The Scourge of God

Theodoric and the Visigoths have joined the alliance against Attila, and even as we speak they are riding with Aetius to the relief of Aurelia. They are just days, perhaps hours, away. That is why you hear the drums, because the Huns are panicking and wish to conquer us before reinforcement arrives. They will fight desperately to get inside these walls, but they will not succeed because you cannot allow them to succeed. You need only fight and win for a little while, and then deliverance will be at hand.” Now the assembly in the church was stirring and whispering, realizing that in an instant the entire complexion of the war had changed. Without Theodoric any resistance was desperate. With him, there was a chance to defeat Attila’s entire horde.

“Can you fail?” Anianus asked in a whisper.

“No!” they roared.

And then the bells and trumpets began sounding the alarm as the barbarian horns rang out from beyond the walls.

The great attack was beginning.

The Huns had outridden their best mercenary engineers and couldn’t make a proper siege. What they did have were arrows, ladders, and an abundance of courage.

They attacked Aurelia from all sides but the river, a wild rush designed to stretch the defenders thin. As the scale of the attack became apparent, it was necessary for nearly every inhabitant of the city-from unarmored women to children as young as ten-to join the men on the ramparts and hurl down stones, tiles, and cobbles. The air was thick with flying shafts, each side shooting back some of the arrows shot at them; and there was an ominous humming in the air like the sound from a hornet’s nest. Scurrying priests and nuns gathered spent Hun shafts in baskets to carry back to their city’s own archers; and occasionally a plunging arrow would catch one of the clergy in the crown of the head, plunging with such force that its point would jut through the lower jaw and sew the mouth shut so tightly that the dying couldn’t scream. He fell, but another priest picked up his burden.

As the missiles flew, the barbarians surged, boling, across the ground outside the city, hundreds struck by the defenders’ salvos but thousands more bunching at the base of the walls. Pots of oil and boiling water, poured from the ramparts, cut swathes of fire and pain in the ranks. Plunging stones snapped limbs and shattered helmets. Yet all this seemed a dent. There were simply too many Huns. Scaling ladders soared skyward like an uncurling fist of claws. Hun archery began in earnest, each volley of arrows timed to follow the last so that it was impossible for the Alans to poke their heads above the protective stone crenellation without being killed. At the same time, attackers swarmed up the ramparts. So the Alans crouched and pitched rocks over the lip of the wall blindly, waiting for that cease in the hiss of arrows that would signal when the first Huns reached the top. Then a great shout went up, and they rose in their iron and leather to clash with the snarling attackers, wrestling on the lip of wall. Here a ladder was overthrown, there the Huns gained a toehold; and desperate battle raged back and forth on the parapet.

The ferocity of the fight made the combat in the lonely tower of Noricum seem leisurely in comparison. Here was battle of an entirely new scale-men swinging, chopping, and biting like animals because even a moment’s pause meant instant death. Some of those wrestling toppled off the wall together, throttling each other as they fell; and if a defender somehow survived such a plunge the Huns waiting below dismembered him and hoisted his limbs as bloody trophies.

I’d borrowed armor to join the battle, now that my message had given hope. I felt more practiced at this grim craft now, rising after the arrow volleys to slash with sword and club with shield, sinking out of sight when more arrows came, and then rising once again. A misstep in this rhythm and I was dead. There was no courage to it because there was no time to be afraid. To lose meant death, so I did what all of us did, what we had to do. We fought.

Soon the parapet was littered with the fallen, defender and attacker alike, some groaning and some already still, festooned with arrows. Many of the dead were women and children, yet new ones constantly clambered up the steps on the city side to drag them aside and bring fresh stones, arrows, or pots of hot oil and grease. At the base of the wall many of Attila’s men were thrashing on the ground and twisting in agony from cruel burns or trying to crawl away on broken legs. The luckiest rocks we dropped struck the ladders themselves, snapping enough in two to seriously limit the routes the attackers could take. Yet to aim a rock was to invite a dozen arrows, and many a broken ladder was purchased at the price of a defender’s life.