The great marble cylinders that he had had stowed along the battlements at regular intervals were rolled out, craned up onto the walls, and dropped onto places where the tunnellers’ activities had been felt. The huge weights thumped down into the ground below, sank half buried, and caved in the tunnels beneath. It was crude, temporary, but effective. A group of Palatine Guard rolled one of the precious column drums down onto an approaching ram and its team, resulting in comprehensive obliteration.
Everything needed to be done lightning fast, every new variety of assault needed to be met with an instant reaction, still more ruthless and violent than the assault itself. Thanks to Aetius’ foresight, his energy and commanding presence, again and again the Huns were met by just such savage resistance. It was last thing they had been led to expect, and already a few were voicing doubts.
Some went further. From beneath a monstrous pile of Kutrigur Huns near Military Gate IV, a survivor came crawling, slathered red in his own and his comrades’ blood. He knelt below the Walls of Constantinople, clutching his near-severed right arm to his chest, seeming oblivious to the arrows that hissed around him. Instead he raised his head and looked up to the starless sky, blinded with blood, and howled with such fury that his words carried far. ‘Astur curse you, Great Tanjou Attila! Astur damn you, Attila son of Mundzuk! Lord Widow-maker! World-ravisher! Blood-worm!’ An arrow struck him in the thigh, yet he barely stirred, continuing to gaze heavenwards open- mouthed, panting. Eventually, grim-faced old Chanat strode out from behind the middle wall and cut his head off. Yet his words had been heard, by attacker and defender alike.
Still the Huns continued to ascend the walls, fast as quicksilver, lassoing the battlements, swinging themselves up like acrobats in a circus.
‘Like Barbary apes up the cliffs of fuckin’ Gibraltar,’ as Knuckles put it, clubbing another one down.
But the pace of the battle was slowing. For each fresh wave of Hun warriors, the greatest obstacle before the walls was the slippery heaps of their own dead. This was not, as Aetius observed, good for their morale. Another ram was smashed, the siege-engines were either burned or stuck fast amid jagged hillocks of rubble and broken walls, and the onagers, too, had fallen into dismayed silence. Aetius leant on the battlements and checked along the ranks. His men stood firm. No arrows came in.
‘We’ve broken them,’ muttered Tatullus. Centurion and general exchanged glances, both thinking the same: for now; but they will come again. And again. And again.
With their numbers thinning, and the coherence of their command structure going, the Huns resorted to individual heroics, which only caused them greater casualties. Vainglorious adolescents came galloping wildly across the mess of rubble, breaking their horses’ legs beneath them, leaping free, yowling and flailing their whips. Most of the nets had been cut free and burned, so these last-ditch attackers tried to cast their lassos high enough to noose the battlements and swing themselves up. One of them dangled half way up the wall, a dagger between his teeth.
Aetius rapped out an order to the nearby artillery unit. They swivelled their arrow-firer at an enfilading angle and punched two heavy bolts into the dangling warrior. One of the bolts cut him through the spine, and he hung there noosed by his own lasso, head back, mouth open, sightless.
Aetius went over and cut him down himself. The youth, perhaps fifteen or sixteen summers old, slithered back and lay splayed almost shapeless on the stones below, no longer in the shape of man or youth or any thing. Aetius turned away. How foul was war.
He felt something on his bare arm.
Tatullus said, ‘It’s rain.’
Aetius turned his face up to the cleansing waters of heaven and prayed with closed eyes. The fires of the Huns began to sizzle softly, and then the rain grew heavier and they smoked and began to die, and darkness fell over the crowded plain.
He went to inspect the walls, overseeing hurried rebuilding and blockading here and there.
Gamaliel came to find him.
‘The boy?’
Gamaliel nodded and smiled, drawing his long wet locks back from his cheeks. ‘Both he and his right arm will survive.’
Aetius exhaled, as if he had been holding his breath all this time.
‘He will have a fine old scar to prove his manhood, though.’
In his tiredness Aetius forgot formality and grasped the old vagabond’s scrawny hand and shook it. ‘Thank God, thank God,’ he muttered. Gamaliel laid his other hand over Aetius’, looked into his eyes, and saw the passion burning beneath the iron control, and the gentleness beneath the soldierly steel. They parted again. There was work to do.
‘By the way,’ Gamaliel called after him, ‘this rain.’ Aetius turned. ‘It will do the Huns in their camp no good. Standing puddles, mosquitoes, even this late in the year…’
Aetius frowned. ‘Mosquitoes? Annoying little buggers, sure, but I don’t think they’ll bother the Huns too much.’
‘Well,’ said Gamaliel, ‘I do have a theory… In any case, rain and foul air and camp fever go together.’
‘Damn right. By my reckoning, our besiegers are going to need around nine thousand gallons of drinking water and thirty tons of fodder every day, and their people and livestock between them will produce about a hundred tons of shit a week. You can work it out. Such unsavoury and unheroic facts can win whole wars. They’re going to poison themselves out there. Meanwhile, I want this city kept as clean as marble. In fact,’ he added, ‘when you’re done in the hospital, you can check the streets and make sure all’s well. Organise the civilians; speak to that Portumnus. Good clean water, no refugees sleeping rough, sewers clear, all bodies burned. Any incidence of plague or dysentery, isolate the victims immediately and report back to me. Yes?’
Gamaliel was already gone.
Not long before dawn the Huns came again in another wave. They didn’t trouble with unwieldy siege-engines this time, only a vast, two-mile long escalade with nets and light cane ladders, hoping to achieve victory against the exhausted defenders through lightning speed and sheer bravado. But the Palatine Guard and the auxiliaries were as indefatigable as ever, the Gothic wolf-lords seemed to be men of iron, and the civilian bands would not even forsake the walls to allow fresh reinforcements to take their place. Already battle-bloodied, though trembling with fatigue and showing many a wound, their confidence was higher than before, their self-belief a powerful weapon in itself. When the sun rose, they had saluted it in greeting, as a brother. Heaven and earth were both with them.
The Huns surged up the walls and met a solid blockade of men and blades. Here and there they did break through, but could still not build on it and capture a single tower. In the thickest of the fighting Knuckles found himself surrounded, his club knocked from his hand, and a lean, wiry Hun pulling back his spear to drive it into him. Then the Hun reeled and arched, his back sliced open by Arapovian behind. In the space of three blows, the silent, implacable Armenian had kicked the slain Hun off the parapet, knocking one of his fellow Huns askew as he fell. Arapovian drove his sword into him as he stumbled, a light but effective stab, so as to draw the blade free again in time to parry a mighty swashing blow from a third attacker, an ugly painted Kutrigur, his teeth blood-red and filed to carnivorous points. Arapovian spun out of reach of his heavy blade, then ducked back and rose up at his side to behead him where he stood. The rest of the Hun bridgehead was taken apart from behind by six Imperial Guards working in close order, spears held low, and their bodies tossed back over the wall.
Knuckles was down on all fours, shaking his head like a wet dog. He clambered to his feet a little blearily. One side of his face was caked with blood, his thatched hair matted and shiny.
‘You need attention,’ said Arapovian, retrieving the Kutrigur Hun’s head from where it lay at his feet, staring up at him with a perplexed expression, and tossing it over the wall.
‘Not before I’ve thanked you profusely for so heroically coming to my rescue, my lissom Parsee playmate,’ rumbled Knuckles, touching a great paw to the side of his dented skull and staring down at his wet, red fingertips. ‘I do ’ope you think it’s worth it, in the long run. You must have trained as a dancer in the theatre, the way you skipped around that lot.’
Arapovian looked haughty.
‘Very noble of you anyway, I’m sure. Thought I was a goner there. And I’ve lost me club.’
‘You’ll find it down below,’ said the Armenian. ‘On your way to the hospital.’
‘All right, all right, I’m going to get myself stitched. By the way,’ he added as a parting shot, ‘there’s some more of ’em coming up behind you. Best turn round.’
And the stained eastern sword-blade flashed in the air once more.
