The Kutrigurs and their enemies looked the same way and saw that a distant fire rent the horizon. It was not a great fire, but great enough to be seen, to the east, some five miles off, where the Kutrigurs’ camp lay. Against the deep-blue sky, black smoke rose high into the cooling air, like smoke from a furnace, like black smoke from the accursed oilfields of the wild Chorasmian shore, blotting out even the distant purity of the single glow hung like a lantern in heaven.
Attila’s last ally. Black fire.
Up a low rise, perhaps half a mile away, came shuffling a sorrowful line of people. Not an army of noble warriors come to his aid in the hour of need, in recompense for some act of heroic comradeship long ago. Their rescuers were, as he said, marked not for their strength but for their weakness: ancients with bound and skeletal hands, women roped together with hemp ropes of their own making, children draggled and nervous. As many as a hundred of them, perhaps more, terrified, held at spearpoint.
The deep moan of the horn came again, and it was Geukchu who blew it. He and Candac and their troop of twenty men now also showed on the skyline to the east in the growing darkness, mounted, flanking their prisoners, roped and shackled and dejected. The horn that was sounded was an immense crescent of ivory, yellow and cracked with age. It was the Kutrigur priests’ sacred horn, dug from the ground generations ago, the hollowed-out tusk of some ancient animal whose bones had appeared out of the ochre dust in some crumbling cliff of limestone and whose offspring, it seemed, no longer walked the earth at all.
The Kutrigurs stared long and hard at the sight of their own people in chains. The old chieftain’s eyes were not strong, not in the failing light. But many among his warriors strained and thought they could see their aged fathers and mothers among the wretched captives, or their sisters still too young to come to battle with their little curved knives, their wives nursing their infants, the infants wrapped in their mothers’ arms, or the toddlers holding their mothers’ hands. Ruthlessly roped together at wrist and ankle, while the twenty mounted warriors who flanked them held their spears levelled and unwavering towards their captives’ chests and throats. They had the prisoners tightly circled in perfect, disciplined formation, and any who tried to break ranks and run would have been instantly skewered. Their baleful guardians sat their horses still and silent, like those who will do just as they promise to do. A mere twenty! But more than enough for the purpose.
Curse them. Curse these intruders who had outwitted them, outflanked them even in the heat of battle, sent out a secret detachment behind their backs, and fallen on their own defenceless camp as the men were away fighting.
Some of the younger and more impulsive Kutrigurs ground their teeth and whirled back towards their enemy for one final merciless assault, and the instant they did so their leader responded in kind. That fierce fighter with his blue tattoos and ragged topknot, whom they had picked out long ago but could not get near, or getting near, could not get away again alive. As the weary made to attack again, to ride in and finish these wretched brigands and insolent trespassers in their domain, that tattooed leader raised his sword in his right hand. At the same instant, as if in mirror image, as if there were no time or distance between them, the leader of the twenty horsemen on the hill raised his spear and prepared to drive it into the body of the nearest rope-bound captive. The captive, a thin girl in her teens, pulled away and cowered.
The chieftain of the Kutrigurs saw it all, and roared to his men to be still. The girl was his daughter.
An impasse settled upon them all.
The sour-faced old chieftain looked long towards the rise where so many of his own people stood in ropes and chains. He thought of the great camp beside the river that they had left that morning in such hot blood; it now, he doubted not, lay in fire-blackened ruins. His livestock must have been slain, his best horses taken and driven off, and the rest stuck with arrows and dying with thirst, mouths agape, lying on their swollen sides kicking their legs in slow agony by the winding river’s edge. For a moment the blood ran hot again through his thin old veins and he thought they should ride on and finish their enemies regardless, letting their old and their young go as sacrifice.
A sacrifice willingly made for the death of our hated enemies, he brooded. Our infants? There are more where they came from. But you, our enemies? He turned back and regarded the exhausted, bloodied men behind their pathetic ranks of staves. You dogs of cowardice and treachery, you vicious rats of men. The chance to destroy you may come but once.
But it would be no good. His men would turn on him in their fury and grief, and he would be finished as a chieftain and killed.
He must find some good in this. He must act the chieftain in this dark hour, or his men would be like wolves to a stag and rend him.
Slowly he walked his horse towards the battle line. He carried no weapon, only his wooden staff. His men parted before him. He stopped before the wreckage of the thorn brake. His warriors all fell back. The enemy leader had remounted his horse to meet him. His right side was drenched and dark, but he sat still and straight and did not waver. His horse was a grubby little skewbald with a fierce eye. It was a fighter’s horse. But the old chieftain knew that by now. He knew that these few dozen men were fighters such as he had never encountered before - God’s curse on them.
The two leaders faced each other.
‘So,’ said the chieftain, ‘you attack our women and slaughter our children. You put our suckling infants to the sword. This is how you fight, how you win your battles.’
‘Your eyes grow dim, old man,’ said Attila. ‘Look again. Those may be your ways. They are not ours. Your women and your children still live, unlike many hundreds of your finest warriors.’
‘You spawn of a—’
‘I am a merciful man,’ said Attila. ‘What shall I signal my warriors to do? To kill all your women and your children in your sight? They will all be slain before you can gallop that far to stop them. It will be the work of a few heartbeats to slay them all. My men are fast workers.’ He smiled. ‘But they have no wish to kill the defenceless and weak. They are merciful as I am merciful. Let us parley.’
‘You are a devil.’
Attila shook his head. ‘You cannot parley with heated blood. Perhaps you need to rest after the exertions of battle, old man, and then we can parley. But remember your women and children on the hill yonder; as shall we. Until you are ready to talk truce, we shall take care of them.’ And he smiled again his wolfish white-toothed smile, folded his powerful forearms across his chest and tossed his head back high.
‘I need no rest,’ growled the chieftain. His face was dark with anger. He fixed his glowering eyes upon the stranger’s yellow eyes and said, ‘What is your name?’
It was a sign of weakness among all the steppe peoples to surrender your own name first; an admission of weakness. But Attila was ever scornful of such customs, as if he well knew where true strength and weakness lay.
‘I am called Attila,’ he said, ‘son of Mundzuk.’
The chieftain narrowed his eyes. He had heard this name before. He had heard great things of this name. Even further east, among the mountains, there had been a bandit king ...
‘And your name?’
The old chieftain steadied his restless horse beneath him. ‘I am called Kizil-Bogaz,’ he said, ‘Red Craw. Chief of all the Kutrigur Huns.’
‘All?’ repeated Attila mockingly. ‘All that remain. Look around you. You cannot defeat us. Already half your men lie dead, stuck with arrows like hedgehogs. Already the desert rats and flies devour them. Look out over your dead army. Will you see the other half slain likewise, and your own power blown away like a dead thorn in a gust of desert wind? Look over my men. I have a hundred men, no more, no less. How many lie dead?’
‘How many?’ The old chieftain knew the answer well enough. He had neither need nor desire to look again. He knew the evil arithmetic of this battle. This overbearing bandit king had lost no more than a handful. But as for his
own people - another such battle and they would be finished. They had never known such attrition. This morning he had ridden out with two thousand warriors at his back. Now, littering the stony ground, and piled up in stained heaps within that fatal circle, as many as five hundred lay dead. As many again had fallen back and lay in the gathering gloom, tending arrow wounds, sword cuts, broken limbs, as best they could. There was no camp to retreat to, no felt tents to rest in. No women with beakers of cool water and gentle hands. Even their tents lay mangled and burned to ruins. God curse this yellow-eyed laughing bandit king.
‘How many of yours lie dead?’ repeated the old chief bitterly. ‘Not enough.’
‘Your army was numerous but weak,’ said Attila. ‘Join with me and I will make you strong.’ He nodded. ‘Join us.’
Red Craw stared at him. ‘You have slain fathers, sons, brothers on this field. The Budun-Boru do not easily forgive.’
‘Then we can decide it in single combat,’ said Attila. ‘You and I.’
Red Craw eyed him, with the wound still wet in his side, but sitting as still and hard as stone. Clearly the wound was not a serious one. He looked away.
‘Your ancients and women and your infants are not the only reward you will have from joining with us.’
Red Craw looked back, curious despite himself. ‘Speak.’
‘We ride west. Against the empire of Rome.’
Red Craw frowned. ‘What is Rome?’
‘A great empire. You will ride with us. We are brothers. We will ride together against Rome, an empire as great as China.’
Red Craw smiled for the first time, though there was little mirth in it. ‘There is no empire as great as China.’
‘There is one as rich, but not as strong: the Empire of Rome.’
Red Craw brooded. What reason had he to believe this murderous, treacherous upstart? Except that he knew from some men’s eyes you saw the truth burn like a lantern in a window. Curse him.
‘Besides,’ said Attila, laying his left hand flat over the right side of his chest. ‘I need a healer. Many of my men, too, and even more of yours.’
‘You have burned our tents. There is nowhere to go.’
‘Very well,’ said Attila. ‘We have parleyed enough.’ He looked towards the horizon and raised his sword. The lead horsemen on the rise, barely distinguishable now in the gloom, raised his spear likewise. The line of shackled people swayed before it like corn before the wind.
‘Wait,’ said Red Craw.
He looked down at his dusty, bloody hands on the pommel of his wooden saddle. He sighed. Then he pulled his horse round, and rode back slowly to his men.
Attila waited.
He and his men hardly understood what happened next. Red Craw spoke briefly to his captains, and then he dismounted before them, which was unusual. They could not hear the words spoken between them. Red Craw suddenly sank to his knees before them, as if asking their forgiveness for the botched battle against so small an enemy. Then he fell away to one side, and they saw with horror that he was only a headless trunk. His head rolled in the dust before him. The warrior facing him still had a short curved sword in his hand. He had sliced clean through Red Craw’s neck.
The warrior straightened again. He had many feathers stuck in his clay-whitened hair, and he was much younger than Red Craw. No more than forty, perhaps younger. His chest was broad and thickly muscled and he looked as strong as a bull. He sheathed his sword again without cleaning the blood off, and heeled his horse over.
‘My name is Sky-in-Tatters,’ he said without preamble, ‘chief of the Kutrigur Huns. We accept your offer. You are our brothers. You fight well. We will ride with you.’
He was squatly built and very strong but his voice was hoarse and strangely high-pitched. His eyes were small and suspicious, and had none of Red Craw’s brooding intelligence. He would not be a good chief.
Attila nodded. ‘Welcome,’ he said.
The two tribes burned their dead. Eight of Attila’s men lay dead. Most of the living carried a wound of some sort or other.
Yesukai, eager young Yesukai, always wanting to be the first in everything ... He was the first now, too: the first among Attila’s captains to go the way of all flesh, though the youngest. It is often so in war.
The arrow that had pierced his upper arm had gone further and also pierced his chest. The blood that coated him from shoulder to thigh, as he fought on regardless throughout that bitter day, was his own blood. He had given it up carelessly, as if his life were a thing of no moment.
He lay dying against one of the blackened staves and Chanat cradled his head. He would drink no water. He spoke very quietly with his eyes half closed, and each time the blood bubbled from his lips Chanat wiped it away again as tenderly as a mother wiping milk from her baby’s lips. Aladar, Attila and Orestes stood nearby in the gloom. In turn, according to custom, they and all the captains knelt before Yesukai and asked his forgiveness for any wrongs they might have done him in life. In reply, to each of them, young Yesukai smiled his boyish smile and murmured, ‘No wrong, no wrong,’ and reached out and laid his other, unbloodied hand on their foreheads in blessing. Each of them got to his feet again with tears blurring his sight. For they had been like brothers on the long ride and in the long fight.
‘My women,’ murmured Yesukai. ‘My youngest, Kamar. She was very dear to me.’ His head dropped and they thought he was gone. But then he said, ‘My heart is sorry for Kamar.’ His eyes were closed, his words almost inaudible. Attila knelt near him to hear. ‘And my children, my sons and my daughters. Care for them.’
‘As the sons and daughters of a king,’ said Attila.
Chanat wiped the young man’s mouth one last time, and then there was no more blood.
It was night when they burned his body on a great pyre of dry scrub, along with the bodies of the eight other men who had died that day. The funeral pyre was only one of many such pyres that covered the dark battlefield: the Kutrigurs were also burning their fallen. Little beacons in the vast and silent landscape, under the midnight blue vault of heaven. Among the beacons, firelit creatures moving as slow as ghosts, heads bowed low, and then stopping and groaning, and falling to their knees beside headless trunks and broken bodies, and weeping unconsolably. Mothers and wives, sisters and aged fathers from among the Kutrigurs, come seeking among the living and finding only the dead. Children and toddlers standing around, grubby-faced, barely understanding.
As the centre of his pyre, Yesukai’s body was seen amid the flames, his ribcage bare of flesh and ablaze and falling apart in white ash. The sparks flew upwards and were lost among the stars, and they sang his soul to heaven. Their lament was for themselves, after the custom, and the noble friend and comrade they had lost.
‘He has fallen, he has fled from us, noble Yesukai,
Yesukai of the laughing eyes, Yesukai of the brave heart and the high soul,
Kings are not, captains are not, who fought and died like Yesukai,
An eagle among men, a leopard, he has left his people poor;
Let the vultures cry among the Tien Shan, let the winds tell it over the Plains of Plenty,
Let the rains fall year long on the green grasslands in mourning for Yesukai!
The sword is cast away, the bow is broken, the weapons of war are perished,
Comfort is not, consolation is not,
For our noble friend, our Yesukai, is fled from us,
And we are left alone.’
At last the funeral pyres burned down low and they mounted their horses again and moved slowly away east.
The chief of the Kutrigurs, their uncertain allies, called out to them in the darkness, ‘Where are you riding?’
Attila regarded him. At last he nodded and said quietly, almost with tenderness, ‘Come.’
After half an hour’s ride through the desolate night, towards the river, with the women and children and the ancients of the Kutrigurs, restored to them and now unroped and unshackled, trudging along in
the rearguard, they emerged onto the lush floodplain of the great river. They sat their horses and waited for the Kutrigurs to draw up alongside them on the rise.
Sky-in-Tatters came alongside Attila and gasped.
Ahead of them burned the remnants of a huge fire, some way from the camp of black felt tents. It was an artificial fire, made of brushwood drenched with pailfuls of the foul black oil that Attila had made his men collect in the desert. Now they understood: another of Attila’s tricks. The black smoke that the Kutrigurs had seen on the skyline, and assumed was their camp going up in flames ...
The camp still lay by the river’s edge, as ever, under a soft and benevolent moon. The horses’ were breathing and peaceful in the corrals, the tents deserted and unharmed.
Sky-in-Tatters tore his gaze away from the sight of the untouched camp and gazed with grudging admiration at this yellow-eyed bandit king, Attila, son of Mundzuk.
Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Page 23