The Scourge of God (44 page)

Pushing against the Huns, I saw, was a stormy wall of my own cavalry, a scrambled mix now of Roman and Visigoth and Frank and Alan, yelling themselves hoarse as they rode over Huns too slow to escape. I ran myself, sideways, to get out of the path of careening horses. Now all the horns were blowing, Roman and Hun alike, and the whole field seemed in vague motion from west to east, as if we were on a plate that had been tilted. The battle was sliding off toward Attila’s camp.

I found a mound of dead and clambered up on it to see what was going on. What I observed stunned me. The Visigoths had not broken from the battle, as I had feared. They had rejoined it. But this time they came in an unstoppable wave under Theodoric’s son Thorismund, and their charge was carrying all before it like a flood from a dam. Here was revenge for the death of their king and the mutilation of their princess! Many Huns were still fighting furiously, others were ridden under, but tens of thousands were retreating to the wagon laagers that Attila had arranged as crude forts, taking refuge there.

They were whipped.

The sun was glimmering on the western horizon. “Advance!” Aetius was roaring as he rode among us. “Advance!”

Had the old iron sword worked? Was this to be the final destruction of Attila?

I went forward with the others, but for most of us it was more a stagger than a charge. We had been ferociously fighting for the day’s full second half; the battle had become an apocalypse of death; and it was hard to merely lift a weapon, let alone wield it. The Huns were in no better shape. Yet when they reached the wagons they reached water, and it revived them enough to take up their bows and fill the sky with defensive arrows. Our own bowmen and war machines were out of range, and so when this black rain fell out of the dusk none of us had any missiles to return or the stomach to go further. Not even me, who wanted Ilana. I was astonished to be alive, drunk with fatigue, and unable to fight longer. We retreated out of range of the Hun arrows, the battered armies separating by a mile again, and collapsed in the charnel house that was our field of victory. The sun was gone, and darkness seemed a blessing. So I found a skin of water on a slain legionary, drank, and faded into exhausted oblivion.

XXVIII

THE SWORD OF MARS

I
came to my senses some hours later. The moon had come up to illuminate the field of the dead. The butchered stretched as far as I could see, farther than any man had ever seen: None would recall any battle as huge and horrible as this one. Who could stand to count? No one ever tried to bury them all. We instead fled from this place when it was all over, letting nature reclaim the bones.

It was an eerie, haunted night, the moans of the wounded creating a low keening and their anguished crawling producing scuttling noises like small animals or insects. Dogs long abandoned by their masters in the summer’s invasion came to eat at the edges of the carnage. So, I was later told, did wolves, their eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Howls and snarls lilted at the edges of the armies.

It had taken the entire world, it seemed, to stop Attila, and even now none of us was certain he had been stopped for more than an evening. He had retreated, yes, but would he ride out of his laager again on the morrow? Alternately, could Rome sustain another assault on his wagons? An entire generation had been half wiped out in a single long afternoon and evening, and the cost of this battle would be remembered and whispered for centuries. Never before had so many died so quickly.

It was not just men but horses, thousands of them, too. By the moon I could see the corpses of soldiers and animals formed curious patterns: lines, crescents, and circles that marked where the fighting had been the fiercest. It was like the design of an intricate, macabre carpet. Some of those who survived were wandering the field looking for friends or loved ones, but most on both sides had simply collapsed in exhaustion so that the dead were swelled by vast numbers of the sleeping and unconscious. There was already the stench of blood and piss and shit. By tomorrow’s noon there would be the smell of rot as well, but for now our army nested among the fallen.

I had not the slightest idea what I should do. I’d seen so much horror in the past year that life had become incomprehensible. I felt disconnected, drained, dreamy. Only chance had kept Skilla from killing me this time. Why? What was God’s purpose in all I had seen? I could find Aetius, but to what end? I could crawl toward Ilana, but she seemed as elusive and remote as ever. Attila’s surviving army still stood between us. I could again fight Skilla but he, too, never seemed to die. Oddly, he’d become the one warrior I felt closest to. We shared a love, battles, and a historic journey; and I wondered if, when this was over, we could stop fighting and simply share wine and kumiss in front of a hot fire, trying to remember the cocky young men we’d once been before the slaughter here.

Was he gone forever, swept away by the Visigoths’ charge? Or hunting for me still with taut bow and arrow?

I explored my body and was astounded to find no wounds despite my bloody clothing, and my bruises and sores. I was not equal to three-quarters of the warriors who had died and yet here I was, breathing, when they were not. Again, why? I once thought experience would solve the mysteries of life, but instead it seems only to add to them.

So I sat with these foggy thoughts, as useless as my own broken sword, until finally I noticed a dark form weaving toward me through the dead, as if looking for a fallen companion. The task would not be easy. Inflicted wounds had been so brutal and the slain so trampled that many were past recognition. I admired this figure’s loyalty.

It turned out to be loyalty of a different sort, however. His form became disquietingly familiar, and suddenly my exhaustion was replaced with anxiety. I stood, swaying. He stopped, the moon behind him and on my face, and spoke softly to me from thirty paces away. “Alabanda?”

“Don’t you ever rest?” My voice quavered with weariness.

“I’ve not come to fight you. I’m tired of killing. This day wasn’t war—it was insanity. It has destroyed my nation.” Skilla gazed out at the moonlit bodies. “Ilana needs our help, Jonas Alabanda.”

“Ilana?” I croaked the name.

“Attila has gone mad. He fears final defeat tomorrow and has built a pyre of wooden saddles and his richest possessions. If Aetius breaks through the wagon wall, he intends to light it and hurl himself into the flames.”

My heart hammered at this unexpected information. Were the Huns really that desperate, or was this some kind of trick? “If Attila dies, perhaps Ilana goes free,” I suggested groggily.

“He has chained her to the pyre.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Do you think I would come to you if I didn’t have to, Roman? You’ve been a plague to me since I met you. I came within moments of killing you yesterday, but the gods intervened. Now I know why. Only you can save her.”

“Me?” Was this a trap? Had Skilla decided to win by guile what he’d been robbed of in repeated combat?

“It’s impossible to rescue her,” he said. “The pyre is surrounded by a thousand men. But Attila will still take the sword for the woman.”

So this was it. “The sword of Mars.”

“He blames its loss for the evil that has befallen our people this day. Half the Hun nation is gone. We cannot attack anymore, that’s obvious, but we can retreat as an army, not a mob. Attila’s sword will give my nation back its heart.”

“It is you who has gone insane!” I cried. “I don’t have the sword, Aetius does. Do you think he wants to give it back now that final victory is within our grasp?”

“Then we must steal it, like you stole it from Attila.”

“Never!”

“If we don’t, Ilana will burn.”

I looked out into the darkness, my head aching. Had I come so far, and fought so hard, only to see the one I loved consumed by flames because of victory? How could destiny be so cruel? And yet what Skilla was asking me to do was to risk sure Roman triumph for a single woman, to put into Attila’s hands the symbol he needed to rally his battered army. I had no guarantee the Huns would let Ilana go if I turned over the sword. They might simply burn both of us for amusement. Maybe this was Skilla’s way of killing me—by luring me to his camp with the promise of Ilana.

Or maybe he truly loved her, too, loved her so much that this madness somehow made sense to him. So he thought it should make sense to me.

I stalled, trying to think. “If we save her, which of us gets her?”

“That will be Ilana’s choice.” Of course he would tell me that, because I would assume she’d choose me. She was Roman. Yet what did I really know? The only word of her survival had come from Skilla himself. For all I knew she’d died in Hunuguri or had married Attila or even had married Skilla! He would tell me anything to get the sword. And yet, looking at him—this man I’d come to know too well through too many combats—I knew he was telling the truth. Knew it in my gut more than my mind. War had given us a curious comradeship.

If I did nothing, she would die. If I acceded to Skilla’s plan, there was a good chance that both Ilana and I would die. And so no chance existed, or did it? The seed of a desperate alternative began to form in my brain.

“I’m not even sure where the sword is,” I said as I thought. What if it now served a different purpose—to demoralize instead of empower?

“Any fool knows where it is. We saw Aetius lift it. Where your general sleeps, there sleeps the sword.”

“This is madness.”

“The madness is men’s preoccupation with that old piece of iron,” Skilla said. “You and I both know it has no power beyond what superstition gives it. That relic will not change what happened here, or what must happen tomorrow. My people cannot conquer the West—there are too many to conquer. But the sword saves Ilana and it saves my kagan. It saves my own pride.”

I looked at him, wondering how my plan could possibly work.

“We must work together, Jonas. For her.”

At the outer fringes of the battlefield, where the Roman armies rested, tens of thousands of surviving soldiers were sleeping as if clubbed, every fiber drained by the fight we had just been through. Thousands more wounded had been carried or had crawled here to die. Fresh troops were still coming up to the field, so universal had been the response of resistance in Gaul. The work of war went on. These newcomers were making lanes of advance through the dead by piling them like cordwood. They were bringing fresh supplies of food and water, wheeling catapults and ballistae forward, and were readying for a resumption of battle on the morrow. Others were being sent into the battlefields to retrieve spent bolts and unbroken arrows. I paused to speak quietly to a carpenter working on a catapult, and took the tool he charged eight times too much for.

Torches lit the way to the complex of tents that marked the headquarters of Aetius. I’d left Skilla behind, telling him to lie still like one of the Hun corpses to avoid discovery. I would get the sword by persuasion or not at all; the two of us could not hack our way through an aroused Roman army. I went by myself knowing that my general would think me a lunatic. Yet didn’t I have some claim to the weapon? Could I tamper with the sword? Was a gamble any worse than renewed slaughter?

If Aetius needed any reminding what his profession was, the night’s sounds provided it. I could hear the shriek of the wounded from all points of his headquarters compound. Trestle tables had been set up within a stone’s throw; and limbs were being hacked, set, sewn, and bound for those unlucky enough to be grievously wounded and yet still alive. It was a demons’ chorus, despite the vaunted skill of Roman surgeons. A ditch and wooden stockade had been erected around this nexus of the army, and I worried that I might be stopped from entering, ending my ploy before it began. But, no, Jonas of Constantinople was well known as the general’s aide, envoy, spy, and adviser. With my face wiped clean, I was let pass with a salute of respect from the sentries. I walked toward the sword, listening to the cries of the dying.

What is one more dead?
I asked myself.
Even if it was me?

“We thought you had perished,” one centurion remarked with more prescience than he knew when I came to the tents. I saw Visigothic and Frankish sentries and a little galaxy of lamps in one of the tents and heard a low murmur. The highest-ranking kings and generals were still awake, apparently, debating what to do when the sun came up. Aetius would be in there, but I needed to speak to him privately.

So where would Aetius have put the old sword? Not on the council table as a symbol of his own luck. He would diplomatically leave it aside and pay attention to the pride of the kings he’d bound to him. This triumph must be theirs as well as his. The weapon would wait in his sleeping chamber.

“The general has asked me to fetch maps and the great sword,” I lied. Aetius traveled with charts of the entire West, poring over them in the evenings the way a merchant might a budget. As his aide, I’d fetched them a hundred times.