Attila: The Gathering of the Storm

by William Napier

  ‘Kutrigur Huns,’ he said. ‘The Budun-Boru.’

  Attila looked sharply at him. ‘So far west?’

  Chanat shuddered a little, as if shaking himself free of some infestation. ‘All the tribes are moving west, and have been for two generations. They say that the heart of the world and the high plains will never see rain again.’

  Attila brooded.

  ‘Who is this arrow-master amongst us?’ sneered Little Bird. ‘And what does this rank old goat know of the arrows of the fearsome Budun-Boru?’

  Chanat turned on him furiously. ‘You will know of the arrows of the Budun-Boru yourself soon enough, when they are stuck in your shivering hide and you are yelping like a spitted puppy!’

  Little Bird laughed and rode out of Chanat’s range. ‘There is truth in the arrow’s sting, old Chanat, as much as in the song of a beautiful girl!’

  Chanat growled wordlessly at the capering fool.

  Attila ignored them both, looking at the unearthly animal across the plain.

  On its broken cairn, taking its last stand dying and motionless, no blood staining its fine white pelt, the auroch stood bellowing with rage at the cold plains stretching endlessly away on every side, and then raised its great heavy head and bellowed at cold Heaven itself. Heaven echoed back its roar of pain and nothing changed.

  Attila shook his head and said softly, ‘Leave it. It is its destiny.’ He flicked his reins and kicked his horse forward again. ‘It is not any more in nature.’

  After the injured horse and the auroch, there was the eagle: a triad of animals or animal spirits both for good omen and for admonition. Do not despair, the spirits seemed to say: the horse was healed. Do not presume: the bull was not healed. And thirdly there came a spirit for ever untouched and unharmed, unattainable in his perfection in the tormented world of men.

  The hail came out of nowhere, drumming the plains around them into invisibility. They rode on into it, but then a hailstone the size of a child’s fist smashed and broke over the muzzle of Orestes’ horse and slithered away in shards of ice to the ground. The horse shook its head and reared belatedly, teeth bared, screaming with pain and indignation. They dismounted and pulled their horses close and took shelter in that pitiful lee as best they could. The din of the hailstorm forbade speech.

  A few minutes later the roiling angry clouds passed on and then vanished altogether to the east, and the sky returned blue and clean again. They rode on over the now sunlit plain scattered for miles with bright droplets clinging to the broken grass-stems. Reaching down from heaven to the horizon hung the multicoloured Bow of Tengri, the god of the sky. Away to the west they could see curling snakes of mist steaming off the sunbaked pan, and for many miles as they rode, cloudy and opaque hailstones nestled in the roots of the long grass and crunched under the hooves of their horses, and then brightened and melted in their wake like passing pearls.

  The sun burned down on them again and their greased woollen cloaks and their horses steamed with a rich woolly stink, and beyond that the air was filled with the sweet scent of damp, beaten grass and their hearts lightened.

  Attila suddenly seized his bow, nocked an arrow and fired it high into the blue sky overhead. Only then, looking up, did his men see the great deep golden shape of an eagle passing over them, and they flinched with horror at the blasphemy of what he had done. But of course the arrow curved and passed harmlessly in the air far below the eagle’s flight, many weary lengths short of killing a god. The eagle flew on unheeding, its amber eyes set on other distant things, on mountain ranges they would never live to see.

  Their crazed king pushed himself up and twisted in his saddle to look back at the eagle, face full into the sun and aglow in that blazing light, his golden earrings dancing in reflection, his head back, laughing, teeth white and wolfish. He threw his arms wide and looked over his men.

  ‘The people who are born on a smoking shield!’ he cried. ‘The people who shoot arrows in search of the gods!’

  And Astur his father passed away westwards, impervious and indestructible.

  At evening they stopped and hobbled the horses. Attila set out watchmen with arrows already fitted to their bows, and they lit dung fires and cooked. The smoke rose in a slow column into the windless night. A lonesome wolf howled in a neighbouring valley, its howl like the voice of the desolate landscape itself. Two whooper swans passed overhead in the twilight, the soft beating of their wings heard over the crackle of the dung fires and the call of the lonely wolf the only sounds in that vast country.

  Some of them thought good to make a low windbreak of saddles and horse-blankets, and then to heap up more saddles and blankets into a makeshift throne for their king to sit on at the fireside, a thing that they had never done before. But he chided them and kicked the saddles and blankets angrily away. He scuffed the dusty ground quite flat again with the soles of his battered deerksin boots, and sat crosslegged on the ground in the dust along with the rest of them. He drew his sheath knife, leaned forward and cut a strip of meat from the sizzling haunch on the iron spit.

  Geukchu sat close as they ate, which was unusual as he was a man who liked to eat alone, wary, like a dog. When he had finished chewing he took a swig of koumiss and shucked his teeth and passed the flask on and said softly, ‘We are being followed.’

  Attila nodded. ‘By outriders only. It is not the main force yet.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  The king took a long draught of koumiss and smiled into the firelight. ‘If the main force were near, we would know it by now.’ He looked around at his chosen men, each of them with their eyes on him. Orestes sat a little way away whittling a stick, apparently not listening. But he always looked that way. He heard every word.

  ‘Keep your men prepared but do not panic them. In the imaginations of their hearts the Budun-Boru are demons and spirits, evil, beyond explanation, no more to be defeated that a river in full spate may be stopped with arrows - the People of the Wolf, who change into wolves in their very flesh and bone and devour their fellow men by moonlight. But they are men of mortal flesh like any other. Indeed, they are our distant kin, and they worship Astur, too, and bid each other “Sain bainu” when they meet, and “Bayartai” when they depart. And if you prick them, they bleed.’ He signalled for the flask of koumiss to come round again. ‘I know. I have had dealings with them before.’

  ‘A shaman: one who knows,’ said a little singsong voice nearby. It was Little Bird, tangential as ever. He even revolved around the outside of the seated circle in some self-moved and eccentric planetary orbit as he taunted. ‘What a lot you know, my lord Widow-Maker! ’

  ‘And what a lot you have to learn, my little singsong fool.’

  Little Bird tripped into the circle and took his place beside Chanat. He beamed up adoringly at the old warrior. Chanat scowled down at him. The other men laughed.

  ‘But,’ said Little Bird, leaning back and staring up at the still stars, ‘the shadowlands ruled by Tengri, Lord of the Sun, and by Itugen, Lady of the Moon, are debatable lands. And the way to the spirits is littered with the souls of fallen shamans.’ He looked at Attila. ‘It is a bitter calling.’

  There was no sound but the crackling of the fire for a while.

  Then Attila stirred and said, ‘For a long while, I did not know this: I did not know the will of the gods.’

  Little Bird said, ‘He who presumes to know the will or the design of the gods knows less than nothing.’

  Attila regarded him and continued, ‘For long I puzzled in my heart over the destiny of our people and over our treatment at the hands of the spirits; how Astur turned us out into the wilderness to be a homeless people and the scorn of all men, despised and travel-weary, dust-blown and starving. There is a people who live in the empire of Rome called the Jews, and they, too, have no home.’ He fell silent a while.

  ‘But now I see. We shall gather all the clans and all the tribes of the wide-wandering Hun people, all who answer our call, and all othe
rs who will serve under our banners. All our kindred amongst the White Huns of the west, and the Hepthalite Huns from beside the Aral Sea, and even the Budun-Boru, the Kutrigur Huns, whom we have so feared for generations. Perhaps yet others who do not speak our language or worship our gods, but who in their valour or despair will answer our call.’

  ‘I once knew two brothers called Valour and Despair,’ said Little Bird. ‘Twins they were.’

  Attila ignored him. ‘Whoever will answer our call will ride with us against the Western Empire. We shall be such an army as the world has never seen, our horsemen as numberless as the sands of the Takla Makan. We shall ride west, and we will destroy Rome and raze it to the ground and every vestige of it that stands. Not one stone shall rest upon another, for they have hated and despised and insulted our people from the beginning. Finally, when our own empire stretches from that far grey sea they call the Atlantic, which is the western border of Rome, eastwards across all of Asia to the very shadow of the Great Wall - then we will turn on our most ancient enemy of all. Our immemorial enemy, generations before the name of Rome was heard of among the Huns. The empire of China.’

  The word hung in the air like a curse. Little Bird hissed at it and looked away, wincing. The other men barely dared look at each other. The cursed word. The word never to be spoken. Their nemesis in ancient times. ‘The empire to the east’, they customarily called it, if they referred to it at all. Never ‘China’. That word hurt their eardrums, soured their palates, ached in their skulls even as they heard it. A word under a curse. The rune of ancient catastrophe.

  ‘Our power then will be very great,’ he said. ‘China will fall, and the whole world be ours.’

  The men tried to take in his words, to digest his vision. Chanat said afterwards that he felt as if he was trying to swallow a whole cow.

  An empire of the Huns, encompassing the whole world from the ruins of Rome to the ruins of China. It was beyond imagination.

  Attila talked to them of their past and of their future, their god-given destiny. He conjured in their imaginations images of once-great Hun cities laid waste by the armies of China in ancient times. For once they were kings, he said, and lived in majestic cities, within a wide northern loop of the Yellow River, in a rich and well-watered land called the Ordos.

  ‘I dispute this,’ growled a low old voice.

  It was Chanat.

  The others drew in breath at his insolence, but Attila smiled and listened. His fondness for the fearless old warrior was very great and he gave Chanat free rein.

  ‘I dispute this talk of cities,’ said Chanat. ‘We were born on horseback. You know the myths of our people.’

  Attila inclined his head. ‘Perhaps, perhaps not,’ he said. ‘But that China is our ancient enemy you would not dispute.’

  Chanat pondered, stroking his long grey moustaches, then shook his head and said gruffly, ‘That I would not dispute.’

  At this Little Bird took from his cloak a strange, battered instrument with a single string. He plucked at it softly and changed the note by bending the wooden frame of the instrument one way or another, from a low drone note to higher, more insistent and mournful tones. And he recited one of the ancient lays of the people from that time, in his hypnotic and haunting voice which was not quite singing and not quite speaking, this little riddle of a shaman who was not quite man and not quite child, not quite mad and not quite sane, and who sat backwards on his horse as often as forwards.

  He sang of a great king, Tumen, who gave his eldest son, Motun, to a neighbouring tribe as a hostage, and favoured his second son as his heir. Then, wanting Motun dead, Tumen attacked this neighbouring tribe, but Motun escaped and returned home. Tumen greeted with him with false smiles and feasting, plotting in his wicked heart all the while to kill his own son. But the son was plotting in his turn to kill his own father, and his plan was dark indeed: he would make all his men as guilty of regicide as he, so none could rebel.

  First he drilled his men cruelly. ‘Shoot whatever I shoot,’ he cried, ‘and death to any who hesitates!’

  Then he went hunting. Every animal he shot, his men shot too. Saiga were stuck like porcupines, wild boar lay dead like giant hedgehogs. Then he raised the stakes. He turned his bow on his own favourite horse, one of the Heavenly Horses. Some men hesitated and he promptly had them executed. Then Prince Motun turned his bow on his favourite wife - again, some men did as he did, and some hesitated. Again, he had those weak ones killed. Finally he turned his bow on his father’s most treasured horse. More arrows; none wavered.

  Then on a hunting expedition he rode behind his father and nocked an arrow to his bow and shot him in the back. His father reeled in his saddle, agonised, astonished. The rest of Motun’s men, so drilled in obedience now that they did not hesitate, did likewise. In an instant King Tumen lay dead on the ground, his body so stuck with arrows that there was no room for one more.

  Motun had the remains of his father burned and scattered to the four winds, taking only his flensed skull as a drinking goblet. He became a great king, and conquered and united many tribes. Such were the beginnings of the Hun kingdom in the northern bend of the Yellow River, in the land known as the Ordos.

  Little Bird laid down his instrument. ‘Many kingdoms have been born out of feuding families,’ he said. ‘I have even heard it related that Rome was born when a warrior, Romulus, slew his brother Remus.’ The little shaman looked at Attila and smiled.

  ‘But the kingdom of Motun did not endure,’ said Attila. He scowled into the firelight. ‘Though he ruled over thirty walled cities throughout Mongolia and Xinkiang, and our people, the Khunu in the ancient tongue, were equal in pride and glory to the empire of China, and though Motun ruled at his capital, called Noyan Uul, with a rod of iron, upon the Mountain of the Lord, nevertheless they were despised by China. Although the Khunu meant only ‘the People’ to them, to the Chinese it sounded like Xioung Nu, which means ‘the wicked slaves’ in the language of China, and they flung this insult in their faces.

  ‘War broke out between them, and the Chinese brought down fierce warriors from Manchuria, and there were many years of war, and treachery undid them. In the end the thirty majestic cities were laid waste, and the proud towers and palaces of Noyan Uul were burned to the ground, and the few Khunu who had not gone to their deaths in battle were sent broken and starving out into the wilderness. Many are the peoples who have been ‘abolished’ by empires like China. They drifted westwards into the void of Central Asia and were lost for ever.’

  He nodded slowly, still gazing into the fire. ‘And there we Khunu became a mythical, insubstantial people of the wastes, impoverished bands of wilderness wanderers, tent dwellers, cannibals, so it was said, preying upon settlers’ children like vagabond dogs. Scavengers in sandblown rags and tatters, the offspring of witches and demons of the wind. Well, let them believe it, if it serves to chill their bones.

  ‘They were our fathers.’

  So Attila spoke, so the Hun mythology went, and who was to say that it was not the truth? He knew from his boyhood the tale of how the father of Rome, pious Aeneas, defeated by an ancient enemy, fled westwards from crumbling Troy, carrying old Anchises on his broad shoulders. Were not the parallels and echoes uncanny? You heard in those echoes the laughter of the gods.

  Then there was Emperor Titus, who destroyed the temple of Jerusalem and drove the Jews out into the world to be a nationless and accursed tribe of wanderers for ever. Just so, like the Trojans or the Jews, the Huns’ forefathers had fled westwards from their crumbling cities, whose very names were now lost in the desert sands, but for towering and majestic Noyan Uul. And as the Greeks were the doom of the Trojans, and the Romans the doom of the Jews, so the Chinese were the doom of the wandering Huns. But it is hard to be a wanderer, and a nomad’s life is much bitterness and wordless endurance.

  Once there was a tribe that appeared in the empire of Rome: the Ampsivarii, they were called, and they were nomads. Tacitus tells the ent
ire story of that nation in two curt, typical sentences. ‘In their protracted wanderings, the exiles were treated first as guests, then as beggars, then as enemies. Finally their fighting-men were exterminated and the young and old distributed as booty.’ Of the Ampsivarii, we know not a jot more.

  It was almost the same story with the Jews. Trajan considered exterminating that entire troublesome and bellicose tribe, stiff-necked and superior and proud in their own conceit as the ‘Chosen People’. But surely it would be madness to think you could exterminate a whole people? Then remember the Ampsivarii, now forgotten, along with their language, their customs, their gods. Or remember the Nasamones of the Libyan shore. No, you do not remember them, nor does History herself. They have vanished as if they never were. For once they rebelled against paying taxes to Domitian, and that cruel emperor promptly ordered them exterminated, man, woman and child. When it was done he declared simply, ‘I have stopped the Nasamones existing’ - as if he were a god! Which, of course, he was: a divine Caesar. So perhaps Trajan could have done the same to those irritating Jews after all. But now the recognised god of the world is a Jewish carpenter, and consubstantial with his heavenly father.