Knuckles was back with bandaged head and rescued club within ten minutes, fighting alongside Tatullus close to the north side of Military Gate V. They fought in a relentless duet of club and billhook as of old, still fired by the memory of Viminacium and their fallen comrades. Knuckles grunted and roared and swore, raining down colourful curses.
‘You barbarous fuckin’ horse-fucker, eat that! Here, you, come and get a fuckin’ headache! I got one off one of your lot like you wouldn’t believe! You wriggling little fucker, keep still while I brain you! Now fuck off back over the wall. Gah!’ – lurching forward and caving in another skull.
Tatullus fought in silence, jaws grimly clenched, steel helmet lowered, forearms like oak and those deepset eyes even and unblinking as his billhook cut a murderous swathe through unarmoured men, a true veteran unperturbed by screams of the dying. When a stray arrow fired from an agile climber pierced the brass-studded leather guard protecting his left shoulder and stuck fast, he neither cried out nor even turned his head. Pausing only to break off the shaft and toss it clear over the wall, he pressed forward to slash and slash again, like some nightmarish iron automaton dreamed up by a Jewish cabbalist in the smoke-filled inventiveness of his hermit cell, created out of the fires of his furnace while chanting of Adonai and Jahweh and the Elohim and all the ten thousand names of God.
Suddenly they were gone.
The attack was over.
Only then were the defenders overcome by their unspeakable weariness. Men sank down behind the battlements, almost too exhausted to pull their helmets from their sweat-drenched heads. Aetius ordered food and water to the walls.
He saw Knuckles’ bandaged head. ‘You, Rhinelander. You might get a corona obsidionalis for breaking a siege, if we all come out of this alive.’
‘Thank you, sir, but I’d rather rather have a cup of wine right now, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘I thought you didn’t drink?’
Knuckles gawped at the master-general’s astonishing memory for detail. Then he said, ‘Well, sir, I admit that there was that unfortunate incident with the fishmonger’s daughter at Carnuntum, whose sordid details I’d rather not burden you with, sir, begging your pardon, as they might put you off your dinner. Suffice it to say that, although I did then take a pledge to stay off the booze for a good while thereafter, I…’ Knuckles tailed off.
The general was walking away, not having quite the leisure needed to hear Knuckles out when he was in full flow. But he called back over his shoulder to one of the runners, ‘Get that man a bucket of wine. A horse bucket,’ he added with a flash of a grin.
He resumed his station on the tower of Military Gate V, and exhaustion hit him like a wall. He could barely stand. But he could not sleep. There was too much to do. He ate only dry bread and drank water. Tatullus and Captain Andronicus of the Guard came to him. Now the fighting was finished and the rush of blood had subsided, they, too, looked beyond exhaustion, and the light was gone from their eyes. He knew how they felt. This did not feel like victory, and there was no cause for wild celebration. Not yet. This felt only like temporary survival. Out there on the plains, Attila still crouched like some beast of prey ready to spring, with his vast army diminished by all of one or two thousand men.
Now it was time for Aetius to hear their own losses.
Of the two companies of Imperial Guard, one hundred and sixty men in all, over sixty were dead and another forty or so wounded beyond fighting. That ratio alone spoke volumes; and that percentage. Well over half the Palatine Guard was destroyed, and every single one of them had shed blood this last day and night. For Attila, though, those piles of Hun dead at the foot of the walls were only a fraction of his forces. Of the forty-four wolf- lords, only three were slain, and three lay in the Emmanuel Hospital. Astonishing figures, and no reflection of the bravery with which they had fought, all day and all night, unrelenting. Even Andronicus was forced to admit that they had taken so few casualties because they were such skilled and ferocious fighters. Flaxen-haired giants, they fought like lions.
As for the eighty Isaurian auxiliaries, again, more than half were dead or else wounded beyond fighting. Their active numbers were down to thirty. Of the citizens who had given their lives for their beloved Holy City – ordinary men, fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, men whose only skill in life was to bake bread, or hammer horseshoes, or even trim beards – the number slain was beyond reckoning.
Down there below them, those slaughtered heaps of feathered and tattooed wild men, who had fought virtually naked, tooth and claw, howling in a language that none but Aetius himself understood – they too were fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. It was too terrible. It was nothing but loss and waste. This was the time, when the battle ebbed and stilled awhile, that grief could overwhelm even the strongest man. What had they fought each other for, these fathers and sons? What had it all been about?
Aetius, Tatullus and Andronicus stood silently side by side on the tower, watching unarmed Huns returning under the burning midday sun to retrieve their dead and take them back for decent mourning and burial. It was a foul task which would take hours. Aetius did not need to give the order not to fire on them. None of the defenders would be so cruel. He bowed his head. His heart was like a stone with sorrow.
Behind them, one of the guards suddenly muttered, ‘Oh my God, no.’
The three exhausted men turned round.
Turning round also to look back across the city they had fought so courageously to defend, their backs to the armies of Attila, all along the walls exhausted men were sinking down to their knees, dropping their weapons, calling on the name of Christ and weeping openly. For the Holy City was lost.
The air was still, distant smoke rising into the autumnal air, the sun bright on the city’s rain-washed golden domes, starlings still wheeling about the spires, the monks still chanting the Kyrie, sweetly oblivious. Away to the east, near the Imperial Palace itself, tall flames were licking up into the pale September sky like flames going up from a pyre.
22
‘Sir,’ cried a runner, appearing up the side steps, his hobnailed sandals ringing on the stone. ‘News from the city, sir.’
Aetius said, ‘We can see.’
The Huns were inside the city after all, and all was lost. They had made it, tunnelling in under the walls, or perhaps by treachery, an unremarked postern gate unlatched for them by some craven Byzantine Judas for thirty pieces of silver. Already the eastern end of the city was burning. Soon they would hear the distant cry and wail of the people. The soldiers and citizens on the walls could not speak, gazing out over the suffering city aghast. All they had fought for was finished. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken us? It is finished.
Beyond that, all of Asia was finished, too. There was nothing left to oppose the Huns’ murderous progress. Rome did indeed stand alone, her sister city destroyed, and her inevitable destiny, as Aetius could well judge now, inscribed in stone. They themselves, the last of the few, were effectively surrounded, attackers before and behind, and this battered wall a mere promontory in a sea of blood. The city they had fought so hard to defend was already taken. Words came back to him from the past: ‘You are fighting for a cause that is already lost.’
He, Tatullus and Andronicus gripped their sword-hilts tightly. Captain, centurion, master-general of East and West: all three would die like common bloody soldiers today, shoulder to shoulder, and proud of it.
Surely it was the Imperial Palace itself that was burning? Aetius’ eyes were bright with emotion and despair. The view was increasingly obscured by a thickening pall of funeral smoke, but somewhere in that palace was the woman he loved – had always loved. He saw the scene. Tattooed warriors howling down marble corridors, priceless statues thrown down and broken, mosaics smashed, cloth-of-gold tapestries cut to ribbons and burned, prayer books, gospels and missals spat on and abused, slaves hung from hooks, or bound to pillars and used for target practice, maidservants raped and murdered, debauched even where they lay groaning in their own blood. The emperor pitifully down on his knees, babbling and pleading. She, the young, brilliant, bright-eyed daughter of Leontes of Athens, so full of youthful innocence and hope when he first saw her, now ravished and slain.
