Attila: The Gathering of the Storm

by William Napier

  Attila said gently, ‘Our boyhoods made us all.’

  Bare under heaven lay the sorrowful village of that dying people. Not a spot of shade, not a tree. The flat salt desert only, and the wretched dying lake. The occasional passing herds too far and fleet for them. Their best hunters all long gone, hunted into extinction themselves by greater, crueller hunters. The cold winter to come and then a little grass in the hollows, perhaps. An existence pitiable, threadbare, a people clinging to their own lives by a thread, to the skin of the parched earth like fleas clinging to a dog’s hide. To be brushed away indifferently at any moment and indifferently by a greater power, into oblivion, into empty air.

  ‘A small thing it is we fight for,’ muttered Chanat. ‘A few yards of grey desert.’

  ‘We fought for a smaller thing this morning,’ said Attila. ‘A single life.’

  ‘You were fools.’

  Attila laughed. ‘Your gratitude embarrasses me, Chanat.’

  The old warrior coughed and spat.

  ‘I knew you’d resist,’ said Attila. ‘I actually had my hand on the butt of my lariat, ready to knock you cold.’

  Chanat eyed him.

  ‘You’re such an old mule, you would have started arguing - in the very shadow of our enemies.’

  Chanat grunted. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘And then we would all have been killed.’

  ‘As I said, you were fools.’

  Orestes said in his quiet voice, his hands clasped, his clear blue eyes still fixed straight ahead across the empty plateau, ‘Do you never do anything foolish yourself, wise Chanat?’

  ‘Only when a woman’s involved,’ growled the old warrior. And he stalked away to the other side of the corral.

  Attila and Orestes exchanged smiles.

  They shared a flask of water and wiped their mouths.

  The cold blue sky above them. A stillness. All the world waiting. Only the goatbells sounded in the oppressive silence as the animals moved and grazed among the scrub, happily oblivious. Death was coming.

  ‘This reminds me of many times before,’ said Attila. ‘This waiting. ’ His forehead was beaded with sweat.

  Orestes nodded. A runnel of sweat ran down his own forehead and over his nose, despite the coolness of the day. You never conquer the fear before a battle. He swiped the sweat away with the back of his hand.

  ‘The time we fought on foot on the green plains of Manchuria,’ murmured Attila, ‘because our horses were sick, do you remember? And the time we fought the forest kings, who wore wreaths of leaves for armour?’

  Orestes smiled his faint smile. ‘And when we stood at arms beside the Yellow River, and you fought with a spade because your sword was broken.’ He shook his head. ‘So much fighting we have done together, have we not? And now it is come to this: a flyblown village beside a dying lake, in a land not yet given a name.’

  Attila brooded. Then he said, ‘There was a time in Italy, when I was still a boy and a hostage with the Romans, when we came under attack from Romans. They wanted me dead.’ His lips curled as he said these words.

  ‘But other Romans saved you.’

  ‘There was one good Roman. A young officer.’

  ‘There are good Romans, then?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘And the boy in your uncle’s camp? Aëtius?’

  Attila said nothing.

  They drank again.

  ‘Before I came to you,’ said Attila, ‘you and your sister, in your Apennine cave and then in that haunted valley.’

  ‘I have not forgotten.’

  ‘Nor I.’ His voice was soft and low.

  ‘Four will fight for the end of the world,

  One with an empire,

  One with a sword,

  Two will be saved and one will be heard,

  One with a son

  And one with a word.’

  There was silence, and then Orestes said, ‘There is much that we do not understand.’

  ‘There is much that we will never understand,’ said Attila. ‘But war is a great teacher.’ He touched his hand to the hilt of his sword, his beautiful inlaid sword which had been given him by a Roman general, and which he had shown to his people as the Sword of Savash. They had believed. Did he himself believe? Who can say? Who can say what a man like Attila truly believed?

  He nodded towards the far horizon.

  Orestes looked, and it seemed to him that the horizon itself was astir. As if it were smouldering, and the smoke was dust. He wiped the sweat from his face again.

  ‘An ordinary raiding party would number only a few dozen,’ mused Orestes. ‘That is no few dozen. That is no ordinary raiding party.’

  ‘Two thousand will come. They want revenge. And we want them all to come.’

  Orestes let out a long, hissing sigh. ‘You’re crazy. With all due respect and that, my lord. But you are madder than a monkey’s tail.’

  Attila said nothing for a while, his flint gaze set on that distant, smoking horizon. His eyes narrowed, his earrings flashed in the sunlight. He said softly, not turning, ‘With respect, old comrade, we want them all to come, so that their camp will be left unguarded.’

  And then the People of the Wolf came howling in.

  They came howling in with an animal music which grew louder and more terrifying as they approached at full gallop. Yowling and yikkering, whooping and screaming, they came riding out of the dust across the plateau. They erupted in a thunder of hooves and drums, spears held aloft, arrows already notched to bowstrings.

  The old priestess had underestimated when she had said that there were a thousand of them, maybe two.

  Many wore next to nothing, and what they wore was purely decorative, for they had taken time to dress themselves for the killing. Their womenfolk had decorated their warriors further, with great care and pride, and sent them off into battle with much dancing and ululation, bidding them come back covered in the blood of their enemies or else their own. ‘Let no man come back to us unbloodied!’ the women sang.

  Now they rode down upon this insolent little band of nameless and unknown enemies. They were decorated with scars and weals of paint, with dots and lines scratched out at needlepoint by their women, ink poured drop by delicate drop into the oozing cuts. Dressed in feathers and furs, their reins were hung with the severed heads of their enemies or any other they had happened upon, knotted by their own hair. They rode bedizened with offcuts of Chinese silk and the bloodied vestments of slain priests and the incongruous floating muslin veils of maidens, from ransacked cities, now similarly bloodied and soiled and wrapped round thick wrists or powerful biceps as spoils of war and emblems of victory. Bracelets of hares’ feet and capes of buffalo hide were tied at their throats. Wolfskins and wolf pelts being of great totemic power, the highest warriors among them wore headdresses of wolves’ heads, jaws set perpetually agape, and necklaces of severed wolves’ ears. Others wore fur kalpaks stuck with the dyed antlers of deer, and long tresses of captured women’s hair tied vainly into their own.

  Their faces were tattooed and gaudily painted with white and ochre and red, cheeks and foreheads patterned crimson with fearsome devices drawn with knifepoints dipped in the blood of beetles crushed in mortars by their women. Upon their broad hairless chests were etched grinning suns and moons and blue faces with writhing snakes for hair, and upon their dusty backs were bloody handprints slapped by their fellows. Their horses’ flanks were decorated with birds and fish and bright yellow ochre chevrons and reddish handprints, some printed from real hands severed from the bodies of their groaning vanquished.

  Some wore the dark blue turban-cloths of slaughtered Persians artlessly wrapped round their heads or throats, some wore rawhide helmets stuck with the horns of bulls or saiga, embossed with strange designs of occult power. They clutched bunches of arrows in their fists, and clenched more between their filed and sharpened teeth, for some of them were cannibals. And some had coloured their lips and around their mouths a brilliant ca
rmine red, to that end as if to suggest to their enemies that there were others lying dead already, as if their mouths were still laced with blood from the last massacre, where they fallen on the slain and drunk wildly.

  Thus they came howling, and from behind their pitiful thorn brake Attila and his men saw that some among the enemy rode perversely naked but for bangles and bracelets straining round their thick wrists, spurring their horses onward with sparkling anklets of costly looted jewellery, like murderous mounted whores. Some wore nothing but leather belts round their waists, circled with hatchets and daggers and scalps tied thereto by the bloodcrusted fronds of their own hair. Further scalps and heads festooned these, and they clutched evil curved picks and lariats of crude nettle-rope, their very flesh stuck with shards of broken glass, bright beads, jewels. Some were already in a state of excitement, panting and with eyes half closed as they approached another slaughterous climax.

  And Attila’s men behind the thorn brake knew how they would die if they were captured alive, in what foul manner, and how slowly.

  Such was the legion of thousands that came howling down upon them that day, their appearance and noise abominable, drumming up clouds of dust through which they erupted terrible and demoniac. And behind them came many of their women and older children, readying themselves with little knives and daggers for the final despatches to be made upon the groaning battlefield after the fury of battle was done.

  Among them came also the witch Enkhtuya.

  Attila’s little army looked out aghast at this monstrous horde and tried to assure themselves that they had faced worse in the past and triumphed - though just for the moment they could not recall when. They steeled themselves as best they could and trusted to their king.

  Orestes glanced sidelong and saw Attila with his bow gripped in his left hand, his face raised, that old sardonic grin flickering about him even now; that laughter in the face of death, as if to lose like this were no loss but, against such absurd and impossible odds, in this nameless wasteland, with a final shout of laughter for your last gasp, a kind of despairing victory.

  Orestes shook his head. ‘Lose the smile, in Hades’ name,’ he growled. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ said Attila with equanimity, his smile growing broader by the second.

  ‘Thinking what?’

  ‘I was just thinking: imagine how the legions of Rome will react to a sight such as this, to this legion of howling horribles. They have faced many enemies, but they have never faced anything like the Kutrigur Huns in full rampage.’

  Orestes shook his head. ‘First things first,’ he said. He plucked up his first arrow from the ranks of them stuck in the earth at his feet, and nocked it to the string.

  ‘Not until I give the order.’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ muttered the Greek with a certain sarcasm.

  Attila nodded towards the horror rushing on them in fury and dust. ‘Observe.’

  The Kutrigur had galloped easily over the featureless plateau beaten flat by the years and the wind and even the pitiless sun. The miserable huddle of their foes stood behind their contemptible thorn brake, less than a hundred in number, peering out over the rim like marmots peering out of a burrow. There was laughter amid the howling, and some of the warriors bit their lips bloody in their excitement.

  ‘Now,’ said Attila.

  The front rank of the Kutrigur horses had come galloping among the rocks strewn on the hard, unforgiving earth, lying almost camouflaged in the pale desert dust. One, a single horse, took a tumble, and the rest slowed and reeled upward and began to step carefully. Their enraged riders beat them with lariats, belts and whips, but the horses could no more gallop through this slew of rocks than a camel can gallop over sand dunes. Warriors coming up behind drove their horses onward in an unabated gallop into the stalled front rank and they began to cram powerlessly together.

  Attila raised his right arm. His eighty men watched him, not their enemy.

  He waited. Then he saw one warrior strike out at one of his fellows, who veered sideways and almost fell from his horse. He slammed into a third warrior, whose horse bucked with indignation and then came down painfully on a rock, its rear leg hobbling.

  Attila dropped his arm. ‘Now!’ he roared.

  The eighty bowmen were gathered round only one side of the thorn brake. The Kutrigurs in their red rage and incompetence had not even encircled them, but packed together in one jostling, milling band.

  ‘They have no experience of attacking a fortified position,’ said Orestes.

  Attila nodded. ‘Not even one as pitifully fortified as ours.’

  The arrows came at their appointed rate upon them, each bow-man firing a dozen a minute, arcing high into the eternal blue sky and then falling down through the air and down through helms and hauberks and cuirasses of oxleather, through brain and flesh and bone. They fell like rain. A thousand arrows fell upon the Kutrigurs in the first minute, by which time hundreds were wounded and at least a hundred dead. Horses reared and rampaged, biting each other in their agony and madness.

  At last, from somewhere behind the ranks of the chaotic beleaguered horsemen, came a voice of authority. Somewhere the old, grim-faced chieftain, with his pockmarked cheeks and nose battered flat, was giving his orders. The flanks of the jostling horsemen began to move out, and the warriors to separate. Those on the left flank began to gallop after all. Gaps appeared between them. Arrows began to fall from the sky and hit the dust. More and more failed to find their target. The horsemen scattered further apart, found their space. And then all began to gallop. They thinned out and moved, faster and faster. Not towards the thorn brake, over the treacherous slew of rocks, but round it. They set up a warcry and moved as fast as dust-demons round the brake, and the eighty men’s arrows missed their whirling targets more and more. Then the Kutrigurs began to nock arrows to their own bows and fire back. Their discipline was poor and their marksmanship little better, as had already been divined by testing. But so many, firing so prolifically . . . Their arrows began to tell.

  Attila nodded grimly. He had expected as much.

  He ordered his men to keep low and keep firing.

  Through the pell-mell and melée of dust and galloping hooves, they glimpsed further Kutrigur warriors lassoing the last of the livestock, the droop-eared goats and the skinny-ribbed cattle, and dragging them to the ground and killing them. They set torches and burning brands to the huddled huts of the village and flames roared into the sky.

  The villagers huddled in the centre of the thorn brake in their tent of leaning wooden slats and clutched each other in terror and silence. The old priestess’s lips worked furiously with incantation, though none could hear her words over the sound of the furious battle, the cries of men and the screams of horses, and the endless thump of arrows into the thin wooden slats over their heads.

  The galloping Kutrigurs also began to drop arrows down onto the livestock inside the thorn brake, and the few horses that remained. The villagers watched the horses’ agony in an agony of their own. There was no shelter for them, nothing they could do. Now they understood why Attila had given the order for most of the animals to be driven off earlier, to some place of safety, some green and innocent valley beyond the horizon, far beyond the reach of men and their falling arrows.

  Two of Attila’s warriors fell back with arrows in their chests, for while the thorn brake was a good horse barrier it was a poor barrier to arrows. But it was all they had, all they could muster. Now the galloping Kutrigurs began to learn, and instead of arcing their arrows into the air, fired them directly into the thorns. A few picked their way determinedly among the rocks and assembled at the perimeter of the thorn brake but they were easily brought down by arrows or long spear-thrusts. Others went crashing into the ditch dug by the Attila’s grumbling warriors - it was roughly but effectively covered by stretches of canvas strewn with sand - and were similarly finished. But the ground had been too hard, and the time too litt
le, to make of the ditch a proper defence. It was enough to break the legs and bring down the riders of a few front-running horses, but no more. Attila had inspected it earlier and muttered, ‘Not up to Roman standards, but it’ll have to do.’

  Now he ordered his men to drop to the ground. Just at that moment, Yesukai reeled and spun round, clutching his upper arm and bellowing in anger: there was an arrow straight through his arm. Chanat leaped to his feet again and ran to him, in obedience to no order but to look to Yesukai.

  The warriors lay flat on the ground and fired as best they could through the thorns, but now the difference in numbers was taking its toll. One of Attila’s men suddenly reared up - he had an arrow straight in the top of his head. He half turned, then his eyes rolled upwards to the whites and he fell dead in the dust.