Pamphilus watched grimly.
‘Sir,’ said his optio.
He tightened his grip on his spear.
‘ Sir,’ repeated the optio. ‘Behind us, sir.’
Pamphilus glanced back and cried out.
The barbarians had already broken down the gates and were in the town. Margus was ablaze. Behind its walls, the red-tiled rooftops were smoking, and flames licked up round the narrow tower of St Peter and St Paul. The iron bell would already be glowing red. Pamphilus thought he could hear distant screams.
They must have moved like lightning. How had they crossed the river? Apart from the town bridge, there was no crossing until miles upstream. Was it possible that this howling horde of barbarians was in fact highly organised? That behind this film of blood and chaos, there was some keen, all-commanding mind at work?
Idiot barbarians, though. The keen-eyed watchmen on the walls of Viminacium would have seen the smoke, and already be sending out riders to ascertain the cause. An idle Margus housewife not minding her hearthfire, a street of wooden houses going up in flames? Or something worse? Then one of his riders or one of the refugees would get through, and the legion would be called to arms.
It was good to know that reinforcements were on their way. Meanwhile, they must try to hold their position and survive. Surrounded.
‘Two rear ranks – about face!’
Then on the far ridge of the hills, a mile distant or more, he thought he saw him: the barbarian leader. A group of men gathered closely around him, but that was the king. He held a sword above his head and moved it in precise strokes downwards, left and right and before him. And on the plain before him, his horse-warriors wheeled to order, as disciplined as columns of imperial cavalry. More so. More agile. They wheeled as a flock of starlings wheels in the sky, as one body.
Now gradually they were closing in, herding rather than killing, crushing the people back against the bridge.
Pamphilus cursed.
He would have fought like Horatius on this bridge, along with his men, against these contemptible horsemen. His blood was up now. Too many of those he had been sent to guard had fallen already. They had watched the savages riding through the fair, whipping and lassoing, destroying and burning, picking off selected victims for sport and target practice. Usually men of fighting age, fools who came at them with pitchfork or stake. But sometimes they had cut down anyone in their path, fleeing girls, infants, and those nursing infants. Those broad-cheeked faces expressionless, those yellow eyes unmoved.
But how could Pamphilus and his men fight back, with this human tide around them? That of course was the plan of this warlord, this king.
He looked again and the warlord had galloped down from the ridge and in among the press of his warriors. Soon the trapped legionaries could see him approaching with his little band of captains, and then reining in. Pamphilus observed him across the heads of the trapped and huddled people, through the haze of drifting smoke. The stony face of the barbarian warlord. Iron-grey hair bound up in a topknot, blue weals on his face, a gold torc round his strong, grimy neck. Dusty leather breeches, deerskin boots. Nothing fancy. Naked to the waist but for spiralling tattoos, quiver and bow and scabbard across his back. No great king, then. Still fighting in the line with his fellow warriors. Beside him, a man with lighter skin, very close-shaven or bald, blue-eyed. Very still, assured and silent.
A hush fell over the people.
Glittering yellow eyes fixed on him.
‘Your name?’ called the warlord.
He gave it.
‘From Viminacium?’
Pamphilus nodded.
The warlord stroked his wispy beard. ‘It was forces from Viminacium that executed my people. You would call it a punitive expedition.’ He spoke faultless Latin, with perfect, rather aristocratic pronunciation.
Pamphilus’ head whirled and he glanced sideways at his optio. These were the Huns. Not vanished after that bloody foray at all, as the intelligence had said, but making only a feigned, a Parthian retreat. The cunning devils. For the first time Pamphilus sensed that they were here not for a bit of light raiding and enslaving after all, but for some more memorable act of vengeance. He steeled himself against fear, stemmed his rising panic, gripped the spearshaft tighter in his sweating hand and put from his mind as best he could all rumours of barbarian tortures. Crucifixion, excoriation, impalement. ..
Beside him his optio was shaking. His men were backing into each other. Behind them, the burning town was beginning to roar under the noonday sun. Where was the VIIth, O Jupiter, Mithras, Christ? They must have seen the fires by now. If they could just hold out for a while longer, the first of the cavalry might yet arrive. He prayed for them to come soon.
The warlord was speaking again, his voice low and harsh and grating as old steel. Pamphilus shook his head at what he heard, so the warlord repeated it. ‘Either we kill all these people before you,’ he said, ‘or we kill you.’
He shouted back, ‘The price your people pay then will be terrible.’
The warlord grinned, a horrible, wolfish grin, and his men raised their swords.
‘They will make good slaves!’ blurted out his optio.
‘And you will make good corpses.’
One of the savages struck down his first victim, an old man stumbling before him, penned in by the people around him, eyes staring in blank terror.
‘Let them go!’ bellowed Pamphilus.
Their discipline was instant. Their leader gave the nod, and the encircling horsemen pulled up their bristling weapons. Every ugly little pony took several neat steps backwards on command.
The huddled people remained frozen like prey for a moment. Then the warlord said something more in his low voice, and the people, dazed and stumbling, turned and fled away south into the waiting hills.
The warlord looked back at Pamphilus.
The centurion lowered his spear, couched it under his right arm and set the butt against one of bridge planks. Leaned his weight against it.
‘Well, men,’ he said. ‘Sell yourselves dear.’
The town burned on all through the late summer afternoon and on into evening. No help came. Through the blood-red sunset, the slaughter went on. This was the beginning of vengeance, the beginning of sorrows.
Here a Kutrigur warrior rides down another victim, using a trident for a spear, jabbing it into the back of a fleeing girl.
She stumbles and falls, sinks to her knees, finally dropping the yoke of wooden pails she has carried all the long day, even in the midst of the slaughter. She reaches back to her wound before she slumps and dies. The goat’s milk runs across the hard ground, mingling with her blood. The warrior wrenches his cantering mount round almost on its hind hooves and whacks its rump with the flat of his crude and bloodied trident and grins through the orange firelight and yowls and rides on.
His fellow warriors yowl and grin, too, milling murderously among their last sacrificial victims. Men like wolves, but wolves who love chaos and firelight. Wolves in winter come in from the cold and the snow-bound steppes and from the edges of the great northern forests when the dewdrops harden into glassy unforgiving ice on the resinous needles of the firs. They come hungrily eyeing the well-fed towns and the comfortable firesides with their fathomless yellow eyes, creeping westwards across the wind-frozen plains towards the warm evening glow in the west. They slink down darkened streets, past lamplit taverns and houses where the plump merchants and bankers and well-paid bureaucrats of the empire sit at their ample dinners, joking and feasting and sipping their good Moselle wines shipped down to the Danube to these Eastern provinces of Moesia and Thrace. None knowing that the wolves are coming – indeed, are already come, a tide of grey fur sweeping across the steppes. Yellow eyes gleaming, white teeth ready for the kill.