of the attack tower, a grandstand view of savagery fully visible to all. Corpses flung out and falling, spraying gore from cut and missing limbs, crashing onto the besiegers below and pulped upon the hard ground.
Aladar rose up in his saddle on his fists and roared out at such theatrical cruelty. ‘Vengeance will rain down on them like blood!’
Attila said nothing but the set of his face was grim.
‘Let them come and take their comrades home,’ growled Tatullus, throwing out the last of the slain. ‘Any come near, we destroy them.’
It was foul and unforgiving, but it was the first hint that day that not everything might go the way of the heathen.
The other two attack towers further down the walls had been smashed and burned before they could drop their bridges. At the same time, the packed Huns who had gained the walls by escalade had been rolled up from either end in the furious two-sided onslaught, and their bodies tossed back over the walls. The net ropes were cut and dropped down after them, and the citizen militia thought to pour boiling oil down on them and then throw flaming brands after, so that the nets couldn’t be used again without long and tricky repairs.
At last the walls were cleared. Hundreds of Huns had died that day, as many from falling as from fighting. Not one of them made it past the Inner Walls. Their mining operations had been ruthlessly sabotaged, and none of the attack towers had made it. Aetius collapsed at last in the shadow of the battlements, pulled his helmet off and swiped the sweat from his face. His arm was almost too tired to lift. Spread out before him was the city they had fought so desperately to defend, the sinking sun gleaming on its myriad golden cupolas and spires. The Holy City of Byzantium. He smiled.
‘My brother,’ said Torismond nearby, gasping. He pulled at Aetius’ arm. Aetius wrenched it free again with weary irritability. ‘My brother,’ cried the prince more desperately, nearly sobbing. Suddenly Aetius was alert again, dragging himself to his feet. The princes had fought as fiercely as any today, and their wolf-lords had been crucial.
‘Where is he?’
Torismond sobbed that he could not move. His arm…
‘Come on,’ said Aetius. ‘We’ll get him to the Emmanuel Hospital.’
Theodoric’s wound was ghastly. Without analysing why, Aetius demanded the old trickster medic, Gamaliel. The hospital was not even full, the defenders’ casualties had been so few. The old man came hurrying, shambolic grey gown gathered up round skinny white ankles. Aetius and Torismond started talking at once, but he ordered them to be silent.
The wounded boy lay on his back, his face white as chalk, his forehead beaded with sweat, drifting in and out of the faintest consciousness. Gamaliel gently unwrapped the filthy rags used as emergency bandaging, saying nothing.
‘He killed six or seven at least,’ said Torismond. ‘One burly fellow must have been twice as broad in the shoulder as my brother. Theo drove his sword right through him. But as the fellow died, he brought his sword down on Theo’s arm and…’
He broke off and buried his face in the crook of his arm. Aetius laid his hand on the boy’s trembling shoulder.
Gamaliel said, ‘In amputation for gangrene, the crucial thing of course is to remove more bone and leave more soft tissue for better healing.’
Torismond looked up, eyes bright with tears.
‘However,’ said Gamaliel, ‘the boy is young, and God is merciful. It may not come to amputation, we cannot be sure. As the First Hippocratic Aphorism states, “Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience fallacious, and judgement difficult.”’ He smiled gently at the two exhausted soldiers and added softly, ‘I have always thought it a good guide to life in general. However,’ and his voice grew brisk again, ‘before resorting to the crude science of amputation, we shall trust to vascular ligature – unknown either to Hippocrates or that fool Galen, but widely practised among the physicians of India – as well as the liberal application of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine, and those two great healers time and hope.’
He said to Torismond, ‘You must sleep, boy. You can sleep here. When you wake again, talk to your brother. Even if he is unconscious, talk to him. Do you play a musical instrument?’
Torismond looked baffled. ‘A lute. Badly.’
Gamaliel turned to Aetius. ‘Get the lad a lute.’ And to Torismond he said, ‘Play the lute to him. Even badly.’
There was one final chapter to this gruelling day. Tatullus had roped up the half-destroyed siege-tower with a couple of huge iron hooks, and with ropes long enough to reach the ground. A team of oxen waited in the cool of the evening shadows, nodding their heads. There was the sound of a whiplash, and the oxen were driven forward. The two mighty ropes stretched taut from the tower. The oxen bellowed under the lash, their hooves scrabbled. Dozens of citizens seized the quivering ropes as well, hauling as in a neighbourhood tug-of-war. The huge siege- tower creaked, tilted fractionally. Below it, still ramming under orders but no longer with any hope, the Huns glanced up and saw what was coming. The tower tilted further – a little further – and then the meridian was past and gravity did the rest.
Like a monstrous tree in a forest, felled by giants, the unmanned tower fell sideways with dreamlike slowness and crashed down onto the ram tortoise, smashing both itself and the tortoise to matchwood in twin destruction. The ram team had pulled away in time and not one was injured, but for their fighting spirit it was the last straw. They retreated and ran, along with the surviving warriors around them, back over the smashed middle and lower wall, crowding together to cross the pontoons. In their desperation some even flung themselves into the water.
In final farewell, the wolf-lords knelt calmly at the battlements, unslung their bows and took out more of the fleeing enemy, one by one, silently and without mercy. No volleys, but a lethal, individual killing. For the besiegers, now in full flight across the plain, it was the first defeat they had ever tasted. When they reached their own lines, they heard that the Lord Attila had retired to his tent.
21
Aetius was too tired to eat, but he drank water from a cup handed to him by a woman in the street. Without his helmet on, and caked with sweat and dust as he was, she didn’t recognise him and called him ‘dearie’. He drank, gave the cup back to her and thanked her politely.
Before a few hours of uneasy sleep, he talked with Tatullus, Malchus and Andronicus, with Prince Torismond, who looked grave and sad, suddenly old for his years; and also with Zeno of the Isaurians, and one Portumnus, a plump burgher of fifty years of age who seemed to have appointed himself leader of the citizen militia. He would have to do, even though, as Aetius reflected, those who appoint themselves leaders are rarely the best at it.
‘It’s been a good day,’ declared Malchus, wiping his encrusted sword and grinning. ‘They sustained a lot of losses. And not a few, I don’t mind saying’ – he held his sword upright and inspected its freshly shining blade – ‘by my own heroic hand.’
Aetius wasn’t impressed. ‘They can take a lot of losses,’ he growled. ‘There are a hundred thousand of them out there. Today we killed, what, two or three hundred at most? We lost maybe a dozen men. That sounds fine, but they could fight for a year like they fought today, and still not worry about losses. Could we? They still teach you maths in the cavalry, Captain Malchus?’
Malchus refused to look chastened, but he had no reply.
‘Plus, two of our artillery machines are buggered, and our walls have taken a bad pounding, and we have neither the men nor the energy to rebuild any more.’
‘The citizen bands fought like lions, though,’ said Portumnus.
Aetius nodded, and even Andronicus grunted.
‘But if we win this one – if we survive at all – we’ll win up here.’ Aetius tapped his head. ‘Today was the first
