The Greens marked every downbeat of their chant by striking their weapons on the pavement.
The Blues around me began a chant of their own. Then – just like at the races, though now with malevolence – the ritual insults and curses flew back and forth.
As the Greens came within striking distance, my Blues took up their slingshots and let fly with volley after volley of the excrement they’d taken the trouble to collect from around the Great Church. The smell was overpowering. The Greens let out a howl of rage as it splattered all over them. Their fine green banners turned brown. Some slipped on the splashes of shit littering the ground in front of them and fell heavily down.
The Blues screamed with laughter. Some of my more vulgar men even took to pelting each other. Their betters called them to order with canes, and turned their attention back to the advancing enemy.
The Greens were now coming on fast. Then, with a last and terrible scream of hatred, they broke into a run for the last twenty yards of the advance. As their twisted faces grew clearer, I heard the panted aftersound of their war chant and the scuffing of leather on pavement as the massed attack of the Greens came closer and closer.
With a sudden shock, they crashed into the wall. The wooden planks shook horribly at the impact of so many hundreds of bodies. I clutched at the inner frame of the wall to hold myself steady. I thought at first it would tumble down, and we’d be into open combat.
But the wall held. Now into another of their Circus chants, the Green attackers grabbed hold of the walls where they could and rocked backwards and forwards. I thought to jump down before I was pitched off, but the Blues beside me now went into action. They poked the attackers with sharpened stakes and poured cauldrons of boiling water over their heads.
It was very light work to break the force of the Green attack. After taking a few dozen casualties, they drew back. They stood about ten yards from the wall, throwing stones and chanting more factional insults. The occasional severed head bumped against the outer planks. Shaking their weapons, the Blues chanted back. No one seemed inclined to engage in more bloodshed.
I climbed down from the wall. ‘This all seems to be under control,’ I said briefly to one of my students.
At that moment a message was delivered from the barricade by the Saint Julian Church. This was one of the strongpoints, but now it was under attack by regular troops.
59
We arrived just as the enemy was battering at the wall. In scarlet cloaks and pointed silver helmets, the soldiers had marched straight down the shopping street beyond, and were now attacking the wall more effectively than the Greens had managed.
The citizen defenders hadn’t yet run away. But they stood nervously back from our side of the wall. Some of them were still throwing a few stones over the top. For all the good that did the defence, it might have been rain.
‘On to the rooftops!’ I shouted. I led the way up to the roof of the church. Some of the Blues already there were looking nervously over to the archers who stood further back from the attack force. Though not so dangerous in street-fighting as on an open battlefield, archers on the opposing side are bad news when you have none yourself.
I took up one of the cobblestones Priscus had made sure to put up there in great baskets. I threw it and hit one of the attackers straight on the forehead. He went down like a stunned ox. The soldiers beside him stopped their pushing at the wall and looked up.
‘Come on,’ I said encouragingly. ‘They die just like the rest of us.’
I threw another stone and this time caught an officer on the shoulder. There was a shout of sudden confidence around me, and a whole volley of stones followed mine.
‘Now for the glass,’ I said. The small catapult that had been dragged up there went into action. Heaps of glass dishes and drinking vessels flew about thirty yards down the street beyond our barricade. These didn’t hit anyone. Instead, their purpose was to hold the cavalry back. The enemy plan, it was clear, was for the infantry to smash the wall down so that mounted troops could sweep straight along the street to the city centre.
That had to be avoided whatever the cost. Now their blood was fully up, my Blues were a match for any regular troops so long as we had some advantage of cover. There was nothing we could do against heavy cavalry. That would go straight through us.
Well, we did avoid it. That set of barricades wasn’t going anywhere soon. And horses would now have to be led very carefully round those shards of glass.
I felt a surge of joy as I called the men back. The defence wasn’t going too badly so far.
A hand brushed my cloak. ‘My Lord,’ someone said from behind, ‘they are breaking through by the Urban Prefecture building.’
He was right. By the time we got there, they had already done so. Soldiers stood with raised shields to fend off our hail of slingshot, while Green volunteers cleared the far less solid barricade Priscus had put there.
‘Charge!’ I called to my students. My mouth had gone very dry and my sword arm trembled as I led them into battle.
We took the soldiers by surprise. They hadn’t expected active resistance and we were on them before they could mount a defence. I struck one of them straight in his bearded face with the pommel of my sword. I drew its edge along his throat and pushed him back against another two. I snapped another’s neck with the edge of my shield. Beside me, my students hacked and shouted their way through the soldiers as they pushed them back to the other side of the barricade. We moved away just in time to avoid the boiling oil that had begun to rain from the upper windows of the Prefecture.
With the soldiers in retreat, we turned on the trapped Greens and butchered them until the ground under our feet turned slippery with blood. I lost my sword in one particularly fat victim. It went in easily enough, but got stuck somewhere on the way out. He squealed and rolled his eyes as I pushed in and out of his body. It must have seemed rather comical to anyone watching.
‘Take this one,’ somebody yelled in my ear, passing over a much heavier military sword. The new weight and length took a bit of getting used to, but this one cut through flesh and bone as if it were a butcher’s cleaver.
With a blast of trumpets, the soldiers were sent back to rescue the Greens. We now went for Greens and soldiers indiscriminately. The ground before us was a natural killing ground; we had the advantage of cover and a slight incline.
I picked up a spear and threw it at the fleeing soldiers. It caught one of them in the leg. As he went down, one of my students – the young man who’d spoken of Saint Sebastian – disregarded my orders and ran forward. He dodged past the pools of steaming oil that covered the ground and killed the man with a sword-thrust into his mouth. Waving a stolen shield above his head, he danced back behind the barricades, his face shining with joy.
I wanted to supervise the rebuilding of the barricade while the soldiers were in retreat but before I could do so another message arrived. We were hard pressed a few hundred yards down the line where someone had fired one of the buildings. I filled my lungs with clean air as we dashed into the cloud of smoke and felt our way towards the new threatened point. Buildings were burning around us. Missiles rained from the tops of burning buildings as we fought and killed and raced from one threatened point to another.
There were still no cavalry attacks, perhaps because the streets were so choked with debris. But the main danger now was arrows. It seemed that hundreds of archers had been brought forward to join the few I’d seen earlier. They stood out of range of anything we could send back at them, firing off volley after volley of arrows. Most of them fell spent around us, but they made getting about the streets inside the barricades increasingly slow and difficult.