HAGAN LOOKED TO his left and saw many in the crowd of watching women and children had fallen. Their prone bodies, dressed in their finest clothes for the occasion of the battle, were now splattered red with blood. The thundering of hooves mixed with the high-pitched squeals of frightened and wounded children and the horrified and agonised screams of the women with them.
The Hun cavalry rode into the gap between the two opposing armies. The Burgundar champions – Hagan’s father among them – who had advanced into that space between the armies were still there, exposed and away from their own lines by the sudden attack.
‘Run! Get back to our lines,’ Childeric shouted. The men of the shield wall started shouting similar encouragement.
‘If the Huns catch them in the open like that then I don’t care what their prowess is,’ Childeric said in a lower voice, ‘they’ll be mown down like hay at the harvest.’
The champions stood between the Huns and the women and children, however. A heavy feeling wrapped around Hagan’s heart. He knew they would not run. What sort of heroes would they be if they bolted for safety, leaving their women and children at the mercy of the charging Huns?
He was right. They did not run. Instead they turned to face the approaching horsemen.
The Huns unleashed a volley of arrows. Hagan saw his father and the other champions drop behind their shields. He heard the clattering of arrows hitting Burgundar shields. Those around Hagan groaned in dismay as some of the champions were cut down by the hail of arrows. For men who had fought many single combats in their own and the tribe’s honour, it was an ignoble end.
Godegisil stood up from behind the cover of his shield. He sheathed his sword then pulled his francisca from his belt. He held the short-handled, arc-headed throwing axe above his head, arm cocked, as the horsemen pounded towards him. The other heroes did the same. The francisca was a weapon all Burgundar warriors practised with from nearly as soon as they could walk. It was their weapon of choice, and many enemy tribes had learned the hard way to respect the wicked blade that could cause death and injury even when thrown from thirty paces away.
Hagan heard his father scream a defiant war cry, audible even above the thundering of hooves. The Burgundar champions all hurled their axes at once. The franciscas tumbled through the air, their wicked-sharp blades flashing in the sunlight as they spun end over end through the air. Each axe found its target, hitting horsemen or their mounts. A whole row of riders went down in a tangle of thrashing hooves and injured or dead men.
Hagan yelled in triumph but his cry died in his throat. There were many more riders coming behind. To the shock of all watching, they galloped over the broken bodies of their fallen comrades and charged on. They swirled around the Burgundar champions like a black river bursting its banks and flooding around the stout trunks of trees in the forest.
Godegisil drew his sword once more and readied himself, bouncing from left foot to right foot as another horseman bore down on him. The rider loosed his bow. With amazing speed, Godegisil blocked it with his shield, stepped close to the horse and struck with his sword. The blade separated the horseman’s leg at the knee. Screaming, the Hun toppled off his saddle leaving an arc of blood in the air behind him. When he hit the ground the impact sent his helmet flying from his head and Hagan saw that the man’s skull was nearly as tall as his helmet. It looked strange, elongated, as if he had worn the helmet since birth and somehow his head had taken on its conical shape.
In a moment there were two more horsemen in the rider’s place. Acting in tandem, one shot his bow from the left and the other from the right. Godegisil again managed to block the arrow from the left but it was impossible to protect himself from both. The second rider’s arrow smashed through the rings of his mail shirt and bore into the flesh of his right shoulder.
The Burgundar champion looked angry rather than in pain. He slashed the arrow shaft with his sword then swiped his blade across the back of the man who had shot him as he rode past, opening up a deep red wound that sent his enemy toppling from his saddle.
Even as he did so, another oncoming rider shot an arrow into Godegisil’s exposed left side. This time Godegisil was hurt. He doubled over.
A fourth rider came forward, bearing what looked like a long noose at the end of a rope in his hand. He spun it around his head as he rode. Then he cast it. The noose floated through the air and fell over Godegisil’s shoulders. The Hun rode past him, pulling the noose tight to pin the Burgundar’s arms to his sides.
Godegisil, now unable to raise his arms, braced his feet, dipped and drove himself away from the horseman, using all the power of his massive thigh muscles to power forwards. The Hun, holding tight to the other end of the rope, was pulled from his horse and crashed onto the ground.
The tension released, Godegisil tried to use the blade of his sword to cut through the noose that constricted his arms. A look of frustration crossed his face. The blade, sharp as it was, seemed to have no effect on the rope.
Hagan looked on in horrified fascination. He shouted out, starting to push forward into the men in front of him, desperate to help his father. To his surprise he felt a hand on his shoulder, holding him back. He turned, a questioning look on his face.
‘No,’ Childeric said. It was he who had grabbed Hagan. He glared straight into the youth’s eyes. ‘We must stand firm. Or we will all be lost.’
Hagan felt tears sting his eyes. He knew Childeric was right, but he also felt he couldn’t just stand by while the man he still thought of as his father was in such peril.
He looked around again. Godegisil was upright and trying to free himself but three more arrow shafts now impaled him: two in his chest and one in his back.
‘How is he still standing?’ Gunderic said, his mouth open in amazement.
The big Burgundar champion staggered in a circle. He tried to swipe his sword at the riders who swarmed around him but could not raise it past his waist due to his constricted arms. The arrows that skewered his flesh also pinned Godegisil’s fur pelt cloak to his body. He looked like a bear wounded by hunters and dogged by a pack of hounds. As Hagan watched, four more Huns loosed their bows and hit their mark. His body now riddled with arrows, Godegisil arched his back; his mouth, visible under his helmet visor, was set in an agonised grimace. His clenched teeth were coated with blood, yet he did not cry out.
Another Hun rode at Godegisil. From paces away he loosed his bow. The arrow streaked straight through the left eye hole of the Burgundar’s helmet visor. Its head burst through the back of the helmet with a spray of blood.
Godegisil dropped both his sword and shield and fell flat on his back.
Hagan looked on aghast. A nauseous sensation writhed in his guts at the realisation he had just watched the death of the man he had always called father and done nothing to prevent it.
‘If you’d gone to help him you’d be as dead as the rest of them are,’ Childeric said, pointing to the corpses of the other champions that now littered the meadow. The pride of the Burgundar folk, their mightiest champions and bravest warriors, were dead, riddled with arrows, bound by nooses or crushed under the hooves of the charging Huns. Hagan felt a chill. If their best were dead already, how would the rest of them fare?
He glanced across the battlefield and saw the Romans had still not moved. Their general, Aetius, was on his horse before them again. He seemed to be agitated as ever. He was shouting and waving his sword.
The heroes had at least disrupted the Huns’ charge at the women and children. In the short time it had taken to deal with them, though, the Huns had changed from a charging line to a swirling mass, shooting arrows at the Burgundar champions from all around. In the brief respite, someone among the women and children had had enough sense to get them moving towards the relative safety of the city walls. Women trailed the larger children by the hands while others scooped up the younger ones and carried them on their shoulders. The crowd was now running en masse towards the ancient stone gatehouse that marked the main entrance to Vorbetomagus.
The Huns pounded after them.
Hagan could see the women and children would not make it to the gates before the Huns reached them. The riders were already drawing their bows again.
It was too much for many in the Burgundar shield wall. All discipline disappeared, and many left formation and began running after the Huns, desperate to do something to save their families while they still could. In moments the whole unified block of the army confronting the Romans turned into a disarrayed, charging mob. The remaining Burgundar war leaders screamed at the men around them to hold firm but to no avail. The Burgundar horns sounded unheeded calls to regroup into a shield wall.
The Hun leaders watching from the forest edge sent out another signal from their own horns. At this sound from their rear, the Hun cavalry divided into two groups. The leading horsemen kept on pounding after the women and children running for the city gates. Most of the rest of the Huns skidded to a halt, swung their horses around and began charging back towards the pursuing Burgundars.
Hagan saw now that the attack on the women and children had been a ruse; a ruthless tactic to make the Burgundians break their shield wall. Like their heroes and champions before them, the rest of the warriors were now at the mercy of the horsemen, and mercy was not a quality that could be seen on the faces of their foes.
The horsemen powered into the Burgundian horde, launching arrows and spears as they went. As the riders swirled around them, warriors spun around, desperate to not leave their backs exposed to a foe now both before them and among them. Each turned to face a different enemy that threatened him individually, only to leave his back exposed to the others coming from a different direction.
The Huns galloped back and forth among them, loosing arrows from their saddles left and right, killing men from mere paces away. Other Burgundars went down under the thrashing hooves. Many Huns cast the same sort of nooses they had trapped Godegisil with over the heads of Burgundars, either choking them or pinning their arms to make it easier for their fellow Huns to kill them.
Hagan just stared, frozen at the sight. His consternation and fear turned to utter terror as he realised that their war horde – the pride of the Burgundars – had been shattered and now Death rode among them.
He felt a hard shove on his right shoulder.
‘Wake up, lad,’ Childeric was shouting. ‘Form up or we’re all dead men.’