The Scourge of God

that Church will come to an end.”

He held them in silence a moment, his gaze circling the room.

“All life is a fight between light and darkness, between right and wrong, between civilization and barbarism, between the order of law and the enslavement of tyranny. Now that fight has come to Aurelia.”

Men unconsciously straightened. Fingers flexed. Jaws tightened.

“You cannot fail because the Holy Church is behind you, and I say to you this morning that God is on the side of our legions and that Heaven awaits any man who falls.”

“Amen,” the Christians rumbled. They put their hands on the hilt of sword, mace, ax, and hammer.

Anianus smiled at this ferocity, his gaze circuiting the room and seeming to rest for a moment on each man in turn.

He spoke softly. “And you cannot fail, brave warriors, because a messenger came to us last night with great tidings.

Theodoric and the Visigoths have joined the alliance against Attila, and even as we speak they are riding with Aetius to the relief of Aurelia. They are just days, perhaps hours, away. That is why you hear the drums, because the Huns are panicking and wish to conquer us before reinforcement arrives. They will fight desperately to get inside these walls, but they will not succeed because you cannot allow them to succeed. You need only fight and win for a little while, and then deliverance will be at hand.”

Now the assembly in the church was stirring and whispering, realizing that in an instant the entire complexion of the war had changed. Without Theodoric any resistance was desperate. With him, there was a chance to defeat Attila’s entire horde.

“Can you fail?” Anianus asked in a whisper.

“No!” they roared.

And then the bells and trumpets began sounding the alarm as the barbarian horns rang out from beyond the walls.

The great attack was beginning.

The Huns had outridden their best mercenary engineers and couldn’t make a proper siege. What they did have were arrows, ladders, and an abundance of courage.

They attacked Aurelia from all sides but the river, a wild rush designed to stretch the defenders thin. As the scale of the attack became apparent, it was necessary for nearly every inhabitant of the city—from unarmored women to children as young as ten—to join the men on the ramparts and hurl down stones, tiles, and cobbles. The air was thick with flying shafts, each side shooting back some of the arrows shot at them; and there was an ominous humming in the air like the sound from a hornet’s nest. Scurrying priests and nuns gathered spent Hun shafts in baskets to carry back to their city’s own archers; and occasionally a plunging arrow would catch one of the clergy in the crown of the head, plunging with such force that its point would jut through the lower jaw and sew the mouth shut so tightly that the dying couldn’t scream. He fell, but another priest picked up his burden.

As the missiles flew, the barbarians surged, boling, across the ground outside the city, hundreds struck by the defenders’ salvos but thousands more bunching at the base of the walls. Pots of oil and boiling water, poured from the ramparts, cut swathes of fire and pain in the ranks. Plunging stones snapped limbs and shattered helmets. Yet all this seemed a dent. There were simply too many Huns. Scaling ladders soared skyward like an uncurling fist of claws. Hun archery began in earnest, each volley of arrows timed to follow the last so that it was impossible for the Alans to poke their heads above the protective stone crenellation without being killed. At the same time, attackers swarmed up the ramparts. So the Alans crouched and pitched rocks over the lip of the wall blindly, waiting for that cease in the hiss of arrows that would signal when the first Huns reached the top. Then a great shout went up, and they rose in their iron and leather to clash with the snarling attackers, wrestling on the lip of wall. Here a ladder was overthrown, there the Huns gained a toehold; and desperate battle raged back and forth on the parapet.

The ferocity of the fight made the combat in the lonely tower of Noricum seem leisurely in comparison. Here was battle of an entirely new scale—men swinging, chopping, and biting like animals because even a moment’s pause meant instant death. Some of those wrestling toppled off the wall together, throttling each other as they fell; and if a defender somehow survived such a plunge the Huns waiting below dismembered him and hoisted his limbs as bloody trophies.

I’d borrowed armor to join the battle, now that my message had given hope. I felt more practiced at this grim craft now, rising after the arrow volleys to slash with sword and club with shield, sinking out of sight when more arrows came, and then rising once again. A misstep in this rhythm and I was dead. There was no courage to it because there was no time to be afraid. To lose meant death, so I did what all of us did, what we had to do. We fought.

Soon the parapet was littered with the fallen, defender and attacker alike, some groaning and some already still, festooned with arrows. Many of the dead were women and children, yet new ones constantly clambered up the steps on the city side to drag them aside and bring fresh stones, arrows, or pots of hot oil and grease. At the base of the wall many of Attila’s men were thrashing on the ground and twisting in agony from cruel burns or trying to crawl away on broken legs. The luckiest rocks we dropped struck the ladders themselves, snapping enough in two to seriously limit the routes the attackers could take. Yet to aim a rock was to invite a dozen arrows, and many a broken ladder was purchased at the price of a defender’s life.

On the eastern side of the city where I was stationed and where the Hun concentration was greatest, the defenders had erected a Roman tolleno, a huge pivoting beam with a hook on its end that could be manipulated by a counterweight to swoop down outside the walls like a bird of prey. The hook whistled down, snared a Hun, and hoisted him, kicking, high into the air before the wetness of his entrails made him slip off. The machine did not kill that many, but the huge whir it made as it dived was cruelly effective in throwing the attackers into disorder.

Yet all this furious fighting was really a mask for the primary Hun assault, which was the advance of a wheeled battering ram to destroy Aurelia’s main gate. What the attackers had not gained by stealth they would break open by brute force.

The ram rumbled forward, surrounded by a swarm of upended shields like an undulating roof, and our arrows against it were feeble as rows of Hun archers suppressed our own.

The ram, we knew, could spell disaster. Shouts of warning attracted our bishop, and Anianus waved his cross like the standard of a general to draw more troops to this crisis point. Yet what could we do? And then Zerco appeared.

Where he’d been I had no idea, but just as he’d shown at the Roman tower in the Alps, he seemed to have a presence of mind in battle the rest of us lacked. Now he stayed below the wall’s lip, busily tying a huge grappling hook to a rope stout enough to tether a ship with. “What are you doing here, little friend?” I wheezed when the fighting momentarily slackened. “You’re likely to be stepped on.”

The dwarf smiled. “But not shot. Envy me, Jonas. I do not have to duck.”

“Don’t try to be a hero in a sword fight.”

“Hero! I scuttle between their legs, and they dance like chickens. Here, let the others hack at the Huns while you help me finish my toy. My brain is as big as anyone’s, but I’ll need a broad back like yours to make this work.”

“What is it?”

“A ram snagger. The tolleno gave me the idea.”

The battering ram traversed the last few yards, running over broken bodies; and then with an ominous boom it slammed into the oaken gate. The entire wall trembled. Our garrison let loose a small avalanche of rocks and they crashed on those pushing the log, momentarily stunning or scattering some of them; but then the wounded and injured were dragged aside, new hands took the handles of the wheeled device, and it struck again. Inside, yellow cracks appeared in the gate like the ruptures of an earthquake. We were running short of stones; and those defenders who rose to hurl what we had left were picked off by arrows.

“They’ll pull it back in a moment to get some momentum for the next attack,” Zerco said. “When that happens, be ready. Anianus! Get us some strong backs to help!”

The bishop quickly understood what the dwarf was trying to do. He shouted for men to stand in a line along the rope, his clear, earnest voice quickly assembling a company.

I, too, saw what the dwarf intended. “We’ll be skewered by arrows.”