The Sword of Attila (29 page)

Flavius turned to him, but did not even need to ask. Aetius pointed south: ‘Go.' Flavius shouted to Macrobius, who had gone back to the
sagittarii,
‘Centurion, follow me.' He sheathed his sword and began to run, followed by Macrobius and the other men of the
numerus,
Apsachos and Maximus coming hard behind, weaving and jumping over the corpses that lay strewn on the battlefield, leaping over the blood-filled stream just below the ridge and making their way as fast as they could towards the fighting. Flavius could pick out individual Visigoths coming up from the river bank, surging forward behind their chieftains to join the fray, shrieking and bellowing as they reached the swirling clash of arms in the centre; the Gepids were holding a line and resisting each Visigoth attempt to break through and separate them, to make it easier to overwhelm and kill them. Two hundred paces further on, with the bodies piled up ever higher, Flavius drew his
gladius
and yelled as he ran, leading Macrobius and the others through the outer Gepid line and towards the melee in the centre of the fight.

Flavius slashed and thrust, catching one man in the throat and slipping with him on the bloody ground, jumping back to his feet just as a flight of arrows from the Visigoth archers thudded into the line of Gepids to his left. He was running to the place where he knew that Theodoric was most likely to be leading his men forward, and then he saw something that made him stop in his tracks. The Gepids were close kin to the Ostrogoths, but were smaller, stockier, and used shorter swords; the men that Flavius saw ahead were not Gepids but Ostrogoths, taller and more muscular than the men around them. Aetius had done his best to keep the Visigoths from fighting their Ostrogoth cousins, but somehow it seemed that an Ostrogoth unit had become incorporated into the Gepid force.

As he got closer he realized that it was more than that. Several of the men wore embellished helmets and Hun segmented armour. These were not Ostrogoths separated from Ardaric's army that the
comitatenses
had faced on the ridge to the north – they were from Attila's own bodyguard, an elite unit, perhaps the best troops at his disposal. For these men not to be guarding Attila now was extraordinary; they must be on a mission of great significance, under orders from Attila himself. Flavius realized that Attila may have had the last play in the battle after all: once he knew his own Hun forces had been defeated and Aetius was inviolable on the ridge, he would have been bent solely on trying to kill Theodoric and would have committed his best resources to this one last act.

Flavius' mind raced as he lurched forward, slipping on blood and stumbling over bodies as he searched for the Visigoth king. He remembered what Aetius had said about the power vacuum after the battle, about the uneasy alliance between Romans and Visigoths. Attila had known of that too; the king they had seen in the laager bellowing above his funeral pyre was a master strategist as well, not just a warlord. Flavius realized that Attila's melodrama on the pyre after the failure of his archers had been a distraction to keep their eyes off the Visigoths, off the dispatch of his elite bodyguard into the fray. By ordering his bodyguards to kill Theodoric, Attila may have been trying to secure a lifeline, knowing that Aetius might think twice about allowing the Visigoths under an ambitious new prince to pursue and destroy the surviving Huns and create a momentum of their own, potentially turning back against their Roman allies and Aetius himself.

Macrobius came up alongside him, panting and dripping with blood. He pointed with his sword. ‘That's Andag. I remember him from Attila's bodyguard at the citadel.'

Flavius stared at the hulking form about twenty paces in front of them standing beside a pile of Visigoth bodies and goading others to try him on. A huge ball-and-chain mace hung from his left hand, the ball covered with vicious spikes. The Visigoths had fought around him as they pushed the Gepid line back, leaving plenty of room as he swung the mace provocatively. The reason he was standing his ground and not flailing into the advancing Visigoths lay on the ground in front of him: it was a crushed hunting horn. He was like a predator with a kill, standing over the body of his victim, making sure that his enemy saw that he had been victorious. The Visigoths were a hundred paces and more beyond him now, pushing the Gepids back down the slope, but still Andag stood there, glaring and circling. Flavius gripped his sword, walking forward.

Macrobius came after him. ‘He is isolated now and cannot survive. We need just wait and he will be brought down by an arrow.'

Flavius shook his head. ‘Thorismud and his brother are nowhere to be seen. The other chieftains are dead or are leading their men on the flanks. I am the one who must take vengeance.'

A cry came from behind them, and Flavius turned to see Maximus encircled by a group of Gepids who had turned back from their retreating line for a final fling at the enemy. Apsachos had been searching for arrows to fill his empty quiver, but drew his sword and ran to help, Macrobius and the others following close behind. Flavius turned from them and went forward until he was only a few paces from Andag, separated only by a platform of exposed rock and surrounded by Gepid and Visigoth corpses. He saw the horn again, and then in front of the mass of mangled bodies in a pool of blood he saw a sword with a golden hilt that he recognized from the night before, when Theodoric had come and stood with him beside the river bank.

Andag was a monster of a man, two full paces at least in height, and he had stripped off his armour to reveal a barrel chest and shoulders and biceps as big as any Flavius had ever seen. He suddenly heaved up his ball and chain and brought it down with sickening force on the head of one of the corpses sticking out of the pile, mashing it into a bloody pulp and then raising the mace and swinging it round his head, the fragments of skull and gore that had been caught on the spikes flying off around him. He let the mace down and stared at Flavius, panting and slavering like a dog. ‘The king is dead,' he sneered, his Latin thick with a Gothic accent. ‘Long live the emperor.'

‘Your emperor is trapped in his laager, ready to light his own funeral pyre,' Flavius said. ‘His mounted archers have been destroyed by our
sagittarii
on the ridge. Beyond that, the Ostrogoths have been vanquished by the
comitatenses,
and you can see what has happened to the Gepids. We are all that is left, Andag. You and I
are
the battle.'

‘Then why do you confront me? Why do you not let me be finished off by one of your archers, or leave me to skulk away and disappear?'

Flavius replied in the Goth tongue. ‘Because I know you are no coward. Because you will stand over your trophy until you are challenged. And because he was my king, and I will have vengeance.'

He gripped his
gladius
and leapt forward, avoiding a slippery slick of blood that had pooled on the rock, and thrust hard into Andag's abdomen, feeling the muscles grip the blade as he slid it in up to the hilt. Andag had been caught off guard by the speed of his attack, and bellowed with rage and surprise, bringing up his mace and swiping it across the old scars on Flavius' forearm. Andag fell back, staggering, the
gladius
pulling free as he did so and the wound in his abdomen welling up with blood. Flavius knew that his thrust had missed the spine and would not be enough to fell Andag immediately, and he stood tensed and ready, his sword dripping in front of him. He remembered his first kill all those years before, the Alan in front of the walls of Carthage, the point of vulnerability that Arturus had taught him to anticipate. Andag was visibly weakening now, his abdomen and legs glistening with blood from his wound, but he swung the mace behind him and suddenly bounded forward, his torso and neck exposed just as the Alan's had been. This time it was Flavius who was caught off guard by the speed of the assault, unable to do anything except throw himself forward and hold out his sword with both hands at arms' length, locking it into his body so that he became a human spear. He felt the crunch as the sword drove into Andag's forehead, the huge man unable to stop himself because of the momentum of his arms, the mace flying out of his hands and whirling away over Flavius' head.

The two men slipped together on the pool of blood and Andag crashed into Flavius, the huge body knocking the wind out of him and snapping his head backwards. In the split second as he struggled with consciousness he knew that it was not the absence of Attila's great sword that had won this battle, but sheer force of arms, the brutal struggle of men in individual combat, fighting for their lives as he and Andag had just done.

Then he saw nothing but blackness.

Flavius recovered consciousness face down in a puddle of gore, the blood having pooled on the hard ground and trickled under his head and body. With one eye open he could see the rivulet of blood feeding the pool from the pile of corpses beyond, their wounds drained and open: partly severed heads, gaping slices through limbs and torsos, dark holes where bowels had spilled out and lay glistening in lurid cascades over the bodies beneath. He tried to move, but his body seemed paralysed, a feeling he had not had since being tackled by his Goth cousins while playing their ball game as a boy. Then he remembered Andag, the brutal body-blow as he had thrust his sword forward, the funnel of Visigoths who had run up screaming to support Theodoric, the bellowing and chanting of the Huns, the last lunges of the stricken king. He tried to move again, and felt his knees bend, and then his arms. As he did so he saw an arm lying out from the pile, half-submerged in blood, the attached torso pulverized beyond recognition and the head a mess of bloody hair and bone and brains. He kept the hand in his sight as he slowly raised himself to his knees, and then he saw it: the gold ring, unmistakably, on the index finger.
It was Theodoric.

He stared, his mind reeling. He could see the letters engraved on it: HEVA. He remembered the feast in the great hall in the forest when Theodoric had shown it to him, the heady laughter and tales of derring-do in battle, their intoxication from honey liqueur and wine and the meat from the hunt. Theodoric had explained the meaning of the letters:
Hic est victoriae anulus. Here is the ring of victory.
Flavius looked around, seeing the blood beginning to congeal, the flies already settling on the eyes and mouths of the corpses. If this truly was victory, then Theodoric had secured his place in the great mead hall in the sky. Flavius saw the king's short sword poking out of the gore, and the longer one impaled in a Hun warrior a little further away. He pulled the torn chainmail on the forearm up over the hand, concealing the ring from any scavengers, and drew the sword hilt down and clasped the lifeless fingers around it. He would find Thorismud and his brother and bring them to this place, and the ring would prove that the mangled corpse was their father. And they would see that he had died sword in hand, facing the enemy, in the bloodiest battle that had ever been fought in the name of their kingdom and of Rome.

He slowly raised himself to his feet, seeing the fresh wound on his forearm across the four white scars where the Alaunt had torn into him all those years ago before the walls of Carthage. He remembered the raging thirst he had felt after that battle, and he felt it again now, only this time it was as if his soul itself needed replenishing. He took a few hesitant steps forward, swaying on his feet, and then saw the colossal form of Andag lying contorted among the corpses just ahead of the pool. The weight of Andag's own body as he had slipped in the blood and fallen on Flavius' sword had driven the blade through the back of his neck and out of his forehead, and yet he had lived on for a few tormented moments, somehow heaving himself up and staggering back before falling, his hands clasped against the sides of his head and his eyes wide open and distorted with horror.

Flavius put one foot on Andag's head, reached down and pulled out the
gladius,
holding it unsteadily and looking around in case any more of Attila's warriors were ready to spring up and attack him. But the only living forms he could see on the battlefield were dazed Roman
milites
and Visigoths wandering among the piles of corpses, occasionally reaching down to check a fallen comrade, sometimes delivering a sword or spear thrust to end the agony of a friend or dispatch an enemy. Macrobius was there, and behind him Flavius could make out half a dozen men of the old
numerus
; Astragos the Sarmatian was supporting Maximus, his head wrapped in bloody fabric. Macrobius had removed his felt hat, and he looked old, his hair white and his face etched with lines, but as he came closer he seemed the timeless image of a Roman warrior. Flavius held up his arm and the two men clasped hands, the survivors of the
numerus
gathering around them. For once, there were no quips, no attempts at battle humour. They were all exhausted and caked in blood, and the scale of the carnage seemed to leave even Macrobius dumbstruck.

‘I need to find Thorismud,' Flavius said, his voice hoarse. ‘His father lies slain beneath that pile of corpses.'

Macrobius pointed to a cluster of men and horses over a fold in the ground to the west. ‘He is conferring with Aetius. Thorismud wishes to pursue Attila, but Aetius is warning against it. Attila is a spent force, and Thorismud as the Visigoths' new king needs to secure his throne in Tolosa before he sets off on campaign again.'

‘I will go to him. Before that, we need to find water for our men.'

‘The stream through the battlefield runs red with blood. The nearest source is the river above the point where the stream flows into it, about two
stades
to the west. We will need to leave now to reach there before sundown.'

Flavius rested his hand on Macrobius' shoulder. ‘Make it so, centurion. The last great battle of Rome is over. We have done our duty and upheld our honour. Now is the time to look after our men.'