The Sword of Attila (12 page)

He was jolted back to the present as four slaves appeared on the
palaestra
ground carrying a wooden trestle table, followed by Macrobius with a wrapped bundle of weapons which he rolled out on the table top. This afternoon's practical was to be their final class on the weapons of their enemies. Last week it had been the throwing nets of the Suebi, said to have been based on those used by the
velationes
in the days of the gladiators, something that not even Macrobius could master; today he would be on firmer ground with the weapons of the Huns. From here they would go for three months' intensive training on the Field of Mars, leading infantry and cavalry
numeri
in mock battles, learning the basics of artillery and field engineering from the catapult men and the
fabri,
and finishing with the route marches and endurance tests that would determine the final selection. In the class that morning Flavius had been less harsh than he might have been following their obvious indulgence in the taverns the night before, remembering his own last night of freedom before the drill centurions of the Field of Mars bawled their orders and locked them inside for the duration.

They came trooping out now, a dozen boys and veteran cadets, and formed a loose semi-circle in front of Macrobius, squinting and shading their eyes against the sun. Macrobius glanced up at Flavius, who nodded, and then he glared at the class. ‘Welcome to the daylight. This should roast the last of the wine out of you. Who can tell me about the Huns?'

There was silence for a moment, and then Quintus put his hand up and stepped forward. ‘They live east of the Danube and north of the Maeotic Lake, near the Frozen Ocean, and they are a race savage beyond parallel.'

He paused, and Macrobius stared at him. ‘Well? Go on.'

Quintus cleared his throat. ‘They are of great size, but low-legged, like shaggy two-legged beasts. At the moment of their birth they are slashed across the cheeks three times, giving them scars for life and meaning the men can't grow beards. They roam wild about the grasslands, sleeping under the stars or in rude tents, and on campaign they live in wagons like the Goths.'

Marcus Cato put his hand up as well. ‘And they eat the half-raw flesh of any animal, merely warming it up by placing it between their own thighs as they ride or on the backs of their horses,' he said, adding enthusiastically, ‘and they wear round caps with ear flaps, and leggings of calf-hide, and tunics made from the skins of small mice intricately sewn together, and armour made of small bronze plates knitted into their tunics, said to have been copied from the warriors of the land of Thina itself. And they cover themselves in blue woad.'

‘No, you idiot,' Quintus scoffed, turning to him. ‘That's the Agathyrsi.'

Macrobius narrowed his eyes at them. ‘Some of this sounds familiar. What have you two been reading?'

‘It was yesterday afternoon, in the Latin Library,' Quintus replied.

‘When you were supposed to be researching the Battle of Adrianople.'

‘I found this volume by Ammianus Marcellinus,
Res Gestae,
“Things I have done”, written in the time of our grandfathers,' Quintus said. ‘It was the coolest book, way more interesting than those books on Adrianople. No disrespect, but the Greeks who wrote them didn't seem to know much about battle, whereas Ammianus was the real deal.
And
he wrote in Latin.'

Macrobius grunted. ‘Ammianus was a real soldier, I'll give you that, unlike the so-called historians of our time, monks and pen-pushers who've never raised a sword in anger in their lives.'

‘He wrote that he was in the
protectores domestici,
' Quintus said. ‘It was a unit modelled on the old Praetorian Guard, for protecting the emperor.'

‘That was early on in his career, a ceremonial posting for rich boys like half you lot. But then he went on to do some real soldiering, campaigning in Gaul and Persia under the emperors Constantius and Julian. He became the right-hand man of
magister militum
Ursicinus, the greatest general of modern times until Aetius. My own grandfather fought alongside Ursicanus' son Potentias at Adrianople,' Macrobius said gruffly, ‘standing astride his body after he had been felled and dragging it back to the Roman lines, an act that would have won him the
corona civica
had any officer been alive to see it. Ursicinus and Ammianus were both dismissed from the army after the Persians took Amida in Asia Minor. It was an impossible place to defend, but the emperor needed someone to blame, so he cashiered his best general and his most able lieutenant. Typical.' He glared again at the two boys. ‘Well? What else does Ammianus say?'

Quintus cleared his throat again. ‘I didn't have time to get any further on the Huns, but I did see where he said that no wild beasts are more deadly to humans than Christians are to each other.'

Macrobius glanced up at Flavius on the balcony, and then leaned forward with a hand on one knee, his voice lowered. ‘In this man's army, whatever god, whatever idol gets you through the night, whatever steels you before a battle, is yours to worship, no questions asked. But outside the four walls of this
schola,
be on your guard. Repeat anything like you've just said, and you'll be in trouble. I'm amazed the monks who run the libraries haven't spotted it and put Ammianus on the scrap pile. The bishop of Rome now thinks he's God himself, and has spies everywhere.'

Quintius nodded thoughtfully, and then put his hand up again, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Ammianus also says that beyond the land of the Huns is the tribe of the Geloni, who flay the enemies they've slain in battle and make clothes out of the skin for themselves and their horses.'

‘I've heard that,' another of the boys said. ‘My old riding master had been taught by a Scythian horseman who'd actually seen it. He said the Geloni prefer to flay a man before he's dead, because then the skin is still alive and when you put it on it clings to you like a glove, and fits perfectly. Saves paying for a tailor, doesn't it?'

‘That's sick,' another of the boys said.

Marcus Cato stood forward, his eyes gleaming. ‘Quintus, do you remember that last passage from Ammianus that you read out to me in the library? About the anthropophagi and the Amazons?' He turned to the group. ‘The anthropophagi live beyond the Geloni near the land called Thina, and they eat only human flesh. The Amazons, well, we all know about them from the Taverna Amazonica down by the Tiber, where the whores dress up as Amazons. They fight naked except for a loincloth, and are always hungry for men. They give a special discount for cadets from the
schola.
'

The other boy who had spoken sneered at him. ‘You mean they give
you
a special discount, Marcus Cato, because you always finish your business before they even have a chance to touch you. You wouldn't know how to pleasure a she-goat, let alone a woman.'

‘I'd have a crack at real-life Amazons any day,' another said assertively. ‘If they're hungry for man flesh, I'll show them what a real Roman is made of.'

‘Real Roman, or real Goth?' another said. ‘You should remember your lineage, Julius Acer. And last I heard, real Goths only get it up when they're chasing a retreating army of bare-arsed eunuchs.'

‘Watch what you say,' an older
optio
growled. ‘Half of us here are Goths and combat veterans, and we know what it's like to spill blood on the field. If you want a demonstration, you can bare your arse to us on the Field of Mars after the
schola.
That is, if you're not too busy being chased by Amazons.'

‘Enough,' Macrobius bellowed, barely suppressing a smile. ‘Save it for the exercise ground. As for flesh-eaters and skin-flayers, I can't vouch for that. But I can vouch for Amazons. And you wouldn't be taking a crack at them, Julius Acer, they'd be taking a crack at you.' He turned and carefully picked up an object from the table, a blackened, congealed mass that looked like a coil of long-dead snakes. ‘Anyone recognize this?'

Quintus stepped forward, peering. ‘It's a whip. A very old whip.'

‘Good.' Macrobius stood with his legs apart, showing the object around so the others could see. ‘It is said that this war whip was carried by a Scythian princess who fought alongside Scipio Aemilianus at the siege of Carthage, and that her use of it broke the will of the Carthaginian Sacred Band. For almost six hundred years it passed down through the generations of the Scipio family, and now it's one of the prized possessions of the
schola
armoury. The princess had ridden with the Berber tribesmen in the desert, and had learned from them how to embed razor-sharp slivers of obsidian near the tip of the whip, as you can see here. She left it with Scipio when she returned to her people, but she took the idea with her and ever afterwards the warriors of her tribe have been armed with steel-tipped whips. She never married, but her son, said to have been fathered by a Gaulish prince who had also been with Scipio at Carthage, became the first great warrior king of the people who were to call themselves the Huns, the ancestor of Mundiuk and Attila.'

The cadets stared silently at the whip, their banter forgotten. ‘So these will be used against us in battle?' Quintus said, reaching over and touching one of the obsidian blades, drawing a drop of blood.

‘I myself have only seen them at a distance, when a Hun unit joined the flank of the Ostrogoth line before Aquileia, the first action of my
numerus
after we returned from Carthage,' Macrobius said, puffing his chest out. ‘All we could see was a silvery shimmer above the heads of our soldiers caused by the polished steel blades reflecting in the sun, but it was enough to put the fear of God into some of the
foederati
among our line who had seen the Huns ravage their homelands. Those closer to the action said that while the front rank of the Huns engaged our troops with swords, the next rank used whips to draw forward our men in the second row, lassoing them around the neck and dragging them into the melee, throwing our front line off balance. The Huns then leapt forward and finished them off with the sword, except for those, that is, who had already had their throats cut or been decapitated by the blades on the whips.'

‘Can the whips be parried?' Marcus Cato asked, his voice wavering.

Macrobius snorted. ‘They come as fast as a scorpion's tail, too fast to see. All you can do is pray to whichever god tickles your fancy that you are not the one chosen, and try to press forward to within thrusting range. But they are skilled at using the whips at close range too, cracking them high in the air so that the tip coils round viciously at neck level, slicing into our soldiers even when they are on top of them.'

He picked up the second weapon on the table, a bow, and held it out to show the cadets. ‘Some of you may rue the day that you first saw one of these. This is a Hun bow, taken from a Goth by the men of my
numerus
in a skirmish in the northern forests of Gaul eight years ago. It's composite, made from three different elements laminated together. The inner surface is a wood said to come from a stunted tree of the steppes, and the outer surface a wood the barbarians call
iwa
or
yew
and we call
baccata,
a strong and flexible evergreen. In between these is a continuous length of ivory said to come from the tusks of long-dead elephants of gigantic proportions found by the Huns along the edge of the Frozen Lake to the north. Because only the Huns know the source of the tusks, it's impossible for our
fabri
to replicate the laminate. These three elements give the bow its incredible strength.'

To make his point he placed the bow between the ground and the edge of the table and then leapt on it, an action that would have snapped a normal Roman bow but that left him bouncing off and the bow intact. Marcus Cato stooped over and picked it up, handing it back. ‘Why the strange shape?' he asked, pointing at the asymmetry of the bow, the upper recurve larger than the lower and the grip placed below the centre and at an angle.

Macrobius straightened up and took the bow. ‘It allows you to shoot an arrow at a greater initial velocity than you can with our bows, if you have the strength to hold the grip at that angle and take the strain it puts on the wrist and forearm. Our archers find these bows almost impossible to use without months of practice. Our bows have the edge over Hun bows in their maximum range, as it makes them better suited to lobbing arrows high and dropping them into an enemy formation, but the Hun arrow with its heavily weighted iron tip flies faster and on a level trajectory for a greater distance, perfectly suited to the Hun mounted archers who ride to within fifty paces before loosing at their enemy.'

He picked up another bow, a more orthodox shape bearing the numerical mark of one of the
sagittarii
units stationed in the city, strung an arrow and aimed at a post that the slaves had placed in the centre of the
palaestra
with a thick slab of wood attached to it about head height as a target. He pulled back as far as he could and then released, the arrow flying forward and embedding itself in the board up to the end of the tip. He put it down, picked up the Hun bow and another arrow, this one shorter, strung it and clenched his teeth as he pulled back, the muscles and veins in his arms taut with the effort. With a grunt he loosed the arrow and it shot forward, just hitting the corner of the target but driving right through it up to the feathers, the wood split and the arrow quivering on the far side.

He put the bow down, rubbed his right bicep and turned to the cadets, his face set like stone. ‘I'll tell you what else Ammianus Marcellinus had to say about the Huns. He said they charge at huge speed, on horseback or on foot, bellowing and ululating and making a throat chant to terrorize their enemy, who fall back in disarray; they are then broken into smaller clusters by the Hun cavalry, who ride round and round each cluster in turn, finishing them off with their arrows. Even against an unbroken line their foot archers and infantry inflict terrific casualties with bone- and iron-tipped arrows, and with lassos. At close quarters they fight on horseback and on foot with the sword, not shying away from using their hands and even their teeth to finish off those who have survived the onslaught. Ammianus, a veteran of war against the Gauls and the Goths and the Persians, said that of the barbarians he had encountered, the Huns were the most terrible of all warriors.'