Bleda looked into his younger brother’s burning eyes, and it crossed his mind to say that he didn’t want to rule the people. He would rather stay in his tent with the new young girl he had bought recently with a gift of gold from Ruga. Circassian she was, and her body was so smooth. When she—
‘But first,’ said Attila, striding away from him and then back again, clapping his hands together. ‘Organisation.’
Bleda sighed.
After dark, and a few mouthfuls of meat but no wine, Attila walked out with Chanat among the tents of the people. The king wore no crown or diadem, no rich Byzantine robes of purple silk, but only his battered leather jerkin and crossgartered breeches, his rough deerskin boots.
‘My lord,’ began Chanat. ‘Your slave, Orestes. He addresses you by your familiar name. I have heard him. It is not right.’
‘Slave?’
‘Your . . . servant.’
Attila shook his head. Orestes was not his slave any more, nor his servant. Even the words ‘friend’ or ‘bloodbrother’ were inadequate. There was no word for what Orestes was to him.
‘Orestes can call me what he likes,’ he said. He glared at Chanat. ‘And only he.’
The old warrior could not approve, but he said nothing.
Towards the edge of the great circle of tents they pulled up and looked over the corral of the horses. There were perhaps a thousand of them; squat, ungainly beasts, with huge heads and thick necks, barrel chests and short, sturdy legs. As fast as deer, as tireless as mules.
‘There lies the strength of the Huns,’ murmured Attila.
‘By our horses and our bows the world will know us,’ said Chanat.
The horses whinnied and snickered in the corral, snuffing the night air, the low moon of the first hours of darkness casting a low silver light along their backs and over their coarse, cropped manes. Attila turned his face to the sweet horse smell of them and inhaled.
A voice came to them through the night air, and on such a night as this, of promise and expectation, it struck Attila as a dreary and mournful song. He turned and stepped nearer the tent where the music came from. It was a woman’s voice, soft and low. He moved silently though the darkness and saw her sitting in the entrance of a humble tent, an infant asleep in her arms. Another child of two or three lay asleep on some blankets close by, and three or four other women sat behind and around her in a semicircle. She sang:
‘Though the grass will shoot from the land
He is not grass, he will not come to my calling,
Though the waters will rise from the hills,
He is not water, he will not come to my calling
Oh the jackal lies in your bed,
The raven broods in your sheepfold.
Only the wind plays the shepherd’s pipe,
Only the north wind sings your song,
Oh my husband ...’
The woman’s voice faltered and stopped and her head fell in sorrow onto her breast and her infant looked up wide-eyed at her. One of the others close by reached out her hand and laid it on the singer’s shoulder.
‘Who is she?’ whispered Attila.
‘The woman of one of the two guards you killed in Ruga’s tent.’
Attila frowned. He had forgotten them.
He went up to the tent and stood silently. After a while the women looked up and some of them started. But not the widowed woman.
Attila gestured over his shoulder at Chanat.
‘Woman,’ he said, ‘here is your new husband. Be content.’
She stared up at him through tear-bright eyes. Then she slowly got to her feet, her infant still in her arms. She stepped in front of him and spat on the ground almost between his feet.
She said, ‘You slew my husband and burned his body to ashes without burial. You left me a widow and my children helpless orphans. My heart is broken like an old pot, it is in a hundred pieces on the hard ground. My tears have all cried out and dried and still my sorrow within me would cry out a river. Now you treat me as you would a cow, and give me to this ancient bull here with his old dog’s breath and his wrinkled ballbag. But I am not to be so easily given. Leave my tent and go back to your own bed, with your bloody sword for company through the cold night. And may the gods judge you harshly.’
Chanat stepped towards her, but Attila held his arm out across the warrior’s chest.
The woman stared a little longer at the king, contemptuous and unafraid. ‘How many more will you slay likewise, my lord widow-maker? I know minds and hearts such as yours, and they are no mystery to me. O great Tanjou! Khan of all the kingdoms under heaven! Great king of everything and nothing!’
She spat again, then turned swiftly and went back into the tent and pulled it closed behind her.
‘My lord!’ protested Chanat, but Attila shook his head.
‘Words, words, words,’ he said.
They walked on.
‘In the face of desert storms, the lion’s teeth, armies of tens of thousands,’ Attila said, ‘one may ride without fear. But in the face of a widow’s anger . . .’
‘Such a woman would be a good hot ride,’ said Chanat. ‘And a good mother of warriors. A pity her desire was not stirred by the thought of my wrinkled ballbag.’
‘A pity indeed,’ said Attila.
Passing another tent nearer the heart of the camp, they heard a young girl’s screams and an old man’s impotent bellowing. Then the girl herself almost fell out of the grubby, mean-looking tent at their feet. Her hair was torn out in clumps, her face beaten and bruised, and her tunic half ripped from her back. After her stumbled an old man, gasping with fury, his eyes bulging, and spittle in his skimpy beard. He stopped and pulled up when he saw the king.
‘How did you come by her?’ rasped Attila. ‘I gave her to Zabergan.’
‘Zabergan sold her to me,’ said the old man. ‘He is my cousin. I gave a good price.’
‘And now you beat her?’
The old man smiled conspiratorially. ‘The more it is beaten, the tenderer the meat.’
‘How do you beat her?’
‘With this,’ said the old man, brandishing a knobbly stick. He came closer to them, and his breath was hot and thick with koumiss and lust. ‘On her back,’ he said, almost whispering, ‘on her firm young buttocks, and on her soft young thighs—’
‘How? Like this?’ said Attila. And in a blink of an eye he had snatched the stick from the old man’s grasp and hurled him to the ground. Chanat thought he heard something old and brittle crack as he hit the hard ground. Then Attila was standing astride him and belabouring his skinny, bony back with all his might. Under the rain of blows the man could do nothing but curl up and whimper for mercy. Attila stood straight again, snapped the stick over his upraised thigh and dropped the two halves into the dust.
He pulled the girl to her feet and looked her over briefly. ‘Go to the Compound of the Women. Tell them I sent you. They will clean you up well enough. You are mine now.’
The girl stared at him, rabbit-eyed.
‘Go,’ he said, giving her a shove.
She went.
‘Sorting out my people’s domestic troubles!’ he growled, looking after her. ‘I had my mind on higher things when I dreamed of being king.’
Chanat guffawed. ‘You are kind to women.’
They walked on, leaving the old man in the dust.
‘Kind?’ Attila grunted. ‘Kindness has nothing to do with it. I want good warriors out of that one’s womb.’
In the morning, a widow in a tent at the edge of the camp near the corral of the horses, her face etched and exhausted with grief, came to her door to find the silent Greek on horseback, holding out a fine silver vase. She took it and looked inside. There were some ashes. She turned without a word and vanished back into her tent.
At dawn, Attila and his chosen men were already out on the plain for target practice.
‘You will learn how to shoot as well as your king shoots,’ he told them, ‘or your fingertips
will bleed away in trying.’
He left them and rode on with Chanat and Orestes.
Orestes’ big hare eyes darted left and right across the steppes, as if expecting the shadow of the Erinyes themselves to come up over the horizon: those clotted avengers from Tartarus with blood spilling from their eyesockets and snakes twined in their hair, as they had come to another older Orestes. Come as before to avenge the murder of parent or uncle by the outraged prodigal child.
But then Orestes always looked guarded and uncertain. Or certain only of the uncertainty of the world. He had come back from his thirty years of wandering with his master through the unknown wastes like a man who trusts in the stability of nothing. Except of his own heart.
Finally Attila reined his horse in, and the three sat and gazed at the far horizon.
‘My father ...’ he began.
‘Do not ask, I beg you,’ said Chanat. ‘Oh, do not.’
‘Ruga had no sons or daughters.’
Chanat looked away. ‘He was injured in his stones. When he was twenty summers or so.’
The grey sky of the steppes was paling and warming in the sun. From afar off came the high chatter of spotted susliks. Dust on the far horizon, perhaps a herd of saiga antelope. Perhaps only devils of the wind.
‘Before that, Ruga and my mother . . .’
‘Oh, do not ask, my king.’
The sky lightened from shield grey to pale and then to daylight blue. Like the fine blue silken robes that King Ruga had worn when he gasped and died.
Attila turned and nodded to Orestes. The Greek already knew his mind, as always. They did not even need to speak in a private language, these two, as old friends do. They barely needed to speak at all.
Orestes heeled his horse and rode on, veering southwards towards the settlements beyond the low hills.
‘Might I ask who, my lord?’
Attila gazed at him unblinkingly. ‘My family,’ he said.
In late afternoon two days later, after many miles of riding, Orestes came back into the camp, dusty and weary, with a strange procession of women and boys. The older boys, well into their second decade, rode horses of their own, but the younger, and the women, rode in a covered wagon, peering from the back at the unfolding camp.
The camp gazed back in curiosity and then in astonishment. There were arguments about how many there were, but general agreement was that there were six sons and as many daughters, and then again as many wives.
Attila commandeered two more fine tents in the heart of the camp, and into one trooped his six sons. Their ages ranged from seventeen or so down to four or five, and the youngest wept as he parted from one of the women. Attila sat his horse and watched them go. Into another tent trooped his women. In time, the people learnt that they comprised five wives and eight daughters, and they marvelled anew. For a king to have five wives was nothing. But for one who had been a vagrant in the wastes of Scythia for thirty years to have five wives, and to keep such a family together, defended from every brigand that passed by, was scarcely imaginable. What strength must have defended them. What ferocity . . .
As the stature of the sons and the beauty of the daughters well attested, the wives themselves were no cast-offs from some foul-smelling brigand’s harem. The older were as haughty as queens, and the younger were as young as his eldest daughter. Surely their new king was a great king.
At the head of the wives walked one who was perhaps as old as her husband. Her step was graceful and serene. Her eyes were large and dark, her hair loosely braided. Her gown was a simple brown woollen robe, and her only decorations were two modest gold earrings, and a fillet of fine gold round her brow. She was tall and slender as a queen, but her fine, handsome face told of long hardship and desert wanderings, and no soft years in a royal palace for her. She already had many delicate wrinkles around her beautiful eyes, her skin was drawn across her wide, high cheekbones, and her long dark hair was greying at her temples.
The king called out, a word that none understood. The woman stopped and looked across at her lord and master, and smiled with a smile of covert triumph. She walked over to him, and into his fine blue tent behind. The rest of the wives - younger, prettier, still of childbearing years - watched her go. And then they went on into the new tent of the king’s wives.
‘What is the first wife’s name?’ Chanat murmured to Orestes.
Orestes didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, with a small smile, ‘She is called Checa. Queen Checa.’
Long after dark she lay on her back beside her husband, her face streaked with perspiration, her hands folded, a smile on her lips as playful as a young girl’s.
‘Oh great tanjou,’ she whispered, looking across at him and widening her eyes beseechingly. ‘Oh my great lord, my strong lion, my ravisher, my fierce king and conqueror. Did you miss me these last few days?’
‘Hnh,’ grunted Attila, his eyes closed.
Checa laughed.
When she awoke an hour later he was gone.
For his blood was up and his time had come and the strength and surge of his blood knew no bounds and his hunger for the world was limitless. He strode out onto the plains alone and unarmed and held his arms wide under the stars and prayed to his father Astur, who made all and watched all. He asked for nothing in his prayer. He had all he wanted for now, and all else that he wanted he would soon have, too. He closed his eyes and smiled up into heaven and his only prayer was to feel the presence and power of his father Astur and be bathed in the silver starlight that God made even before he made the earth from a clot of blood.
He returned and went into the tent of the women and pulled them to him. Among them was the girl he had rescued from Ruga’s tent and given to Zabergan. Still bruised from the brute who had beaten her, she came to him shyly. And when dawn came up over the eastern steppes, five more concubines lay on their backs with their hands on their bellies and uncertain smiles on the lips, wondering if they might now be carrying a son of the new king.
The king was gone already. He had slept two hours that night and it was enough, more than enough. Sleep made him impatient. ‘Time enough to sleep in the grave,’ he growled, toeing Orestes grumblingly out of his blankets. Now, as dawn came up, they were already out on the plains, a dozen miles out from the camp and still at full and furious gallop, Attila yaa-ing and roaring, Orestes jolting in the saddle and laughing at the pitiless energy of his master, a fast-moving dustcloud of saiga ahead of them and the king with teeth bared like a wolf that was ready to devour the whole herd.
For he had waited thirty years to come into his kingdom. Riding the solitary grasslands and the dustlands and deserts farther east, shoulders hunched and head bowed against the scouring sands and the blistering loneliness. But one soul stayed with him through it all and would not leave his side, though at times he commanded him to and flung his loyalty back in his face with bitterness. Orestes stayed there by his side, no more to be cleaved away from him than his own shadow.
In some distant, hidden valley in the far White Mountains - so the story went among the fascinated and gossiping people who now called him their king - he had carved out a bandit kingdom, and drawn men to him. And wives. The wives had come with him, back west to his heartland in the pastures by the Euxine Sea. And the men - perhaps they still waited for him far to the east.
Now the three desert decades were over, and it was time for it to begin. He could not have returned earlier, all the tribe would have been against him. But he had served his traitor’s exile, cut off from his people, his shamans and his gods, and now it was time. Time to come into his kingdom, and ride out against the world that had so belittled and humiliated him. He had survived scorn and abuse, beatings, half-killings, silence and contempt, as must any tribeless man with none to defend him or fight with him. He had been a mere bandit leader, though the son and grandson of kings. For the world is not a just place; or it is just only to the powerful.
When he rode out into the wilderness, a broken-hearted bo
y all those years ago, none had believed him truly a traitor. But Ruga’s sentence that bright morning had expressed the will of the gods, and none might go against it. Had any in the tribe spoken with Attila or taken him in as their secret guest during years of his exile and ostracism, they would have been punished terribly. None would have so transgressed. Now he was back, an aura of miracle about him in that he had survived so long alone and tribeless in the wilderness, with only his silent, watchful, mistrustful foreign slave and his ragged, mysterious family for company. Surely the gods must have watched over him, for such survival would not have been possible otherwise.
There are many such tales among other peoples, of mad kings driven into the wilderness to live like animals: King Nebuchadnezzar of the Jews, who turned aside to eat grass like the oxen, and whose body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws. Or one-eyed King Goll of the Celts, who fled from the field of battle not from cowardice, but maddened by that blood-red rage which grips men amid carnage. I heard a fragment of the haunting Song of King Goll sung long ago by a brown-eyed Celtic boy:
Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Page 4