Attila: The Gathering of the Storm

by William Napier

  Many Kutrigurs lay dead beyond the thorn brake, but many more came on, vaulting over the corpses of their comrades as they rode. The defenders’ bow arms, though as hard as steel, began to tire. Each draw of the string was like pulling yourself up by one hand from an overhead branch. Each warrior had fired a hundred times or more. There were arrows remaining in store, but the archers themselves were only flesh and blood. And the Kutrigurs, like jackals, scented blood and injury and came closer.

  Some slowed their horses and still tried to trot through the field of rocks but were quickly shot down. Others, however, did something no Hun warrior ever did willingly, and it came as a surprise. They dismounted, dropped to the ground and began to make their way across the mere hundred yards or so to the thorn brake on their stomachs. Hatchets, daggers, clubs and short stabbing-spears clutched between their teeth, they crawled zigzag on their elbows and knees like an army of lizards. They clung flat to the ground among the strewn rocks and were hard to hit. Attila’s men rolled low and fired out at them but the target was small and too often their hard-drawn arrows only clattered off the shielding rocks or skittered over the dusty earth and ceased.

  Some got close enough to lash out with long lassos, with ropes hooked and barbed, and managed to drag sections of thorn brake clear and came crawling through. The sharpened staves within might stop warriors on horseback but they could not stop men on foot or crawling on reptilian bellies. Then they stood and came running in, naked and howling, weapons held above their heads. It became as desperate a face-to-face battle, on foot, as Attila had foreseen.

  ‘Aladar’s men!’ he roared out across the circle. ‘To my left! Hold that gap!’

  The men rushed to attack the Kutrigurs breaking through, and all was chaos and dust.

  Seeing that the battle was reaching its endpoint, old Chanat cast aside his offensive weapon, his bow, the weapon of hope among the Huns, and instead drew his old sword, its dulled edge nicked and serrated by six decades of unforgiving blows. Attila glanced across and saw the old warrior standing proud and looking out over the thorn brake and stiffening himself against the coming onslaught. And the king turned aside and for a moment could look no more, not at Chanat, not at anything.

  Then he drew his sword likewise and waited.

  A naked savage came at Chanat, jabbing at him with a short stabbing-spear. Chanat swept his sword low. The savage stepped backwards, yikkering like a monkey, his spear held out low in defence, and Chanat stepped towards him, raising his arm for a second right-handed swipe. At the last instant he turned easily on the ball of his right foot, spun in a swift semi-circle and stabbed backwards from this new and unexpected angle, close in to his enemy’s exposed left side. The old warrior stood straight, pulled his sword free of the dead man’s ribs, and turned to fight again without looking back at him once.

  And there was Orestes, fighting two at once. Chanat tripped one of them, knocked him to the ground and cut his head off. The Greek fought as silently as a cat, and perhaps with the same pleasure.

  Chanat was injured now. He fought on, his neck wound bleeding afresh with each mighty stroke he gave, longing for rest. But there would be no rest on this battlefield before the grave. ‘Then let it be,’ he growled. Another Kutrigur turned and fled, and one of Aladar’s men put an arrow in his back and he came down.

  Chanat approached his king, covered in dust and blood, his neck slick with blood, his leather jerkin ripped almost from his broad chest.

  ‘Geukchu and Candac,’ he said gruffly, jerking his head. ‘You sent them away with the horses. And for reinforcements?’

  ‘Of a kind,’ said Attila.

  ‘Then where are they? If they come not very soon they come too late. And we have need of their fresh strength.’

  ‘It is not fresh strength that they bring,’ said Attila. ‘On the contrary. They are coming back with old weakness.’

  Chanat scowled and muttered bitterly that this was no time for riddles and runes: ‘Riddles win no battles.’ His king only raised an eyebrow, then turned to drive his sword deep into the ribcage of a Kutrigur who had vaulted the loosened brake, slipped between the staves and came running at him with teeth bared like a wolverine.

  Behind the crawling Kutrigurs, the mounted horsemen heard another order go out from their cunning old chieftain - no man remained chieftain of the Kutrigurs for long without the keenest and cruellest cunning. Then some passed burning brands along their lines, and others broke away and collected arrows from a flatbed wagon; women passed them out, smiling and chirruping. These arrows had shafts tightly wrapped in resinous reeds, the kind that do not freeze or die beside the marshes, however icy the weather. Some were also dipped in oil from the desert oilbeds, and once lit from a burning brand would not be extinguished until they had burned out. The Kutrigurs lit these fire-arrows from handheld torches, smoking flambeaux held aloft and fluttering like victorious pennants, or else lit them from the blazing huts of the village itself. Leisurely taking careful aim, they began to fire them down upon the thorn brake. Instantly the dry thorn brake was ablaze and burning merrily.

  Flames exploded before Orestes’ and Attila’s faces and both men fell back in an instant, Orestes staggering a little.

  It was as Attila had foreseen. Once the thorn brake had been fired, their best line of defence was its momentary flames, and then the staves. The brake would soon fall apart, lying a tattered and black smoking ruin, and the Kutrigurs would be through on foot. And then this little band of warriors and adventurers, so far from home, would be slain with ease, no matter how valiantly they fought.

  Arrows still flew. Another warrior, one of Aladar’s men bearing the brunt of the attack where the thorn brake had given away, fell back and went walking slowly across the compound towards the centre where the terrified villagers crouched. He cradled the flight of white feathers that nestled up into his stomach, walking slowly, carefully, nursing the feathers as if they were a baby bird. Another arrow, two more, struck him as if randomly, insolently in the back as he walked before he fell and lay dead.

  Among the villagers huddled under their wooden slats, the sound of weeping was heard.

  The first horses had stumbled and fallen into the ditch outside the thorn brake, their hooves dabbling at the empty air, their lips drawn back over their long teeth, whinnying. They had scrabbled desperately to clamber up the crumbling sides of the cruel, half-concealed barrier before the thorn brake that now towered above them, and there they and their riders had been shot at close range. But now the ditch was half filled by the dead and dying, and the thorn brake was aflame and falling into ruins.

  Now mounted warriors came up close and fearlessly to the brake, just the other side of the choked ditch, and lashed at its last remnants with their long lariats, catching the thorns and dragging them away. The ditch filled with horses and men, footsoldiers taking axes to the fire-blackened staves and splintering them into pieces, and the finest of the Kutrigur cavalry riding in, still fresh for battle.

  ‘Aladar!’ yelled Attila desperately. ‘Get your men over here. Hold this gap whatever happens!’

  Aladar and his men sprinted across the circle and did more than hold the gap. Aladar fell on the lariat ropes with his dagger and cut them, and his men fell to their knees in the very shadows of their enemies’ rearing horses and fired arrows straight up into the horsemen. One Kutrigur half slipped from his stumbling horse, but regained his feet. He drew his long, curved sword and faced Aladar. Aladar ran at him sidelong and with a single backhanded swipe of his sword took off the top of the man’s skull, which spun away through the air like a bone dinner-plate. The man stood stock still, his eyes wide, astonished. His brains oozed over the top of his opened skull like grey porridge bubbling over the rim of a cauldron. Aladar spun on his heel and cut back across the man’s stomach, opening his belly. The doomed man remained alive long enough to see his own seal-grey guts slip to the ground before him, like a mass of writhing eels. Then he fell dead upon them.

>   Nearby, Yesukai passed his hand over his face and his chest heaved, and fresh, bright blood seeped from under his arm. The arrow had penetrated further than it seemed.

  Orestes pulled further back from the collapsing furnace of the thorn brake and looked at Attila, the whites of his eyes shining in his soot-blackened face. He said nothing. What was there to say? They had fought their way through war-torn Italy together when they were yet boys, evading Goths and Romans alike. They had buried a third child, Orestes’ own flesh and blood, his beloved little sister Pelagia, and had walked on unbeaten. They had escaped a Roman legionary city and crossed the Danube under fire. Since then they had fought across Scythia, and as far as the wide, sandy shores of the Yellow River and across the emerald green grasslands of Manchuria. At other times in their long brotherhood they had fought across the parched plains of Transoxiana, and in the mountains and the precipitous passes of Khurasan, against the might of the Sassanid Kings. And they had fought in strange and unholy battles amid the ruins of the Kushan Empire, and sometimes they had fought for Indian princes and at other times they had fought against Indian kings, and they fought for both gold and glory. And now it had come to this, in a land, as Orestes said, not yet named. They had faced poor odds before, but none so terrible as this. The day was at last against them.

  Attila knew what Orestes’ thoughts were, and the thoughts of all his failing men. He turned and strode among them, his sword whirling and flashing over his head, his stride that of a conqueror. He proclaimed to them in a voice that carried even above the din of battle that this was not how it would end. This was not his destiny, to end here, nor was it theirs. Their destiny was still to ride against Rome and to destroy it, and then to ride against China. For all the world was theirs. He said that he had heard word of it from Astur the All-Father, and it would not end here, and not now. And though each and every warrior knew well in his heart that this was exactly where it ended, and that their time was come and they would go down fighting amidst this blaze of thorns, under the arrows and blades of the Kutrigurs, nevertheless, at the same time, somehow they still believed in him.

  He shouted a brief command and instantly his weary but well-drilled men did as he ordered. They abandoned the broken line of brake and staves and moved backwards. Now, to huddle together in a desperate last stand about the wooden tent of slats would apparently have been the best sense, but there they would have made a good, single target for the Kutrigurs’ murderous arrows. Instead Attila’s order was that each gather into his own small troop of ten, or however many of that ten remained alive, and fight as a mobile unit.

  It was a cunning stroke. The Kutrigurs were unable to fire their arrows into the mass because there was no mass, and they might well hit their own. As they came riding in, yelling and whooping over the smoking ruins of the thorn brake, they were obliged to attack each small unit separately. And as they attacked one, they themselves were savagely attacked on the flank or rear by another. It was a military tactic of small extent but great effect. The strength and swordsmanship of Attila’s men, and their fanatical comradeship towards both each other and their visionary king took a terrible toll, and the bodies of Kutrigurs piled up at many times the rate of their own. Though none but one man there knew it, the tiny units of Attila’s men were fighting like miniature Roman legions; and against the milling, bewildered, clumsily close-packed cavalry of the Kutrigurs, they were proving just as unbreakable.

  Smoke and dust filled the air, and cries more like those of animals than of men. A weariness descended over the fighting crowd, slaughterous drudgery of stab and despatch, stab and despatch. How much longer could they go on? It would be weariness that killed them, not the valour or strength of their enemies. It is almost always thus for a warrior. It is tiredness that kills.

  Attila and Orestes and his closest men fought back to back near the eastern edge of the circle, trying to draw in towards the centre. But their attackers kept coming. They couldn’t move, couldn’t reposition. It was all they could do to stay alive.

  Attila cried a warning, and Orestes turned and saw a Kutrigur almost upon him, a tall, lean fellow with his long hair scooped upwards and cemented with white clay, his face splashed and printed with fresh blood, his beribboned spear raised. Orestes held his longsword out horizontally and made as if to sweep it sidelong into the warrior’s belly. The warrior pulled up, lowered his spear and held it out two-handed and vertical in an artless blocking stance. Thus he could break his attacker’s stroke and then swiftly turn his spear, even if the shaft was broken, and drive it into his side. But Orestes had his adversary just as he wanted him. He was making one of his favourite moves, in his usual, expressionless silence, as if practising swordplay with a friend.

  The moment the warrior’s spear tilted downward into the defensive, Orestes changed his stroke and in a single fluid movement he swept his sword-blade up over the warrior’s head, switched the position of his hands on the hilt even as the sword flashed through the air, and then brought it back down, left-handed and with punishing force, across the back of his adversary’s legs, slicing through his hamstrings, his muscles, and halfway through the bone.

  He drew the sword free and straightened up and held it right-handed once more. The bewildered warrior’s legs buckled as if the muscle had been stripped out of them entire at that lethal stroke, and he sank to his knees in a pool of his own spreading blood, still not understanding what had happened, what had gone wrong. He would never understand. But the gods had given the nod that day, and granted death his request. For death makes the request regarding every man, each and every day. And the day dawns when the gods give the nod to death for each and every man.

  Orestes drove his sword into the man’s torso and pulled it free again. He planted his foot in the small of his back and booted his lifeless body into the burning thorn brake.

  It had been more like an execution than an even fight.

  But they were losing. No matter how ferociously they fought, how bravely and with what murderous skill, it was certain that they should lose. A dozen of them lay dead already; two or three times that number bore scarlet wounds. Their weariness almost overwhelmed them even as they fought on, unyielding. Their enemies were numberless: for every howling savage they killed, two more took his place. And the day wore on.

  Attila still strode among his men, marshalling them, ducking random spear-thrusts, impatiently swirling and cutting a man almost in half at the waist when he came at him, snarling, as the king was trying to order his men to turn their other side. He roared to them and then they took heart from it and fought more bitterly yet. But they were losing.

  The sun was going down at last on that short cold winter day, and still they fought, warriors becoming no more than unreal, flame-rimmed silhouettes against the sunset, puppets of the gods in lethal shadowplay. There was a nightmare beauty to the field of blood: the sky of fiery orange, warriors groaning and buckling, falling back into their comrades’ arms and dying there, warriors crying out curt battle laments before leaping into the fray once more to take what lives they could before being cut down and sent below in their turn.

  High above, against the enflamed sky, a skein of wild geese passed over, black shadows likewise against the setting sun, and some warriors stopped amidst the carnage and looked up at them and could think of nothing, no words to express what they felt when they saw those silent blackwinged forms pass overhead distant and serene heading west into the flaming dying sun.

  Three things happened in quick succession. Chanat groaned, turned away from the line of battle and took shelter amid the handful of his fellow warriors. Attila, before his own men’s horror-struck eyes, dropped his head and clutched his chest. Then he dropped his sword as well, and reeled a little, and as he reeled, they saw that he had been hit by a black-feathered arrow. It was no minor wound to be battle-dressed, patched and forgotten. The arrowhead was sunk in between his ribs, though not on the heart side, in dense chest-muscle. Attila broke the shaft off an
d threw it away, closed his leather jerkin over the wound, knotted it and stood upright again.

  Almost at the same moment, there came a weird far-off sound, muffled and eerie in the dust-choked air. The fighting slowed, became hesitant, dreamlike. One Kutrigur stopped in mid-swipe and half turned. He could have been killed in that instant, but the sound came again, and his adversary - it was Yesukai, drenched in blood down one side from shoulder to thigh - stopped likewise and looked blindly into the east.

  A third time the sound came, an unaccountably mournful sound which rumbled though the air and the ground itself. The Kutrigurs ceased fighting altogether, and at their rear their old chieftain turned and stopped still. It was as if some unseen god had given the order that battle should cease. The field fell still and waited.

  8

  THE CAPTURED, THE WOUNDED AND THE DAMNED

  The dust drifted and passed away. Low fires still crackled and burned from the huts of the village, but the thorn brake itself was gone, no more now than a charcoal perimeter to the fighting, like the boundary marker to some complex and murderous game.

  The air cleared. The sky above was a deepening velvet blue stuck with a lone golden planet.