not even now in early summer. The winter had been bitter, and spring had been wet and overcast. At the head of the vast horde, Attila rode out in front, his head bowed, hatless, his coarse grey locks sodden and dripping, his face deep-graven and grim, speaking to no one. Orestes and Chanat rode a little way behind him.
As for the nomad horsmen themselves, the Kutrigur Huns under Sky-in-Tatters, the Hepthalite Huns under Kouridach, the Oronchans under Bayan-Kasgar, and many others, their leaders were no longer admitted to the Great Tanjou’s councils. Somewhere along the way, the Tanjou had become sole commander, and they his wordless slaves. Already they had begun to fade away from his rag-tag army. Riding cold and hungry through these rainy western lands, they had begun to feel homesick.
Here, in these prosperous, well-farmed provinces of the Western Empire, there were roads and towns and farmsteads everywhere, and no room to gallop or breathe. The fields were hedged around and enclosed, the forests fenced and owned, and an alien, man-made world it seemed to them. How their hearts ached for the wind on the treeless steppes and the white glittering mountains beyond. All the vastness of Asia was theirs for the taking. What were they doing here?
Too far we have come from our homeland, they said. In the Pastures of Heaven there is such peace and space that it is sacrilege even to shout in those high meadows, so near the home of the gods. Here men say that the world is fallen and darkened with sin and wickedness, but they have not seen the Pastures of Heaven. The world has not fallen there, on the very threshhold of heaven. There peace comes on every soft breath of the wind, whispering over the emerald grass, and how fat the horses are there. Their sad horses now could do with the green grass of those Pastures, but they were months and years away. So distant, it was pain for the heart to think of them, and the snowdrops and alpine asters and edelweiss in the passes of the mountains surrounding the plains in a giant ring, the nodding oxeye daisies and cyclamen and wild garlic and the cranes crossing the sky beneath the eye of heaven.
But still they must fight, it seemed. The Great Tanjou had decreed it. And had heaven itself not appointed him?
Aetius gave orders for his army to rest, feed the horses, do their hooves, give ’em a good brush-down, all that horse stuff. Also to feed themselves, get some sleep. No booze. ‘We’ll be on the road and fighting again tonight.’
His men groaned. He grinned. He himself appeared to need no sleep.
Towards dusk, fresh war-parties came in to join them. Not large, but good for morale. Stocky Bretons from Armorica, Burgundians from the north, noblemen from Aquitania, moustachioed Frankish fighters with their lethal franciscae or thowing-axes.
‘Rome’s a bit like your health,’ Aetius commented dryly at this sudden show of alliance.
‘Sir?’ said Tatullus.
‘You never appreciate it till it’s on the wane.’
Tatullus laughed. True enough. Suddenly every citizen of the empire, from the most indolent patrician to the near-barbarian on the fringes, with the Hun war-machine on their doorstep, seemed to have become intensely appreciative of the benefits of Roman civilisation.
They rode out at dusk under a rising summer moon and the golden globe of the planet Jupiter. The great column, lit by torchlight, was a magnificent sight, like something out of the ancient world.
By the strong moonlight they could see the devastation the Huns had wreaked: vineyards and orchards ravaged and burned; entire villages razed to mere circles of charcoal and ash; slaughtered cattle all along the road, like boulders haloed by moonlight in the darkness. If the Huns could not take them, no one else would have them, either. Already there was a bitterness in the Huns’ savageries which looked like the last retribution of a defeated army.
Aetius and his men might even have taken comfort from that thought had the atrocities they encountered not been so foul, nor the glimpses of unhoused and starving people been so frequent. Filthy, snot-nosed children scurried away from them like frightened animals, to find what shelter they could in the remnants and ruins. They were the lucky ones – luckier, at any rate, than those who had been roped and torn apart by horses, or crushed under wagon wheels, their split limbs left at the roadside for the dogs.
This was the nightmare landscape that the Huns had carved out of the most civilised and affluent of all the Western provinces. A land of vineyards and orchards, fine towns and elegant villas, rendered down to a primeval country of well-fed wolf-packs howling under the moon, dark smoke drifting across the extinguished land. Some ancient sorceress with sloughed snakeskins knotted into her hair, stirring a foul-smelling pot by a dung fire. Naked horsemen taking scalps with hand axes. History itself erased.
Lastly they came to a village where a group of naked children hung from the lower branch of a chestnut tree. They had been tied back to back and a heavy rope wound round their necks, bunched together like dried flowers. The rope had been lashed over the lower branch and they had been hauled up to hang there, turning slightly in the night breeze on that creaking rope, ghostly in the dappled moonlight through the lanceolate leaves above their heads, their naked bodies white and innocent still, but above the rope their heads black like old and withered seedheads on young flowers.
Men of war as hardened as Tatullus and Germanus and Knuckles were frozen in horror for a moment, staring up in disbelief.
‘Cut them down!’ said Aetius savagely.
To think that only lately he had entertained thoughts of noble, copper-skinned warriors on the free and windy steppes. He yanked his horse away. He was a dreaming fool. Nobility and evil mixed in the Huns, as in all men.
The battle-hardened legionaries lowered the bodies down. There was no time to bury them decently: atrocity would follow atrocity along the road ahead. But of course they did bury them decently, and set a wooden cross in the fresh-dug earth for each and every one of them. Afterwards, Knuckles was seen taking his club to the trunk of the tree itself in maddened but silent anguish.
Aetius called him over. The hulking Rhinelander stopped and wiped his brow and then came slowly over.
‘We were never going to give Attila quarter,’ said Aetius. ‘Now you see why.’ He looked away down the dark road. ‘Back on your horse now, man. It’s Huns we’re here to fight, not trees.’ Then he addressed all the men within range. ‘We catch up with them and harry them tonight. They are going slowly because their horses are starving, and because they have… amusements to practise along the way, which slow them still further. They’re defeated and out of fuel. Now it’s their turn to suffer.’
There was a terrible shout, and the column moved out at a grimly determined pace. The miles raced by beneath their horses’ hooves.
At the front of his army, Attila heard the distant hubbub. It was the Romans falling on his Gepid rearguard and taking it apart piecemeal. Others of his followers were harried bloodily away into the night, losing formation and quickly being destroyed. The vast horde was being eaten up from behind, driven east in bewilderment and terror along the dark roads.
Attila rode on regardless.
Only towards dawn did the Romans fall back and give them respite.
The day was unseasonally cold for summer, and there was a thick mist, an unseen sky. It was a country of tall poplars and slow-moving streams, tributaries of the River Matrona. The Catalaunian plain: a flat, sodden land which filled the steppe horsemen with heaviness and dread.
For three nights Aetius’ forces harried the invaders, and then let them camp, exhausted and deeply demoralised. There was a river running roughly east-west, wych elm and alder, heavy ploughland, stretches of forest, and a thick mist again. No moon.
The Romans camped, too. They would do battle in the morning.
In the night there was the sound of approaching horsemen, but it was only the returning Moorish cavalry. Mission to destroy the granaries fully accomplished.
At last the two great opposing armies faced each other in the Catalaunian Fields. Dawn broke slowly on that mist-shrouded day, and as soon it broke a shape was seen looming up on the Huns’ right, the Romans’ left. In the moonless, misty night, neither army had seen it as they drew up their lines and committed themselves to battle. Yet this could change everything. It was a hill. A solitary round-headed hill, maybe a couple of hundred feet above the plain, lightly scattered with beeches. It commanded the entire field. And it was nearer to the Hun lines than the Roman.
No sooner did the dark green bulk of the hill loom out of the thinning mist, the sun itself not visible yet, than
