and dreams of Byzantine gold, they were unlikely to give up their position once they had taken it.
Tatullus faced the approaching siege-tower with his billhook lowered. He bellowed for more men-at-arms up here. These bird-brained artillery novices had left it too late. This tower was going to get bloody very soon.
But the primal instinct of raw fear had finally galvanised the unwarlike artillery technicians. In a few seconds of astonishing deftness, they had raised the trajectories of their machines to face the head of the tower, not ten feet off the walls now, and let loose. Serried metal bolts shot forward out of each shivering machine, flat and lethal, at speeds of more than fifty or sixty feet a second, or so the mathematicians of the imperial workshops had calculated. Those huge, straining torsion ropes could store an astonishing power. The flight of bolts drove straight through the raised drop-bridge and anyone within. The slingballs simultaneously slammed into the side timbers, causing less damage to the occupants but at least as much terror. Rapidly assessing the situation, the slingers forsook their machines, took flaming pots and brands in their hands, and lobbed them across onto the roof of the siege-tower, where they exploded into fireballs and began to burn the overhead timbers.
Tatullus almost guffawed. The artillerymen’s initial dithering incompetence had actually drawn the Hun attack tower in too close, only to be suddenly blasted with this volley of heavy steel bolts at almost point-blank range, and then set afire to boot.
‘And again!’ he yelled, thumping his billhook furiously on the wooden deck. ‘Give ’em hell!’
Sweating with effort and dread, sweat both hot and cold running together, blinded until they wiped their faces clear with stained neckerchiefs, the artillerymen strained back on the well-oiled winches and reloaded the arrow-firers, so finely manufactured and gauged by the best engineers and technicians in the city’s Imperial workshops. They slotted in a new set of bolts, whose crossply steel heads no armour in the world could withstand, let alone mere timber walls, while Tatullus bellowed down to the citizen runners to bring more. The torsion ropes twisted and screamed, the nearest arrow-firer swivelled on its base towards the siege-tower, like some terrible steel animal with eyeless gaze, and then the bolts erupted from their ports again and drilled into the blank face of the tower. Inside there were more screams signifying carnage. The drop-bridge had paused in being lowered, barely open.
‘Fuck it,’ growled Tatullus. They had only killed the operators, when they wanted to get inside and slaughter the rest of them. He sensed a crazed stratagem and an invaluable morale booster rolled into one. Off to the south, another tower was disgorging its occupants onto the undermanned Military Gate IV, with only citizen militia to oppose them; likewise a further one on the Rhegium Gate. Below came another thump from the ram. There would be more work to do elsewhere soon enough, so they needed to get this finished.
‘Let’s get that drop-bridge down now so we can cut ’em up inside! Knuckles, and you Parsee fancyman, get with me!’
Then he was up on the battlements and jumping, flying out across the gap between wall and tower, slamming into the wooden sides, clasping the rim of the drop-bridge in his left hand, his right bringing his billhook back and ramming it repeatedly though the splintered front timbers and stabbing anyone who stood inside. Then he slashed overhead at the ropes of the drop-bridge with such determined swipes that the ropes bristled and frayed in moments. The bridge fell with a mighty crash, Tatullus still hanging beneath it, forty feet above the ground and with Hun archers below gazing up, already nocking arrows to the bow. With the agility of an adolescent acrobat, this centurion of twenty years’ service was back on the bridge like a cat, even as the the arrows thumped into the timbers beneath his feet, his billhook flailing in the open mouth of the tower-head, holding the drop-bridge alone for a moment. Then Arapovian and Malchus and Knuckles were with him again, the four survivors doing what they did best, fighting shoulder to shoulder against impossible odds.
The Hun ram drivers felt the gates suddenly heavier under the blows. The gang-master galloped around lashing at them, but it was no good. Inside the city, the quick-thinking Isaurians under Zeno had realised what was happening and baulked the gates with anything and everything they could find. Barrels of sand, rocks, massive timber props and, best of all, a wagon laden with stone. The ram could hammer away all it liked; it wasn’t going to come through the Gate of St Romanus any time soon. And as long as the Huns were still trying…
‘Back to the walls!’ growled Zeno, seizing one of the mattiobarbuli or weighted darts from behind his shield grip. The ram drivers would soon be targets themselves.
The tower-head, prised open, exposed and blazing, revealed a mass of startled warriors ready to leap onto the city walls. A breeze blew, a breath of God’s mercy, and the heat from the rooftop blaze gusted away from the defenders, dark smoke drifting away west over the mass of the Hun army out on the plains beyond. Somewhere, sitting his horse, Attila would see this: one of his attack towers already burning. The first setback. Soon there would come news to him of the ram’s difficult progress, and then news of the mining operations having been shut down by an unexpected and ferocious underground attack.
There was a momentary stillness while Tatullus and his three men stared at the twenty Huns packed inside the tower-head. Then they roared the old cry, ‘Six times brave, six times faithful!’ and charged in.
The Huns were packed too close within the wooden walls. They were expectant, sweating, their red and black war-paint already running in greasy streaks across their faces, trembling with battle madness, fire roaring above their heads, desperate to be out and free and fighting; ready to erupt across the drop-bridge and fall on those thinly defended battlements like wolves. But they would never get that far. They were trapped in their wooden cave, backing up against tightly nailed timbers which their own slaves had built not days before. The din of battle was all around them, but immediately before them in the late afternoon sunlight stood the terrible figure of an iron-hard Roman soldier, of the kind they said no longer existed.
Pale blue, emotionless eyes burning like hard gemstones, a tight-fitting steel helmet like a bare metal skull, a long noseguard running down between those deep-set, implacable eyes, the Roman swung a monstrous billhook left and right like a scythe through dry grass. The warriors with their short-swords couldn’t get close to him, and none of them had brought bow and arrow. They cursed and howled, caught between the blazing fire above and the murderous blades before, limbs lopped off, arteries severed, chests and bellies opened and spilling, the enclosed space an infernal abattoir, a place of fire and blood. Behind the billhook came a huge man wielding a club, and an eastern swordsman, and some civilians and a couple more hard-looking soldiers in black armour. The Huns stabbed and fought as desperately as trapped rats, and one even made a dash for the edge of the drop-bridge and hurled himself to a kind of safety forty feet below. But even as he leapt, the eastern swordsman slashed his weapon in a wide arc and cut him across the backbone, so that when he fell to earth below he was already dead. It was hopeless. Within a minute or two the Huns lay slaughtered in heaps within the tower-head. Two of the Palatine Guard lay with them.
Along the wall the gathered Huns faced a jaw-like attack at both ends from the long spears of the wolf-lords on their left and the Palatine Guard on their right. Their own numbers were vastly superior, but they realised in panic that this would not help. They were as good as trapped along the wall, and could offer no broader line of battle than the battlement walk allowed. They had packed themselves too tight. More and more warriors were still coming up the nets behind and squeezing through the embrasures to enter the fray, but there was barely space for them to drop down the other side, let alone swing a chekan or sword. Now suddenly there were disciplined forces hitting them either side, long spears lowered to gut height, forcing them together more closely still. Then the killing began, even as the Huns were still squabbling among themselves.
Inside the siege-tower, Arapovian thought for a moment that his centurion had gone insane for, having slain all living men before him, he was attacking the rear wooden walls of the tower, jabbing at them ferociously with his mighty billhook, splintering timbers and kicking them out into the air where they wheeled and fell free, until the protective tower-head was half destroyed.
‘Pile in, you idle fuckers!’ he yelled. ‘And you, blacksmith, get your hammer in there. I want this wall smashed down.’
Still not understanding they piled in as ordered, the blood-boltered centurion still muttering about morale, eyes gleaming through a mask of other men’s gore. ‘Good for our morale, bit of a downer for them.’ And as he kicked out the last of the rear timbers and exposed the tower-head to the setting sun, Arapovian understood. Tatullus began to hurl the slathered bodies of the Hun warriors out of the tower-head to the ground a long way below.
Knuckles booted the corpses out with his great feet, grumbling that they’d be under attack again at any moment. But it made a horrible and telling spectacle.
From the main Hun lines across the plains, from their restless horses, the waiting warriors saw comrade after slain comrade, the bodies of fathers and brothers and sons, mutilated and hacked to death, come wheeling back out
