William Napier: The Judgement

Now she lingered shyly before an old woman’s canopy of grubby canvas supported on gnarled staves.

‘Come you in, girl, come you in. It’s a lover you’ll be wanting at your age!’

The old woman grinned and bobbed about among her strange wares, performing almost a little dance, her white hair in a tight bun, her ringed fingers fluttering. The old woman was no witch, no purveyor of instruments for cruelty, malice and revenge, but only a fortune-teller. A preacher had earlier that morning come out of the town to stand by her tent and preach on the text ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, but the people only scowled at him and passed on, leaving the preacher impotent and the old woman alone and unlynched.

The girl hesitantly set down her pails and the old woman took her hand and drew her in. Within the shadows of the tent there were animals’ feet and tails, and strangely shaped stones like seashells, long dyed feathers of heron and bustard, tufts of multicoloured rags tied round sticks topped with small brass bells, leather pouches of herbs, bottles of dubious liquor. Then something else caught the girl’s eye, something very beautiful, which she took at first for a mirror. A little vanity such as rich ladies use to admire themselves when they are carried to dinner in their gilded litters, through the grand wide streets of great cities. Jewelled ladies with their white-chalked faces and forearms and little flattering mirrors.

The old fortune-teller knew at once what she wanted and bobbed over and retrieved it. It was a strange box made from hinged coloured glass, held together with silver wires. It would be very costly and the girl had no money but for the few desultory coppers she had earned so far that morning. But the old woman brought the coloured glass box out into the sunshine anyway and passed it to her without mockery.

‘Look into it,’ she said. ‘Hold it up to the light. Some see the world as it is, though in many pretty colours. But some, who have the gift, see the world as it will be.’

The girl hesitated. She didn’t know that she believed in such things. Not really. Besides, who has the strength to see their own future? Especially a poor goat-girl with a scold of a mother and a hare-shot lip?

The woman nodded encouragingly. ‘Look, child. The future may yet be sweet, and you have the gift.’

Somewhere in the distance there was a boy crying out from the river, drawing up his boat. Yelling, screaming about something. Running towards the fair. It was all the excitement no doubt, nothing more.

So the girl held the little box of coloured glass up before her face and opened one of the delicate little hinges. It was the deep red glass that she held up to her eyes, and she looked through and shuddered. Because she saw the world as if covered in blood. The mountain of gold to the west was a mountain of blood. The screaming of the boy running up from the river grew louder, closer. She saw the straggling meadows leading away along the river bank, groups of people carrying their baskets, pushing their handbarrows, coming through the long grass towards the fair on this gentle summer day. And beyond that, the low line of hills still catching the morning sun, but all red, all clouded red. The future.

She felt the old woman tugging at her sleeve, heard her saying something, and was about to tear her eyes away from this ghastly vision, this world of a blood-red future, when a movement in the far distance caught her eye, and instead of lowering the evil box she continued to stare through its red haze.

Rising up over the crest of the low hills to the west, she saw a line of horsemen. Banners in the breeze and spears against the sky.

Never would the people – those few who survived, stumbling away through the blood-soaked grass to cry their story into horror-stricken ears – never would they forget that day, nor their first sight of the horsemen from the east.

They rode muscular little ponies with big, ungainly heads, brutish and monstrous, like the heads of bulls. Shaggy even at the fetlock, with deep chests and haunches betraying their massive strength and stamina. Hooves and manes were dyed blood-red with crushed insects or dried berries from last autumn, boiled up again in water and fat. The riders had long arms and barrel chests, short legs and narrow, slanting eyes of cunning and glittering cruelty. Some of them, disdaining to wear helmets as they rode down upon the near defenceless fair, seemed to have skulls deformed and domed by some evil practice in infancy. Others wore pointed Scythian caps of leather, kalpaks, fringed with grey wolf ’s fur. Wolves falling on the stricken townspeople not in lean winter but in fat high summer, driven not by the stark necessity of hunger but by the love of destruction for its own sake.

Some had the sides of their heads scarred with burns to kill the hair there, others were crudely shaven, and almost all had their cheeks and the sides of their heads cut and deep dyed with tattoos. The thin, sparse beards on their chins were further garlanded and beribboned, or twisted into little plaits, and in their ears they wore heavy hoops of gold. Some rode barefoot and some wore leather leggings, gripping the sides of their mounts so surely that they seemed one with their horses. They wore barbarian breeches but most rode naked to the waist but for jangling bone jerkins, their dark chests and backs tattooed with snakes and grotesque faces. Their wrists and sinewy arms were wrapped with iron bands, gold bracelets, cloths and strips of leather, and they wore beaded silver torcs and the teeth of wolves and jackals on thongs around their dirty muscular throats. They rode with their reins hung with the flensed skulls of slaughtered enemies, with human scalps or hanks of blood-dried hair.

Each warrior bristled with the tips and points of a multitude of weapons. Short stabbing spears, long steel knives, curved swords slung across squat, powerful backs, curved spiked hatchets, and, clutched in the right fist, the deadly recurved bow of the steppes, with a bunch of arrows clutched alongside. Arrows strung and shot and falling interminably onto the stricken fair.

The people turned and ran among the falling tents and the already blazing stalls, but there was no escape. Already a column of the murderous horde had ridden round and taken the hills to the south, and cut the people off from flight that way. To the north there was only the river. Some fugitives threw themselves in and tried to swim for it, and of these a few survived, carried downstream and crawling back onto the southern shore miles away like half-drowned animals to tell their tale.

Singled out from among the wailing masses was the half-century of bewildered soldiers from Viminacium. The first were cut down where they stood, whirling on the spot in a spray of blood, unable to believe that this little light guard duty at a summer fair had suddenly turned into massacre, and this bright sunshine day to nightmare.

The captain of the guard, a centurion named Pamphilus, registered the numbers of the barbarian horde and immediately bellowed orders to a couple of his riders to head east, straight to Viminacium to call the full legion to arms. As an added precaution he despatched another squadron, an eight-man contubernium, to requisition a boat and make for Viminacium by river, just in case his riders were cut down on the road. Though he doubted very much that barbarians would have the foresight for such things.

But how had they got across the river? What had happened to the Danube lookouts? And the signalling stations that stretched all the way along the imperial frontier from the Euxine to the mouth of the Rhine? How could this have happened without warning? Where was the intelligence? Why hadn’t the exploratores reported back in advance? Raiding parties like this didn’t erupt out of nowhere.