The Scourge of God (41 page)

For long minutes it was pitched battle that could have gone either way. I used my horse to butt and unbalance the Gepid infantry, striking down with my sword, but I also saw Frankish nobles swallowed by the maelstrom. Then the fury of the Franks began to tell, Gepid courage began to break, and the enemy was pushed to the water. There they realized their peril. The bank was steep and if they slid down it they couldn’t properly fight, so their choice was either to abandon their comrades and swim for safety or be speared or shot by Frankish bows where they stood. They began shouting for help to their comrades on the far bank. Some plunged in to come to their aid while others called for withdrawal before it was too late. It was chaos, and the Gepid generals, accustomed to being under the domineering thrall of Hun warlords, seemed at a loss whether to counterattack or withdraw. As more and more Franks came up to the battle, the beleaguered Gepid troops became packed and they panicked.

A regiment of Huns rode up on the far side and began firing arrows in support, but, as Anthus had hoped, distance and the melee of combat made the volleys ineffective. The Hun archers killed as many Gepids as they did Franks. Had the horsemen crossed upstream and circled to the Frankish rear, they would have had better effect, but they were loathe to be cut off from Attila.

Yet the Gepids on the far shore were equally reluctant to abandon their kinsmen by retreating. They fed themselves piecemeal into the fray, plunging into the water and wading or thrashing slowly across, some picked off by arrows, some simply drowning. The survivors clambered up the Frankish side to try to stiffen the barbarian line even as it was dissolving. This prolonged the fight but did not change it. Our cavalry chewed huge gaps in the Gepid formations, swords and axes hewing down at the tangled footmen and grinding them under hoof. Meanwhile, Frankish infantry exploited the gaps to take the Gepids from the side and rear. The fight began turning to a rout, and then the rout into slaughter. Attila’s henchmen broke to plunge back into the river, desperately pushing, and Frankish archers tormented them from the bank. As each invader tried to save his own life, most died in a waterway that had turned red.

Our victory won on the western shore, a few of Anthus’s cavalry splashed across to continue the pursuit; but now the enemy had the advantage of a high bank and greater numbers, and these impetuous Franks either died or were forced to a quick retreat. Finally the Gepids themselves drew back farther, both sides temporarily disengaging from the embattled river, and this preliminary battle died. Raggedly forming, the shattered rear guard of Attila’s army shambled up and over the far hill. The supporting Huns, mustered from Attila’s main force, rode back and forth on the crest as if to continue the fight, but finally thought better of it. The day’s shadows were long, the western sun was in their eyes to blind bow aim, and they could see the shine of other Roman formations coming up in support of the Franks. Better to wait for the morrow, when Attila could bring his full might to bear.

They turned, and vanished from the crest.

I caught my breath. My arm ached from the shock of striking shield, helmet, and yielding flesh. My sword was red and myself, miraculously, unhurt. I looked back at the carpet of bodies, thousands of them, and was appalled to realize that this was only a beginning. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen battle corpses, of course, but the sheer number sobered me. The bodies lay still and strangely deflated. There was no mistaking the dead.

At the same time I felt exhilarated by my survival, as if infused by the glow of the storm’s earlier lightning. Was it a sign that no missile or blade had touched me? We’d crushed the rear guard as the Frankish king had predicted, and for a briefly insane moment my greatest fear was that the Huns would keep running before I could get to Ilana.

Anthus hauled off his helmet again, his sweaty hair in strings and his eyes bright with triumph. “Come, let’s get a look at the rest of them before we lose all the light!” he roared. “This battlefield is mine, and I want to claim that hill!”

A thousand Frankish cavalry foamed across the stream in a body, now that the enemy was gone, and rumbled to the crest of the ridge that the enemy had just left. We reined in, the ground pockmarked with hoofprints, and looked eastward in awe.

The dying sun emphasized the darkness of the clouds to the east, turning them jet-black, while bathing in gold the panoply before us. The effect was dazzling, and the panorama was one I will never forget. We were seeing, it seemed, every person born east of the Rhine.

A few miles away the lines of the Hun camp began, great swaths of men settling in for the night. There was an enormous double-laager of wagons beyond, canvas hoop tops and yurts blossoming like gray mushrooms. We could see the crossroads of Maurica in the far distance and tens of thousands—nay, hundreds of thousands—of Attila’s warriors around it like a vast browsing herd. There were also chains of ponies, flocks of bleating sheep, and pens of oxen. The very ground seemed to move and twitch like an animal’s skin. The smoke of ten thousand cooking fires created a purple haze, and the metal of countless stacked spearheads sparkled with menace. It was as if every man from every place was at last coming here, to settle world supremacy once and for all.

“Look and look well, my brothers, for no man has seen such a sight in a thousand years,” Anthus solemnly said. “Does it look like a fight worth fighting?”

“It looks like every nation on Earth,” a Frankish captain said in awe. “My hands ache from swinging my sword, lord, and yet we’ve barely begun.”

“Aye, but the Romans and the Visigoths and the rest of them are coming up now, so they’ll help finish what we started. We’ve shown them how to do it.” We turned and saw tramping columns of our allies converging from all directions, swallowing the last few miles before Attila’s camp. Their dust had turned the setting sun bloodred, and their armor looked like an advancing tide of water.

“Look at this sight and hope to remember it for your children,” Anthus murmured. “Look and never forget.” He nodded, as if to himself. “Not only has no such gathering ever happened but never will it happen again.”

“Never?” the captain asked.

The king shook his head. “No. Because by nightfall tomorrow, many of them—and us—will be dead.”

XXVII

THE BATTLE OF NATIONS

W
hat I remember of the night before the great battle is not fear and not sleep but song. The Germans were great singers, much louder and more demonstrative than we quiet and methodical Romans; and as regiment upon regiment, division upon division, and army upon army marched up to take the places that Aetius assigned them, settling down to a restless night on the grassy plain, they sang of a misty and legendary past: great monsters and greater heroes, of golden treasure and bewitching maidens, and of the need for each man to convince himself that on this night, of all the nights of his life, it was necessary to conquer or die. If dead they would pass to an afterworld, a jumbled mixture of the pagan great hall and Christian Heaven, and take their places in a pantheon of heroes and saints. If they survived, they’d live free of fear. As the words lifted to summer’s great starry night, the air warm and still humid from the thunderstorms that had dissipated, song built on song into vast resolve, giving our soldiers courage.

The Huns sang as well. In the aftermath of their invasions they have been remembered as virtually inhuman, I know: an Eastern plague of such unworldly ferocity that they seemed to belong to Satan or older, darker gods. Or, as Attila called himself, the Scourge of God. Yet while I knew they had to be defeated, I also knew them as people: proud, free, arrogant, and secretly fearful of the civilized world they had hurled themselves against. Their words were hard to catch from such a distance—overladen as the songs were by the Germans’ singing nearby—but its hum was strangely softer and sadder, sung from deep within their squat frames. The Hun songs were of a home they had long left, of the freedom of the steppes, and of a simplicity they could not regain no matter how hard and far they rode. They sang for a time already gone, no matter who won this battle.

The Romans were quieter at first, trying to sleep or, giving up on that, sharpening their weapons and wheeling into place hundreds of ballistae that would hurl bolts capable of cutting down a dozen enemies at a time. Their habitual discipline was silence. But near dawn of this shortest of the year’s nights, the mood caught some of them as well. They finally sang, too, choosing new Christian hymns. Bishop Anianus had followed us from Aurelia; and now I watched him walk among these rude soldiers, dressed like a simple pilgrim, blessing and confessing the believers and offering encouragement even to those who had not yet been won by the Church.

The sun rose as it had set, red through smoldering cloud. It glinted in our eyes, and Aetius ordered his generals and kings to brace our disorganized ranks in case the Huns used the light at their backs to charge while we were relatively blinded. But the enemy was no more ready for combat than we were. Such numbers had never been assembled for a battle; and there was considerable confusion on both sides as men were moved first here, then there, grumbling about the anxious waiting as the sun climbed higher and hotter. There was a small stream that tantalizingly ran between the armies, but it was within bowshot of either side so none dared venture there. Instead, women passed down the ranks with skins and jars of water drawn from the captured river in our rear.

The men drank thirstily, sweating in their armor and pissing in place until, by the time it was noon, the battlefield already smelled like a privy.

“When will it start?”
we grumbled.

The plans of the two sides were opposites of each other. Attila placed himself and his Huns at the center of his line, clearly hoping to use his cavalry, the fiercest of his forces, to split our army in two.

Attila’s Ostrogoths with King Valamer were on his right, facing our Roman left, as were his battered Gepids and the rebel Bagaudae. Cloda, the Frankish prince who wanted the crown, would there face his brother, Anthus.

The Rugi, Sciri, and Thuringi tribes allied with the Huns were, in turn, on Attila’s left. These were stiffened by a force of several thousand Vandals who had come to kill Visigoths.

Aetius, in contrast to Attila, put his best troops on either wing and, as promised, Sangibanus and the Alans in the center. “He does not have to win. All he has to do is hold,” Aetius said. This force was stiffened by fresh troops as yet unblooded, the Liticians and the Olibriones. What the old Roman veterans lacked in youthful vigor they more than made up in experienced determination.

Theodoric and his Visigoths formed the Roman right flank. They were the most powerful cavalry we had, arrayed against the Rugi, Sciri, and Thuringi.

Finally Aetius and his Roman legions—combined with the Franks, Saxons, and Armoricans—made up the Roman left. Except for the Frankish heavy cavalry that had fought so well the afternoon before, these were primarily foot soldiers, shield linked to shield in unbroken walls, who would advance like a lumbering dragon against the German infantry on the enemy side. What Aetius hoped was that as the Huns hurled themselves against his center, he could close on the Hun allies on either side and push the invaders together, trapping and slaughtering them as the Romans had been slaughtered at Cannae by Hannibal or at Hadrianopolis by Fritigern and the Goths.

“All will depend on two things,” he told us. “The center must hold, or Attila will run rampant in our rear and cut us down with arrows from behind. Second, our own wing must seize that low ridge before us, because from there our infantry can hurl spears down on any enemy charge and turn it back. The decisive blow will then be delivered by Theodoric and his Visigoths. If the Huns are in confusion, his cavalry can win the day.” He put his helmet on his head. “I told Theodoric all the riches of the West and East are waiting in Attila’s camp. He told me that in that case, he will either be wealthy beyond measure or dead by the nightfall.” His smile was grim, and not entirely reassuring. “That prophecy works well enough for all of us.”

History has recorded these battle plans as simple and clear. The reality is that both sides were a babble of languages and a coalition of proud kings; and so neither the patient diplomacy of Aetius, nor the terrifying charisma of Attila, could easily maneuver men into position. We could scarcely understand one another or grasp the scale of the field, which ran for miles. It could take half an hour to relay an order.

How many were assembled that day no man will ever know for sure. Tens of thousands of escaped Roman slaves had swelled the ranks of Attila. Tens of thousands of merchants, shopkeepers, farmers, scholars, and even priests had swelled the Roman ranks, knowing Aetius offered the only chance to sustain civilization. Any attempt at counting was impossible in the milling throngs and swirling dust, but the numbers on each side were in the hundreds of thousands, I believe. It was as if this
was
Armageddon, the final battle in the history of the world, and every man had pledged his soul on its outcome.