The Scourge of God

Horns blew and Aetius halted his advance just downslope of the crest of the hard-won hill. Thousands of bodies marked its summit, some utterly still and others twitching and moaning as blood gushed out, their jutting and splintered bones jostled by reinforcements as our men dressed their ranks. The Romans killed those Ostrogoths they found who were still alive, even as the Ostrogoths took the few Romans they’d captured and gutted or dismembered them before our eyes. Here, where height gave the throw of Roman javelins a few yards’ advantage, we caught our breath.

And now the battle began in earnest.

If the ground had trembled before, now it shook-and it shook with violence reminiscent of the earthquakes that had toppled the walls of Constantinople a few years before. Survivors told us later that Attila had disdained lending his cavalry to help the Ostrogoths struggle for the ridge, because he thought the hillock insignificant in the context of great cavalry charges. He shouted to his warlords that the unmounted Romans were slugs who could be covered by dust and ignored, while the real battle would be decided by horsemen.

So with a shout he led the cream of his army at Sangibanus and his Alans in the center, vowing to ride down the king who had somehow failed to surrender Aurelia. If Attila cleaved through there, the battle would be over. The Huns rode with a high, wavering yip, firing sheets of arrows. I remembered Zerco’s early lesson in war by the Tisza River and wondered just when, if ever, these horsemen would run out of shafts-and whether it would be too late when they did. I also wondered if Aetius had been wise to bet his center on Sangibanus, because our general seemed in no hurry to envelop the Huns with his two wings. Until he did, the battle would ride on the Alans, Liticians, and Olibriones. We held our breaths as the Huns charged.

Our armies tried to slow them with missiles, our arrows fewer but our heavier artillery cutting wicked furrows in the oncoming assault with stones, ballista bolts, and flaming kettles of fire that tripped whole swathes of Huns. At the same time, the Alans were charging forward on their horses, many with their own deadly scores to settle with these eastern barbarians who had besieged their city and killed members of their families. The combined ranks were riddled with arrows as the space between the two cavalries closed, men sinking. With a few more volleys, perhaps the Huns could have cleared a gap for themselves and sliced our army in two. But even the steppe warriors could not fire fast enough; and their numbers were so huge that instead of simply being overwhelming, they were getting in the way of one another.

None of the nations assembled had experience controlling such an assembly. So at last the centers met, and that collision dwarfed what I had seen on the ridge, a slamming together not just of men but heavy horses. I hadn’t seen the western ocean yet, but I sensed this is what it must sound like, the boom of breakers against rock, as tens of thousands of horsemen plowed into one another. Horses neighed and screamed, lances and shields splintered, and some collisions were so violent that spear tips, helmets, armor fragments, or even pieces of bodies erupted into the air. The bits cart-wheeled lazily, seeming suspended for hours, before raining down.

All was then swirling confusion, but the Huns were not equipped for the kind of brutal close-quarters hacking that the bigger and more heavily armored Alans had adopted in the West. Hun ponies were eviscerated, running backward with dead riders entangled in their tack, dragging their own entrails. Light lamellar and leather armor were punctured and shredded under the assault of hard Alan steel. Horsetail banners that had not fallen for generations toppled. Whole clans of Huns were trampled under in the desperate center, their long family sagas snuffed out in a few anxious moments of carnage. Even as the Ostrogoths were advancing again on our Roman lines, Aetius was exulting and waving the huge iron sword, one arm already bandaged and bloody.

“They’re holding! They’re holding!” Now the center’s infantry was coming up, and the Hun horses were balking even as their masters urged them against the ranks of spear-men. I could imagine Attila’s frustration.

Line after line of Hun cavalry went down, and to continue this close-quarter mismatch was madness. The barbarians broke to retreat and re-form, even as still more horns and drums sounded and Attila’s left wing began to advance toward Theodoric and his Visigoths on the right. If they could not break us at one point, then maybe at another!