The Gathering of the Storm

2

The hundred men with Attila at their head rode eastwards for seventeen days and seventeen nights, crossing the Iron River well north of its marshes and its hundred mouths and passing by the vast flat salt-sown shore north of the Sea of Ravens. Then they turned south.

Already the grasslands were beginning to fail and fade beneath their horses’ hooves, and the short golden season of autumn was rushing past, fleeing before the oncoming winter. Deer fled before them like ghostly ancestors, and there were the light tracks of wolves in the sand among the dying grasses. Sometimes they came upon haunting reminders of where tents had previously stood: pale yellow rings in the grass, among windblown middens and scatterings of the bleached white bones of animals. Tattered nomad bands of nameless peoples, perhaps their distant kinsmen, perhaps their enemies, who had vanished into the endless eastern steppes, with no more substance left to them than the shadow rings of their tents in the withered grass.

They came down into a shallow canyon in late afternoon, passing great strewn boulders copper-coloured in the setting sun, filed down a narrow stony path and saw reeds and stunted trees below; the air was cooler and smelt of streams. In a silent valley already out of the sun they passed through a cool green curtain of willows and watered their horses and rested.

The next morning they climbed up out of the canyon on the farther side, through a thin copse of orange pine, the ground strewn with fragile needles and the air full of resin, and they rode on.

At noon their leader called a halt near a high cairn of tumbled stones. The men let their reins drop and their shoulders sank and they sagged in their saddles, and the horses leaned and tugged at the thin grass at their feet. Attila swung his leg over his horse’s head, jumped to the ground, walked over to the high cairn and climbed it, as graceful and easy as a child. He pulled off his battered felt kalpak, scooped his fingers through his dark shaggy hair streaked iron grey, his mouth set hard in that characteristic, sardonic, world-mocking smile, and gazed out to the far horizon. As far as the eye could see the wind shimmered softly through the sunfaded grass, which billowed like a feather-grey ocean, and beneath his feet it soughed through the little caverns and passageways among the cairn of rocks. To the south, as he squinted into the brightness, the grass looked yellow, and the horizon was blurred with dust where the steppeland finally ebbed away to desert. Far to the north and east, maybe a tint of green, the rich dark green where the silent pine forests started. But maybe not. No man can see as far as he thinks he can, not even a king.

He turned to jump down, and there from the direction they had come rode a single horseman. He remained on the cairn and watched and waited. The warriors followed his gaze. The lone horseman shimmered and came on.

After many minutes the figure grew in size, and then they could hear the swish of the horse’s legs through the grass and see the horseman’s tattooed face. Finally he stood before them.

‘So,’ said Attila, jumping down from the cairn. ‘Little Bird. The world’s madman.’

‘It is I,’ confirmed Little Bird grandly, giving a little bow of his head. ‘Life was dull in the camp. There was a danger I might have lived for ever and grown as old and useless as old Chanat.’

Attila grinned and remounted and gave the order for them to ride on.

Little Bird came alongside him. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘there was a woman.’

Attila glanced sideways and raised an eyebrow.

‘At first it was sweet to lie between her thighs. But soon she became to me a deep pain in the fundament both morning and evening, as if I were passing stools the size and shape of wagon-spokes.’

‘A hazard of the amorous temperament,’ said Attila gravely.

‘But war will bring relief,’ said Little Bird.

At dusk in the fading light one of the pack-horses stumbled in a marmot hole. The men instantly drew their knives, their mouths already savouring fresh horsemeat roasted on a slow fire, but Attila forbade them. Little Bird went over to the animal, which stood patient and shivering with pain, fresh dung lying pungent between its hindlegs, a foreleg crooked and resting on the rim of its hoof. The shaman spoke in its ear and stroked his hennaed hand over the horse’s fetlock. He murmured over and over words that none who heard understood.

In the morning the horse was healed.

They crossed a desolate plain where the heavy grey sky over their heads suddenly came alive with the cries of wild geese. The cries startled and then comforted them with the sense of living creatures in company with them in this wilderness. The geese passed on and their cries faded away and the air grew silent around again and the men slumped down a little in their cloaks and bowed their heads and rode on. The sky overhead was a darkening grey, a beaten iron shield, but along the horizon was a seam of silver light that seemed to seep in from an enchanted world beyond, as if they rode under a giant lid, claustrophobic, shut off from grace. Their fear grew continually, and their courage grew to meet it. All of them were quite prepared to die, and half expected it, this far from home and they so few in number. But they would go down fighting.

And then, standing alone and many days from its herd and from its native woodland, for no reason that they could discern, they saw an auroch: a massive white bull, one of the wild cattle that roamed freely in the birchwoods far to the north. The mountainous white beast stood like a statue, like a creature from heraldry, amid a pile of broken rocks, with an arrow buried deep in its withers. Again here was good meat for the taking, but the men knew that the uncanny creature was somehow removed from them and forbidden. They squinted and saw that the arrow was of no shape they recognised.

It would not be long now.

Chanat trotted nearer to the wounded animal, which turned and lowered its massive head towards him. He reined in at a safe distance, his right hand resting lightly on the shaft of the spear slung at his side. A full-grown auroch, wounded or not, could disembowel a horse with one swipe of its long, curved horns.

He turned sideways and squinted at the animal a little longer, then rode back.

‘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 others 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 entire 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.

What twists and turns the Muse of History takes, and how the laughter of the gods echoes over our bowed heads.