate. Tatullus was roaring, asses screamed as they dragged heavy loads, bringing up more ballista missiles; there was a clatter of running hobnailed feet, the rush of citizen militia with their pitiful wooden staves. In the hazy distance, a monotonous beat on a barbaric oxhide drum.
Aetius raised his hand, and the tower commanders all along the walls read the signal and did likewise.
He hesitated and sent a prayer like an arrow heavenwards.
He dropped his arm. ‘Fire!’
The artillery units initially wasted their missiles trying to take out individual galloping horsemen as they darted in across the broad terrace beneath the walls howling like animals, arched back in their saddles, grinning up at the shaken defenders behind their battlements, baring their berry-red teeth. Aetius was onto them immediately, striding over, shoving Imperial Guardsmen out of his way to reach them, roaring up at the next tower.
‘The horsemen may look frightening to you, soldiers, but they’re not coming in just yet! They’re trying to distract you. So ignore them! Take out the siege-towers, you hear? Kill the siege-towers!’
Tatullus echoed his commander’s orders all along the walls in finest centurion style, with just as much volume and some extra colour.
‘You heard the general, ladies! Hit the fucking machines! I see any unit wasting missiles on those malodorous fucking horsemen out of Scythia, I’ll break your fucking legs!’
He bore down on a single hapless artillery unit atop the Romanus Gate, and they quailed before him. They were good technicians, but they’d never felt the hot blast of a centurion’s angry breath in their faces, and it focused their minds wonderfully. As Tatullus well knew, it was essential they feared him more than the enemy. He seized one fresh-faced youngster by the scruff of his neck and flung him back against the wall with the might of his right arm alone. The youngster gasped and cowered.
‘Now get back on your fucking machine and line it up there!’ Tatullus screamed, spit flying in their startled faces. ‘You can see the target, it’s not exactly shy. There!’
Indeed, the attack tower was already looming over them, the rubble field of the collapsed lower walls already having been traversed with quick-laid planking and lightning-fast winching from the darting enemy.
Further along, more Huns were attacking without the complication of artillery. Aetius spotted them immediately.
‘Escalade!’ he yelled in warning. ‘Wolf-lords, to me!’ and he dashed southwards to the section being breached. A swarm of half-naked Hun warriors had rolled from their ponies to race across the moat on a dropped pontoon, the stretch of water proving as much of an obstacle as a broad puddle. ‘Complain about it later,’ Aetius growled to himself. ‘Shout at the devil.’
Jormunreik and Valamir ran with him, arrows already nocked to the bow.
‘Station here,’ said Aetius. ‘Hit them on the flank as they come across.’ He ran on.
The Huns came scrabbling over the collapsed lower walls, tripping and stumbling in the limestone rubble of their own creation. Immediately a short, hard volley of Gothic arrows slewed into them from the side and, close- packed as they were, found many a target. But countless more warriors came on behind, daggers clamped between their teeth as they scaled the ruined walls, using their gleaming Hunnish chekans or cruel spiked hatchets to dig into the stone like climbers.
Aetius ordered Captain Andronicus up with his century, and strung them along the battlements. ‘Escalade,’ he said by way of brief explanation. ‘Get ready to wash your spears.’
The Gothic wolf-lords kept up relentless volley after volley of long ashwood arrows, cutting into the flank of the advancing horde, but it barely slowed them. Somewhere back across the crowded plain Attila would be sitting his scruffy skewbald pony, oblivious of the deaths of individuals, his own or the enemy’s, and dreaming only of
