The Gathering of the Storm

11

They had been out upon the vast plain ringed by those towering mountains for seven days, and with their wagons and oxen and the arduous river crossings they were doing only ten miles a day, perhaps a little more. It was clear cold day, with a little powdery snow underfoot, the air crisp, a sickle of moon high in the cold blue sky.

At the head of the great trundling column, Geukchu of the hawk-eyes slowed his horse almost to a standstill and stared. Attila raised his hand and the column stopped.

They waited. There was nothing. Geukchu continued to stare eastwards. Impatient young Aladar came galloping up.

‘My eyes are half the age of yours, Geukchu!’ he cried. ‘And I see nothing.’

Geukchu ignored him. Time passed. Chagelghan harrumphed and tossed his big ugly head. Attila pulled him up.

Geukchu said, ‘There. Like a drift of smoke on the horizon. There is another column approaching us.’

Attila stared, too. Nothing. ‘It is the wind,’ he said, ‘stirring up the snow.’

Geukchu shook his head. ‘No wind blows so steady. It is a column.’

Orestes spoke, though none had noticed him come up behind them; even his horse trod lightly. ‘It is a column.’

Some time later, Attila said, ‘It is a Chinese column, a column of the Northern Wei.’ He looked round at his men and his eyes gleamed and danced. ‘Good practice.’

He gave low orders to Aladar and Geukchu and they pulled their horses back and began to supervise the men. The women and children were led further back and left undefended among the wagons.

Attila and Orestes sat side by side.

‘Just like old times,’ murmured the bare-headed Greek.

‘The emperors of the Northern Wei were Toba people once, a steppe people.’

Orestes nodded. ‘And now look,’ he said. ‘How quickly Chinese silk and civilization weaken them.’ He added sardonically, ‘Syphilization.’

The Chinese general rode under an embroidered yellow palanquin, reclining upon one elbow. Then one of his horsemen came riding to him, and he was suddenly sitting very upright indeed.

The two armies drew up opposite each other. A mile or more still lay between them. The numbers of the Northern Wei were perhaps four or five thousand, every one a trained man-at-arms.

Attila had long since broken all his warriors into divisions under his chosen captains, mingling Black Hun and Kutrigur together and setting them competing against each other, striving to outdo each other in valour on the field. Like proud regiments, like the Roman legions themselves, quite dissolving any former ties they may have had to each other or to their people, and fixing all their loyalty upon their own band and their captain. On his far left wing, Aladar rode at the head not of a pitiful little troop of ten, but of more than three hundred bristling mounted warriors. They were the youngest and most hot-blooded, their horses the fastest, all bunched and rippling haunches, deep chests enclosing mighty hearts and lungs. Aladar’s warriors were the finest of them all, and they knew it. They knotted black pennants behind their spearheads and crimson bands round their upper arms.

The three brothers, Juchi, Bela and Noyan, commanded some eight hundred in the centre, on the heavier horses, and skilled with the lance. Csaba with his fleet three hundred occupied the right flank, where there was more space between the column and the first low foothills of the mountains to the south. Behind were the troops of Chanat, and of Geukchu and Candac, bows readied and arrows to the string.

Attila sat at the forefront of his army, Orestes a little behind him to his right, and Sky-in-Tatters to his left.

He held his men steady and motionless as the main ranks of Chinese cavalry began to walk and then trot towards them, red banners gradually taking shape and billowing out behind them as they moved faster and faster over the frost-hard grass. The watching Huns would always remember this moment as one of great beauty as well as terror. Neither the Kutrigurs nor the Black Huns had ever faced such a massed professional army in the open field before. Attila himself only smiled into the sun, as if all the training and drilling, grouping and regrouping, had been in preparation for this, and the day were already won.

For to empire-dreamers and lovers of war, there can be no sight more beautiful in the morning sunlight than ranks of mounted warriors, their pennants fluttering from the spearhafts in the breeze, the silvery winter light glancing from bronze helms and damascened scabbards and rippling chain-mail hauberks, horses champing and tossing their heads, manes flying. The immemorial cult of war to which men of heroic blood have been devoted since they first looked out unblinking on the world and understood that life was vain but death could make it glorious; and that war was the supreme rite of Death, the oldest and the greatest god of all.

Attila raised his hand and dropped it in one swift and easy movement, supremely confident. The whole battle was conducted this way, as if against a gang of insolent boys rather than a five thousand-strong column of the Northern Wei. The arrows did their work, falling accurate and lethal into the close-packed ranks of armoured warriors, their armour merely useless weight against that stinging rain. Men reeled and fell and the snow cushioned their falling, as it muffled their cries and the cries of their horses. Indeed, the whole brief battle was muffled in near silence, an eerie and unreal encounter upon that desolate snowbound plain, ringed about by the white and watching mountains. Red banners trembled and tottered and fell and lay stretched and motionless against the white snow. Iron arrowheads burst armour casings and bone lap-pings alike, and sprays of blood dotted the powdered snow as red as bryony berries in that slow midwinter massacre.

As the Chinese attack slowed and jostled and struggled to maintain formation, the heart of Attila’s army did the strangest thing. It melted away. The Chinese armoured knights now came on again with a vengeance, spurring their horses forward into a gallop, only to find that the ranks of barbarian horsemen they galloped against were no longer there. But the barbarian arrows kept coming. The heart of Attila’s army had turned and fled, it seemed. But as they galloped away, as fast as the Chinese pursued them, they continued to fire volley after volley of arrows back into the massed ranks of the oncoming enemy. The volleys were perfectly judged, and fell murderously time after time, like clouds of black hawks stooping on their prey. The Chinese pursuers trying to fire after the retreating Huns in their turn, found that their arrows fell relentlessly short. It was like trying to pursue a ghost, but a ghost armed with weapons of iron.

Meanwhile, Attila had ordered the horns of his army to separate from the main body – another outrageous deviation from the Chinese rule-book of war which left them baffled. An outnumbered army in the open field, under attack, must always stick together and keep formation. Unity is its only hope. But not this evanescent army with its deadly arrows. The wings commanded by Aladar and Csaba moved outwards like the horns of the buffalo, Aladar to the left and Csaba to the right, howling a war-song, racing out over the snow-dusted grass and arcing round on their wild ride, cantering far beyond the exposed flanks of the Chinese army and then moving up from a canter into a full-tilt and furious gallop, slicing back like scythes into the enemy’s undefended sides.

Until the very moment of their attack, Attila dared to have his own retreating archers continue to drop volley after volley of arrows onto the stricken ranks of the Chinese. Only when Aladar and Csaba came with a hundred yards, fifty, did he finally give the signal for the murderous rain to stop. And not one of his own galloping men was hit. The warriors of Aladar and Csaba slammed into the flanks of the Northern Wei, swords whirling in the bright air, and began to roll them up into one single mound of the dead.

Attila called a halt to his main body of men and turned them round again and settled them. Immediately behind him, the eight hundred warriors of Juchi, Bela and Noyan, the solid heart of his little army, were as frustrated as their champing horses at this waiting, longing to move forward into the attack. But there was nothing for them to do. The six hundred warriors who comprised the two scything wings were handling it all on their own, and there was nothing for the rest but to watch. Even Sky-in-Tatters looked on in disbelief and laughed. This was what Huns could do at their best, drilled and lethal. It was almost too easy.

The warcries of the Hun cavalry carried across the snow, and the spectacle of their mad courage, their shocking contempt for death, panicked the Chinese and they lurched back and into each other pell-mell. Any formation or room to manoeuvre was gone now, and everything was confusion and entanglement and steady slaughter.

Finally Attila gave the order, and the rest of his army surged forward to finish the work. There were units of footsoldiers behind the melee of dying Chinese cavalry, and they needed mopping up. None of them had even been engaged in the battle, although sturdy drawn-up footsoldiers could often be the best defence against a wild mounted attack.

Attila lay almost flat upon his horse’s outstretched neck, his sword held out forwards like a lance, and its long sinuous tip went straight into the open crimson mouth of a Chinese knight in mid-cry, ripping out again sideways through his jaw, Chagelghan barely slowing his charge all the while.

Geukchu and Candac had taken their troops round to surround the Chinese rearguard and prevent any escape, and to finish off the bewildered, milling footsoldiers. A secondary order had been to take at least two senior Chinese officers alive. It was a while before Geukchu could find any. Eventually he lassoed one, a squat Chinese captain with grey moustaches, and dragged him away from the battlefield, bellowing, as he would have dragged an unruly steer from the herd. He stood with his sword to the man’s neck, and the man turned with the cruel hemp rope tight around his bound arms, and watched grim-faced as his comrades struggled even to draw their swords in the press, and were cut down in wave after wave, like summer grass before the reaper.

The horses reared and screamed, throwing their riders and trampling them underfoot, panicked and horrified, as horses are, to see that they had trampled other living creatures to death. Horses slammed sideways into each other, and men were trapped between horses, dragged from their fine-tooled leather saddles, squeezed lifeless between sweating flanks, falling to their knees and crawling, abjectly searching for dropped weapons, stumbling over fallen comrades, slithering on slicks of blood coating the cold hard earth. Others crawling free, hoping to flee away from the horror over the plain, were brought down by a single thrust from a lance, or a single straight-flying arrow, fired on the turn from horseback with negligent ease.

Huns were already dismounting and walking on foot, to make the final despatch easier.

A young Wei soldier, a boy of fifteen, lay unable to move in the snow, his legs numb, looking out sidelong across the plain, his left cheek freezing. His sad brown eyes saw not this plain of death but his father’s house. The hearth-fire, the cedarwood rice-chest, the small carved figures of the ancestors in their niche. Outside, the duckpond, and his mother throwing grain to the ducks. The longnecked white ducks stretching forwards eagerly. He felt someone standing close behind him, and his fingers crawled forwards in the snow as if for grasp, but still he only saw his village with its rising woodsmoke, his home. Little children clapping. His sisters, his brothers. His mother flapping her white apron. The dog with his long tongue out, laughing. The goldfinch in his cage of willow twigs, and the green shadows of spring under the willows.

The boy’s head was lifted off the ground and dropped back, and his big brown eyes, still open wide and looking out across the snow-white plain, were lifeless and saw nothing more. Aladar had taken his scalp.

Hiding under the collapsed palanquin at the very heart of the slaughter, the rich yellow watered silk now speckled and streaked here and there with red, they found a Wei monk on all fours.

Attila reached down and dragged the silk canopy off him, rolled it up roughly and tossed it to Sky-in-Tatters. ‘First loot,’ he said.

Then he stooped down to the half-concussed monk and shook him hard.

‘Xioung Nu,’ murmured the monk, sitting back on his haunches and looking up at Attila with fluttering eyelids. ‘Xioung Nu.’

‘Hunnu,’ said Attila. ‘Your ancient enemy.’ But the monk did not understand this harsh, barbaric language, spoken from the back of the throat. He looked up expectantly at the other fearsome Hun warriors standing around him. They were sweat-stained and some even blood-stained, with long black moustaches, and strands of their long black unkempt hair still plastered across their grimy cheeks. Their reddened swords were still in their hands. He said a prayer in his heart.

Then he reached inside his orange robe and pulled out a little ivory plaque of carved openwork and prayed to it. He prayed to the Lord Buddha, and spoke in his language of the Buddha Sakyamuni, and traced his fingers over the Buddha sitting peacefully beneath the sala trees with his disciples. He touched his fingertips softly to the ivory figures.

Attila took the little ivory plaque from the monk, who watched him anxiously. He touched his filthy, broken fingernails to those delicately carven faces. He ran his stubby, battle-scarred fingers over those serene figures beneath their ancient trees.

‘Buddha,’ he said softly.

‘Buddha,’ said the monk, nodding with great eagerness. ‘Buddha Sakyamuni.’

Attila squatted down beside the monk, and the monk pointed to each of the Buddha’s disciples in turn. ‘Manjusri,’ he said. And ‘Samatabhadra,’ and ‘Mahakasyapa,’ as if those names so dear to him and so alien to his captors were talismans of power that might save his life even in the midst of this nightmare. At each name the Hun chieftain nodded thoughtfully, and the monk began to look more and more hopeful. ‘Buddha,’ he said again, his eyes pleading.

Attila remained squatting, looking at the delicate ivory plaque and stroking his thin grey beard. Then he shook his head. ‘I do not know this god.’ He smiled at the monk, a little regretfully, drew his dagger from its sheath on his broad leather belt, took hold of the monk by his sparse topknot and cut his throat. He stood up and sent the little ivory plaque spinning through the air to Chanat.

‘Might make a good knife-handle,’ he said.

In the cold white light, there was Enkhtuya passing over the battlefield with her snakes, a tall gaunt figure moving silently among the dying and the dead.

Sky-in-Tatters looked on, still disbelieving. Already his men were calling it the Battle of Forty Breaths, it was over so quickly. Some four or five thousand Chinese warriors had lost their lives on this battlefield in the space of an hour. Among the Huns, fewer than fifty were dead. He turned to Attila, his eyes shining. ‘Let us ride on. Nothing can stop us now. They fell before us like men already slain. Now all the riches of China lie before us – gold and pearls, silks and ivory, and tiny barefoot girls with high-arched brows.’

Attila slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘this was an easy battle but it would take more than our two thousand to destroy China.’ He looked up. ‘Or Rome. Our power may be great, but our time is not. Rome first.’ He nodded. ‘Then we will come back for China.’

Geukchu drove over the captured Chinese officer at spearpoint. Csaba brought him a head in a soggy sack, the head of the general who only half an hour before had lain under his palanquin, enjoying his ambling, well-protected tour of the emperor’s northern borders.

Attila loosed the rope from round the man’s burly chest and arms, and handed him the sack. ‘You alone are free to go. But you will take this to the emperor and tell him that the Xioung Nu will yet return.’ He added, ‘The bad slaves,’ and spat.

The officer looked him in the eye, nodded, and took the sack. Attila signalled for him to be given a horse, and the officer mounted, tied the sack to the pommel of his saddle. He rode away east, shrank to a wavering black figure on the vast snowbound plain and was gone.

They burned the Chinese dead like dogs, and the few of their own men they had lost that morning with appropriate honours and lamentations. The Kutrigur women and children walked among the dead and expertly stripped them of any valuables left on them. They gathered as many arrows as they could, both Hun and Chinese, and three wagonloads of swords and helmets and spears. Only the heavy, unwieldy rectangular infantry shields of the Chinese footsoldiers were useless to these horse-warriors, but they loaded them up anyway for barter or scrap. Some of the Hun warriors now wore battered hauberks and jerkins of lamellar armour, but most continued to disdain such cumbersome apparel, continuing to believe in the virtues of hardened but lightweight leather. The women dismembered other bits of armour and wore the bright little plates of bronze as earrings, or threaded them on strings for necklaces. The children hoarded little bags of bright plates eagerly, and the boys fought for them and the girls played elaborate games for them.

It was mid-afternoon before they left the battlefield. They rode for a while and then stopped to eat. Some of the children cheekily bartered weapons for food.

Then they turned south and left the battle plain, and ascended into the foothills of the mountains called the Qilian Shan. They camped for the night in a cold valley, and by midnight fog had settled in the hollows and chilled their hobbled horses to the bone, more so even than the distant, muffled howling of the wolves. But at the fireside in their tents, reliving the glorious day and the Battle of Forty Breaths in glittering detail, the warriors’ hearts still burned within them.