thunder, a great violent shock of wall hitting wall; and here the discipline of Aetius’s Roman line began to tell. They bent and rippled but did not break, even as the Ostrogoths recoiled slightly.
I crawled out from under my protective shell and hoisted the shield to my arm. With the melee joined, the storm of missiles had slackened. Three arrows were stuck in my oval disk of protection, reminding me of my earlier lone combat with Skilla. I was still somewhat stunned by the squall of arrows, and had to remember what my task was. Ilana! Life!
The thought of her jolted into my consciousness again, and it energized me for the work at hand. For the moment I was an infantryman and as desperately needed as every other Roman that day. The two sides were locked together in front of me in a vast scrum, and when enough men went down to provide a gap I waded atop groaning bodies and added my own sword and muscle to the clamor. Ahead I could see the Ostrogoth Valamer and his brothers Theodimer and Val-odimer urging their troops on, and our crazed Anthus trying to hack his way toward his rival Cloda. Romans and Huns fought for empire. The allies on both sides fought ancient feuds.
I wish I could tell you of swift parry and clever thrust, but I remember nothing like that, or much of any skill at all. Just a sea of Gothic heads, some with helmets and some without, pushing up the ridge and we Romans grunting and pushing and stabbing and slashing down it. Each side shoved against the other. By the grace of a few paces, we had gained the tiny advantage in altitude that made all the difference. I held up my shield while things hammered on it, like intruders trying to break down a door, and cut blindly with my own blade, usually hitting something hard that reverberated in my hand . . . but sometimes striking softer things that howled. Men clutched at my ankles, and I swore and stabbed at them. A man beside me lurched backward, his face cleaved with an ax: I remember that because the gore sprayed like a fan, spattering half a dozen of us all around. I don’t recall much else. Entire ranks seemed to go down on both sides, as if swallowed by the earth, only to have replacements close in right behind. I tripped on something, a body or a spear, and fell with an awkward gasp, exhausted already. I was down on all fours, my back exposed, and I tensed myself for a final thrust. But, no, the line moved past me, fresh Romans taking my place. Goths were toppling, retreating, as Aetius’s legions pressed. I was to learn later that this first fight was vital, giving our armies an advantage we never surrendered in the long nightmare to come, but the significance of this early action wasn’t apparent to me then.
I stood upright in time to see the mounted Skilla being carried backward by the sea of retreating Goths and Gepids, shouting at them in Hunnish to stand firm. They cried oaths in their own language, trying to reorganize after the death of so many of their chiefs. I doubt he saw me; I was too low.
Horns blew and Aetius halted his advance just downslope of the crest of the hard-won hill. Thousands of bodies marked its summit, some utterly still and others twitching and moaning as blood gushed out, their jutting and splintered bones jostled by reinforcements as our men dressed their ranks. The Romans killed those Ostrogoths they found who were still alive, even as the Ostrogoths took the few Romans they’d captured and gutted or dismembered them before our eyes. Here, where height gave the throw of Roman javelins a few yards’ advantage, we caught our breath.
And now the battle began in earnest.
If the ground had trembled before, now it shook—and it shook with violence reminiscent of the earthquakes that had toppled the walls of Constantinople a few years before. Survivors told us later that Attila had disdained lending his cavalry to help the Ostrogoths struggle for the ridge, because he thought the hillock insignificant in the context of great cavalry charges. He shouted to his warlords that the unmounted Romans were slugs who could be covered by dust and ignored, while the real battle would be decided by horsemen.
So with a shout he led the cream of his army at Sangibanus and his Alans in the center, vowing to ride down the king who had somehow failed to surrender Aurelia. If Attila cleaved through there, the battle would be over. The Huns rode with a high, wavering yip, firing sheets of arrows. I remembered Zerco’s early lesson in war by the Tisza River and wondered just when, if ever, these horsemen would run out of shafts—and whether it would be too late when they did. I also wondered if Aetius had been wise to bet his center on Sangibanus, because our general seemed in no hurry to envelop the Huns with his two wings. Until he did, the battle would ride on the Alans, Liticians, and Olibriones. We held our breaths as the Huns charged.
Our armies tried to slow them with missiles, our arrows fewer but our heavier artillery cutting wicked furrows in the oncoming assault with stones, ballista bolts, and flaming kettles of fire that tripped whole swathes of Huns. At the same time, the Alans were charging forward on their horses, many with their own deadly scores to settle with these eastern barbarians who had besieged their city and killed members of their families. The combined ranks were riddled with arrows as the space between the two cavalries closed, men sinking. With a few more volleys, perhaps the Huns could have cleared a gap for themselves and sliced our army in two. But even the steppe warriors could not fire fast enough; and their numbers were so huge that instead of simply being overwhelming, they were getting in the way of one another.
None of the nations assembled had experience controlling such an assembly. So at last the centers met, and that collision dwarfed what I had seen on the ridge, a slamming together not just of men but heavy horses. I hadn’t seen the western ocean yet, but I sensed this is what it must sound like, the boom of breakers against rock, as tens of thousands of horsemen plowed into one another. Horses neighed and screamed, lances and shields splintered, and some collisions were so violent that spear tips, helmets, armor fragments, or even pieces of bodies erupted into the air. The bits cart-wheeled lazily, seeming suspended for hours, before raining down.
All was then swirling confusion, but the Huns were not equipped for the kind of brutal close-quarters hacking that the bigger and more heavily armored Alans had adopted in the West. Hun ponies were eviscerated, running backward with dead riders entangled in their tack, dragging their own entrails. Light lamellar and leather armor were punctured and shredded under the assault of hard Alan steel. Horsetail banners that had not fallen for generations toppled. Whole clans of Huns were trampled under in the desperate center, their long family sagas snuffed out in a few anxious moments of carnage. Even as the Ostrogoths were advancing again on our Roman lines, Aetius was exulting and waving the huge iron sword, one arm already bandaged and bloody.
“They’re holding! They’re holding!” Now the center’s infantry was coming up, and the Hun horses were balking even as their masters urged them against the ranks of spear-men. I could imagine Attila’s frustration.
Line after line of Hun cavalry went down, and to continue this close-quarter mismatch was madness. The barbarians broke to retreat and re-form, even as still more horns and drums sounded and Attila’s left wing began to advance toward Theodoric and his Visigoths on the right. If they could not break us at one point, then maybe at another!
Now the battle was well and truly joined along miles of front, great tides of men surging back and forth under the singing arc of uncountable arrows. There was no hope of any one man controlling the fury that followed. It was the havoc of horse and foot, spear and arrow, sword and biting teeth. Whole companies seemed to be swallowed, and yet as soon as they disappeared in the slaughter, fresh companies pushed ahead.
The Ostrogoths charged us Romans again and then again and then yet again, surging up the ridge to try to take the advantage. Each time they had to clamber up a slope slick with blood and thick with the bodies of their comrades, a hedgerow of stiffening limbs and broken weapons. The Gepid king, Ardaric, went down with a spear wound and was carried away, delirious; and the ambitious Cloda the Frank sank somewhere in the carnage, his corpse deliberately trampled by the hooves of his brother’s steed. Each time the Ostrogoths charged, the disciplined legions made them come through a wave of javelins. Hundreds of Goths grunted and went down with each volley. The Goths clawed and spat and stabbed at us, but the loss of the ridge crest was proving catastrophic to them. Too many warriors were dying, and Attila’s right flank was weakening. What if Aetius could begin to squeeze them upon the Hun center, as he hoped?
But the sun was still high; fresh Ostrogoths kept appearing, their numbers seemingly as endless as grains of sand.
We Romans could not be dislodged, but neither could we advance. Men were staggering from exhaustion after each attack, chests heaving, the blood running down their limbs in bright sheets. During pauses they let their shields slump to the ground and crouched behind them for a while in an attempt to recover and to keep from being shot.
I found myself back with Aetius and was given the horse of a dead centurion. Mounted once more, I could better see the battle, but reunion with our general was not entirely reassuring. Clearly he was now growing as frustrated at this failure to break the Ostrogoths ahead of him as Attila had been frustrated at failing to crack our center. “We have to fold them and we can’t!” he muttered. “This fight may finally be settled elsewhere.” He glanced worriedly down the rest of the line.
