The Sword of Attila (8 page)

Flavius heaved the body aside, put his foot on the chest and pulled out his sword. Macrobius had picked up the bow and quiver from the dead archer behind them and was shooting as fast as he could over the parapet. The Vandals had broken through the carnage caused by the fireballs and were seconds away now. Flavius looked left and right along the trench, seeing only corpses. Macrobius loosed the last of his arrows, grabbed his sword where he had driven it into the ground and pulled Flavius around. ‘They are all dead or gone,' he bellowed. ‘You have done your duty. Now we must join the survivors.' He dragged Flavius down into the trench and up the other side, towards the waiting artillerymen. As he did so Flavius saw that the Sarmatian lying closest to them was still alive, his mouth moving and his hand gesturing. Flavius dropped his sword and pulled him onto his back, but as he did so an arrow flew through the man's neck and head, spraying Flavius with blood and pitching them both forward. Macrobius wrenched them apart, the man's eyes now wide open in death, and together the two men stumbled over the ditch just as the artillerymen dropped their tapers into it and the naphtha erupted in a wall of flame.

Flavius halted for a moment, stooping down and panting hard, feeling the heat on his back, conscious of Macrobius and Arturus rounding up the artillerymen and pushing them forward, seeing other survivors from the
numerus
running ahead past the burning
onagers
over the open ground to the east.
Good. He would be the last man to leave.
He had upheld his honour, his word to his uncle Aetius a few weeks before in Rome, and had not abandoned his men. He stared at the blood dripping down his forearm, seeing his engorged veins, feeling his heart pounding. He had felt something else, not just pain and fear, but a huge sense of exaltation. He had killed a man in battle for the first time. In that moment he knew what the Greeks meant by
kharme,
battle lust, and why men yearned for it.
It felt good.

Macrobius was in front of him, yelling. ‘Come on, tribune. To the walls of Carthage. We must run for our lives.'

Half an hour later Flavius sat among his men just inside the east gate of the city wall, the great wooden doors having been opened for them by the squad of sentries from the garrison who had sworn to remain on duty until they were all safely inside. He had watched the sentries bar the gate and then retreat down the streets towards the harbour to join the other rear guard of the garrison, waiting on the quayside to be taken off by the last remaining galleys. The suburb around them seemed deserted, but Flavius knew that the people of Carthage were cowering inside their houses – those who had believed the assurances of the traitor Bonifatius that civilians who stayed would not be harmed nor would they have their property damaged, that city officials would be promised a place in the new administration under Gaiseric and his council of chieftains. It was not an assurance that had been extended to the
milites
of the garrison, nor one that would have been believed if it had. Their token display of resistance from the trench had inflicted enough casualties to stoke the Vandal's rage, extinguishing any slight chance of mercy that they might once have had. Their only chance of survival was to get out of Carthage, and to get out now.

Flavius lifted one of the skins that had been left for them by the sentries and let the water pour down his throat, swallowing great gulps and letting it splash over his face. He passed it back to the man who had handed it to him, and then looked around. Macrobius had given him the butcher's bill, but he could count well enough for himself. They had lost two more men during the retreat to the walls, one to a marauding Alaunt and the other to his wounds, collapsing dead as he was being helped along. Of the original
numerus
of eighty men, only sixteen survived.
Sixteen men.
Flavius had thought his command puny to begin with, but this was beyond a joke. And yet they were the remaining army of Africa, the last soldiers from the force that centuries ago had smashed its way up these slopes to claim Carthage as its own, and he was still their commander. Every one of them bore the scars of the onslaught, some of them gaping bite wounds from the Alaunt and others crushed and ripped flesh where they had endured blows from the clubs of the Alans; Flavius' own scars of battle, the four parallel gashes from the dog's claws along his forearm, were beginning to swell up and throb painfully.

The Sarmatian archer Apsachos rolled over, raised his right leg and peered at the shredded flesh of his calf. ‘That was a dog's breakfast, sir, if you ask me.'

The man beside him guffawed, and then grimaced in pain, clutching a red patch that was seeping through the chainmail on his right side. ‘You crack me up, Apsachos. If I wasn't holding my innards in, I'd give you a belly laugh.'

‘Let 'em out, and let's see if you've really got guts. I didn't see you showing any back there.'

‘That's because you were too busy waving your arse at the enemy as you were trying to escape, while I was taking on an Alan single-handed.'

‘The only one I saw do that was your tribune, Flavius Aetius,' Macrobius said, squatting down among the men. ‘But everyone showed guts here, as did our comrades who are now with God. And Apsachos, if you were as quick with the latrine-digging as you are with your quips, I'd get you the
corona civilis
with olive-leaf garlands.'

‘Decorations for this action, centurion? A failed rear-guard stand in a failed campaign, Rome's finest running away with their tails between their legs after abandoning Carthage, the jewel of the empire? I think this is one that our beloved generals eating their grapes and saying their prayers in Ravenna and Milan would rather forget.'

Macrobius peeled back the mangled chainmail on his left arm, revealing a broken Vandal arrow deeply embedded in his shoulder. ‘We've all got our decorations, Apsachos, decorations that will stay with us on our bodies to remind us of this day and our comrades who fell here. That's all that matters. The generals with their heads in the clouds and the bishops to lead them can go to hell. And now drink up that second skin that the guards left us. I can hear the Alaunt baying at the gates. If we don't go now, we'll be the dogs' lunch as well.'

Flavius helped the last wounded man up and supported him as they trudged east through Carthage towards the harbours, following the route that Arturus had taken ahead of them to find his Nubians and retrieve his saddlebag. The city would not withstand the Vandals for long; as soon as they realized that the walls were undefended they would use grappling hooks to scale them and then open the gates for the others to follow. Flavius could sense their presence outside, a vast, restless force surging against the city, waiting for their forward scouts to reconnoitre the walls and give the signal for the final assault. He tried to quicken the pace, and after twenty minutes they had put the eastern wall a good quarter of a mile behind them. Near the sea front they passed the vast structure of the imperial baths, breaking the line of the sea walls. Ahead of them lay the famous land-locked harbours, built seven hundred years before by the Punic Carthaginians against the threat of Roman naval attack, a threat that became real when Scipio Aemilianus landed his forces from the sea and razed the city to the ground. The harbours were in sight now, rebuilt at the time of Julius Caesar, and after another twenty minutes, during which they passed villas and tenement blocks, they came to the edge of the complex just before the eastern promontory where the city jutted out into the Mediterranean Sea.

The streets had been eerily quiet, almost devoid of people, but he could see a few dozen figures on the far side of the quay in front of the prow of a galley, the last ship afloat in the harbours. As they came closer he spotted Arturus in his cassock with the two Nubians and his mule, and beside them the white-bearded captain who had agreed to remain behind to pick up any survivors. Flavius hurried forward to the man, clapped his hand on his shoulder and spoke to him in Greek. ‘We are only sixteen in number. There are no more. Thank you for waiting,
kyberbetes.
'

‘No need to thank me, Flavius Aetius. Remember, I too was once a tribune in my youth, the commander of a
liburnian
in the Adriatic fleet, the
classis Adriaticus.
Even now as a civilian I would never leave behind fellow warriors of Rome. You and your men have
virtus,
unlike those members of the garrison who have already fled.'

‘When can we board?'

‘Very soon. We are loading the last of the silver and gold plate of the Bishop of Carthage. It is by express order of the emperor's
primicerius sacri cubiculi,
Heraclius.'

‘That eunuch? The emperor's wet nurse?' Macrobius had joined them, and leaned over and spat. ‘Better you truss him on board and then dump him out at sea.'

‘Treasure before men,' another of the
numerus
grumbled. ‘It's always been the way.'

The captain looked apologetically at Macrobius. ‘You know the score, centurion. If I show up at Ostia with no treasure and only soldiers, Heraclius' Goth thugs will drag me off to the Mamertine Prison in Rome and flay me alive. If I show up with treasure
and
soldiers, all should be well.'

‘Best for Heraclius that you show up with treasure but no soldiers,' Macrobius said. ‘Then that snivelling toad might live another day. I've got time for Valentinian, but his eunuchs can go and piss in hell.'

Flavius looked at the captain. ‘You have ten minutes, no more. The Vandals will have broken through and be here within the hour.'

‘Ave
, tribune.' The captain turned to where his crew were manhandling boxes and crates up the gangplank onto the galley, a wide-beamed single-decker with spaces for thirty oarsmen and the men of the
numerus,
if they could fit among the crates on the narrow deck that ran above the spine of the hull between the benches. The vessel was docked on the edge of the rectangular harbour opposite the eastern channel that led out to sea, their escape route. On the other side of the quay was the land-locked circular harbour, once home of the war galleys of the Carthaginians and then the headquarters of the Roman grain fleet. Drawn up against the edge of the harbour were the remains of four Roman war galleys, their bottoms staved in and their oars smashed. Flavius glanced at Arturus. ‘At least once we're at sea the Vandals won't be following us in a hurry.'

Arturus tied up his saddlebag and then looked at the harbour. ‘Don't count on it. There's a myth that because the Goths failed to cross the Bosporus at Constantinople after the Battle of Adrianople sixty years ago, the sea is the barbarians' Achilles' heel. But they were inexperienced in the ways of the Mediterranean then, and more intent on going west than east. When they reached the southern tip of Greece and then Italy in their great migration, it was not so much ignorance of the sea that prevented them from going further south as the fact that they could see no point in it; they wanted land, not to become pirates. Gaiseric is different. He understands that the sea is not a barrier but a route, that the Mediterranean is a battleground that any barbarian intent on Rome ignores at his peril. Among the mercenaries from Britain who stayed with Gaiseric after I left his service was a former artificer of the channel fleet, the
classis Britannica,
who knew how to build the flat-bottomed boats favoured by the sea peoples of the North-West. It was boats of that design that allowed Gaiseric to cross between the Pillars of Hercules, between Spain and Africa. And you can be sure that once he and his Vandals take the harbours of Carthage they will quickly assert themselves on the Mediterranean. Raiders on land will become raiders by sea. Remember, I know these barbarians. I have seen them with my own eyes, I have fought alongside them, in the mountains and plains of the north, in the forests, on the steppe-lands many
stades
to the east far beyond the reach of Rome.'

Flavius eyed him. ‘You have travelled far, Arturus.'

‘I have been to dark places.'

Arturus turned to the Nubians, delved into his cassock and gave each man a small pouch of coins, and then stroked the mule's nose, reaching up and whispering into its ear. He slapped its haunch and raised his hand in farewell as the mule trotted behind the two Nubians away from the harbour and towards the eastern gate of the city.

‘Where will they go?' Flavius asked.

‘Some place where men like them are not enslaved by men like us,' Arturus said. ‘I have advised them to travel east beside the great desert to Egypt, and then south along the course of the river Nile to the kingdom of Aksum. It is the first Christian kingdom in the world, founded even before Constantine the Great had his revelation and converted the Roman Empire. If they reach Aksum safely, they may find sanctuary and freedom.'

‘And you? Why do you not join them?'

Arturus heaved the saddlebag onto his shoulder. ‘Because I swore an oath that I would take these works of Augustine to safety in Italy.'

‘Are they for the libraries of Rome? There at least the monks of the
scriptoria
will preserve them as the word of God, and not deface and destroy them as they are doing to so many of the great works of the pagan past.'

‘I will tell you once we are on the ship. We must go now.'

The captain of the galley beckoned them forward urgently. A fat cleric pushed ahead, a bishop to judge by his robes, dragging a sack that clunked with precious church metal in one hand and with the other pulling along a slave girl by her neck. She was tall, an African, but unusual, with curly black hair and bruised cheeks, and as she was hauled by she gave Flavius an unfathomable look. He had seen enough battered slave girls in his time to think he was immune to feeling any emotion, but the sight of this girl being dragged along by a sweaty cleric with his bag of loot repulsed him. He knew it was the last thing that should concern him now, and he tried to put it from his mind as Arturus mounted the gangplank and went on board. Flavius waited until the last of his men had followed, and then stepped up the plank after Macrobius. He thought for a moment, then turned and ran back past the sailor who was unlashing the plank from the quayside, squatted and pressed his hand against the old Punic stone of Carthage for the last time. As he looked down he saw something in a crack between the blocks, a corroded silver coin, and prised it out, seeing the head of a goddess on one side. He flipped it over, staring at it, and then shoved it into the pouch on his belt. He turned and ran back up the gangplank, jumping onto the galley deck just before the men began to haul the plank on board, then looked back to see only the discarded water skins and food peelings that were the last residue of the Roman army on the shores of North Africa.