‘Speak!’ Attila roared after them. ‘Damn you, brown-eyed poet!’
All along the Hun lines, his warriors levelled arrows at the backs of the departing riders, but Attila swept down an angry arm, and their bows were lowered.
Ahead of them, the distant Roman lines began to shimmer in the rising summer heat. Attila’s yellow, wolfish eyes seemed to shimmer, too, those ancient, glittering eyes which had seen all and known all and found no rest or contentment in all the world. Those eyes shimmered as if even he were deeply moved. The gallant Celtic war-band would soon meet its death here on these lonely Gallic plains, loyal unto death to an empire whose days were done, trampled beneath the hooves of two hundred thousand of his warriors. Had not Astur willed it long ago? ‘ Yet hard is the Gods’ will, My sorrows but increase, And I must weep, beloved, That wars will never cease’: an ancient song that someone he once knew used to sing to himself. And then it came to him, who it was who used to sing that ancient song to himself, softly, by firelight, in Italy long ago.
Then let it begin.
Or let it all fall.
Twenty or thirty yards off, Lucius reined in, turned sideways in his saddle, and spoke to Attila one last time.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘your baggage wagons are burning. ’
Attila glanced back, and instantly began lashing his horse into motion, sorrow transformed into howling rage. From a mile or two behind the Hunnish horde, thick black smoke was roiling up high into the morning air.
9
Aetius had used his Batavian special forces, his superventores, exactly as they were supposed to be used, skilfully and in secrecy.
The single century of lightly armoured men had skirted the hill as soon as its possession was consolidated by the Palatine Guard, well-dug in around the summit. They had crawled along a drainage ditch, well wide of the Hun lines, running down to the river that formed Attila’s supposedly safe right flank. Safe enough from major attack or cavalry, true. But the Huns wrongly supposed their own fear of deep, strong rivers to be universal, and their focus was elsewhere.
The Batavians came across the river as swiftly as crocodiles across the serpent Nile, breathing through hollow reeds, swimming strongly. They slithered up through the sedge of the far bank, dripping like watery ghouls, duckweed stuck to their lightweight leather cuirasses. Their backpacks dripped, too, but the contents were still as dry as desert sand, triple-wrapped in oilcoth. They crept along the riverbank until they reached the baggage wagons.
The great high-wheeled Hunnish wagons were entirely unprotected by warriors, although crowded on top of them were old men, women and children, gazing southwards, munching strips of smoked meat, eagerly waiting for the battle to begin. On the nearest wagon, the superventores noted, chuckling to themselves, one old woman was even making the best use of this tedious time before the fight by doing sewing repairs to a leather jerkin.
Shock and terror would clear them off quickly enough. And then speed of retreat would be everything.
The eighty men came screaming and yelling up through the reedbeds, muddy and plastered with weed, swords whirling. The women took one horrified look at these river-demons, snatched their infants down from the wagons and fled. The superventores were at the wagons in an instant, kneeling down behind the solid wooden wheels emptying their backpacks, plastering the dry old wooden wheels with a special mix of naptha, sulphur and highly refined oil on wads of fresh lambs’ wool, sticky and murderously flammable. Right across the rear of the Hun lines the wagons stretched away, piled high with the loot of half the civilised world. There might have been a hundred, no, three or four hundred – they couldn’t possibly damage them all. But by the time word got to the nearest Hun warriors, sitting their horses in the rear battle-lines, the Batavians had fixed up over thirty wagons.
A couple of hundred horse-warriors came galloping furiously back across the grass towards them.
The commander of the superventores knelt, flipped open his tinderbox and flicked the wheel.
‘Sir, we’re in range!’
The first arrows hit the ground nearby. A junior lieutenant held out a wooden staff topped with a blob of pitch and the commander lit it.
‘Now run!’ he roared. ‘The rest of you – to the river!’
The main body sprinted for the water, crouching low, while the lieutenant dashed along the line of wagons with the flaming torch extended. Every time it brushed against a treated wheel, the wagon exploded into flames like a bone-dry hayrick.
The Huns were bewildered and indecisive, some making towards the burning wagons intending to extinguish them and save the loot, though God only knew how. That moment of confusion was the lieutenant’s chance of escape, and he took it, sprinting towards the river, dashing beneath a low-hanging alder for cover even as arrows sliced through the leaves around him, and diving headlong into the river. Horsemen arrived on the bank above, howling with fury, their horses champing, tossing their brutish heads, fighting against entering such a fast-moving current when unable to see the bottom. The riders drew back their bows and arrows slapped into the water but instantly lost trajectory, flattening out across the surface like skimmed pebbles or spinning round to face the powerful current. In any case, the Batavians were already down in the murky depths, lungs forcibly emptied, navigating only by the feel of the current dragging them back to safety, swimming like tritons with grins across their water-stretched faces.
As Aetius well knew, such flamboyant tactics had absolutely no effect on the material progress of the battle, but they could do wonders for morale. His lines cheered wildly as the black smoke billowed up into the air behind the Hun army, and they saw the Hunnish leader himself, fearsome Attila, galloping furiously back to view the damage.
‘An ostentatious little jape,’ muttered Aetus, ‘but a useful one.’
Tatullus grinned. ‘What’s he wasting his time for? He needs to get on with it.’ He jerked his head right.
Aetius nodded. The sun was indeed, as usual, coming round. With every delay, the Huns would have to fight facing more and more directly into it.
The commander of the superventores reappeared, still at the run. Well, special forces were expected to be able to cover forty miles in a day with sixty-pound packs on their backs. This was a nice day out for them.
He saluted. ‘Job done, sir.’
‘Casualties?’
‘None, sir, apart from one novice who slipped coming out of the river and bloodied his pug. Getting bandaged up right now.’
Aetius grinned. ‘Good man. To the rearguard now. There’ll be more work for you later.’
‘Sir.’
It was late morning, and still nothing. Attila’s delaying tactics were wearisome to the Romans, but they would test his own, undisciplined warriors’ patience to the limit. Sooner or later they were going to have to charge. That mile between them would tire them, especially with their horses, poorly fed for these past weeks and months. And then they would hit the earthed-up pikes of the Alans and, behind them, the Roman legionaries. That was what Aetius wanted. As for the coming arrow-storm, he had two ways to deal with that.
Meanwhile the two armies stood motionless, and the sun kept coming round. Tube-like dracones, wind-socks, droned in the wind. The Hun horses stamped restively. Occasionally there were sorties from their lines, jeered at and sharply rebuffed, the horsemen retreating in disorder. Then as the air warmed a light southerly breeze blew up.
Aetius looked sharply at his centurion.
Tatullus produced a small white feather, raised it above his head and let go. It twirled briefly, then drifted steadily towards the Hun lines.
The centurion looked around, scanned the horizon. ‘A calm summer’s day. June. Gaul. A few clouds low in the
