The Gathering of the Storm

4

The desert night is always cold, but now the desert days grew cold as well. The wax and wane of one more moon, and the days would be at their shortest, the nights long and cold, hospitable only to witchcraft and the demons of the night.

There was grey gravel desert, and then some dying greenery by the shores of a steel-grey lake. It would be snowing up in the Tien Shan mountains and on the peaks of the Tavan Bogd, the Five Kings. But here, after brief autumn rains and occasional hail, it was dry and forlorn and cold.

The Kutrigur had left other signs for them: dropped feathers, tufts of horsehair caught on thorns, a spatter of blood on a pale-grey rock, like unnatural rust-red lichen, haunting and inexplicable. A deer lay recently slain beside the trail, part butchered but left with fresh meat on its shoulders, a little ragged from the beaks of birds but substantial nevertheless.

‘Looks good to me,’ said young Yesukai.

Attila shook his head. ‘Our kinsmen in their black cloaks do not leave gifts for their enemies. Eat that and you’ll soon be as dead as the deer.’

‘Ah.’ Yesukai nodded, and they rode on.

They rode over desolate saltflats, setting off clouds of little pied birds pecking for shellfish. Stark and solitary greygreen thistles grew out of the crusted earth. Afar off, over the plains, they saw a single round white tent, a nomad ger, flaring like Greek fire against the dark sky. And so onward, eastward ever eastward, drawn deeper into the wasteland as some strong disillusioned men are drawn into self-destruction. They had long since forded the Amu Darya, the Oxus, and the Syr Darya, the Jaxartes, and passed through the low green Hills of Ulutau, and by Lake Tenghiz, and seen the snow-white Tien Shan rise to the south, and passed by the vast still waters of iron-grey Lake Balkhash where monsters lived. In those marshy plains their horses swishing through the long sodden grass set the plovers calling over the wetlands, and startled the coots in the reedbeds; they heard the heron’s harsh cry and saw its tufted head among the tufted grassheads. The sun went down in fire through the reeds where they camped, bars of molten copper on the river.

They were weakening with hunger, but each day they came upon those hungrier than they. They rode into the Desert Kingdom, over lifeless saltpans, and into the Kyzyl Kum, the Red Sands, a blistering sandscape spiked with lonely stands of coarse sandyellow grass. They saw occasional oases, gravel deserts, watercourses, herds of haggard horses. The riders bowed their heads in their hoods and remembered that drought is always the nomad’s greatest enemy. Why did they ride east into this world of desert and drought? So that they could increase their numbers, and then turn west for the green pastures and gentle woodlands of Europe. Let that day come soon.

In the furrows of the sand and its dunes carved by the hot wind, the sorrowing men read prophecies of long sleeps and sudden awakenings. The sand blinded their pawing horses, which whinnied mournfully, red sand thick in their manes and in their long eyelashes. Beneath the sands hereabouts, they said, lived a bloodworm that spat acid; headless, eyeless, lurking underground, a thing of horror.

They rode over a high, stony plateau, and in a wide hollow beside a dying lake four bony cows stood disconsolate with withered udders on the hard, cracked shores of sunbaked mud. Some bareboned villagers were sluicing grey water into a trough for a huddle of flyblown sheep with long, scrawny necks, the wool shedding in hanks from their heads and necks from disease. Some of the younger warriors prepared to take the sheep for meat, anyhow, putting arrows to their bows, but Attila stayed their hands.

The people stood and stared, the young naked, the old toothless, the children caked in mud, flies at their eyes and noses, passively awaiting some event from heaven over which they had not even the power of prayer. Their eyes followed these horsemen from another world but blankly and unblinking, as if they could not see them at all.

After being asked about the Kutrigur Huns, which questions they greeted with sullen silence, one or two of them began to speak brokenly, interrupting each other. Their language was strange but Attila understood it well enough.

They said they had been raided many times by the horsemen in black. Their winter stores had been dragged off, their best livestock slain. Some of those evil riders had tipped slain livestock down their wells. Why did they do this? They were not their enemies. Why such cruelty, even to strangers? Surely there was no justice under the sun.

An old woman came forward from amongst the wretched villagers, leaning heavily on a stout stick, her face cracked and fissured by sun and wind like the cracked mud by the lakeshore. She addressed Attila angrily, fearlessly, as if in argument with him already.

‘For years we have been at the mercy of that people,’ she said. ‘Where they camp now, east, down by the river, we are forbidden to take water. Only this bitter lake is ours now, as if the gods made the river for them alone.’ She thumped her stick in the dust. ‘Did the gods do so?’

‘They did not,’ Attila said. ‘The rivers were made by the gods for all men alike and without distinction. Every land was made for the nomad riders of the world. The Western Lands were not made by the gods to be an empire for Rome, yet they shut out the poor of Asia from their green pastures and gentle woods and guard them as jealously as misers in their caves. The forests of Europe, the plains and the great rivers of Scythia, the mountains of Asia – they were all made alike without fence or demarcation for all men alike and without distinction.’ He spoke over his shoulder for his followers as well. ‘Remember this when you come into your kingdom, when you look on the great walls and towers and the numberless armies of Rome and your hearts freeze within you.’

One or two of the younger warriors laughed nervously at his words. One or two.

‘But that is not the worst,’ said the old woman, shaking her stick and setting it in the dust again. She would not let this nomad king go until she had spoken. She demanded he listen to her. ‘There is the tribute we must pay them, every eighth day. We must take a carcase that we have hunted, in weight not less than a man, or else we must take one of our own sheep or cows. Every eight days.’ She thrust her hand out, palm open and empty. ‘What have we left? Four cows, some broken-winded oxen, a huddle of goats, some sheep – aye, and some blowfly with ’em. How can we continue to pay this tribute and not end by paying with our lives? The winter is coming. Already our children and infants sicken with hunger. But they do not care, those people, the Budun-Boru. They are devils – devils born of devils.’

Attila considered, then gave orders for two of the packhorses to be unladen, and he distributed amongst the poor villagers aarul, some fat hunks of mutton on the bone and some goat meat. They stood and looked up silently, as if pleading for they knew not what, exhausted, their eyes as dry as dust.

He gave the order for his men to turn about and they rode round the north side of the wretched lake and onward.

As they rode away Chanat said, his voice bitter, ‘They will have to break camp and move.’

‘The world is wide,’ said Attila. ‘All the tribes are on the move.’

‘And the great tribes trample the little as they ride.’

Attila nodded. ‘They will bump into the defences of the empire, as the Goths did before them, and starve and die there in their vast, ragged camps on the banks of the Danube, looking across into the promised land of Europe.’

They glanced back one last time. In the eye of a reddening sandstorm from the south-west, the tattered villagers stood looking after them with hopeless longing, too weak to move, hands clutching the smaller withered hands of their offspring standing by their sides, sheltering from the coming sandstorm in their parents’ shadows. Emaciated children naked but for coverings of fine dust, the sun going down on them, the shadows lengthening. And then they would be lost to sight over the rim of the earth as if they had never been.

‘The world is as it is,’ said Attila. ‘And it will not be made otherwise. ’

‘And yet…’ said Chanat.

Attila wrenched at his reins. Even Chagelghan seemed to hesitate, looking back pitifully into the sandstorm in some sudden and unequine access of remorse.

‘We did not ride out to be nursemaids to the wretched of the earth,’ growled Attila. ‘Those are not our people.’

‘But we could shelter from the storm among them,’ said Chanat. ‘And perhaps tomorrow…’

‘Chanat,’ said Attila with a sigh. He bowed his head so low that his chin rested on his chest. ‘Your kingly nobility and magnanimity make my bowels ache.’

‘Chanat is as he is,’ said the old warrior, grinning delightedly, ‘and he will not be made otherwise.’ He pulled his horse round once more and rode back into the coming storm.

Little Bird lingered nearby. ‘My lord Widow-Maker is growing a heart!’ he sang in his piping, childlike voice above the rising wind. ‘But have a care, my lord, have a care! The larger and softer your heart, the easier the target for your enemies’ arrows.’

They took shelter in the lee of the village huts with their cloaks wrapped round their faces and their heads dropped low to keep out the scouring red sands. But Attila and Chanat and Orestes were pulled into one tattered hut by the old woman with the stick. She shooed them into the darkness of her hut, latched the door and threw some fresh faggots on the fire in the centre of the hut. They sat around it cross-legged in the smoky gloom, listened to the howling wind, and drank the fermented ewe’s milk – she called it arak – that she passed around in a cracked bowl.

As the fire crackled into life again, they saw she was very old. She still seemed sprightly, though, and her bright little eyes, hard and enamelled like a snake’s, still twinkled in her wrinkled visage. Her cheeks were furrowed and crisscrossed crazily with deep wrinkles, like land ploughed in darkness by a lunatic. But when she pulled her shawl back off her head they saw she still braided her long white hair with a few coloured braids like a vain young girl, and they smiled.

Attila passed the bowl to her courteously.

‘So,’ he said, ‘the Kutrigur, the raiders. How many are they?’

She took a long drink and smacked her lips, which were thin and withered with age and the desert wind. She smiled. Then she took another, set the bowl down and wiped her lips with the corner of her shawl.

‘How many?’ she said. She held her arms wide. ‘Many.’

He knew what that meant. It meant there was no word in her language for such a great number.

‘For each of us,’ he pressed her, ‘how many of them?’

She picked up the bowl again, emptied it, and ordered Orestes to fill it up from the leather pitcher in the corner. Orestes looked at Attila. Attila looked amused. Orestes did as he was ordered.

‘How many for each of you?’ she said. ‘Enough.’ She cackled. ‘Ten of them for each of you.’

‘A thousand.’

‘Perhaps twenty.’

Attila looked at Chanat. ‘Perhaps two thousand, she says.’ Chanat grimaced. ‘My lord, we cannot-’

Attila smiled faintly. ‘We stay, as you desired, brave Chanat. But do not be anxious. Thorns make strong allies.’

Chanat frowned.

Attila said to her, ‘When do they return? The raiders?’

She shook her head. ‘It is ours to go to them. In two days’ they are due another tribute.’ She spat into the fire with impressive force, and the fire sizzled and cowered under her bitterness.

‘Two days,’ said Attila. ‘Then tomorrow we will go and find a carcase for them.’

The old woman looked puzzled.

Attila laughed.

The next day was still after the storm, the high tableland parched and sandblasted, looking like the coat of a mangy wild dog and more desolate than ever. Attila took four of his men, Orestes and Chanat, Yesukai and Geukchu, and they rode slowly eastwards towards the low country and the river where the Kutrigur were camped. It was very cold.

They came down off the high stony plateau onto a flat plain of grey grass dotted with stone cairns like the petrified stumps of trees of some long-vanished forest. The bitter wind keened among the cairns and the rose-grey light of dawn was no more than a chill ribbon of sky on the far horizon. They rode trailing long shadows that flickered and danced upon the grass, and they moved uneasily among the cairns, the memorial ovoo s of nameless nomadic people, decorated and hung with coloured plaits of wool, scapulae of sheep and skulls of birds, rocks with strange patterns etched into them, whorls and ridges and curlicues, as if the shapes of ancient seashells were trapped within them.

Then there arose on their right hand sharp mountains of dark-grey shale, with late yellow and purple bindweed and vetch still clinging to life in the sunwarmed crannies. High on the slopes of the mountains they saw a file of Bactrian camels crossing from left to right, ruminating on cud as they went. The horsemen stopped and watched the creatures, their big soft feet noiseless on the flat stone, their aristocratic melancholy, their threadbare nobility, enduring here on nothing amid the wind and the stones.

They crossed the desolate grassland and filed down a narrow gully with ominous high shale walls dark and shiny with water, and then out into a wide, shallow valley and there was the river and there by its edge was the largest camp they had ever seen.

They waited until near dusk, when the winter sun was almost touching the dark rim of the world and its blood-red light ran along the horizon. They silenced their horses with gags of thick rope tied round their muzzles and knotted inside their mouths; the horses bucked their heads and flared their nostrils angrily but in merciful silence. Then they trotted them askance and veered round near the camp under the shelter of a low rise scoured up out of the valley floor by the river in some ancient, boiling flood.

They dismounted and crawled to the top of the rise.

The camp was some three or four hundred paces off, and must have numbered a thousand tents or more. The wind had dropped, and they could hear distant cries and the whinnying of horses. There were men walking among the tents, flickering campfires, children running to and fro, women cooking or nursing. Some women were bringing water back from the river, in huge pitchers on yokes across their shoulders. Stands of spears at the corners of the camp had black leather bucklers hanging from them. Beyond, in the gloom, was a corral of many thousands of horses.

A single star shone above, a single wandering planet almost ahead, over the vast camp. Mercury on his silent course. A flurry of muted black and white shapes downriver was some lapwings taking to the air over the darkening mudflats.

And then another flurry of wings nearby. Yesukai had crawled into a covey of partridges and they had finally taken to the air, as reluctant to leave their warm nests as a hare its form. Their wings whirred in the dark air as they glided away along the ridge to safety. But not before eager Yesukai had nocked an arrow to his bow, rolled over on his back and, still rolling, loosed the arrow at a flying bird. Orestes hissed angrily but too late at the young warrior. Yesukai had learned his bowcraft well and his arrow struck home. The dying partridge tumbled out of the sky, its bright white throat and underwings catching brilliantly the last of the failing sunlight in the west.

Yesukai grinned.

Orestes looked down at the camp.

Attila was already watching.

In the dusk, on the nearside of a camp, a single warrior was looking towards them.

They couldn’t see his face at this distance, but he was burly in build and dressed in black or dark colours. He walked a few yards in their direction, uncertainly, narrowing his eyes. He had heard the partridges take to the air, and turned in time to see one of them fall, flashing out of the sky. He stopped a little way out of the camp, stared a while, then turned and went back.

Orestes sighed and bowed his head, cradling it in his hands.

Attila kept watching.

The warrior passed out of sight behind a wide low tent, and re-emerged a few moments later leading a horse.

Attila looked at Orestes.

Orestes looked at Attila.

Both men looked at Yesukai.

‘You have eel-shit for brains,’ said Orestes.

‘What?’ said Yesukai, startled. ‘What?’ And he started scrambling up the slope to see what they could see.

‘ Stay – down,’ said Attila over his shoulder, in such a tone that Yesukai stayed down.

Attila turned back.

The warrior had mounted and was trotting purposefully towards them. As he came nearer they saw that he wore black leather breeches and boots, and a black leather jerkin loosely knotted, which showed his thick, powerful arms. He held a spear low in his right hand, the reins taut in his left. His long, straight hair was raven-black against the last of the sun, and his broad high-cheekboned face cleanshaven but for a thin moustache that hung down long and finely combed. His eyes were fixed on the rise where they lay.

Attila scrambled back.

‘Mount up,’ he ordered. ‘Here comes our offering.’

The instant the warrior crested the rise, he was hit from both sides by whirling ropes. There was a danger the nooses would knock each other askew, but Attila and Orestes threw them with split-second timing, one and then the other, so that the two nooses settled over his head and round his throat in close succession before he could cry out. They spurred their horses apart so that the leader ropes tautened round the high pommels of their wooden saddles, and the warrior’s neck was half cut through. At the same instant Chanat put an arrow into the horse’s heart and it collapsed, its mouth open, but dead before it could bellow out its pain. It hit the grass and tumbled away down the slope, the Kutrigur warrior pulled free and dangling with his feet barely touching the ground, still caught round his neck by the tight ropes. Yesukai rode in and drove his spearpoint into the warrior’s heart but it was not necessary.

While the rest of them removed the nooses from the dead man’s neck and loaded his hefty corpse across one of their horses, Attila dismounted and crawled back up through the grass to inspect the camp.

Nothing stirred. He continued to watch for some while. Still nothing stirred.

He vaulted back onto Chagelghan and they cantered away, the slain warrior tied tight across the rump of Orestes’ peacable horse, his eyes still open, his head lolling weighty and half loose from his neck, leaking black, bruised blood.