day in Attila’s reign of terror when he didn’t get exactly the result he wanted. Not a defeat, no, but he must have seen his men streaming back across the plain, with nothing to show for their pains. He will be back again, of course. But tonight, some of his men will have begun to doubt him. He can only regain their faith in him by a crushing triumph over us, so he will come back harder than ever.’ His voice was thick with emotion, looking out over the small campfires of the Visigoths, Isaurians, Palatine Guard and citizen bands. A brave but motley crew, and not one straight Roman legion with them. So it had come to this.
‘But each day that his forces do not prevail against us, the Huns’ confidence wanes and their strength ebbs. It is our one hope. We certainly cannot defeat them directly. We are too few.’
The council of war brooded in silence on his words, and then they departed to sleep.
In his tent, Attila ground his teeth and glowered down at his fists. The day had been accursed from the start.
He had always known that Constantinople would be no Viminacium, but he saw now that it was ten, a hundred times harder. They said this was the greatest fortified city in the world. Not even the cities of China had anything to compare with the walls of Constantinople. And now came the news that another of his beloved Chosen Men was fallen.
Old Chanat told him. ‘It was the Lord Juchi, Great Tanjou. He fell upon the battlements, run through by the sword of one of those Gothic princes fighting with them.’
‘I had him,’ hissed Attila, ‘that straw-haired German puppy, I had him before me in my very tent. At Azimuntium I could have destroyed him, destroyed them all. And when they came to our camp to parley, only to assassinate me like polecats in the night. I could have killed them.’
‘My lord is too merciful!’ said Little Bird’s sing-song voice. ‘His heart is as tender as a young girl’s. And oh, a young girl’s heart will be the death of him!’
‘Our brother Juchi,’ said Chanat, ‘took the prince’s arm off as he died, or as good as – sliced it through.’
‘Would it had been his neck.’ Attila leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his mighty hands. ‘One by one my Chosen Men fall from me.’ His voice was low and muffled.
Chanat hesitated a while, then departed so as not to witness this unseemly grief. Little Bird twirled his hair ribbons, like an oblivious toddler beside its weeping mother.
Attila remained motionless on his wooden throne. Only Noyan was left of the four powerful brothers, the sons of Akal. Juchi slain by a pale-haired Visigothic boy. Bela bludgeoned and drowned at Margus Bridge. Then there was eager young Yesukai, bright-eyed, loyal and unquestioning as only the young can be – he had been the first to die. How long ago it seemed. How far to the east, unimaginably far, many months’ ride east upon the steppes into the heart of Asia, and long, long years ago. There was the time he set off a covey of partidges, just outside the camp of the Kutrigur Huns, and nearly got them all killed. The fool. Attila smiled though his eyes were sad and swimming with memories. Yesukai died fighting those same Kutrigur Huns, died that the Kutrigur Huns and the People might come together in glorious conquest. Attila could picture him now as he lay dying, young Yesukai, an arrow through his arm and into his chest, Chanat cradling his head.
Let the vultures cry it among the Tien Shan, Let the winds tell it over the Plains of Plenty, Let the rains fall year long on the green grasslands in mourning for Yesukai!
And now let the vultures cry and the skies weep for Juchi, too, and for Bela. For Csaba also, perhaps, so grievously wounded below the walls of Viminacium in his battle-madness, and half mad from that day to this. But that accursed traitor and deserter Candac, let there be no weeping for him.
There were left only his ever-faithful Orestes, and old Chanat, and Geukchu, and lonesome Noyan. And Rome still so far away.
Aetius had enjoyed all of three hours’ sleep, on a rough straw pallet in the guard-room of Military Gate V, when he was awakened by wild shouts. Still exhausted, he felt he was still dreaming when he stepped out onto the dark battlements to see that another full attack was under way. Attila was using their own tiredness to destroy them. How could they fight another battle, by night, after a day such as they had just endured?
But fight they must.
It was like a dream for the exhausted defenders on the walls. As in a dream they saw the great siege- engines rumbling toward them through the night, and the flames of ten thousand torches, and in the torchlight came the flash of arrow and the glint of iron arrowheads in the midnight air, and the cry and fall of men to the ground below. There were distant juddering thumps of onager strikes against stonework, and the slow crack and susurrus of collapsing masonry. In reality, they could not win again. Not now. But perhaps in a dream…
The Huns were attacking by escalade again, too, against the Palatine Guard and whatever armed citizens were still stout-hearted enough to stay and fight, strung out along three miles of walls. Though the Huns came up in their hundreds, and even their thousands, the slash of soldierly swords and the cruder bludgeon of improvised citizen weapons made their progress over the walls slow and bloody indeed. On the ground below, the bodies of Huns slain in the cruel ascent of that implacable forty-foot cliff piled up like summer flies.
From away to the south came the sound of a more resonant, wooden thump, and the defenders knew another gate was being rammed again.
‘Isaurians!’ roared a deep voice. There was the steady trot of the mountain men, and Zeno once again led them into the breech.
Everywhere there were burning torches, and out on the plain the Huns had built huge beacon fires, for no military purpose, it seemed, but to illuminate for the dispirited defenders the vast numbers of the enemy. But Master-General Aetius was everywhere at once, striding, roaring, gesticulating, harshly joking, and seeming anything but dispirited.
Knuckles eyed the beacons balefully. ‘Very kind of them, I’m sure,’ he growled, then looked prayerfully heavenwards. ‘Come, friendly Gods, and piss their fires out.’
Nearby, the more orthodox Arapovian crossed himself and slid another arrow onto his bow.
The Huns were at every gate now, stacking up oil-soaked bundles of dry reeds and looted haybales. Soon those gates would be burned to wood-ash, and the warriors would come in at every entrance. But the citizen bands were teeming up to the walls in ever greater numbers as panic spread through the city. They poured water onto the brushfire stacks and hurled missiles onto Hunnish heads, a primitive but terrible rain. At gateway after gateway the besiegers were driven back, until finally the defenders at the Rhegium Gate, hammered into an impromptu fighting company by Malchus, leading from the front as always, were actually able to shove their own gates open and make a defensive sortie, driving the Huns away in disorder before their grimly marshalled lines, and dragging free the deadly oil-soaked stacks. They bundled them back over the middle wall onto the lower peribolos, and then flung a flaming brand onto the pyre, burning it uselessly far from their own gates. They ran home to mighty cheers from the walls, and the great wooden barriers slammed shut behind them. Not one citizen of that hardy crew was hurt.
On the walls above the Lycus the escalade was densest, and there the best of the fighters stood together through the night. Roaring defiance, Tatullus slashed his billhook across faces and throats as they appeared atop the nets, then jabbed downwards, splitting skulls, severing heads from shoulders. Arrows clattered around the defenders in the darkness but it was hard even for Hun archers to shoot the enemy and not their own, fighting in such close combat and at night. Time and again a Hun warrior screamed and fell back from a net or a ladder, a black-feathered arrow of his comrades in his back, until eventually one of the Hun generals gave the order to cease firing. The Gothic wolf-lords, meanwhile, continued to return fire into the densely packed besiegers as ruthlessly as ever.
Captain Malchus was soon back from the Rhegium Gate, anxious not to miss out on the fighting, his sword swirling and slashing, his eyes gleaming mad and white out of a mask of blood. He was even heard to yell, ‘This is the life!’ And there was Andronicus slashing and stabbing by his side – the two were like brothers – and repeating low and sonorously as if it were a dark refrain from the Byzantine liturgy. ‘You shall not take this city, you shall not have it, not one of you shall pass…’
The stars had vanished from the sky; only sparks illuminated the black-clouded vault of heaven. From the heart of the city, even now, there came the voices of priests and deacons chanting psalms, and it was to the sound of this sublime and serene plainsong that the men of war fought on.
Near the Blachernae Walls, the Isaurian auxiliaries identified more underground tunnelling taking place. Attila was trying everything, every trick simultaneously, believing that night and numbers were on his side, and the city must be won soon.
‘You haven’t time to countermine,’ said Aetius desperately. ‘Drop the column drums on ’em!’
