The Gathering of the Storm

5

It was dark and there was no moon; they rode by starlight only, their faint star-shadows gliding over the still grass and there was only darkness and shadow under heaven. But upon their return, far into the night, there was great bustle, and the now gleeful villagers sang them back into the village by torchlight, the children dancing with delight leaning forward to spit on the Wolf-Man, reaching up little dirty hands to slap and pinch his senseless corpse. Women threw their heads back and ululated improvised paeans to the noble conquerors, and even the ancient priestess performed a few victory jigs round her stick in the dust.

‘A little early yet,’ murmured Chanat.

They unloaded the corpse, bound it tight to a long stake and wrapped it in heavy hopsack so it would not be eaten by the rats. They raised the stake and lodged it stretching between the roofs of two huts so that the village dogs could not come and tear at it.

‘How do you know that others will not come and tear at us in our turn, while we sleep?’ said Chanat.

Attila shook his head. ‘We were not followed. The Kutrigur will attack us precisely when I want them to – and in disarray.’

Chanat gazed steadily at his lord. He knew his lord was telling the truth, though he did not know how.

They slept.

The next day the villagers feasted them. It was the most pitiful feast they had ever known. They chewed and swallowed slowly, and exchanged looks and their expressions were much moved. They ate strips of nameless meat so dry they thought it would crack their teeth, and sour arak, and morsels of aarul cheese they had brought themselves, and they heartily pronounced it the finest meal they had ever eaten. The villagers beamed with pride.

Later the old woman, the priestess, took a sheepish adolescent boy by the hand and led him three times round a campfire whilst murmuring inaudible incantations. At each revolution of the fire she tossed a handful of grain into the flames, and the sound of her voice rose a little and then subsided again.

In the evening when they sat by the fireside Attila asked her what the ceremony was for. ‘For a wife?’

‘A wife! Is a wife such good luck?’ She rocked backward and cackled. ‘Maybe. Maybe to bring him a wife, to bring him good luck of any kind – rain on a dry day, a newborn calf, anything, any favour that the gods let drop from heaven.’ She eyed them slyly. ‘Perhaps you are the good luck he will have. Perhaps his good luck is to see the destruction of our enemies.’

‘Tell us what you know of your enemies. Tell us about the Kutrigur Huns, the Budun-Boru.’

The old priestess stirred the fire with a thin stick, prodding stray embers back into the centre.

‘By their names you shall know them,’ she said. ‘They have such names as Red Craw and Black Ven, Snakeskin and Sky-in-Tatters, Pebbletooth, Half-Ear, Bloody Midnight and Hawk-in-the-Rain. These are not the names of human beings. These are the names of demons out of hell.’

Attila jerked his head towards the dead warrior bound to his high stake. ‘Demons are not so easily killed as that.’

The old woman licked her lips and grinned slyly. ‘Perhaps you, too, are demons, but stronger demons than they.’

She gazed back into the firelight. Her smile faded. She said again that the Kutrigurs were not human beings, they were demons in the shapes of men.

‘Let me tell you about that people.’ She spat into the fire. ‘About that people, and about my own dying people.’

There was a long silence while the old woman called her story back to memory. When she spoke her voice was low and had great authority.

‘We believed that we were the whole human race, my people. There were no others. In the time before time, when Naga, the Great Mother, first lay with Ot-Utsir, the Cause of the Years, and bore us out of her womb, her children. When we first encountered others, crossing the great sand sea, we believed they were animals, not like us. Now we know we were wrong. But about the Kutrigurs we were not wrong. They are still not human beings. The Great Mother, on the day she made that tribe, dropped her clay in a bed of evil flowers: nightshade and ivy

… bracken to a horse. That is what the Kutrigurs are made of. Poison runs in their veins, snakes nest in their hair. Their nails are claws. They are the neglected offspring, the evil children, of Naga and Ot-Utsir, and it delights them to be so. For evil is like a potent drink. When you first drink it, you are sickened. But after a while you desire more, your appetite for it waxes, and you need more, and then more…

‘We ourselves, we the tribe of Human Beings, are afflicted now with the curse of the Kutrigurs. The Great Mother has visited us in anger and we do not know how or why.

‘There was a girl-’ The old priestess stopped.

She was breathing rapidly – they could see her thin chest moving – and her face was bowed very low. Her fists were clenched tight upon her knees. They waited for her. She raised her face a little and went on.

‘In the days when we were still a great people, when we had more horses in our corrals than we could count, there was a girl, a beautiful girl.’ She swallowed. ‘She was like a bird, a sunbird, and her husband was like an eagle. She… One day she rode out onto the plains with her son, her little red-cheeked son. The boy had seen two summers, two winters. Choro, he was called, for he would have been a great leader. He was too small then even to put his plump little arms right around his mother’s waist.’ She laughed a sudden, grief-stricken laugh.

They waited.

‘Her little boy. He held on to his mother as best he could with his pudgy fists. She took him out onto the spring plains to see the antelope. He loved to watch the animals – all children do. Her husband had said, “Take care. Take care of our son, for he is our firstborn and our only child.” And she had laughed and said she would take care. She had no fear, she threw back her lovely head and laughed. She was a sunbird.

‘They saw many antelope, and the girl took her slender bow, for she was a skilled archer, and she shot a hare and also a partridge for hearth and home. On their return they saw a lone deer, but the girl did not slay it, though she might have done. She was a sunbird.’

There was another long silence.

‘As the girl rode away for home she thought she heard something whistle in the air, and she was afraid. She rode harder, faster, driving her heels into the belly of her pony. But something was wrong. Some horror had come upon her. It was the whistle of an arrow that she had heard. Even as she fled like the wind across the steppes for home, another arrow whistled and struck with a smack.’ The prestess smacked her tongue up into the roof of her mouth, and the sound made the warriors flinch. ‘The girl felt a pain in her back, but the pain in her heart was greater, a horror in her heart. She called out to her son as she rode but he made no reply. She reached back with one hand, reins bunched tight in the other, and felt for him, and he was lolling back like one dead. The arrow had passed straight through the body of the infant, killing him instantly, and passed on into the girl’s own flesh. Not deeply, though deep enough. But it was not her own wound that wounded her to her heart.

‘She reined in her horse with a cry that echoed across the steppes like a howling wind, and she endured the unimaginable horror of reaching back and grasping that arrow in her fist, and wrenching it back by the flight out of her own body, and holding on to the dead body of her son as she almost fell from the horse, a wound in her back near her spine. Her dress was sticky with her own blood and the mingled blood of her son, as once their blood was mingled in her womb. Then in life, now in death.’

The weatherbeaten warriors who sat around her sat in silence, and some of their grim faces were furrowed with bright tears.

‘She lifted the dead body of her son to the ground, broke the head off the arrow and pulled the shaft from his body, and she kissed his face – quite without expression he was, he had died so young. She should have closed his eyes but she could not bring herself to do so. She passed her hand over his face, over his eyes, and looked into them, and they were wide open but there was nothing there any more. The light had gone out of them. She held him to her breast and wept.

‘When she looked up, horsemen were gathered around her. They dragged the dead infant from her and they put a few more arrows into him to make sure, though there was no need. And they threw her to the ground, wounded as she was, and each of them used her as he inclined. Afterwards they hitched up their breeches and spat on her and laughed and took her horse and rode away.

‘Such, great warriors, are the ways of the Budun-Boru, the People of the Wolf.’

The fire burned low. The night air was still and cold.

‘They are the demons that you say they are,’ said Chanat at last.

‘They had none to oppose them. They still have not, perhaps.’

‘The girl,’ said Attila. ‘Did she live?’

The old woman smiled a bitter smile. ‘Oh yes, she lived. She lay out on the ground a day and a night, and then she rose and found her son’s tiny body cold in the long grass and she bound it in cloth and carrying it in her arms she walked all the way back to the camp of her people. And she thought her heart would break.

‘But when she came into the camp of her people, and her strong husband came running to her, her eagle, her lion, his dark eyes flashing, his white teeth shining and his black hair flowing, so glad to see her again, and he saw with his own eyes the bundle that she carried in her arms in its bloodstained cloths.

‘Then her heart did break.’

She looked up at her listeners, and as one man they looked away, unable to bear her gaze.

‘It has not mended from that day to this.’

Their hearts were heavy. In their ears hummed a song of ash.

‘The man,’ said Attila at last, his voice very low. ‘Her husband.’

‘He never spoke to her again. He never forgave her. The next day he rode out alone against his enemies, against all pleading. She never saw him again after that day.’

The old woman bowed her head and there was a long silence. At last she shifted and turned, still crosslegged on the dirt floor of the hut. She reached back and pulled aside her cloak and shawl, unknotted her robe and pulled it apart. There in the dying firelight, beside her bony spine, they saw the puckered outline of an old arrow wound, and they understood. She pulled her coverings round her once more and turned back to them.

She signalled for the bowl of arak, drank deep from the bowl and set it down again. Her eyes were watery in the orange light.

‘Surely grief is great in this world,’ she said at last. ‘And I am not so old as you might think. Old age knocks on some doors sooner than others.’

The warriors took deep draughts of arak. They had nothing to say, nothing to offer. She had travelled far, much farther than they might ever travel.

‘And yet are we to rail at the gods, to blame them?’ she resumed, her voice stronger again. ‘For they made the Kutrigurs as they are, and we cannot know why. There are other tribes as terrible, in the eastern deserts, in the forests to the north. Our eyes are shut to their ways. So should we blame the gods for making us out of the suffering clay and setting us upon the suffering earth, knowing what our destinies will bring each of us? Are we to wail like children and be forever hating and resenting the gods as a foolish child does its parents? Are we to be forever cursing and bewailing our destinies like children? For does not a mother bring forth her child in a welter of blood, both of them weeping, and she knowing full well what grief and suffering and finally what death her child will have to endure? She is, as it were, bestowing these things upon her child as she bears it. And yet do we say wrong when we say that that mother loves her child? Would die for it, if she could?’ She nodded and smiled an inexpressible smile. ‘Oh yes. There are few mothers on earth who would not die for their children. Such is the way of a mother.’ She nodded again.

‘There was an old woman who taught me much when I was young, a priestess in her turn, who walked and talked often with Mother Naga. One day we walked out and we came to a young hare pinioned by a younger eagle, which had stooped on it and caught it and now stared at it as if stupid, not yet knowing how to kill. The first hare it had ever caught, perhaps. And so the hare had not been killed cleanly, as a full-grown eagle would do, but was in agony, stuck to the earth by the eagle’s claws, and it screamed. It screamed. And I, still a child then, with never a crack in my heart, I turned to the old woman whom I loved, and asked why the Great Mother did not come and save the poor hare. How could Naga let the hare suffer so? She turned to me and touched my head, and in that moment, in my childish way, perhaps I thought that this old woman was Naga herself. And she said, her voice so soft and gentle as I can hear it even now, she said that the Great Mother was not in some far distant heaven watching over all. She was no cold Queen of Heaven, no lofty princess, no artful, conspiring Cause of the Years. She was here, now. She was with us, suffering. She was in the hare. She was in the hare’s scream.’

The old woman nodded. ‘I believe it is so.’

The warriors drank and pondered and then slept.