The Gathering of the Storm

7

Attila, Chanat and Orestes sat their horses behind the thorn brake, looking out.

Across from them lay the straggling ruins of the once prosperous village. They had herded what livestock they could into the thorn corral, and the silent villagers sat with them. The rest of the livestock remained outside and would soon be slain by their attackers.

‘When I was a boy,’ said Chanat softly, ‘I dreamed often of a glorious death on some bright battlefield.’

The other two looked at him curiously. Chanat was not a man much given to reminiscence.

‘My brothers and I,’ said Chanat. ‘Four brothers I had, and I have buried them all. We played at being warriors, out on the steppes the livelong summer day. And we all dreamed likewise. As a man, I outgrew such foolish dreams. But now in old age – though the battlefield looks hardly as bright and heroic as it did in my boyhood dreams – those boyhood dreams of a battle-death come again.’

Attila said gently, ‘Our boyhoods made us all.’

Bare under heaven lay the sorrowful village of that dying people. Not a spot of shade, not a tree. The flat salt desert only, and the wretched dying lake. The occasional passing herds too far and fleet for them. Their best hunters all long gone, hunted into extinction themselves by greater, crueller hunters. The cold winter to come and then a little grass in the hollows, perhaps. An existence pitiable, threadbare, a people clinging to their own lives by a thread, to the skin of the parched earth like fleas clinging to a dog’s hide. To be brushed away indifferently at any moment and indifferently by a greater power, into oblivion, into empty air.

‘A small thing it is we fight for,’ muttered Chanat. ‘A few yards of grey desert.’

‘We fought for a smaller thing this morning,’ said Attila. ‘A single life.’

‘You were fools.’

Attila laughed. ‘Your gratitude embarrasses me, Chanat.’

The old warrior coughed and spat.

‘I knew you’d resist,’ said Attila. ‘I actually had my hand on the butt of my lariat, ready to knock you cold.’

Chanat eyed him.

‘You’re such an old mule, you would have started arguing – in the very shadow of our enemies.’

Chanat grunted. ‘It’s possible.’

‘And then we would all have been killed.’

‘As I said, you were fools.’

Orestes said in his quiet voice, his hands clasped, his clear blue eyes still fixed straight ahead across the empty plateau, ‘Do you never do anything foolish yourself, wise Chanat?’

‘Only when a woman’s involved,’ growled the old warrior. And he stalked away to the other side of the corral.

Attila and Orestes exchanged smiles.

They shared a flask of water and wiped their mouths.

The cold blue sky above them. A stillness. All the world waiting. Only the goatbells sounded in the oppressive silence as the animals moved and grazed among the scrub, happily oblivious. Death was coming.

‘This reminds me of many times before,’ said Attila. ‘This waiting. ’ His forehead was beaded with sweat.

Orestes nodded. A runnel of sweat ran down his own forehead and over his nose, despite the coolness of the day. You never conquer the fear before a battle. He swiped the sweat away with the back of his hand.

‘The time we fought on foot on the green plains of Manchuria,’ murmured Attila, ‘because our horses were sick, do you remember? And the time we fought the forest kings, who wore wreaths of leaves for armour?’

Orestes smiled his faint smile. ‘And when we stood at arms beside the Yellow River, and you fought with a spade because your sword was broken.’ He shook his head. ‘So much fighting we have done together, have we not? And now it is come to this: a flyblown village beside a dying lake, in a land not yet given a name.’

Attila brooded. Then he said, ‘There was a time in Italy, when I was still a boy and a hostage with the Romans, when we came under attack from Romans. They wanted me dead.’ His lips curled as he said these words.

‘But other Romans saved you.’

‘There was one good Roman. A young officer.’

‘There are good Romans, then?’

‘One or two.’

‘And the boy in your uncle’s camp? Aetius?’

Attila said nothing.

They drank again.

‘Before I came to you,’ said Attila, ‘you and your sister, in your Apennine cave and then in that haunted valley.’

‘I have not forgotten.’

‘Nor I.’ His voice was soft and low.

‘Four will fight for the end of the world,

One with an empire,

One with a sword,

Two will be saved and one will be heard,

One with a son

And one with a word.’

There was silence, and then Orestes said, ‘There is much that we do not understand.’

‘There is much that we will never understand,’ said Attila. ‘But war is a great teacher.’ He touched his hand to the hilt of his sword, his beautiful inlaid sword which had been given him by a Roman general, and which he had shown to his people as the Sword of Savash. They had believed. Did he himself believe? Who can say? Who can say what a man like Attila truly believed?

He nodded towards the far horizon.

Orestes looked, and it seemed to him that the horizon itself was astir. As if it were smouldering, and the smoke was dust. He wiped the sweat from his face again.

‘An ordinary raiding party would number only a few dozen,’ mused Orestes. ‘That is no few dozen. That is no ordinary raiding party.’

‘Two thousand will come. They want revenge. And we want them all to come.’

Orestes let out a long, hissing sigh. ‘You’re crazy. With all due respect and that, my lord. But you are madder than a monkey’s tail.’

Attila said nothing for a while, his flint gaze set on that distant, smoking horizon. His eyes narrowed, his earrings flashed in the sunlight. He said softly, not turning, ‘With respect, old comrade, we want them all to come, so that their camp will be left unguarded.’

And then the People of the Wolf came howling in.

They came howling in with an animal music which grew louder and more terrifying as they approached at full gallop. Yowling and yikkering, whooping and screaming, they came riding out of the dust across the plateau. They erupted in a thunder of hooves and drums, spears held aloft, arrows already notched to bowstrings.

The old priestess had underestimated when she had said that there were a thousand of them, maybe two.

Many wore next to nothing, and what they wore was purely decorative, for they had taken time to dress themselves for the killing. Their womenfolk had decorated their warriors further, with great care and pride, and sent them off into battle with much dancing and ululation, bidding them come back covered in the blood of their enemies or else their own. ‘Let no man come back to us unbloodied!’ the women sang.

Now they rode down upon this insolent little band of nameless and unknown enemies. They were decorated with scars and weals of paint, with dots and lines scratched out at needlepoint by their women, ink poured drop by delicate drop into the oozing cuts. Dressed in feathers and furs, their reins were hung with the severed heads of their enemies or any other they had happened upon, knotted by their own hair. They rode bedizened with offcuts of Chinese silk and the bloodied vestments of slain priests and the incongruous floating muslin veils of maidens, from ransacked cities, now similarly bloodied and soiled and wrapped round thick wrists or powerful biceps as spoils of war and emblems of victory. Bracelets of hares’ feet and capes of buffalo hide were tied at their throats. Wolfskins and wolf pelts being of great totemic power, the highest warriors among them wore headdresses of wolves’ heads, jaws set perpetually agape, and necklaces of severed wolves’ ears. Others wore fur kalpaks stuck with the dyed antlers of deer, and long tresses of captured women’s hair tied vainly into their own.

Their faces were tattooed and gaudily painted with white and ochre and red, cheeks and foreheads patterned crimson with fearsome devices drawn with knifepoints dipped in the blood of beetles crushed in mortars by their women. Upon their broad hairless chests were etched grinning suns and moons and blue faces with writhing snakes for hair, and upon their dusty backs were bloody handprints slapped by their fellows. Their horses’ flanks were decorated with birds and fish and bright yellow ochre chevrons and reddish handprints, some printed from real hands severed from the bodies of their groaning vanquished.

Some wore the dark blue turban-cloths of slaughtered Persians artlessly wrapped round their heads or throats, some wore rawhide helmets stuck with the horns of bulls or saiga, embossed with strange designs of occult power. They clutched bunches of arrows in their fists, and clenched more between their filed and sharpened teeth, for some of them were cannibals. And some had coloured their lips and around their mouths a brilliant carmine red, to that end as if to suggest to their enemies that there were others lying dead already, as if their mouths were still laced with blood from the last massacre, where they fallen on the slain and drunk wildly.

Thus they came howling, and from behind their pitiful thorn brake Attila and his men saw that some among the enemy rode perversely naked but for bangles and bracelets straining round their thick wrists, spurring their horses onward with sparkling anklets of costly looted jewellery, like murderous mounted whores. Some wore nothing but leather belts round their waists, circled with hatchets and daggers and scalps tied thereto by the bloodcrusted fronds of their own hair. Further scalps and heads festooned these, and they clutched evil curved picks and lariats of crude nettle-rope, their very flesh stuck with shards of broken glass, bright beads, jewels. Some were already in a state of excitement, panting and with eyes half closed as they approached another slaughterous climax.

And Attila’s men behind the thorn brake knew how they would die if they were captured alive, in what foul manner, and how slowly.

Such was the legion of thousands that came howling down upon them that day, their appearance and noise abominable, drumming up clouds of dust through which they erupted terrible and demoniac. And behind them came many of their women and older children, readying themselves with little knives and daggers for the final despatches to be made upon the groaning battlefield after the fury of battle was done.

Among them came also the witch Enkhtuya.

Attila’s little army looked out aghast at this monstrous horde and tried to assure themselves that they had faced worse in the past and triumphed – though just for the moment they could not recall when. They steeled themselves as best they could and trusted to their king.

Orestes glanced sidelong and saw Attila with his bow gripped in his left hand, his face raised, that old sardonic grin flickering about him even now; that laughter in the face of death, as if to lose like this were no loss but, against such absurd and impossible odds, in this nameless wasteland, with a final shout of laughter for your last gasp, a kind of despairing victory.

Orestes shook his head. ‘Lose the smile, in Hades’ name,’ he growled. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

‘I was just thinking,’ said Attila with equanimity, his smile growing broader by the second.

‘Thinking what?’

‘I was just thinking: imagine how the legions of Rome will react to a sight such as this, to this legion of howling horribles. They have faced many enemies, but they have never faced anything like the Kutrigur Huns in full rampage.’

Orestes shook his head. ‘First things first,’ he said. He plucked up his first arrow from the ranks of them stuck in the earth at his feet, and nocked it to the string.

‘Not until I give the order.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ muttered the Greek with a certain sarcasm.

Attila nodded towards the horror rushing on them in fury and dust. ‘Observe.’

The Kutrigur had galloped easily over the featureless plateau beaten flat by the years and the wind and even the pitiless sun. The miserable huddle of their foes stood behind their contemptible thorn brake, less than a hundred in number, peering out over the rim like marmots peering out of a burrow. There was laughter amid the howling, and some of the warriors bit their lips bloody in their excitement.

‘Now,’ said Attila.

The front rank of the Kutrigur horses had come galloping among the rocks strewn on the hard, unforgiving earth, lying almost camouflaged in the pale desert dust. One, a single horse, took a tumble, and the rest slowed and reeled upward and began to step carefully. Their enraged riders beat them with lariats, belts and whips, but the horses could no more gallop through this slew of rocks than a camel can gallop over sand dunes. Warriors coming up behind drove their horses onward in an unabated gallop into the stalled front rank and they began to cram powerlessly together.

Attila raised his right arm. His eighty men watched him, not their enemy.

He waited. Then he saw one warrior strike out at one of his fellows, who veered sideways and almost fell from his horse. He slammed into a third warrior, whose horse bucked with indignation and then came down painfully on a rock, its rear leg hobbling.

Attila dropped his arm. ‘Now!’ he roared.

The eighty bowmen were gathered round only one side of the thorn brake. The Kutrigurs in their red rage and incompetence had not even encircled them, but packed together in one jostling, milling band.

‘They have no experience of attacking a fortified position,’ said Orestes.

Attila nodded. ‘Not even one as pitifully fortified as ours.’

The arrows came at their appointed rate upon them, each bow-man firing a dozen a minute, arcing high into the eternal blue sky and then falling down through the air and down through helms and hauberks and cuirasses of oxleather, through brain and flesh and bone. They fell like rain. A thousand arrows fell upon the Kutrigurs in the first minute, by which time hundreds were wounded and at least a hundred dead. Horses reared and rampaged, biting each other in their agony and madness.

At last, from somewhere behind the ranks of the chaotic beleaguered horsemen, came a voice of authority. Somewhere the old, grim-faced chieftain, with his pockmarked cheeks and nose battered flat, was giving his orders. The flanks of the jostling horsemen began to move out, and the warriors to separate. Those on the left flank began to gallop after all. Gaps appeared between them. Arrows began to fall from the sky and hit the dust. More and more failed to find their target. The horsemen scattered further apart, found their space. And then all began to gallop. They thinned out and moved, faster and faster. Not towards the thorn brake, over the treacherous slew of rocks, but round it. They set up a warcry and moved as fast as dust-demons round the brake, and the eighty men’s arrows missed their whirling targets more and more. Then the Kutrigurs began to nock arrows to their own bows and fire back. Their discipline was poor and their marksmanship little better, as had already been divined by testing. But so many, firing so prolifically… Their arrows began to tell.

Attila nodded grimly. He had expected as much.

He ordered his men to keep low and keep firing.

Through the pell-mell and melee of dust and galloping hooves, they glimpsed further Kutrigur warriors lassoing the last of the livestock, the droop-eared goats and the skinny-ribbed cattle, and dragging them to the ground and killing them. They set torches and burning brands to the huddled huts of the village and flames roared into the sky.

The villagers huddled in the centre of the thorn brake in their tent of leaning wooden slats and clutched each other in terror and silence. The old priestess’s lips worked furiously with incantation, though none could hear her words over the sound of the furious battle, the cries of men and the screams of horses, and the endless thump of arrows into the thin wooden slats over their heads.

The galloping Kutrigurs also began to drop arrows down onto the livestock inside the thorn brake, and the few horses that remained. The villagers watched the horses’ agony in an agony of their own. There was no shelter for them, nothing they could do. Now they understood why Attila had given the order for most of the animals to be driven off earlier, to some place of safety, some green and innocent valley beyond the horizon, far beyond the reach of men and their falling arrows.

Two of Attila’s warriors fell back with arrows in their chests, for while the thorn brake was a good horse barrier it was a poor barrier to arrows. But it was all they had, all they could muster. Now the galloping Kutrigurs began to learn, and instead of arcing their arrows into the air, fired them directly into the thorns. A few picked their way determinedly among the rocks and assembled at the perimeter of the thorn brake but they were easily brought down by arrows or long spear-thrusts. Others went crashing into the ditch dug by the Attila’s grumbling warriors – it was roughly but effectively covered by stretches of canvas strewn with sand – and were similarly finished. But the ground had been too hard, and the time too little, to make of the ditch a proper defence. It was enough to break the legs and bring down the riders of a few front-running horses, but no more. Attila had inspected it earlier and muttered, ‘Not up to Roman standards, but it’ll have to do.’

Now he ordered his men to drop to the ground. Just at that moment, Yesukai reeled and spun round, clutching his upper arm and bellowing in anger: there was an arrow straight through his arm. Chanat leaped to his feet again and ran to him, in obedience to no order but to look to Yesukai.

The warriors lay flat on the ground and fired as best they could through the thorns, but now the difference in numbers was taking its toll. One of Attila’s men suddenly reared up – he had an arrow straight in the top of his head. He half turned, then his eyes rolled upwards to the whites and he fell dead in the dust.

Many Kutrigurs lay dead beyond the thorn brake, but many more came on, vaulting over the corpses of their comrades as they rode. The defenders’ bow arms, though as hard as steel, began to tire. Each draw of the string was like pulling yourself up by one hand from an overhead branch. Each warrior had fired a hundred times or more. There were arrows remaining in store, but the archers themselves were only flesh and blood. And the Kutrigurs, like jackals, scented blood and injury and came closer.

Some slowed their horses and still tried to trot through the field of rocks but were quickly shot down. Others, however, did something no Hun warrior ever did willingly, and it came as a surprise. They dismounted, dropped to the ground and began to make their way across the mere hundred yards or so to the thorn brake on their stomachs. Hatchets, daggers, clubs and short stabbing-spears clutched between their teeth, they crawled zigzag on their elbows and knees like an army of lizards. They clung flat to the ground among the strewn rocks and were hard to hit. Attila’s men rolled low and fired out at them but the target was small and too often their hard-drawn arrows only clattered off the shielding rocks or skittered over the dusty earth and ceased.

Some got close enough to lash out with long lassos, with ropes hooked and barbed, and managed to drag sections of thorn brake clear and came crawling through. The sharpened staves within might stop warriors on horseback but they could not stop men on foot or crawling on reptilian bellies. Then they stood and came running in, naked and howling, weapons held above their heads. It became as desperate a face-to-face battle, on foot, as Attila had foreseen.

‘Aladar’s men!’ he roared out across the circle. ‘To my left! Hold that gap!’

The men rushed to attack the Kutrigurs breaking through, and all was chaos and dust.

Seeing that the battle was reaching its endpoint, old Chanat cast aside his offensive weapon, his bow, the weapon of hope among the Huns, and instead drew his old sword, its dulled edge nicked and serrated by six decades of unforgiving blows. Attila glanced across and saw the old warrior standing proud and looking out over the thorn brake and stiffening himself against the coming onslaught. And the king turned aside and for a moment could look no more, not at Chanat, not at anything.

Then he drew his sword likewise and waited.

A naked savage came at Chanat, jabbing at him with a short stabbing-spear. Chanat swept his sword low. The savage stepped backwards, yikkering like a monkey, his spear held out low in defence, and Chanat stepped towards him, raising his arm for a second right-handed swipe. At the last instant he turned easily on the ball of his right foot, spun in a swift semi-circle and stabbed backwards from this new and unexpected angle, close in to his enemy’s exposed left side. The old warrior stood straight, pulled his sword free of the dead man’s ribs, and turned to fight again without looking back at him once.

And there was Orestes, fighting two at once. Chanat tripped one of them, knocked him to the ground and cut his head off. The Greek fought as silently as a cat, and perhaps with the same pleasure.

Chanat was injured now. He fought on, his neck wound bleeding afresh with each mighty stroke he gave, longing for rest. But there would be no rest on this battlefield before the grave. ‘Then let it be,’ he growled. Another Kutrigur turned and fled, and one of Aladar’s men put an arrow in his back and he came down.

Chanat approached his king, covered in dust and blood, his neck slick with blood, his leather jerkin ripped almost from his broad chest.

‘Geukchu and Candac,’ he said gruffly, jerking his head. ‘You sent them away with the horses. And for reinforcements?’

‘Of a kind,’ said Attila.

‘Then where are they? If they come not very soon they come too late. And we have need of their fresh strength.’

‘It is not fresh strength that they bring,’ said Attila. ‘On the contrary. They are coming back with old weakness.’

Chanat scowled and muttered bitterly that this was no time for riddles and runes: ‘Riddles win no battles.’ His king only raised an eyebrow, then turned to drive his sword deep into the ribcage of a Kutrigur who had vaulted the loosened brake, slipped between the staves and came running at him with teeth bared like a wolverine.

Behind the crawling Kutrigurs, the mounted horsemen heard another order go out from their cunning old chieftain – no man remained chieftain of the Kutrigurs for long without the keenest and cruellest cunning. Then some passed burning brands along their lines, and others broke away and collected arrows from a flatbed wagon; women passed them out, smiling and chirruping. These arrows had shafts tightly wrapped in resinous reeds, the kind that do not freeze or die beside the marshes, however icy the weather. Some were also dipped in oil from the desert oilbeds, and once lit from a burning brand would not be extinguished until they had burned out. The Kutrigurs lit these fire-arrows from handheld torches, smoking flambeaux held aloft and fluttering like victorious pennants, or else lit them from the blazing huts of the village itself. Leisurely taking careful aim, they began to fire them down upon the thorn brake. Instantly the dry thorn brake was ablaze and burning merrily.

Flames exploded before Orestes’ and Attila’s faces and both men fell back in an instant, Orestes staggering a little.

It was as Attila had foreseen. Once the thorn brake had been fired, their best line of defence was its momentary flames, and then the staves. The brake would soon fall apart, lying a tattered and black smoking ruin, and the Kutrigurs would be through on foot. And then this little band of warriors and adventurers, so far from home, would be slain with ease, no matter how valiantly they fought.

Arrows still flew. Another warrior, one of Aladar’s men bearing the brunt of the attack where the thorn brake had given away, fell back and went walking slowly across the compound towards the centre where the terrified villagers crouched. He cradled the flight of white feathers that nestled up into his stomach, walking slowly, carefully, nursing the feathers as if they were a baby bird. Another arrow, two more, struck him as if randomly, insolently in the back as he walked before he fell and lay dead.

Among the villagers huddled under their wooden slats, the sound of weeping was heard.

The first horses had stumbled and fallen into the ditch outside the thorn brake, their hooves dabbling at the empty air, their lips drawn back over their long teeth, whinnying. They had scrabbled desperately to clamber up the crumbling sides of the cruel, half-concealed barrier before the thorn brake that now towered above them, and there they and their riders had been shot at close range. But now the ditch was half filled by the dead and dying, and the thorn brake was aflame and falling into ruins.

Now mounted warriors came up close and fearlessly to the brake, just the other side of the choked ditch, and lashed at its last remnants with their long lariats, catching the thorns and dragging them away. The ditch filled with horses and men, footsoldiers taking axes to the fire-blackened staves and splintering them into pieces, and the finest of the Kutrigur cavalry riding in, still fresh for battle.

‘Aladar!’ yelled Attila desperately. ‘Get your men over here. Hold this gap whatever happens!’

Aladar and his men sprinted across the circle and did more than hold the gap. Aladar fell on the lariat ropes with his dagger and cut them, and his men fell to their knees in the very shadows of their enemies’ rearing horses and fired arrows straight up into the horsemen. One Kutrigur half slipped from his stumbling horse, but regained his feet. He drew his long, curved sword and faced Aladar. Aladar ran at him sidelong and with a single backhanded swipe of his sword took off the top of the man’s skull, which spun away through the air like a bone dinner-plate. The man stood stock still, his eyes wide, astonished. His brains oozed over the top of his opened skull like grey porridge bubbling over the rim of a cauldron. Aladar spun on his heel and cut back across the man’s stomach, opening his belly. The doomed man remained alive long enough to see his own seal-grey guts slip to the ground before him, like a mass of writhing eels. Then he fell dead upon them.

Nearby, Yesukai passed his hand over his face and his chest heaved, and fresh, bright blood seeped from under his arm. The arrow had penetrated further than it seemed.

Orestes pulled further back from the collapsing furnace of the thorn brake and looked at Attila, the whites of his eyes shining in his soot-blackened face. He said nothing. What was there to say? They had fought their way through war-torn Italy together when they were yet boys, evading Goths and Romans alike. They had buried a third child, Orestes’ own flesh and blood, his beloved little sister Pelagia, and had walked on unbeaten. They had escaped a Roman legionary city and crossed the Danube under fire. Since then they had fought across Scythia, and as far as the wide, sandy shores of the Yellow River and across the emerald green grasslands of Manchuria. At other times in their long brotherhood they had fought across the parched plains of Transoxiana, and in the mountains and the precipitous passes of Khurasan, against the might of the Sassanid Kings. And they had fought in strange and unholy battles amid the ruins of the Kushan Empire, and sometimes they had fought for Indian princes and at other times they had fought against Indian kings, and they fought for both gold and glory. And now it had come to this, in a land, as Orestes said, not yet named. They had faced poor odds before, but none so terrible as this. The day was at last against them.

Attila knew what Orestes’ thoughts were, and the thoughts of all his failing men. He turned and strode among them, his sword whirling and flashing over his head, his stride that of a conqueror. He proclaimed to them in a voice that carried even above the din of battle that this was not how it would end. This was not his destiny, to end here, nor was it theirs. Their destiny was still to ride against Rome and to destroy it, and then to ride against China. For all the world was theirs. He said that he had heard word of it from Astur the All-Father, and it would not end here, and not now. And though each and every warrior knew well in his heart that this was exactly where it ended, and that their time was come and they would go down fighting amidst this blaze of thorns, under the arrows and blades of the Kutrigurs, nevertheless, at the same time, somehow they still believed in him.

He shouted a brief command and instantly his weary but well-drilled men did as he ordered. They abandoned the broken line of brake and staves and moved backwards. Now, to huddle together in a desperate last stand about the wooden tent of slats would apparently have been the best sense, but there they would have made a good, single target for the Kutrigurs’ murderous arrows. Instead Attila’s order was that each gather into his own small troop of ten, or however many of that ten remained alive, and fight as a mobile unit.

It was a cunning stroke. The Kutrigurs were unable to fire their arrows into the mass because there was no mass, and they might well hit their own. As they came riding in, yelling and whooping over the smoking ruins of the thorn brake, they were obliged to attack each small unit separately. And as they attacked one, they themselves were savagely attacked on the flank or rear by another. It was a military tactic of small extent but great effect. The strength and swordsmanship of Attila’s men, and their fanatical comradeship towards both each other and their visionary king took a terrible toll, and the bodies of Kutrigurs piled up at many times the rate of their own. Though none but one man there knew it, the tiny units of Attila’s men were fighting like miniature Roman legions; and against the milling, bewildered, clumsily close-packed cavalry of the Kutrigurs, they were proving just as unbreakable.

Smoke and dust filled the air, and cries more like those of animals than of men. A weariness descended over the fighting crowd, slaughterous drudgery of stab and despatch, stab and despatch. How much longer could they go on? It would be weariness that killed them, not the valour or strength of their enemies. It is almost always thus for a warrior. It is tiredness that kills.

Attila and Orestes and his closest men fought back to back near the eastern edge of the circle, trying to draw in towards the centre. But their attackers kept coming. They couldn’t move, couldn’t reposition. It was all they could do to stay alive.

Attila cried a warning, and Orestes turned and saw a Kutrigur almost upon him, a tall, lean fellow with his long hair scooped upwards and cemented with white clay, his face splashed and printed with fresh blood, his beribboned spear raised. Orestes held his longsword out horizontally and made as if to sweep it sidelong into the warrior’s belly. The warrior pulled up, lowered his spear and held it out two-handed and vertical in an artless blocking stance. Thus he could break his attacker’s stroke and then swiftly turn his spear, even if the shaft was broken, and drive it into his side. But Orestes had his adversary just as he wanted him. He was making one of his favourite moves, in his usual, expressionless silence, as if practising swordplay with a friend.

The moment the warrior’s spear tilted downward into the defensive, Orestes changed his stroke and in a single fluid movement he swept his sword-blade up over the warrior’s head, switched the position of his hands on the hilt even as the sword flashed through the air, and then brought it back down, left-handed and with punishing force, across the back of his adversary’s legs, slicing through his hamstrings, his muscles, and halfway through the bone.

He drew the sword free and straightened up and held it right-handed once more. The bewildered warrior’s legs buckled as if the muscle had been stripped out of them entire at that lethal stroke, and he sank to his knees in a pool of his own spreading blood, still not understanding what had happened, what had gone wrong. He would never understand. But the gods had given the nod that day, and granted death his request. For death makes the request regarding every man, each and every day. And the day dawns when the gods give the nod to death for each and every man.

Orestes drove his sword into the man’s torso and pulled it free again. He planted his foot in the small of his back and booted his lifeless body into the burning thorn brake.

It had been more like an execution than an even fight.

But they were losing. No matter how ferociously they fought, how bravely and with what murderous skill, it was certain that they should lose. A dozen of them lay dead already; two or three times that number bore scarlet wounds. Their weariness almost overwhelmed them even as they fought on, unyielding. Their enemies were numberless: for every howling savage they killed, two more took his place. And the day wore on.

Attila still strode among his men, marshalling them, ducking random spear-thrusts, impatiently swirling and cutting a man almost in half at the waist when he came at him, snarling, as the king was trying to order his men to turn their other side. He roared to them and then they took heart from it and fought more bitterly yet. But they were losing.

The sun was going down at last on that short cold winter day, and still they fought, warriors becoming no more than unreal, flame-rimmed silhouettes against the sunset, puppets of the gods in lethal shadowplay. There was a nightmare beauty to the field of blood: the sky of fiery orange, warriors groaning and buckling, falling back into their comrades’ arms and dying there, warriors crying out curt battle laments before leaping into the fray once more to take what lives they could before being cut down and sent below in their turn.

High above, against the enflamed sky, a skein of wild geese passed over, black shadows likewise against the setting sun, and some warriors stopped amidst the carnage and looked up at them and could think of nothing, no words to express what they felt when they saw those silent blackwinged forms pass overhead distant and serene heading west into the flaming dying sun.

Three things happened in quick succession. Chanat groaned, turned away from the line of battle and took shelter amid the handful of his fellow warriors. Attila, before his own men’s horror-struck eyes, dropped his head and clutched his chest. Then he dropped his sword as well, and reeled a little, and as he reeled, they saw that he had been hit by a black-feathered arrow. It was no minor wound to be battle-dressed, patched and forgotten. The arrowhead was sunk in between his ribs, though not on the heart side, in dense chest-muscle. Attila broke the shaft off and threw it away, closed his leather jerkin over the wound, knotted it and stood upright again.

Almost at the same moment, there came a weird far-off sound, muffled and eerie in the dust-choked air. The fighting slowed, became hesitant, dreamlike. One Kutrigur stopped in mid-swipe and half turned. He could have been killed in that instant, but the sound came again, and his adversary – it was Yesukai, drenched in blood down one side from shoulder to thigh – stopped likewise and looked blindly into the east.

A third time the sound came, an unaccountably mournful sound which rumbled though the air and the ground itself. The Kutrigurs ceased fighting altogether, and at their rear their old chieftain turned and stopped still. It was as if some unseen god had given the order that battle should cease. The field fell still and waited.