A flicker of something caught his eye. He looked out over the river and something was wrong. It was on fire.
Out of the darkness still came the sound of drums. Deep, booming barbarian drums.
The night glowed, a flame-red mouth opening up in the darkness, long streaks of reflected flame licking along the surface of the slow-moving river. Then a ship came gliding out of the thin mist.
A galley, wreathed in flames. One of the galleys of the Danube Fleet, captured from God knows where. Gliding downstream like some infernal ghost-ship, sailing into dark eternity unmanned. Silent but for the crackling of the flames and the collapsing spars and showering sparks. Yet there were humans still aboard. Hanging from the masts and yardarms, strangled, dangling, obscene, as if still dancing amid the flames that licked at the soles of their feet, hung the naked bodies of massacred soldiers. They festooned the ship like hellish decorations. Fire danced from their crucified limbs. Their hair flamed. The ship came gliding past, close enough to the north wall of the fort for them to see the victims’ blistering skin, their melting faces.
Sabinus gripped the wall.
‘God’s teeth,’ muttered Knuckles, ‘that’s worthy of a show in the arena, that is.’
Tatullus had his vinestick in his hand in a flash, and struck Knuckles such a blow across the back of his head as would have cracked the skull of a lesser man. Knuckles gasped and reeled and staggered, more bow-legged than ever, his eyes rolling up to the whites before collapsing against the low battlements of the wall. Shaking, in a cold sweat, he sucked in deep lungfuls, gradually letting the pain recede and his vision return.
Tatullus never raised his voice. There was something in this iron-cold centurion that chilled even Sabinus. ‘Those were your comrades you see tortured and crucified below you, soldier. Talk of them with respect.’
Knuckles, still hanging onto the battlement as if it were a rock in rapids and he were a drowning man, pale and nearly sick with the blow, managed a slow nod. ‘Sir.’
Other soldiers gathered from along the walls to stare aghast. Some had their arms round each other’s shoulders as the torture ship passed by. Four of them stood in a line, silent witnesses to the spectacle, like gladiators summoning esprit de corps before the coming doom. Two brothers, their father and their uncle. Local boys, part-time farmers, the VIIth in all its glory. Soon they would be fighting for their lives.
Another spar on the ship came crashing down to the deck in a flurry of sparks, another piece fell free and sizzled out in the black water. But even that sound was muffled by the mist and the night.
Now they would at last be tested, perhaps beyond endurance. They would fight for themselves and each other, for their families and their farmsteads. They had never even seen Rome or Constantinople. The emperor was far away, the empire a thing of the mind. Today they would fight merely for survival. No reinforcements.
The torture ship passed on eastwards, its ghastly light dimming into the darkness. They imagined it finally drifting down through the shadowy gorge of the Iron Gates, reduced by then to a smoking, blackened wreck, to be dashed to pieces there in the whitewater narrows. Bits of peat-black timber and spar washing up on the strand at Ratiaria. Blackened bones.
Away to the west, the drums ceased.
The oldest of the four men turned to Sabinus as he passed by. ‘Are we finished?’
The legate paused, then laid a hand on the man’s shoulder – an unheard-of familiarity.
‘No, man,’ he said gently, ‘not by a long way. No barbarian force has ever taken a Roman legionary fort. Not in seven long centuries.’
‘To your stations again now, lads,’ said Tatullus behind him. ‘Storm coming.’
Another soldier came running, sweating in the torchlight.
‘Sir! Man below the west gate. I think he comes to parley.’
They hurried down to the first level and along the battlements to the west gate. Sabinus gazed out from the tower.
Under the louring walls of Viminacium sat a single man on a dusty skewbald pony. He was naked to the waist but for a purely decorative breastplate of thin bones, and wore no armour but for a close-fitting helmet that shone in the moonlight.
He must be insane.
The man looked up and fixed his glittering eyes on Sabinus, never doubting he was in command. He looked like he needed sleep. His face was deeply grooved and ashen-grey, with a wisp of an old man’s chinbeard, yet his yellowish eyes still burned. He did not seem to raise his voice, yet on the tower they heard each word distinctly.
‘I do not come to parley,’ he said. ‘I do not come for your words. I come for your lives.’
Sweat beaded down Sabinus’ spine. He felt cold. How had the Hun heard them talk of parleying? How had he known? There was something about their visitor not of this earth. Was this Attila himself?
Close behind him, Sabinus became aware, the Armenian, the one who called himself Count Arapovian, was swiftly and silently nocking an arrow to his bow. A short, powerful eastern bow, a compound bow, like the Scythians themselves used. The legate did not stop him.
It all happened in the blink of an eye. The warlord on his pony remained quite still. Arapovian stepped forward with practised swiftness took aim and loosed his bowstring. In the same instant, another arrow came out of the darkness, a single arrow. It arced through the night and struck home. The Armenian gasped and stepped back, dropping his bow clattering to the floor and clutching his forearm. The arrowhead had punched straight between the two bones of his arm and out the other side, so neatly that he barely bled – not until the arrow-shaft was drawn, at any rate.
It had struck him just a moment before he let fly his own. A hair’s breadth of movement, compounded by distance, and Arapovian’s arrow had hit the ground beside the hooves of that motionless skewbald pony.
Arapovian fell back against the wall.
‘Get him to the medics,’ growled Tatullus.
He was helped down the steps.
‘Then get him back here,’ called Tatullus after them.
‘I will return,’ came the Armenian’s voice. ‘Don’t doubt it.’
‘And no one else try anything.’
As if in commentary on what had just occurred, having seen or foreseen everything, the unmoving man down below said, ‘Fools. The blood of my people is on your heads. I come to destroy you.’
From behind his back he drew a spear, bare but for a single black feather, and drove it into the hard ground before the fort. Then he pulled his workaday mount round and walked it away into the darkness.
Sabinus and his primus pilus exchanged looks. Tatullus rested his hand on his sword-hilt. Now they knew what manner of man their enemy was.
Until they had seen the fire-ship, and the man whose mind had dreamed up such an atrocity, Sabinus had still held out hope of imminent rescue. He had thought of ordering out the boats if all the land-routes were taken. They could have rowed downriver to Ratiaria, to Marcianopolis, have the whole thirty-thousand-strong Eastern Field Army here in a few days… But the fire-ship told them – among other things – ‘We have control of the river too. You will never get through.’
The Huns and their Attila: mastermind of panic, conjuror of hysteria. This barbarian warlord with the mind of a fox. Piling on the pressure, drawing out their deepest fears, destroying their reason and their resolve with monsters and threats both real and imaginary.
The abandoned town of Viminacium within its paltry curtain walls began to burn. No citizens fled from the flames. They had all gone already. The remnant VII Legion in their fortress were utterly alone.
Except for their sworn enemies round about. They could hear faint yowls and shrieks of triumph. In the town the savages were looting anything not yet on fire, and outside the town they were ransacking the chapel in the cemetery. They smashed apart an elaborate grave and prised open the lead sarcophagus within, to steal from the dead a gorgeous cloth threaded with gold. The corpse, the crumbling body of a young man, they left hanging grotesquely half out of the battered sarcophagus. Other corpses were strewn more widely about, so that it looked as if the dead had come back to life. As if they had awoken in the night and danced themselves to death again by moonlight, to collapse again half-putrid where they danced.