conquest.
Already the advancing Hun footsoldiers were across the exposed terrace below the Inner Walls. The defenders’ arrows and even the wild stones and improvised missiles hurled by the citizen militiamen took a terrible toll on exposed heads and bodies, but they moved in a swarm, as planned and concerted as a colony of ants. A wily old warlord was with them, Geukchu, having crossed this far on a white horse, and he rode among them giving calm orders. The defenders tried again and again to take him but he seemed under magical protection. Faster than the eye could see, some six or eight Hun marksmen stood back from the swarm and fired small grappling-hooks carrying the thinnest ropes of knotted hemp straight up into the air, only falling back when they were just across the battlements, perfectly pitched.
‘Cut ’em away!’ roared Aetius. ‘Don’t let ’em get up!’
The Palatine Guard followed his orders, but as soon as they leaned out to slash at the ropes, in came the Huns’ covering fire. It was devastating: an instant barrage of three or four hundred arrows, immaculately aimed, scything in over the top of the wall and into the chests and faces of the desperate defenders. Men screaming, flailing, faces crimson, hands clutched to eyes and throats. Andronicus himself was stuck with an arrow in the shoulder, sinking down, snapping it off gasping. ‘Bastards,’ he murmured. There had to be more of a fight than that.
‘Take them out!’ roared Aetius, desperate. ‘Kick away the hooks! Citizen militia, move down!’
But already the hooks were deeply lodged by Hun warriors coming up the ropes, not one of them cut. Knuckles saw the first Hun appear along the walls, and lumbered over to cave his skull in. But the Hun moved like a spider, vaulted over the battlements, dagger between his teeth but not even standing his ground to fight. You don’t take a fortified city with an escalade of one. Moving at blinding speed, he kicked out and loosened the tough little grappling hook from the wall where it had lodged, checked that the rope it hung from was looped only once, nice and loosely, round the back of the merlon – Knuckles was upon him, swinging his club at the half-shaven and unhelmeted skull with a blow that would have killed a horse – and the warrior was gone. Not even looking, holding onto nothing but the little hook two-handed, he vaulted back over the walls to the ground below.
Knuckles looked out after him and roared with frustration. ‘What are you, a fuckin’ circus acrobat or something?’
A clatter of arrows struck all around him and one cut his forearm badly, an ooze of blood among the long- established mess of scars. Knuckles bellowed with anger, clubbing mindlessly for a moment at the rope tightening ominously around the merlon. Then Arapovian was running over, knife drawn.
The rope reeled back down behind the Hun warrior, and he fell to earth slowly enough to roll and then leap to his feet uninjured. Along the walls the same trick had been repeated several times, and though a few of the leading warriors had been cut down, most had not. As the acrobat besiegers almost floated back down to earth, pulled up in counterweight were giant nets, soon hanging in swags from the forty-foot walls. Defenders hacked desperately at the ropes bound around their own treacherous battlements and more were cut free. But not enough. In seconds, the surviving nets were thick with Hun warriors scaling them like lizards. Already the first were vaulting over the tops of the walls and forming small, isolated bridgeheads to protect the remaining nets, and more of their comrades came on behind.
Aetius demanded reports, but none of them was good. Then they stopped coming. Everyone was fighting.
They had to clear the walls. They had to clear them now, or they were lost.
In the darkness underground, another kind of fight was going on.
The sturdy Isaurian mountain men, accustomed to tunnels and caves, as Aetius had surmised, had moved fast down the defensive passageway running out under the Blachernae Walls, then struck left to intercept the Huns. In feeble light and Stygian gloom, they had burst through into the enemy tunnel some way behind the lead party, and immediately found themselves fighting on two flanks, fore and aft. They promptly retreated back into their own tunnel, Zeno at their head, fighting on the narrowest front – only two men wide at most. They fought at thrusting swordpoint and spearpoint, half suffocated with smoke and foul odours, slithering in pools of stagnant water, hand- to-hand in the darkness by guttering oil-light, a scene of Homeric horror. Their enemies were no Huns, for those horsemen of the steppes could never have tolerated this infernally cramped and claustrophobic underworld. They were a mix of Batavian and Saxon mercenaries, used to mining but motivated by greed for gold and loot, not by loyalty to Attila. Faced with a horde of fierce-looking fighters, squat and bearded like the dwarves of their own mythology, short-swords and axes flashing, monstrous shadows on the tunnel walls, they panicked and broke. The Isaurians followed them and cut them down ruthlessly, until the piles of corpses before them meant they could penetrate no further.
They dragged the corpses back and pressed on over them, treading them down into the swamp and ooze, the darkness foul, suffocating, the tunnels slimy mud and dripping rock, until they reached almost the beginning of the enemy mining operations. Here they moved fast, lighting a fire around some wooden pit props to smoke out any last miners and suck the air from the tunnel, then they fell back, smashing down more pit props and collapsing the earthen roof behind them so as to save their own air and their retreat. All the way back they brought down the hard-won tunnel, blocking the final exit with a rockfall, and then retreating up the Byzantine passageway within the safety of the Blachernae Walls. They emerged like bloody moles from Hades, gasping for the clear air and the sunlight, choking but triumphant.
The Huns might try to tunnel again but it was unlikely. This would have cost them too much effort for too little reward.
‘Night and day the gates of Hell stand open,’ growled Zeno with satisfaction. ‘Well, not any more they don’t.’
But there was no time for rest, let alone self-congratulation.
‘To the walls!’ came the desperate cry. ‘Every last man standing!’
Aetius signalled to Andronicus to pull his Guard back towards the St Romanus Gate and re-form his men in a phalanx of spears. Ignore the ram shuddering in below, and the siege-tower behind. Ignore the fact that they were already surrounded, outnumbered, outfought. Never admit defeat. Let the Huns come up their wretched nets and mass together on the battlements. They could take them.
Aetius himself pulled the Wolf-lords back to Military Gate V, spears lowered, waiting. At least the Hun onagers had now been silent for a while, for fear of hitting their own men.
The nets were all slung between the gates either side of the Lycus, and the Hun bridgehead thickened. There were now three or four hundred of them, technically within the city, but with no access yet to a descent. Beyond, Aetius could see the stricken, uncertain faces of the Imperial Guard, looking across to him. What was he doing?
He was waiting.
Near him, Theodoric waited, too, long-sword drawn.
‘You’ll use that to thrust.’
‘I will,’ said the prince grimly. ‘No room for cutting blows.’
‘Quite so.’ He roared down the walls to the Guard, ‘Hold it still!’
‘You want the Huns densely packed,’ murmured Theodoric.
‘You got it.’
A few more agonising moments, the Huns hardly able to believe that they had taken an entire stretch of Wall, and behind them more and more of their comrades coming up the nets unopposed. To their right, one of their rams was splintering in the gates, and the platforms of the gate-towers themselves would soon be flooded with more of their comrades from the approaching siege-tower. The city was as good as won.
Then they heard that hard-faced Roman general roar, ‘Now!’
From behind the Imperial Guard, holding the line rigid with fear, came the sound of something creaking, being winched and lowered. Andronicus told his men to brace themselves. They had their orders. Forward face.
It was Tatullus who led the rearguard attack, along with his old soldiers from the ludicrous remnant of the VIIth, Knuckles and Arapovian and Malchus, and some of the hardier of the citizen militia, including a blacksmith still in his apron and wielding his hammer for a weapon.
The Hun siege-tower was built with a high drop-bridge which would soon fall across the battlements and admit a party of ferocious warriors with squat round shields and short curved swords onto the high platform of the gate-tower, from where they would command the walls and worse, the steps leading down. Crazed with bloodlust
