The Gathering of the Storm

I.’

Red Craw eyed him, with the wound still wet in his side, but sitting as still and hard as stone. Clearly the wound was not a serious one. He looked away.

‘Your ancients and women and your infants are not the only reward you will have from joining with us.’

Red Craw looked back, curious despite himself. ‘Speak.’

‘We ride west. Against the empire of Rome.’

Red Craw frowned. ‘What is Rome?’

‘A great empire. You will ride with us. We are brothers. We will ride together against Rome, an empire as great as China.’

Red Craw smiled for the first time, though there was little mirth in it. ‘There is no empire as great as China.’

‘There is one as rich, but not as strong: the Empire of Rome.’

Red Craw brooded. What reason had he to believe this murderous, treacherous upstart? Except that he knew from some men’s eyes you saw the truth burn like a lantern in a window. Curse him.

‘Besides,’ said Attila, laying his left hand flat over the right side of his chest. ‘I need a healer. Many of my men, too, and even more of yours.’

‘You have burned our tents. There is nowhere to go.’

‘Very well,’ said Attila. ‘We have parleyed enough.’ He looked towards the horizon and raised his sword. The lead horsemen on the rise, barely distinguishable now in the gloom, raised his spear likewise. The line of shackled people swayed before it like corn before the wind.

‘Wait,’ said Red Craw.

He looked down at his dusty, bloody hands on the pommel of his wooden saddle. He sighed. Then he pulled his horse round, and rode back slowly to his men.

Attila waited.

He and his men hardly understood what happened next. Red Craw spoke briefly to his captains, and then he dismounted before them, which was unusual. They could not hear the words spoken between them. Red Craw suddenly sank to his knees before them, as if asking their forgiveness for the botched battle against so small an enemy. Then he fell away to one side, and they saw with horror that he was only a headless trunk. His head rolled in the dust before him. The warrior facing him still had a short curved sword in his hand. He had sliced clean through Red Craw’s neck.

The warrior straightened again. He had many feathers stuck in his clay-whitened hair, and he was much younger than Red Craw. No more than forty, perhaps younger. His chest was broad and thickly muscled and he looked as strong as a bull. He sheathed his sword again without cleaning the blood off, and heeled his horse over.

‘My name is Sky-in-Tatters,’ he said without preamble, ‘chief of the Kutrigur Huns. We accept your offer. You are our brothers. You fight well. We will ride with you.’

He was squatly built and very strong but his voice was hoarse and strangely high-pitched. His eyes were small and suspicious, and had none of Red Craw’s brooding intelligence. He would not be a good chief.

Attila nodded. ‘Welcome,’ he said.

The two tribes burned their dead. Eight of Attila’s men lay dead. Most of the living carried a wound of some sort or other.

Yesukai, eager young Yesukai, always wanting to be the first in everything… He was the first now, too: the first among Attila’s captains to go the way of all flesh, though the youngest. It is often so in war.

The arrow that had pierced his upper arm had gone further and also pierced his chest. The blood that coated him from shoulder to thigh, as he fought on regardless throughout that bitter day, was his own blood. He had given it up carelessly, as if his life were a thing of no moment.

He lay dying against one of the blackened staves and Chanat cradled his head. He would drink no water. He spoke very quietly with his eyes half closed, and each time the blood bubbled from his lips Chanat wiped it away again as tenderly as a mother wiping milk from her baby’s lips. Aladar, Attila and Orestes stood nearby in the gloom. In turn, according to custom, they and all the captains knelt before Yesukai and asked his forgiveness for any wrongs they might have done him in life. In reply, to each of them, young Yesukai smiled his boyish smile and murmured, ‘No wrong, no wrong,’ and reached out and laid his other, unbloodied hand on their foreheads in blessing. Each of them got to his feet again with tears blurring his sight. For they had been like brothers on the long ride and in the long fight.

‘My women,’ murmured Yesukai. ‘My youngest, Kamar. She was very dear to me.’ His head dropped and they thought he was gone. But then he said, ‘My heart is sorry for Kamar.’ His eyes were closed, his words almost inaudible. Attila knelt near him to hear. ‘And my children, my sons and my daughters. Care for them.’

‘As the sons and daughters of a king,’ said Attila.

Chanat wiped the young man’s mouth one last time, and then there was no more blood.

It was night when they burned his body on a great pyre of dry scrub, along with the bodies of the eight other men who had died that day. The funeral pyre was only one of many such pyres that covered the dark battlefield: the Kutrigurs were also burning their fallen. Little beacons in the vast and silent landscape, under the midnight blue vault of heaven. Among the beacons, firelit creatures moving as slow as ghosts, heads bowed low, and then stopping and groaning, and falling to their knees beside headless trunks and broken bodies, and weeping unconsolably. Mothers and wives, sisters and aged fathers from among the Kutrigurs, come seeking among the living and finding only the dead. Children and toddlers standing around, grubby-faced, barely understanding.

As the centre of his pyre, Yesukai’s body was seen amid the flames, his ribcage bare of flesh and ablaze and falling apart in white ash. The sparks flew upwards and were lost among the stars, and they sang his soul to heaven. Their lament was for themselves, after the custom, and the noble friend and comrade they had lost.

‘He has fallen, he has fled from us, noble Yesukai,

Yesukai of the laughing eyes, Yesukai of the brave heart and the high soul,

Kings are not, captains are not, who fought and died like Yesukai,

An eagle among men, a leopard, he has left his people poor;

Let the vultures cry among the Tien Shan, let the winds tell it over the Plains of Plenty,

Let the rains fall year long on the green grasslands in mourning for Yesukai!

The sword is cast away, the bow is broken, the weapons of war are perished,

Comfort is not, consolation is not,

For our noble friend, our Yesukai, is fled from us,

And we are left alone.’

At last the funeral pyres burned down low and they mounted their horses again and moved slowly away east.

The chief of the Kutrigurs, their uncertain allies, called out to them in the darkness, ‘Where are you riding?’

Attila regarded him. At last he nodded and said quietly, almost with tenderness, ‘Come.’

After half an hour’s ride through the desolate night, towards the river, with the women and children and the ancients of the Kutrigurs, restored to them and now unroped and unshackled, trudging along in the rearguard, they emerged onto the lush floodplain of the great river. They sat their horses and waited for the Kutrigurs to draw up alongside them on the rise.

Sky-in-Tatters came alongside Attila and gasped.

Ahead of them burned the remnants of a huge fire, some way from the camp of black felt tents. It was an artificial fire, made of brushwood drenched with pailfuls of the foul black oil that Attila had made his men collect in the desert. Now they understood: another of Attila’s tricks. The black smoke that the Kutrigurs had seen on the skyline, and assumed was their camp going up in flames…

The camp still lay by the river’s edge, as ever, under a soft and benevolent moon. The horses’ were breathing and peaceful in the corrals, the tents deserted and unharmed.

Sky-in-Tatters tore his gaze away from the sight of the untouched camp and gazed with grudging admiration at this yellow-eyed bandit king, Attila, son of Mundzuk.

‘You fought like lions today, and sent many a warrior of my people to his grave. But our old and our young, our women and our virgins, and even the tents and the corralled horses of our camp, you left untouched.’

‘It is our usual way.’

Sky-In-Tatters grunted. ‘You are not the biggest fools I have ever met.’

Attila smiled.

Finally Sky-In-Tatters pushed himself up in the saddle, raised his spear and shouted a declaration to his ranks of exhausted and bewildered men.

‘From this day onward,’ he cried, ‘there is neither Black Hun nor Kutrigur Hun! There are only the Huns. And it is as we have heard. We shall be a great nation on the earth!’

The fifteen hundred horsemen, despite exhaustion and injury and a longing for sleep rather keener, at this moment, than any longing for conquest or empire, responded with a mighty shout which was heard for many miles over the treeless steppes, and set even the golden jackals in their lairs shivering with fear.