Sabinus heard his centurion grunt. He himself took a step forward in fascinated horror, his whole body trembling. He saw but did not immediately understand. He reached out to steady himself.
The barbarians had no siegecraft. He said it to himself again. The barbarians had no siegecraft.
Tatullus spoke for him. ‘What the hell is this, civil war?’ Then ducked and took cover as a single arrow clattered into the stone beside him. Covering fire for the Sabinus did not duck. He stamped his heavy sandals, the hobnails thudding on the thick wooden planks. This was no dream.
This was real. And this was the day he would die.
The mist cleared a little more. There was the lone horseman’s spear from last night, decorated with the single black feather, still stuck in the ground before the west gate. A cool, light wind blew, a very light wind, and the mist drifted away off the wet meadows towards the river. Except they could not see the wet meadows. They were covered in horsemen.
At their head sat a group of long-haired, half-naked, tattooed Hun noblemen, generals, perhaps, gold gleaming around their arms and necks; and another man of different race, fair with close-cropped or thinning hair. At the head of them in turn, gazing up at the walls of Viminacium, smiling cheerfully, sword dangling loosely in his right hand as if ready to ride up and attack the fortress with bare steel, was their leader. The one from the night before. Attila.
‘Sir, boats passing along the north wall. Men taking fire.’
Sabinus ignored him. What was emerging before their horror-stricken eyes out of the mist to the west was everything now. For it was not the vast horde of savagely armed and decorated horse-warriors standing before them that chilled the blood, so much as the weaponry they brought with them. Against all intelligence and expectation. Among the horde, still half veiled in thin mist, stood two huge wooden siege-towers on great solid wheels, two mighty torsion-spring onagers with boulders already set back in their basins, a bronze-headed battering ram expertly protected under a moveable steep-sided tortoise of strong wooden planks and iron plates, and, scattered among the horsemen, a number of other smaller artillery pieces, sling-machines and ballistas. Things that barbarians should not have.
Around the onagers was a busy commerce of men and oxen and wagons, and the distant creaking of ropes and winches and leather slings. Soon would come the nerve-shredding, ascending screech of twisted torsion springs tuned to screaming pitch, and then the snap and thud of release, the loosed beam flying up and hitting the padded crossbeam, and the boulder hurtling through the air towards the walls of Viminacium.
‘Now we’ve got a fight on our hands,’ murmured Tatullus.
Sabinus shook off his trance of horror. ‘Turn the catapults! ’ he roared. ‘Wall artillery! Every unit on the towers. Do it now!’
Suddenly the U-shaped bastions were alive with panic and the noise of the light wall-artillery, the ballistas and the crossbow machines, being scraped round on their solid iron frames and ranged for the initial shots. Windlasses winding up a ferocious amount of energy in the thick reels of sinew, cranked back with mighty force on a long wooden lever and ratchet, men’s arms bulging, the sinew stretching tighter and tighter still, the high-pitched creak as it was wound back and back more, the bowstring drawn back and a heavy iron-headed bolt laid in the groove before it. When the trigger was released, all that pent-up energy discharged the bolt with lethal force. One bolt was good, but a whole bank of such machines discharging their bolts in a volley could bring down an entire line of cavalry, dragging down those in the rear in a bewildered jumble. The Huns would not have encountered such a thing before.
‘Long fire-bolts loaded! Buckets of tar on every bastion. Light ’em up!’
The pedites, the military runners, ran.
‘And bales, rocks, overturned wagons, anything, stacked up inside the west gate. We won’t be using it for a while.’
There weren’t enough men.
‘The question is,’ said Sabinus, looking out again, ‘those onagers: do they know how to use them?’
And then out of the mist, unrangeable, unreachable, the onagers started firing. They heard the muffled shock of massive beam clunking up into padded crossbeam, and the eerie, almost inaudibly low hum of the great missiles gliding in low, expertly aimed for the foundation stones of the fort. Each of the two machines required precisely one ranging shot. A big boulder fell short and slewed to a halt in the dust, its weight and force such that the ground creased up in wavelets before it. Sabinus waited, barely breathing. The second boulder hit the south-west tower a minute later. The sound seemed to come out of the bowels of the earth, like subterranean thunder. Men staggered atop, clutching their spears.
‘Question answered,’ said Tatullus stonily. ‘Yes, they know how to use them.’
The onagers halted. Out on the plain the vast Hun war-machine was beginning to roll forward again. And the Huns, ignorant and unlettered barbarians though they were, their very language no more than a series of unwriteable growls and grunts, knew better than to try and use onagers at the same time as their own lines were advancing in front of them. Yes, they knew exactly what they were doing. They must have formed an alliance with some power skilled in siegecraft. Who? Could it be treachery? Master-General Aetius had been close to the Huns as a boy. Could he have allied with his old friends, to conquer the Eastern Empire for himself?
But no. Not Aetius. Then who?
Huge solid wooden wheels creaked and groaned under the inertia of their giant loads. Oxen were lashed beneath their wooden canopies. Squeals and rumbles of animal, man and machine horribly commingled. And coming to the fore the two siege-towers. The braying of war trumpets, thunderous mounted kettle-drums, each blow with a bone drumstick like a punch in the guts, the crashing of Hunnish zils or cymbals, the earth itself trembling.
Sabinus bellowed another order: ‘All non-combatants to the dungeons, all current prisoners to the execution dungeon.’
A soldier blanched. ‘Families, sir? Children?’
Sabinus looked at him. ‘You have family?’
‘A sister, sir, in VI Barrack, and her two young ones.’
‘Then believe me, man, you’ll thank me soon enough.’ He looked back over the plain. ‘The dungeons are the best place for them.’
On the battlements just below, an archer drew back his bowstring, though the oncoming horde were still far out of range. It was Arapovian again, the impossible, indefatigable Armenian, his self-possession absolute amid the noise and panic of the artillery. His left arm, his bow-arm, had been tightly bandaged by the medics, but there still showed through on his forearm a small circle of deep dark blood. The man’s olive-skinned aquiline face was beaded with droplets of sweat but expressionless. No order had been given to fire, but Arapovian was clearly a kind of free-lance in his own estimation, and not subject to the orders of ordinary mortals. Sabinus watched, intrigued despite himself. Even as Arapovian pulled back his bowstring, Sabinus thought he could see that small circle of blood spreading. What it must have cost him. His biceps bunched as he drew back the sinew string of that lethal eastern bow, sinuously curved and then recurved at each end. The arrowhead was ablaze with a blob of pitch. He sighted along the arrow and fired.
Other soldiers turned in surprise to watch its arc.
The arrow struck the ground at the foot of the Hunnish spear, which still stood like an insult and a judgement before the west gate, its black feather bobbing in the light breeze. Then it went out. There was wisp of smoke, then nothing. He had fired too hard, the burning arrowhead had buried itself in the dusty ground and been snuffed out. An unfortunate omen. But there came another wisp of smoke and the pitch blazed again. A lean tongue of flame licked up the Hun spearshaft and it began to burn.