The Sword of Attila (6 page)

The shadow of a smile passed across the monk's lips and he turned to Flavius. ‘In answer to your question, I've always favoured close-quarter fighting over the arm's-length tactics taught to Roman infantrymen these days. Using those long swords and thrusting spears in massed formation to repel a charging enemy is all very well as long as the enemy doesn't break through your lines, and anyway it's not the kind of fighting that's in my blood.'

‘Which is?' Flavius said, looking at the monk quizzically.

The man paused, looked down the line of soldiers and then lowered his sword, holding out his right hand. ‘Gaius Arturus Prasotagus, former commander of the
Cohortes Britannicus
of the
Comites Praenesta Gallica,
the field army of the North.'

Flavius looked the man in the eye, made his decision and then took his hand. ‘Flavius Aetius Secundus, tribune of the
protectores numerus
of the Twentieth Victrix legion, the forward scouts of the Carthage garrison.' He swept his hand along the trench. ‘These are my men.'

Flavius sensed Macrobius tense and saw him slide his hand down again to his sword hilt. ‘Wait a moment,' the centurion growled. ‘Wasn't that the unit that deserted in Gaul? That went over to the barbarians? That killed Romans?' There was a general movement among the soldiers, their eyes fixing suspiciously on the monk, weapons being drawn. Flavius held up his hand. ‘Let him have his say. And he is now a man of the cloth.'

‘Or pretends to be,' Macrobius muttered.

Arturus reached up and pulled down the cassock at his neck, revealing an old scar that ran from below his left ear across his neck to the opposite collar bone. ‘When I was six years old, the Saxons came across the sea and overran the shore fort where I lived, slaughtering my mother and sisters and cutting my throat, leaving me for dead. My father was the garrison commander.'

Flavius turned to the soldier behind him, a grizzled veteran even older than Macrobius who had been kept with the unit because of his skills as an archer. ‘You were there, weren't you, Sempronius, in Britannia at the end?'

The man lowered his bow, leaned over and spat. ‘I was there, all right. A teenage recruit with the
classis Britannicus,
the British fleet, manning the shore fort at Dover. We were the last to leave, having overseen the withdrawal of all the troops from the northern frontier and the other shore forts. There was no glory in it. It was not even a fighting retreat. We withdrew under cover of darkness, poling off our transport barges from the very place where Caesar had landed almost five hundred years before. Those were the days when Rome was led by strong men. We were led by that weakling emperor Honorius, who abandoned Britain and left the civilians to their fate.'

Arturus listened gravely to the man and then nodded. ‘If the garrison in Britain had been retained, things could have been very different. They wouldn't have been able to repel the Saxons, but they might have persuaded the Saxons to reach an accommodation, to accept a land grant as the Visigoths accepted it from the emperor in Aquitaine. Britain would still have been a province of the empire, and Saxons would have been sending their sons to Rome to be educated just as the Goths do now from Gaul. Instead, the emperors depleted the British garrison to fight their own wars of succession and to bolster their own bodyguard, weakening Britain and providing a tempting target for invasion. By the time of the final withdrawal the British garrison was little more than a skeleton force. Britain was lost not through barbarian pressure but because of the obsession of the emperors with their own security and the threat of usurpers.'

‘The emperor Valentinian is different,' Flavius said. ‘He will strengthen Rome again.'

‘Perhaps,' Arturus said. ‘But I don't see him out here standing behind a cross, leading his men against the greatest threat the empire has faced. Losing Africa with her revenue and grain would be a far greater loss than the sack of the city of Rome itself. Yet the emperor sits with his court in Milan, and all I see before me now is a young tribune, a centurion and sixty-odd men of a
limitanei numerus,
a pebble to hold back a raging torrent.'

‘That's us,' one of the men muttered. ‘The last-ditch
limitanei.'

‘Rome needs generals like Gaiseric,' Arturus asserted. ‘Men who are both kings and war leaders, men like Julius Caesar or Trajan of old. Without them, Rome may win battles, but she will never win wars. And the Vandals are not the worst of it. Behind their northern homeland, in the forests and on the steppes of the East, lies a greater force of darkness than anyone here could imagine, building up strength for a confrontation that will test the empire to its very limit.'

Flavius gestured at the weapon Arturus carried. ‘That sword? A legacy from the past?'

‘My father was left for dead too that day when I had my throat cut, the Saxon dead piled around him,' said Arturus. ‘I managed to crawl over to him and in his dying breath he gave me this sword. He had told me that as long as the sword was carried by a soldier who was descended from its original owner, Britain would resist invasion. I became the boy follower of a
comitatenses
unit, and then was adopted by the soldiers, and two years later, when I left Britain with them, I still had the sword with me. Its original owner was a soldier of the Ninth Legion who had been among the first to step ashore with the invasion force of the emperor Claudius, over three hundred and fifty years before.'

‘So you
are
a Roman,' Macrobius snarled. ‘That makes the crime of desertion even worse.'

‘What does it mean to be Roman?' Arturus said, looking around. ‘Who of you here is Roman, truly? Yes, you fight for a Roman army, against barbarians. But you are also Sarmatians, Goths, Illyrians. I have Roman ancestry, but my father's family were mainly from the British kingdom of the Iceni, my mother from the Brigantes. And after Honorius had forsaken us, we no longer called ourselves Roman. We called ourselves British.'

‘So why the cassock?' Flavius asked. ‘Why aren't you back in Britain, fighting the invaders? There are rumours of continuing resistance in the mountains in the west of the island.'

Arturus re-sheathed his sword and closed his cassock. He put his hands up to his face, sweeping them down his cheeks and over his beard, and remained still for a moment. Flavius saw for the first time how weather-beaten and filthy he was, and how tired he looked. He let his hands drop to the crude wooden cross that hung around his neck. Macrobius remained unmoved, his hand still resting on his sword pommel. Arturus raised the cross and kissed it, and then looked again at Flavius. ‘When I left Britain I was determined to return, to take up my father's sword against the Saxons. My mission for Bishop Augustine is not yet finished. I must take his books to a place of safety, to a monastery in Italy. But I will not flee Carthage without facing the enemy in battle. I offer my sword to you.'

‘You still have to tell us how to kill the Alans,' one of the men muttered.

Flavius looked at Arturus. They did not know the full story yet, the story of how he had come to leave his unit in Gaul, but there was little time for that now. ‘Your offer is accepted.'

Arturus nodded in acknowledgement, and then gave Flavius a steely look. ‘And now, if we are to fight for you, my men and our mule need water.'

Flavius watched Macrobius lead the group towards the watering hole, dropping down into the trench and leaping up the other side, his hand on his sword hilt, still clearly not giving Arturus the benefit of the doubt. He turned back towards the west, pondering what Arturus had said. He remembered as a boy in Rome being overawed by Augustine, the hell-raiser they had all wished to emulate, and being as perplexed as everyone else when he suddenly gave up wine and women for the cassock. Some came to see it as a strength, as evidence that he had the willpower to do away with worldly vices, but others viewed it as a weakness, as a sign that the cloth itself was a temptation that men of action should resist in order to do God's proper work on earth – leading the armies of Christ against the barbarian enemy.

Flavius cocked his ear. He was sure he had heard it again, the sound that had haunted him as he had lain there a few hours before, battling the cold, drifting in and out of consciousness, a sound from the west that had risen and undulated above the snoring and grunting around him. Noises had seemed louder, more acute, since he had drunk the infusion of the
catha
leaf that Macrobius had given him, and he wondered whether this was that same heightened awareness experienced by those who cannot sleep, whether his imagination and the memory of that sound in the night were playing tricks on him. And then he heard it again, and saw others stop what they were doing and listen, as a wave of tension seemed to rustle down the trench. It was a dog baying, and then others, echoing from one end of the western horizon to the other, the noise a lot closer now than it had been when he had heard it earlier. This was not just the yipping and howling of wild dogs – it was something different, more orchestrated, and it sent the same shiver down his spine that he had felt less than an hour before.

He tried to ignore it, and focused his mind on the tactical plan that he had worked up with Macrobius over the past two days. Everything depended on the men of the
numerus
keeping their nerve, and letting the enemy get as close as possible. Concealed among the hillocks behind the trench were five
onager
catapults loaded with fireballs, tensed and weighted so that the balls would burst on the sloping ground less than a hundred yards in front of the trench. They would only have time to fire once, and the artillerymen had doused the machines with naphtha to ensure that the fireballs, as they were lit, would ignite the catapults as well and prevent them from falling into enemy hands. A team of
fabri
from the Carthage garrison had also dug a ditch in front of the catapults and filled it with pots of naphtha, ready to pour out and ignite after the fireballs had exploded, to protect any surviving men of the
numerus
who had fallen back towards the walls of Carthage.

For a line defended by fewer than a hundred men it promised to be an extravagant show of force, more impressive than anything the Vandals would have encountered as the depleted garrisons of the western African shore had fallen one by one to their advance. But Flavius and Macrobius were under no illusions about its effectiveness. Once the Vandals realized the puny size of the force set against them, the momentary check caused by the fireballs would only redouble their fury, and the only chance for those of the
numerus
who could get back to the walls of Carthage would be to escape with the rest of the garrison by sea. But Flavius knew that putting up a planned defence was not merely a heroic gesture; what was at stake was the tattered remains of Roman military prestige. That had already taken a battering with the betrayal of the
comitatenses
commander in the West, and it would suffer a further blow if word spread to the other enemies of Rome that her army could not even be bothered to put up a token resistance against an assault on Carthage, a city whose conquest by Rome six hundred years before had launched the empire. Flavius felt that if he and Macrobius and every last man of the
numerus
fell taking a Vandal or an Alan warrior with him, then he would have upheld his pledge to his uncle Aetius when he was appointed as tribune always to maintain the honour of Rome and that of the soldiers under his command, to ensure that his actions were remembered by history not as the dying gasps of an army, but as a final act of valour and fury.

Macrobius had come upon to the parapet beside him and was listening to the eerie howling coming from the hills in front of them. ‘I've heard that sound before,' he growled. ‘It was while I was serving under your uncle on the Danube frontier twenty years ago, when the Vandals first came out of the forests.'

‘They're called the Alaunt,' Arturus said, coming up on the other side of Flavius. ‘Massive hunting and fighting dogs, trained solely to kill. Gaiseric keeps them leashed until the last moment, until their eyes are red and their mouths are foaming, and then he releases them along with the Alan warriors. When the howling turns to barking, that means they're coming.'

Flavius felt chilled to his core. Now he knew that the howling was a sound not of the desert, but of the northern forests, of a place where the dogs were really wolves and where those who had tamed them, the wolf-masters, came roaring with their charges out of the forest as one, bringing with them the darkness that had been sweeping over the western empire for more than fifty years now. He shut his eyes for a moment, trying to concentrate.
He must not lose his nerve.
He looked again, scanning the horizon, still seeing nothing. The howling had stopped, and had been replaced by a strange, unearthly silence, like the lull before a storm.

Arturus turned to him. ‘What is your plan?'

Flavius took a deep breath. ‘You'll have seen the catapults and the ditch with the naphtha pots beyond the watering hole. After the pyrotechnics it'll be a matter of archery and hand-to-hand combat. This ridge overlooks the road to the western gate of the city. It's the route that any attacker would try to force first. From our positions on higher ground we should be able to defend the defile long enough for any who still remain in Carthage and wish to flee to get to the harbour and embark on the last remaining galleys. When the time is right we will fall back to the city walls.'

Arturus looked back to the city walls. ‘Gaiseric will let his men rape and pillage to satisfy their need, but he will spare the lives of the leading citizens and offer them generous terms. He intends to settle in Carthage, and their tax revenue is his future wealth. But he will spare nobody bearing arms.'

‘You know much about Gaiseric,' Macrobius muttered.