The Gathering of the Storm

3

In the morning in the first grey light before they rode out, he put them, as always, through lengthy drills and practices with horse and bow, galloping and wheeling in tight formation at his every command. Each troop of ten had its own recognised signal and moved independently. The hundred horsemen could split and gallop, reform and turn in the dust, appearing far greater in number than they really were. Their skill with the bow was already terrifying, their speed breathtaking, and their strength and endurance on that long journey unbreakable.

Likewise, each troop began to take on the character of its commander. The warriors under Yesukai were flamboyant and reckless, as were those under Csaba the Poet and handsome Aladar. They would do well in some wild headlong charge that would terrify the enemy with its fearlessness, and they would all die howling and happy. Those under the three burly brothers Juchi, Bela and Noyan were staunch and dogged, and would make a strong centre. Those under old Chanat were steady and wily, those under Candac similar. They would wait patiently on the wings until the order was given, and then swiftly cut into the flanks of the enemy, without noise or fuss, but with ruthless force and despatch, like the horns of a bull. Those under Geukchu might ride roundabout for miles, might ford some supposedly unfordable river way upstream with artful bladders made from goathides, floating over unseen in an evening mist, and fall on an enemy camp by night, cutting throats before their victims even awoke.

Tough as they were, each day they grew tougher, their minds as well as their muscles hardening like the plains under the unrelenting sun.

They rode in the louring, stone-coloured light of dawn, past huge grey boulders nestled in the grass, stained with lichen like melted coins. They passed a dead yak, grass growing tall from the eyesockets, flaps of sunbaked hide hanging from the vast bleached ribcage stranded like an upturned boat hurled far inland by unimaginable storms. Then the sun broke through the clouds on the eastern horizon, as if from a burning abyss glimpsed through fathomless deeps.

This was the great Asian steppeland, not hostile or scornful of the tiny, transient scrabblings of humanity, like the mountains with their ferocious blizzards, or the destroying, storm-riven sea. It was filled only with a vast, desolate, silent indifference. In springtime, leave a spear thrust in the ground overnight and the next day you couldn’t find it, the new grass had grown so high. The Plains of Kulundu: the Plains of Plenty.

So numerous were the antelope and the smaller, lighter cousins of the forest bison that they covered the plains in a carpet of a million chestnut hides. In summer they would come to the banks of a river and drink it dry. Those were the days, the years of God’s plenty. The city dwellers and the farmers would swallow up everything free that moves on the face of the earth, thought the warriors, gazing out over those sacred plains with a rapture that was kin to heartbreak – joyful heartbreak, because they loved so much and what they loved must pass. All things fall and cease, and nothing passes so quickly as a happy man’s life.

They hunted saiga across the limitless steppes, the vast herds of those strange trumpet-muzzled antelope which trotted faster than a man could run, and ran forty or fifty miles in an hour. Their heads held low, they snuffed up the freezing or the hot and dusty steppeland air equally through their long and tuberous noses.

As they rode along a low rise, one single antelope stood out from the herd, eyeing them. It had seen their cloaks fluttering out behind them in the wind and twitched its nose, snuffing the air strongly. Its large brown eyes looked curious but unafraid, and then it sprang forward and veered suddenly into the herd. The great herd and the small band of warriors broke into a gallop simultaneously, the horses swooping down off the rise and flying over the autumnal lion-coloured plains.

Naturally Attila had long before sent a few men, Geukchu’s troop, the long way round to lie in ambush for the panicked herd. Now they veered out from the hide of the long grass, whooping with glee, came alongside the vast panic-stricken herd and began to kill. The saiga ran faster than their horses but the hunters came in close and leaned from their saddles, their legs brushed and bumped by the fleeing animals, and fired down directly into their necks and withers. The arrows flew deep and entered their hearts. Saiga tumbled dead in the dust, front legs sprawling and snapping under their own dead weight, others skittering into them from behind, sometimes leaping free and rejoining the herd’s whirlwind flight, but sometimes tripping and cartwheeling at full gallop into the air, then crashing into the dust to lie stunned, trampled by their fellows or else quickly despatched by the horsemen.

The horsemen suffered, too, in that mad crush, but every moment of suffering was to them part of the glorious game. Their hearts were full and pumping so furiously that nothing hurt them, and they vied with each other in acts of aimless valour. One adolescent warrior, naked to the waist, the handle of his chekan, his spiked hatchet, clutched between his bared teeth, leaped from his horse and fell lengthways upon the back of a fullgrown male antelope. As he fell seized the antelope’s horns, beautiful, amber-coloured, lyre-shaped horns with deep rings, as he boasted later by the fireside, ‘so easy to hold on to’. Then the boy flung himself to one side and wrestled the bellowing saiga to the ground, though he stripped the skin and flesh from both an arm and a leg in doing so. He scrabbled out from under it, took the chekan from between his teeth, and swung the long curved spike into the saiga’s skull. He came up out of the dust grinning from ear to ear, with the antelope sagging at his feet like a weighted sack, and held its head up by a sinuous horn, laughing with victorious joy. Desert dust, streaked with his own blood and the antelope’s pungent urine, coated his right side from shoulder to shin where the stricken beast had dragged him for a while over the excoriating earth as he clung on to its furious bucking head.

Other warriors finished up similarly coated in dust and blood, or with fresh tattoos of bruises from the hard ground or from flying hooves. Teeth glinting whitely through split lips, roaring with laughter and wild delight, they dismounted and patrolled on foot, killing any wounded saiga with their long knives, as they would wounded enemies on a battlefield. The herd had long since vanished in a great cloud of russet dust that drifted across the horizon. The rest of the war party joined them and there was back-slapping and mockery in equal measure. How few they had killed! What paltry leavings! Why had they taken only the oldest and foulest of the herd? Women hunted better!

They took the choicest cuts and made camp back on the far side of the rise, facing east to be ready to greet the sun in the morning, and dined on raw liver still warm, and broke open the knuckle-bones to suck the soft marrow. They smoked more meat over the fire and gave thanks as the sweet savour rose with the smoke up to the drifting stars. They slept easy and well, dreaming of the saiga herd moving on southward over the plains for the winter, their buff coats whitening in accordance with the coming snows. When they rode on the next day after sun-up, both their panniers and their bellies were bulging.

There was a camel train of traders from Bokhara, bearded, dark-eyed, their faces closely wrapped and hidden. They rode near where the grasslands gave way to scrub and then desert, thinking they would be safer there from encounters with nomad warriors. One of them looked back as he rode; he called out and they stopped. They looked where he was pointing, and each prayed to Ahura Mazda and waited. The savages came galloping across the level grassland towards them and then reined in. Their leader rode close and inspected them. He had blue tattoos on his cheeks and the traces of three thin scars on his wide, sun-bronzed forehead, and his eyes were narrow and cruel. He smiled at them.

The traders were tall men. Their camels were the usual mangy, two-humped creatures but their horses were very fine, with harnesses decorated with charms of turquoise and smoky silver alloys. The leader of the savages asked them what news, and the traders told him, trembling, wondering what method of death he would choose for them. Crucifixion? Impaling?

But the leader waved his hand regally over them, as if he were a king, and bade them good day. He turned back to his company of bandits and they rode on east. The traders looked after them astonished. Then they looked heavenwards and gave thanks to the astonishing and unpredictable ways of Ahura Mazda and rode on west.

‘They will never make Bokhara alive,’ said Attila, turning in his saddle and looking after them. ‘This is no country for traders or merchantmen. The fools.’

They rode across scrubland and desert, ‘wild Chorasmia’, to the Greeks, and a day later came to remote oilfields where black pitch soaked through the barren sands to the surface, some of the tarpits smoking perpetually. The horses stood and eyed the lakes of oil with suspicion.

Sometimes this pitch ignited of its own accord and burned for days or even years, as Herodotus says it does in the deserts of Parthia. The Persians call it rhadinake, and even that clever, sly and untrustworthy people find no use for this black and unctuous pollution. It kills the crops, poisons the air, is death to both man and beast, and it burns without extinction, tall amber flames bursting sheer out of the ground, seen in the starlit nighttime for many miles around. But in daylight it was a very different sight: a black, smoky and hellish place, death to everything that lives and breathes.

Nevertheless, Attila saw some use for it, and without further explanation, had four of his men dismount and gather large leather panniers full of the black ooze, to their disgruntlement.

He urged his men on into that unhallowed place, which lay in perpetual twilight even though the midday sun shone on all the world around. The sun burned only weakly through the pall of dense smoke, the horses lowered their heads and half-closed their eyes and their nostrils. The air was dark and choking, the light sulphurous and smoky. The stench of seeping or burning oil was foul, and there was not a sound but for the soft footfalls of their horses in the sand. There were demons here. At any instant a warrior might feel his horse sinking beneath him, the hushed, leaden air rent briefly with the beast’s screams. Man and horse would fall into a lake of pitch, sinking down and down into everlasting darkness, limbs outstretched, mouths open and gasping silently in the blackness, warrior still mounted on his drowning horse, the two of them united in hellish bond, falling for ever to the centre of the dead and midnight world.

Soon after this monstrosity of nature they came across a monstrosity of men. It was the merchants from Bokhara, laid out for them across their path as if for welcome. They must have been captured many miles to the west and brought here. Games were being played. Their evil kin, the Kutrigur Huns, were taunting them, with an eye for the theatrical.

Some of the merchants still groaned alive on their stakes. Chanat dismounted, drew his knife and brought an end to their suffering. He wiped the blade clean on one of their blue silk robes and remounted, looking disgusted. Impaling was a rare punishment among the People, reserved for the most grievous of crimes such as the ravishing of a royal wife or daughter, base treachery or the dishonouring of a burial-ground. But the Kutrigur impaled for recreation, for reasons of humour. They were jackals among men, and, like all cruel men, cowardly as well as cruel. The People of the Wolf.

Chanat leaned from his horse and spat. ‘Death take them.’

‘Men do as they do,’ said Attila. ‘It is not the gods who prevent them.’

The line of impaled merchants led them deeper into the uncertain light of the oilsmoke, their horses whinnying in fear, their lungs smarting. At times they thought they saw dark shadows moving through the fog around them, behind them, but they said nothing, not wanting to strengthen their fears with words. They killed some more who hung in the fog dying their foul slow deaths. The Kutrigur had impaled them with great craftsmanship, sharpening the staves to a fine point first and greasing them with animal fat. Then they would have taken their time to ease the point of the stave into each naked captive crouched in the sand, so as not to kill him, the point entering slowly over some time, gently pushing aside the internal organs, the liver and spleen, intestines and stomach and lungs as it progressed. Then the tormentors would cut a deep slice at the shoulder so that the greased stake could slide out again, and they would bind their captive’s feet to the stake and his arms behind him likewise so that he would not slide down, and then they would set it upright in the ground, and there the impaled wretch would hang for two or three days before his longed-for death.

A little further on they came to stouter stakes bearing the severed heads of the merchants’ camels, the ragged red flaps of their necks hanging down and dripping. The Kutrigur despised camels. The horses they had taken, and the plunder.

When they emerged from that smoky twilight valley and rode over scrubland, some of them broke into a mad gallop to shake off their uncleanness and disgust. Then, abruptly, they reined in and looked up.

On a low ridge of dusty chaparral to the north-east two Kutrigur tribesmen were sitting their ponies, spears held above their heads in defiance. Then they turned their ponies and vanished down the far side of the ridge.

Attila kicked his horse into an instant, furious gallop after them, scornful apparently of death or worse, and reared to a halt on the crest of the ridge and looked beyond. His men came up behind him, and surveyed the shallow valley that lay before them. The two horsemen had vanished over a farther ridge. Below, a huge ring-camp was burned into the dying grass. The Kutrigur Huns were gone.

A few miles further on they came upon further scenes of horror. A stunted thorn in a dry gully, a few last withered berries, deep red as ox-blood. Impaled on the long black thorns, were human hands, raggedly severed at the wrist. They stopped and stared, almost unable to comprehend this new atrocity. Eventually Attila spurred forward and examined the hands. Marmoreal white, unreal, a ragged ribbon of blood and skin around each wrist, they were small hands. Nearby, another thornbush was draped with intestines in grey and glistening coils.

‘They are afraid of us,’ said Chanat, trying to discern some good. ‘They are trying to frighten us off, as if they do not wish to fight us.’

‘They are not afraid of us,’ said Attila. ‘They are testing us to see whether we are afraid of them.’

He gave the signal and they rode on. Most now rode with bows and a few arrows clutched ready in their fists. They had felt a fierce joy when hunting the saiga, and a burning pride in being alive throughout this journey, even in the harshest landscapes. But now they were hunting men, and where men are, there is also the light of good and the shadow of evil, and their hearts were grave and solemn and dutiful.