Orestes shook his head. ‘Best not.’
On the third day, Bayan-Kasgar rode into the camp alone and sought audience with Attila in his tent.
They sat on low stools. The general planted his fists on his knees.
‘So,’ said Attila. ‘I take it one arrow was sufficient.’
The general grunted and said, ‘Rhubarb leaves.’
Attila looked questioning.
‘A plant we eat - parts of it. None of it is to my taste, in truth, but the leaves are poisonous: a powerful laxative. Fatal in quantity.’
‘Hm. It must have been a messy death.’
‘Fitting,’ grunted the general. ‘He was a swine.’
A scintilla of humour passed between them. They clasped hands, and laid their other hands on each others’ arms and swore fealty unto death.
Thus the Huns of Attila, already united with the Kutrigur Huns, were further united with the people of the valley of Oroncha, and their emperor, Bayan-Kasgar, Beautiful Wolf.
Attila said he would prefer to call him Beyaz-Kasgar, or White Wolf. He told the old general that he had many virtues; but beauty, alas, was not among them. Bayan-Kasgar acknowledged the truth of this ruefully, but said that a man’s name was not a thing that could be lightly changed.
When Attila grew to know him better and they had shared a bowl or two of koumiss, the nomad king called him Ravent-Yaprak, which is to say, Rhubarb Leaf. But only Attila dared to call him that. The general might be into his seventh decade but his temper was that of a young bull.
He brought with him more warriors than they could number, some mounted on the slain god-king’s herd of two thousand prancing white horses, in whom the blood of the Horses of Heaven clearly ran. Many more rode horses of a more common but sturdy breed, skewbalds and piebalds and dusty bays and stocky little greys. A horde of farmers, suddenly taken with the spirit of adventure, wanted to learn again the ancient arts of their fathers with arrow and bow, shield and flashing sword. Young men not yet married, and more eager to fight than marry. And older men, husbands and fathers, bidding bitter wives and tearful children farewell at the cottage gate, and riding away torn between guilt and excitement. Before long the excitement triumphed, and any remaining guilt was irritably dismissed or forgotten amid the headlong rush of galloping horses and the wide and limitless freedom of the plains.
The union of the Black and the Kutrigur Huns had been forged in bloody battle. But the union of their conjoined forces and the people of the valley was effected only by guile, threat and shrewd judgement of men, and with the loss of only a single and unlamented life.
Attila led them north in the bitter early months of the new year, and they were reunited with the rest of the Kutrigur people, the women and children, and with Juchi and Bela and Noyan and their eight hundred horsemen. They rode for two famished but strangely exhilarated weeks until they found pasture in a great depression in the midst of the desert where moisture collected and green grass grew all the year round. The yellow-eyed nomad king had known it was there, none knew how. Other nomads were camped there already when the great army hove in view, but they did not linger, and soon many thousands of horses were grazing the grass to its roots.
Soon other bands of nomads came to join them, having heard fantastical tales of a mighty army of Asiatic peoples, and a great quest, and a commander and king who shone with the favour of heaven, against whom no man or empire could stand. Some bands numbered no more than a dozen, some several hundred, and the spring grass struggled to grow fast enough to feed the horses’ many thousands of mouths. Horses and weapons and goods were amicably traded, marriages were made, and even the hardiest warriors grumbled in their tents at night at the din of all the wailing newborns in the night. And so, by fame and alliance, courtship and copulation, the numbers of the people grew and grew.
Each people formed its own regiment, but learned its discipline and took its orders from Attila and his chosen men. When not drilling they played the furious, competitive games of the steppe peoples. Picking up tiny gold rings from the grass at full gallop, or lunatic wrestling matches between two men each mounted and galloping side by side. Trying to steal kisses, and more intimate forfeits, from young maidens who rode armed with long whips with which they lashed their pursuers mercilessly. The lashing they gave with their tongues was even worse.
Then it was time to break camp for the last time, and begin the long journey west, for the first signs of spring were appearing everywhere and the horses and livestock could forage as they went. Early clover and vetch, sainfoin, corn spurrey and slender oatgrass coloured the warming plains.
‘To Rome!’ cried Attila, raising his sword high. ‘Even to the shores of the Atlantic!’ His numberless thousands of warriors gave a great shout, most having no clue what ‘Atlantic’ meant but liking the grandeur of the word.
Little Bird, sitting his pony close to the king, did not shout with them but only gave a heretical sigh amidst all this martial rejoicing. ‘All the same, I would have liked to have seen China, my father,’ he said. ‘Before I died.’
‘You will see China,’ said Attila, wrenching at his reins. His voice was fierce, but Little Bird’s voice was soft and melancholy.
‘Only in dreams,’ he said. ‘In a dream, I climbed to the top of a high hill from where I could see all of China.’ He spoke now in his sing-song rhythmical lilt, as if reciting a poem. ‘The hanging gardens of the emperor’s summer palace, the jade streams singing, the glimmering bird-girls in their leaves of silk and gold.’
He stopped and smiled at Attila.
Attila said nothing in reply to Little Bird’s haunting words, so rich and strange, of such sad omen.
The shaman’s eyes were silver pools, quite inscrutable.
‘Ah, but China is vast,
You will never see it all.
The mountains are high, the emperor is far away.
The emperor is forever far away.’
15
HOMECOMING
The great army looped northwards and towards the time when the days grew as long as the nights, they met the edge of the northern forests where the spring grasses were lush and green, and followed their path westward that way. There remained patches of shrinking snow in the shady hollows, but in such threshold places, between forest and steppe, as between land and sea, there is always good hunting.
At times, with the sun setting low in their eyes, it seemed as if autumn had returned in all its majesty, the branches of the trees burning gold in the dying blaze. And at times the jaws of winter snapped at them still, and sharp flurries of wolf-weather returned. The king was always urging them on into the night, the children exhausted, asleep in the wagons. Sometimes they looped northwards to find fords across the great rivers of that country, riding through the midnight forest, snow aslant, wolves tracing them, shadows through the firs, the most mournful howls echoing across the starlit sky. Beyond the wolves, other figures moved through the forest, watching them, pushing through the towering pines as a man walks through grass: vast, nameless beings more powerful than any wolf that ever lived.
But spring came on steadily, and each day they drew further west out of the iron jaws of central Scythia, and towards the rich pastures beside the Euxine Sea. They rode through long, damp grass beside the forest’s edge with dewladen bittercress brushing their horse’s hocks. They came through the country of gentle, brown-eyed woodland people, who used jawbones of pike to tattoo their bodies with numberless waves and spirals. They lived in bark-covered tepees, said Little Bird the Wise, though only the children believed him. The adults scoffed and laughed to hear the mad little shaman talk of woodland people who ate moss, and in winter rode through the snow on reindeer with bridle and saddle. Still farther north there were people who hunted seals with obsidian-tipped spears, and roofed their huts of ice with the ribs of whales.
At the riversides the Huns stopped to water their horses among the broadleaved poplars. This was a land so mild and gentle and filled w
ith birdsong that it seemed to them like some great king’s private hunting park. They sometimes glimpsed the people of the woodlands, who had long since glimpsed them through the trees: a horde of hellish horsemen, armed to the teeth, eyes as restless as those of hungry wolves. The woodland people had watched them approach for a while with big, mournful eyes, hidden in their bird-skin capes, and had slipped quietly away, taking to their coracles and their leaf-shaped canoes and vanishing northwards into the safety of the deep and endless forest.
There were the pale green shoots of wild onions, the aroma of wild thyme beneath their horses’ hooves. A stream of snowmelt so young that it flowed in a streambed merely of flattened green grass, padded and silent, the world so bright and young, as if new made by the All-Father’s unseen hands in the night. There are no words for expressing the joy of spring after such winter bitterness as is felt by all nomads and wanderers. Not for them the safety of stone houses. Not for them steaming hypocausts and heated floor-tiles. Only a dung-fire and a horseblanket between them and the killing cold.
Their hearts soared like hawks, bursting with love for the land.
They surprised a black bear one day bumbling out of the woods. When they had speared her and rolled her over in the grass and prayed to the Little Sister’s spirit for forgiveness, they found she had milk in her teats. She had hidden her cubs under moss, knowing she must die that day. But they searched and found the cubs and killed them, too, their fur so fine a gift for a pretty girl. But one cub they kept alive, wet-nosed and wide-eyed, with huge and floppy paws, and he came along with them after that. They packed up the meat from the rest of the cubs and the mother and went on. Little Bird carried the cub on his lap when he began to tire, and the cub slept and then urinated on him lavishly by way of thanks.
‘Tell me about Rome,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, lying back in the firelight after gorging too heavily on bearmeat. He belched and rubbed his bulging belly.
Attila sat cross-legged and looked into the fire. He spoke slowly and softly:
‘By a King of Kings from Palestine
Two empires were sown,
By a King of Terror from the east
Two empires were o’erthrown ...’
Despite his groaning belly, Sky-in-Tatters sat up, or at least raised himself on one elbow. ‘Explain.’
‘This is a prophecy, a Roman prophecy. The first lines refer to that fiery Jew they call the Christ, the King of Kings, who sowed the empires of Heaven and Hell. In the empire of Rome, he is their god.’
‘He is a great warrior?’
‘He preaches peace. Preached. He is dead now, though they believe he lives.’
‘In heaven?’
‘In heaven. Palestine is . . . a desert country far to the south. The tribe there is called the Jews. Now this dead god-king is worshipped by all the empire of Rome.’
‘Though they are not Jews?’
‘No.’
Sky-in-Tatters was looking more and more baffled. ‘But they in Rome - Romans . . . ? They do not follow his preaching? They are great warriors?’
‘Not bad.’
Sky-in-Tatters shook his head. ‘My heart is heavy for them. They are confused.’
Attila went on, ‘This Christ taught that we should forgive our enemies.’
Sky-in-Tatters threw back his head and laughed. ‘When all men know that the sweetest pleasure in life is to destroy our enemies, rape their women, and steal their gold!’ He reached for the flagon.
‘It was the Romans themselves who put him to death.’
Sky-in-Tatters drank from the flagon and wiped his mouth. ‘Now my head is beginning to hurt. And it isn’t the koumiss.’
‘They put him to death four centuries back, and then realised they’d killed God.’
Chanat said, ‘No man is God.’
‘There was a Greek wise man,’ put in Orestes from the edge of the circle, ‘who said that if horses pictured god, they would picture him as a horse.’
They all chuckled.
‘These Greeks,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, ‘they are not the biggest fools I have ever heard of.’
‘They are conquered by Rome now.’
Sky-in-Tatters pondered. ‘And the other verse. This King of Terror from the east ...’
Attila’s eyes shone and he said nothing.
Geukchu said, ‘Perhaps he will overthrow even heaven and hell itself, Your Majesty.’
Attila didn’t look at him. Geukchu shrank back into silence. ‘Rome and China,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, a slow smile dawning on his face. ‘That makes two empires.’ He raised the flagon of koumiss again and took a long, long draught.
A broad river they forded in silvery light, and a rocky defile colourful with larkspur, and then down another sunbaked slope of clattering scree and over a stony plain of malachite and slate, warm fumes of rosemary and lavender and chives rising amid the horses and the leather. It was summer now, sunbaked, and they had ridden the long trail back west for many months, the sun hot on their forearms as they turned and headed south amid a chorus of oxlips and cowslips and anemones and musk orchids, lilac cornflowers and yellow broom and white clover, white windflowers and purple pasqueflowers, with insects rising and falling murmurously among the open flowerheads.
There were silver poplars and rose-coloured rocks, rocks along the river valley, this river that ended at home. Rocks crumbling under the generations of ice and wind, brown earthbanks crumbling into the mighty river. Horses strained up the farther side, wagons clattered over the gravel strands and up shallow slopes to the plains again. The plains that hereabouts were dotted with mighty kurgans, the tombs of the ancient, bearded, blue-eyed Scythians, silent monsters asleep in the long grass.
As for Attila, the fierce joy in his heart was boundless. He could barely hold himself down in the saddle; he kept pushing himself up on his fists, looking afar off for the camp of his people. Orestes noticed and teased him for it. Only Orestes could. He even dared to mention the name of Queen Checa. But it was true. Their joy was boundless, their future without check or limit. They had done it. It was an unbelievable feat, this vast project of unification. They had ridden out across the steppes at the onset of winter, eastwards over the Iron River. They had ridden thousands of miles into the heart of Scythia, to the very shadow of the Great Wall itself. They had united Hun peoples, the Kutrigur and the Black Huns, and joined with another great people, the Oronchans. They had massacred an entire Chinese armoured column for good measure and good practice, and they had been joined by several thousand more nomad and distant kinsmen as they journeyed home. Ahead of them now, ahead of so great and powerful an army, lay only more conquest, and then the ultimate prize. None could stand against them.
Even in these last days, as they approached their homeland, more came to join them. Some had come before, a year ago, hearing of the finding of the Sword of Savash, and then drifted away disconsolate when Attila rode east. They came back, laughing with astonishment, those tribute kings and petty princelings, rulers over tiny, scattered bands of White Huns from the shores of the Caspian, under their king, Charaton; and Kouridach, the great, bow-legged chieftain of the Hepthalite Huns from beside the Aral Sea.
Charaton made to dismount from his horse when he came before Attila, by way of submission, but Attila stopped him. So Charaton sat his horse, and told him that he, even he, had had an embassy from the Byzantines. They had not dared to raise their eyes towards him, they said, for fear that they should be dazzled by his effulgent brilliance. And then the Byzantine ambassadors had offered him a bribe to ally with them, but Charaton had declined their offer, ‘though,’ as he admitted ruefully, ‘it cost me dear.’
Attila told him not to repine. ‘We will be before the gates of Constantinople soon,’ he said, his eyes glittering. ‘Then Constantinople and all its wealth will be yours.’ He stroked his beard. ‘Soon now.’
It was dawn on the last day of their journey, which had lasted two hundred days. By nightfall they would be back among their ten
ts and their women.
Attila assembled them in their regiments and ranks and told them that they were the greatest army the world had ever seen.
‘A great war is coming, and a great empire is falling,’ he said.
‘And all of you - Black Huns and White Huns, Red and Yellow and Hepthalite Huns, Kutrigurs and Oronchans, people of the mountains and the valleys and the plains - all of you will have glory for yourselves and your descendants in this war. Only follow me and you will be great. For the time of the Hun nation has come.’
The shout might have been heard in the camp. But they would be there by nightfall anyway. He looked over his ranks of men, tens of thousands strong now, and the wagons without number. Then he turned and raised his head high, and they rode on home.
Little Bird galloped half a day ahead, alone but for his bear cub.
Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Page 29