The Gathering of the Storm

8

The dust drifted and passed away. Low fires still crackled and burned from the huts of the village, but the thorn brake itself was gone, no more now than a charcoal perimeter to the fighting, like the boundary marker to some complex and murderous game.

The air cleared. The sky above was a deepening velvet blue stuck with a lone golden planet.

The Kutrigurs and their enemies looked the same way and saw that a distant fire rent the horizon. It was not a great fire, but great enough to be seen, to the east, some five miles off, where the Kutrigurs’ camp lay. Against the deep-blue sky, black smoke rose high into the cooling air, like smoke from a furnace, like black smoke from the accursed oilfields of the wild Chorasmian shore, blotting out even the distant purity of the single glow hung like a lantern in heaven.

Attila’s last ally. Black fire.

Up a low rise, perhaps half a mile away, came shuffling a sorrowful line of people. Not an army of noble warriors come to his aid in the hour of need, in recompense for some act of heroic comradeship long ago. Their rescuers were, as he said, marked not for their strength but for their weakness: ancients with bound and skeletal hands, women roped together with hemp ropes of their own making, children draggled and nervous. As many as a hundred of them, perhaps more, terrified, held at spearpoint.

The deep moan of the horn came again, and it was Geukchu who blew it. He and Candac and their troop of twenty men now also showed on the skyline to the east in the growing darkness, mounted, flanking their prisoners, roped and shackled and dejected. The horn that was sounded was an immense crescent of ivory, yellow and cracked with age. It was the Kutrigur priests’ sacred horn, dug from the ground generations ago, the hollowed-out tusk of some ancient animal whose bones had appeared out of the ochre dust in some crumbling cliff of limestone and whose offspring, it seemed, no longer walked the earth at all.

The Kutrigurs stared long and hard at the sight of their own people in chains. The old chieftain’s eyes were not strong, not in the failing light. But many among his warriors strained and thought they could see their aged fathers and mothers among the wretched captives, or their sisters still too young to come to battle with their little curved knives, their wives nursing their infants, the infants wrapped in their mothers’ arms, or the toddlers holding their mothers’ hands. Ruthlessly roped together at wrist and ankle, while the twenty mounted warriors who flanked them held their spears levelled and unwavering towards their captives’ chests and throats. They had the prisoners tightly circled in perfect, disciplined formation, and any who tried to break ranks and run would have been instantly skewered. Their baleful guardians sat their horses still and silent, like those who will do just as they promise to do. A mere twenty! But more than enough for the purpose.

Curse them. Curse these intruders who had outwitted them, outflanked them even in the heat of battle, sent out a secret detachment behind their backs, and fallen on their own defenceless camp as the men were away fighting.

Some of the younger and more impulsive Kutrigurs ground their teeth and whirled back towards their enemy for one final merciless assault, and the instant they did so their leader responded in kind. That fierce fighter with his blue tattoos and ragged topknot, whom they had picked out long ago but could not get near, or getting near, could not get away again alive. As the weary made to attack again, to ride in and finish these wretched brigands and insolent trespassers in their domain, that tattooed leader raised his sword in his right hand. At the same instant, as if in mirror image, as if there were no time or distance between them, the leader of the twenty horsemen on the hill raised his spear and prepared to drive it into the body of the nearest rope-bound captive. The captive, a thin girl in her teens, pulled away and cowered.

The chieftain of the Kutrigurs saw it all, and roared to his men to be still. The girl was his daughter.

An impasse settled upon them all.

The sour-faced old chieftain looked long towards the rise where so many of his own people stood in ropes and chains. He thought of the great camp beside the river that they had left that morning in such hot blood; it now, he doubted not, lay in fire-blackened ruins. His livestock must have been slain, his best horses taken and driven off, and the rest stuck with arrows and dying with thirst, mouths agape, lying on their swollen sides kicking their legs in slow agony by the winding river’s edge. For a moment the blood ran hot again through his thin old veins and he thought they should ride on and finish their enemies regardless, letting their old and their young go as sacrifice.

A sacrifice willingly made for the death of our hated enemies, he brooded. Our infants? There are more where they came from. But you, our enemies? He turned back and regarded the exhausted, bloodied men behind their pathetic ranks of staves. You dogs of cowardice and treachery, you vicious rats of men. The chance to destroy you may come but once.

But it would be no good. His men would turn on him in their fury and grief, and he would be finished as a chieftain and killed.

He must find some good in this. He must act the chieftain in this dark hour, or his men would be like wolves to a stag and rend him.

Slowly he walked his horse towards the battle line. He carried no weapon, only his wooden staff. His men parted before him. He stopped before the wreckage of the thorn brake. His warriors all fell back. The enemy leader had remounted his horse to meet him. His right side was drenched and dark, but he sat still and straight and did not waver. His horse was a grubby little skewbald with a fierce eye. It was a fighter’s horse. But the old chieftain knew that by now. He knew that these few dozen men were fighters such as he had never encountered before – God’s curse on them.

The two leaders faced each other.

‘So,’ said the chieftain, ‘you attack our women and slaughter our children. You put our suckling infants to the sword. This is how you fight, how you win your battles.’

‘Your eyes grow dim, old man,’ said Attila. ‘Look again. Those may be your ways. They are not ours. Your women and your children still live, unlike many hundreds of your finest warriors.’

‘You spawn of a-’

‘I am a merciful man,’ said Attila. ‘What shall I signal my warriors to do? To kill all your women and your children in your sight? They will all be slain before you can gallop that far to stop them. It will be the work of a few heartbeats to slay them all. My men are fast workers.’ He smiled. ‘But they have no wish to kill the defenceless and weak. They are merciful as I am merciful. Let us parley.’

‘You are a devil.’

Attila shook his head. ‘You cannot parley with heated blood. Perhaps you need to rest after the exertions of battle, old man, and then we can parley. But remember your women and children on the hill yonder; as shall we. Until you are ready to talk truce, we shall take care of them.’ And he smiled again his wolfish white-toothed smile, folded his powerful forearms across his chest and tossed his head back high.

‘I need no rest,’ growled the chieftain. His face was dark with anger. He fixed his glowering eyes upon the stranger’s yellow eyes and said, ‘What is your name?’

It was a sign of weakness among all the steppe peoples to surrender your own name first; an admission of weakness. But Attila was ever scornful of such customs, as if he well knew where true strength and weakness lay.

‘I am called Attila,’ he said, ‘son of Mundzuk.’

The chieftain narrowed his eyes. He had heard this name before. He had heard great things of this name. Even further east, among the mountains, there had been a bandit king…

‘And your name?’

The old chieftain steadied his restless horse beneath him. ‘I am called Kizil-Bogaz,’ he said, ‘Red Craw. Chief of all the Kutrigur Huns.’

‘All?’ repeated Attila mockingly. ‘All that remain. Look around you. You cannot defeat us. Already half your men lie dead, stuck with arrows like hedgehogs. Already the desert rats and flies devour them. Look out over your dead army. Will you see the other half slain likewise, and your own power blown away like a dead thorn in a gust of desert wind? Look over my men. I have a hundred men, no more, no less. How many lie dead?’

‘How many?’ The old chieftain knew the answer well enough. He had neither need nor desire to look again. He knew the evil arithmetic of this battle. This overbearing bandit king had lost no more than a handful. But as for his own people – another such battle and they would be finished. They had never known such attrition. This morning he had ridden out with two thousand warriors at his back. Now, littering the stony ground, and piled up in stained heaps within that fatal circle, as many as five hundred lay dead. As many again had fallen back and lay in the gathering gloom, tending arrow wounds, sword cuts, broken limbs, as best they could. There was no camp to retreat to, no felt tents to rest in. No women with beakers of cool water and gentle hands. Even their tents lay mangled and burned to ruins. God curse this yellow-eyed laughing bandit king.

‘How many of yours lie dead?’ repeated the old chief bitterly. ‘Not enough.’

‘Your army was numerous but weak,’ said Attila. ‘Join with me and I will make you strong.’ He nodded. ‘Join us.’

Red Craw stared at him. ‘You have slain fathers, sons, brothers on this field. The Budun-Boru do not easily forgive.’

‘Then we can decide it in single combat,’ said Attila. ‘You and