Attila: The Gathering of the Storm

by William Napier

  Attila took several fresh young wives himself from among the visiting tribute peoples, and they said that they were running out of different names for all his children. It was thought they numbered over two hundred, but no one was quite sure. He presided over it all with unshakeable serenity and iron will. To some of his closest followers, to Chanat and to Candac, it seemed as if the whole camp of the Huns was turning into chaos - and at the end of summer, too. Soon they would have to move to their winter pastures, but the people and their horses and herds were so many that any new pastures would be quickly exhausted. The people of Ruga had numbered no more than three or four thousand in all, with as many horses and sheep again. Now they were ten times that number, and the surrounding steppelands were already grazed bare. The king’s advisers were filled with foreboding at quarrels breaking out over pastureland, quarrels turning into blood-feuds and full-scale internecine war. Little Bird, true to form, sang bloody little songs and rhymes to a half-broken lyre to that end.

  But Attila’s smiling serenity never faltered, as if all this celebratory chaos were merely part of a wider plan whose lineaments lay hidden in his breast. Already his followers seemed to trust him. Even Chanat, spitting in the dust and muttering that no good would come of it, knew in his heart that his king saw further than he - further than any man he had ever known.

  ‘We are too many,’ he grumbled. He and his king and a few of the chosen men were standing on a small mound looking out over the sprawling camp. ‘There is not enough pasture for us all. We are too many.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Attila. He smiled. ‘We are too few.’

  He summoned the heads of the different clans to him and they stood round the mound expectantly. It was time for them to bid him farewell and return to their homelands, but Attila had other plans.

  ‘Those among you who must move to fresh pastures may do so. But they will return to our camp in the spring. This is good pasture when the snows have melted.’ He pointed up at the moon, still a sliver in the early-morning sky. ‘When that moon has waxed and waned twelve times and no more, I will return.’

  He told them nothing else.

  His brother Bleda he bade govern wisely in his absence. Bleda grunted and nodded.

  He made up a body of a hundred men. He selected his eight chosen men, and also his two eldest sons, Dengizek and Ellak, who looked as pleased as puppies. The other ninety Orestes picked from the ranks. Attila had the ten leaders start drilling their own warbands as he had drilled them. He ordered his sons to choose two hundred of the best horses from the corral. Each man would have one horse to ride and one pack-horse, carrying weapons, arrows, tents, provisions. He ordered the women to get busy.

  For three days they worked tirelessly. The men hunted marmot out on the steppes and brought them in piles to the women round the campfires. The women worked expertly with their sharp little knives, chattering and laughing incessantly but falling silent any time a man came within earshot. The man would hesitate and waver and then walk away uneasily. What did women talk about all day? The women exchanged secretive smiles.

  They flayed the marmot flesh from the skin and smoked it strung out high above the fires. They hung the hides likewise in the dry sun, strung up in gaunt leather shapes like decapitated bats. They drew mare’s milk, rich and creamy and frothing, and poured it into huge sacks of stiff leather. They simmered goats’ milk and poured it into fine cloth bags hanging from wooden posts. The clear yellow whey ran freely down into leather pails at the foot of the posts for making yogkhurt for tomorrow, and with the remaining white curd they made aarul, dried curd cheese that would keep for many weeks out on the steppes.

  They inspected the meat store and dismissed the lean black meat with scornful cries of ‘Khar makh!’ choosing instead the large white cudgels of mutton fat barely streaked with shards of meat, such as are loved by the nomad peoples of all harsh lands, to keep their menfolk alive upon the freezing plains they must ride and through the bitter days and nights they must endure.

  The last evening before they left, some of the clan elders sat cross-leggged on the ground round their dung fires, wrapped in their patched old horse-blankets, and shook their heads and mumbled that he was crazy, this one. This was no season to be riding out on some fool’s errand, the Sword of Savash in his hand or no. The frost-giants and the ice-giants were stalking southwards from the legendary northlands where there dwelt monstrous white bears taller than the tallest firs. Those terrible giants of ice and frost were covering miles with each stride, freezing the earth beneath huge feet as they came. The People should be fleeing southwards before them, making for the winter pastures. This was no season to be riding out on a war party.

  But this one, they said, was no ordinary man. The fire of war burned in his eyes the long year round.

  There was little ceremony to mark their going. In the night shamans slaughtered a chosen lamb and cut it open. They took a handful of bloodfilled intestine, a shive of heart, a shin bone and a gobbet of fat and threw them spitting onto the fire for the gods. Little Bird was near, a clay pipe in his hand and hemp smoke issuing from his nostrils, his flamed eyes shining bloodily in the firelight.

  The omens were good. They went to the king’s palace to tell him, but he wasn’t interested.

  He spent the last night alone in the palace with Queen Checa.

  Some said they heard them arguing in the night. Some said they heard the shrill, fierce voice of Queen Checa saying she had not borne his weight on her, and then borne the pangs of childbirth for him nine months later, and given suck from her own breast for two more years, for him now to ride off with her beloved young sons on some wild quest and lose them! Those who heard her voice marvelled at how well it carried. How sustained and forceful was the voice of Queen Checa! They listened for the deeper, slower voice of their king, or perhaps for the sound of lashes and blows. But none came.

  At dawn Attila emerged and gave one last order. His sons Dengizek and Ellak would not go, after all. The two boys hung their heads in deep gloom, standing outside the royal palace. Then Queen Checa herself appeared between her sons, smaller than they, in her long quilted gown, her hair scraped neatly back. She looked out over the assembled troop and nodded and smiled her firm smile. Her eyes met those of her husband and he turned away.

  He ordered the horses into line and rode at the head with his guard of chosen men. Wives rushed out to dab milk on the foreheads of the warriors’ horses for luck, and some wept. Others told them to bring back many scalps. Children ran about laughing excitedly, waving sheaves of grass or little wooden rattles, or throwing long blades of feathergrass like spears.

  They left in light autumn rain.

  After only half a mile or so, Little Bird came galloping up alongside the king. ‘So, you ride out without your two fine sons today?’

  Attila grunted and said nothing.

  ‘What is it they say in Rome? As I recall, a jest Orestes told me of. Some jest among those powerful, white-haired senators. “Rome rules the world. We rule Rome. And our wives rule us!”’ Little Bird pondered earnestly. ‘Do you think this is truly the case in Rome, Great Tanjou, my totipotent lord and master? In fact, might it not be the case in all countries and kingdoms of the world?’

  Attila said nothing for a while. Then he told Little Bird to get back to the camp with the other women. Little Bird laughed, wheeled his horse round and vanished back over the plain.

  When they had gone it was as though the spirit had departed, the hearth-fire gone out in the camp.

  Before long it was as the elders had feared. The summer fat of the land was ended, the livestock grew thin and lean, the wind blew colder daily, and then disease broke out: dry scab, mange, glanders killing the asses and the horses and threatening to spread to the people. The cattle reeled at the water courses from mad staggers. Even the sheep and the goats, toughest of all animals, were badged and patched with infestations of lice, their raucous calls reduced to dry, malnourished croaks, drinking in
deadly liver fluke at the edge of the fouled autumn streams. There was great dread among the tents that not only would quarrels break out, but so also would the terrible tarvag takal, the plague of buboes, which comes, it is said, from eating sick marmot and kills even the strongest man or woman in days.

  A man from another clan was killed by one of Attila’s men in some argument over a woman, and a full-scale blood-feud was only narrowly avoided with lavish gifts of horses, fine rugs and gold. Slowly the other clans, who had come in such high hopes to worship the Sword of Savash, began to drift away desultorily east and south.

  ‘Remember to return after twelve moons, as your master, Attila Tanjou, bade you!’ called Little Bird after the retreating wagons. ‘Little Bird himself waits humbly for the master!’

  Little Bird took refuge from the disconsolate tribe among the children, whom he loved. They sat around him cross-legged, tiny children with their perfectly round Hun faces and rosy cheeks and wide eyes, while he spun them such tales - of mountains that fought each other by spewing burning molten rock and huge boulders out of their mouths; of mammoths that tunnelled underground as fast as horses gallop, and so caused earthquakes in the world of men.

  Then he stopped abruptly, and leaned over sideways in his extraordinary way, touched his ear to the ground, and opened his eyes wide with astonishment. The children’s eyes grew wider still. Little Bird said that he could hear ants fighting, two whole miles away. He sat up. ‘Over there,’ he pointed, ‘on the other side of that hillock. Can’t you hear? It is a terrible fight. They are fighting bitterly over who should be king of the hillock. By nightfall many of the bravest ants will be dead.’

  The clever children laughed at this nonsense, while the foolish and gullible children looked sad and anxious for the ants. Though perhaps the sad and anxious children were not so foolish after all. Those who think, laugh. Those who feel, weep.

  Little Bird told them another story to console them, about a family of mice with whom he was on friendly terms, who were great travellers. They sailed on the Sea of Ravens in seashells, and travelled over the snowbound wastes in winter on little sleds made from blades of grass.

  When the children had finally curled up and fallen asleep beside the campfire, Little Bird sighed and took himself away and sat high on his favourite sandy bluff, looking out on the dark sea of grass, and sang:

  ‘When hunger bites us daily and the wind blows from the north,

  And the saiga in their autumn coats go by,

  And only sickness stays with us,

  Then Little Bird the Wise

  Sits apart and talks with his only friend, the sky.’

  The next morning Little Bird was seen trembling by a dead dung-fire in the early dawn, and one of the women asked him if he was sick.

  ‘Nightmares, nightmare upon nightmare,’ said Little Bird, staring fixedly into the powdery ashes of the dead fire. ‘Dreaming of snakes again. Snakes coiled about my throat and about my head. About my heart.’ He closed his eyes and his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘They will be the death of me.’

  2

  RIDING EAST: MEMORIES OF CHINA

  The hundred men with Attila at their head rode eastwards for seventeen days and seventeen nights, crossing the Iron River well north of its marshes and its hundred mouths and passing by the vast flat salt-sown shore north of the Sea of Ravens. Then they turned south.

  Already the grasslands were beginning to fail and fade beneath their horses’ hooves, and the short golden season of autumn was rushing past, fleeing before the oncoming winter. Deer fled before them like ghostly ancestors, and there were the light tracks of wolves in the sand among the dying grasses. Sometimes they came upon haunting reminders of where tents had previously stood: pale yellow rings in the grass, among windblown middens and scatterings of the bleached white bones of animals. Tattered nomad bands of nameless peoples, perhaps their distant kinsmen, perhaps their enemies, who had vanished into the endless eastern steppes, with no more substance left to them than the shadow rings of their tents in the withered grass.

  They came down into a shallow canyon in late afternoon, passing great strewn boulders copper-coloured in the setting sun, filed down a narrow stony path and saw reeds and stunted trees below; the air was cooler and smelt of streams. In a silent valley already out of the sun they passed through a cool green curtain of willows and watered their horses and rested.

  The next morning they climbed up out of the canyon on the farther side, through a thin copse of orange pine, the ground strewn with fragile needles and the air full of resin, and they rode on.

  At noon their leader called a halt near a high cairn of tumbled stones. The men let their reins drop and their shoulders sank and they sagged in their saddles, and the horses leaned and tugged at the thin grass at their feet. Attila swung his leg over his horse’s head, jumped to the ground, walked over to the high cairn and climbed it, as graceful and easy as a child. He pulled off his battered felt kalpak, scooped his fingers through his dark shaggy hair streaked iron grey, his mouth set hard in that characteristic, sardonic, world-mocking smile, and gazed out to the far horizon. As far as the eye could see the wind shimmered softly through the sunfaded grass, which billowed like a feather-grey ocean, and beneath his feet it soughed through the little caverns and passageways among the cairn of rocks. To the south, as he squinted into the brightness, the grass looked yellow, and the horizon was blurred with dust where the steppeland finally ebbed away to desert. Far to the north and east, maybe a tint of green, the rich dark green where the silent pine forests started. But maybe not. No man can see as far as he thinks he can, not even a king.

  He turned to jump down, and there from the direction they had come rode a single horseman. He remained on the cairn and watched and waited. The warriors followed his gaze. The lone horseman shimmered and came on.

  After many minutes the figure grew in size, and then they could hear the swish of the horse’s legs through the grass and see the horseman’s tattooed face. Finally he stood before them.

  ‘So,’ said Attila, jumping down from the cairn. ‘Little Bird. The world’s madman.’

  ‘It is I,’ confirmed Little Bird grandly, giving a little bow of his head. ‘Life was dull in the camp. There was a danger I might have lived for ever and grown as old and useless as old Chanat.’

  Attila grinned and remounted and gave the order for them to ride on.

  Little Bird came alongside him. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘there was a woman.’

  Attila glanced sideways and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘At first it was sweet to lie between her thighs. But soon she became to me a deep pain in the fundament both morning and evening, as if I were passing stools the size and shape of wagon-spokes.’

  ‘A hazard of the amorous temperament,’ said Attila gravely.

  ‘But war will bring relief,’ said Little Bird.

  At dusk in the fading light one of the pack-horses stumbled in a marmot hole. The men instantly drew their knives, their mouths already savouring fresh horsemeat roasted on a slow fire, but Attila forbade them. Little Bird went over to the animal, which stood patient and shivering with pain, fresh dung lying pungent between its hindlegs, a foreleg crooked and resting on the rim of its hoof. The shaman spoke in its ear and stroked his hennaed hand over the horse’s fetlock. He murmured over and over words that none who heard understood.

  In the morning the horse was healed.

  They crossed a desolate plain where the heavy grey sky over their heads suddenly came alive with the cries of wild geese. The cries startled and then comforted them with the sense of living creatures in company with them in this wilderness. The geese passed on and their cries faded away and the air grew silent around again and the men slumped down a little in their cloaks and bowed their heads and rode on. The sky overhead was a darkening grey, a beaten iron shield, but along the horizon was a seam of silver light that seemed to seep in from an enchanted world beyond, as if they rode under a giant lid, claustro
phobic, shut off from grace. Their fear grew continually, and their courage grew to meet it. All of them were quite prepared to die, and half expected it, this far from home and they so few in number. But they would go down fighting.

  And then, standing alone and many days from its herd and from its native woodland, for no reason that they could discern, they saw an auroch: a massive white bull, one of the wild cattle that roamed freely in the birchwoods far to the north. The mountainous white beast stood like a statue, like a creature from heraldry, amid a pile of broken rocks, with an arrow buried deep in its withers. Again here was good meat for the taking, but the men knew that the uncanny creature was somehow removed from them and forbidden. They squinted and saw that the arrow was of no shape they recognised.

  It would not be long now.

  Chanat trotted nearer to the wounded animal, which turned and lowered its massive head towards him. He reined in at a safe distance, his right hand resting lightly on the shaft of the spear slung at his side. A full-grown auroch, wounded or not, could disembowel a horse with one swipe of its long, curved horns.

  He turned sideways and squinted at the animal a little longer, then rode back.