Nearer at hand, Naulobates yelled orders. The rear five ranks of the Rosomoni in the central contingent wheeled their ponies and cantered off to the right to form up as a new unit and prevent the horde being outflanked. The elongated, red head of Andonnoballus could be seen getting them into order.
With his narcotic-fuelled dreams of the spirit world, Naulobates might well be considered insane, but he could still manage a battle. He had done the right thing. It left the ranks of the centre and new right wing dangerously thin, but the countermove had prevented the Heruli being overlapped.
Like a festival or a dance, a battle has its own rhythms. A hush spread across the almost motionless field, as if all those thousands of men stood in awe of the deeds they were about to commit. The thunder boomed above them, an unseen blacksmith working at some celestial forge.
The keening note of a trumpet was joined by the whooping of the Alani. The enemy surged forward, and the lines of the Heruli went to meet them.
Watching a battle in which he had no part had an air of unreality for Ballista. He watched the gusts of arrows fall, the ponies racing and turning, the men tumbling beneath the hooves. The choking dust slid across everything. The confused roar of it all was loud in his ears. Yet it had a theatrical quality. It touched him no more than the imperial spectacles in the Colosseum. Men died there; men were dying here. It was almost nothing to him.
A battle confuses perceptions of time. Ballista thought he had been watching the deadly show for hours. Yet when the day darkened as the first storm clouds reached out to smother the sun, he saw it was still early morning. The unseasonable gloom invested the battle with a sombre gravity. The air hissed as the lightning speared overhead, illuminating the black thunderheads from within. The earth shook from the battle. The end would be like this, when the wolf Fenrir killed the Allfather, and the nine worlds would burn, and the gods die.
Ballista wanted it to be over. If, outnumbered though they were, the Heruli won, he would drink and feast with them. If, as must be more probable, they were worn down by exhaustion and the day was lost, he would gather his familia. They would mount the remaining big Sarmatian chargers and small Heruli ponies and try to cut their way out of the chaos.
‘Fuck,’ Maximus said.
Ballista looked where the Hibernian pointed to the west. A pillar of dust, at its base; when the lightning flashed, the glint of metal. A large number of mounted men were riding along the line of the northernmost stream. Still a way off, but travelling fast. They were heading for the camp or the rear of the Heruli line. Naulobates’ overstretched warriors had no reserve to check them.
‘No chance they are Urugundi?’ Castricius said.
‘No chance at all,’ returned Ballista.
‘The daemons of death are afraid of me.’ Castricius had a far-away look.
‘The portent could not have been worse,’ Alaric said. ‘Now, we must look to defend the camp.’
‘It would be no use,’ Ballista said.
Alaric continued to talk.
Ballista did not listen. He was looking all around, thinking. It was difficult to take everything in: the approaching cavalry, the confusion of the battle line, the camp, with the boys looking after the restless mass of cattle, and the pitiful number of wounded guards in the wagons. The noise of the oxen reminded him of something that had happened when the Alani had attacked the embassy on the way out. A stratagem he had read was in the back of his mind.
‘The boys with the oxen are herdsmen?’ Ballista asked.
‘Yes,’ Alaric said.
‘They could drive that herd?’
‘Of course.’ Alaric looked exasperated. ‘The camp?’
‘How many of the injured can still sit a horse?’
‘Twenty, maybe thirty. Why?’
‘Here is what we will do. Alaric, get the boys and all the men that can ride mounted. Have the others cut free four wagons, drag them out of the laager to make an opening. All of us here, get on horseback.’
Everyone was staring at him.
‘I think it was Hannibal, maybe in Polybius. When the Alani outflanking riders get near, we are going to stampede all those oxen into them.’
‘The First-Brother was right about you,’ Alaric said. ‘Loki himself could teach nothing to you. You are Starkad’s grandson in your cunning.’
‘What if it does not work?’ Hippothous asked.
‘Then we fall back on my other deep plan,’ Ballista said.
‘Which is?’
‘Which is every man runs as if all the daemons of the underworld were snapping at his heels.’
Mounted, armoured, flanked by his two closest friends, Ballista felt the usual apprehension. Maximus never seemed to feel it, but Ballista always did. No matter how many battles he survived, he always feared he would die, or, somehow even more oppressive, would let down those around him, would disgrace himself. He pulled the dagger on his right hip out an inch or two, snapped it back, went into the vaguely soothing pre-battle ritual of his own devising.
Behind him, the seething mass of oxen bellowed. The herders kept them back from the opening with difficulty. The crack and sting of the long, knotted hide whips added to the frenzy of the animals.
Ballista had led out eleven Roman riders. The eunuch Amantius, the scribe and the messenger, and the two slaves had been left in the laager as being of no use. With twenty wounded Heruli warriors and a hundred herdboys, those Romans considered martial enough were drawn up in a mounted line masking where the wagons had been hauled clear.
The oncoming Alani had seen them and deployed into a deep line, at least five hundred wide. They were bearing down, whooping. As Ballista had hoped, the nomads had proved unable to resist the obvious chance to get among the booty of the camp.
The Alani were closing fast, the bouncing, short-legged run of their ponies eating up the distance. Five hundred paces; four hundred. It had to be judged right. Three hundred. The Alani rode with their bows or weapons held out wide to the right, not to catch the sides of their mounts. Two hundred paces. They were committed. It had to be now.
Ballista made the signal with his bow — the arrow with the bright fletchings shot almost vertical into the dark sky.
Neat as could be, the screen of horsemen parted, making two lanes. There was a terrible sound, like stones being ground by a river in spate. Bucking, kicking, snorting in fury, the first of the near-maddened bullocks thundered past. In moments, there was a solid flood of oxen.
The Alani sawed on their reins, pulled their ponies back on to their haunches as they tried to stop, to get out of the way. Their numbers, the depth of their formation, were against them. Ponies barrelled into each other. Riders fought to stay in the saddle.
The onrush caught the Alani. The solid weight of the close-packed bullocks crashed into and through them. Men and ponies went down beneath the thousands of pounding hooves. Ballista watched with horrified revulsion the body of one of the Alani bouncing off the ground as it was stamped again and again, and was reduced to a broken bundle of blood-stained, fouled rags, the shattered white of a bone protruding obscenely.
It was accomplished almost before Ballista could comprehend the totality. The outflanking column of Alani no longer existed. The Steppe where it had galloped so proudly was dotted with knots of fleeing horsemen and a widening spread of escaping oxen.
The majority of the Alani were running south past the western edge of the battle line.
‘With me! With me!’ Ballista pushed the big Sarmatian into an in-hand gallop after them.
Already, individuals at the rear left of the Alani main fighting line were turning and slipping away. The sight of their fellow tribesmen routing past them had undermined their resolve, filling their minds with shapeless but awful visions of catastrophe.