The Gathering of the Storm

12

The next day the fog slowly lifted in the low sunlight forking in from the east between the mountains, and they saw how great those mountains were. These people of the steppes had never seen anything like them, although they were among the legends of the People. The summits of the mountains were lost in the still further summits of white air, towering cloud-capped palaces of sun-white clouds. It seemed a blasphemy almost to breathe in the sight of them.

There were valleys where the sun rested and stayed and the snow fled in that false spring. Forks of sunlight raked the yellow grass, and then there was some game, and they would gallop off in a mad hunt, yelling and hallooing, their crazed winter quest briefly forgotten. At night they gorged on half-cooked antelope meat and fell asleep with stomachs groaning with pleasure and pain.

There were a few villages, their livestock brought into their own huts for the winter. The villagers gaped at the approach of the two thousand horsemen, the four- or five-thousand-strong tribe of people on the move. But the passers-by took nothing, looted nothing. Many of them looked gaunt and hungry, but they did no plunder. Near one village, a grubby little girl standing high on a grey precipice of rocks with a herd of droop-eared goats saw them pass by in the valley below, and in the half an hour it took them all to pass not a single other villager set eyes on them. In the evening the girl told her mother and father that she had seen an army that afternoon, more than she could count, armed with bows and arrows and spears and very frightening. Her parents told her not to tell tall stories. She insisted that it was true, and her parents sent her to bed without any supper.

In the morning the father went down to the valley to check his snares and saw the numberless hoofprints at the upper end of the valley where the army had drawn together into the pass, and he stood and reeled and stared. Then he took the hare he had caught, climbed back up to the village and ordered his wife to give the little girl an extra egg for breakfast. He felt he needed an extra egg himself. And he wondered what sort of an army passes by without commandeering all the grain and meat and livestock in a village.

They ascended into a silent and alien world of barbed white peaks and pine forests as dark as pitch, as dark as the oil that bubbles out of the Chorasmian desert sand. There were glaciers that hung like robes of purest mother-of-pearl from haughty mountaintops, and snowcliffs that tottered above them as they wound their way along precipitous paths, the wind blowing gusts of snowdust off the cliffs and into their streaming eyes. Their horses stumbled blindly, the sweat on their necks and bellies freezing into crystals of ice.

They rounded the frozen lower slopes of a vast mountain blazing a luminous fiery red above them in the dying sun, a single crystal of ice a mile high. A terrible abyss lay to their right that none dared look into. They kept their heads down and eyes ahead like blinkered horses, frightened of what lay alongside. And then one of the wagons tilted and gave a low groan and slid freely sideways across the icy path pulling the two drafthorses with it. The animals spread their shaggy hooves wide, surprised, unafraid, not understanding. They continued to slide, and the heavy wagon laden with Chinese infantry shields slid over the side of the path, tilted a little and then fell away into the noiseless abyss below. The horses likewise. The people tiptoed forward and peered over the edge of the precipice. They saw the wagon falling silently into the abyss, its wheels slowly turning, and the horses pawing at the empty air, making no sound, the bright red and gold Chinese shields falling through the air around them in a glittering cloud. Not a sound to accompany their falling, not a moan. Only the wind sighing up from the darkening abyss, and silence among the people as they waited for some sound of the fall, and no sound, not a sound from the abyss, only returning silence and the soft wind everlasting.

The wagons and the packhorses and many of the very young and the very old could go no further. Attila divided his forces, and sent all the women and children and the old men and the remaining wagons back down from the mountains under the escort of Juchi and Bela and Noyan and their troop of eight hundred men. The three brothers scowled bitterly at being left behind, but they said nothing. Attila gave them instructions where to make camp. The twelve hundred mounted warriors rode on.

They saw two buzzards, high in the blue sky, tip and tilt and steady again against the wind, a pair of them working the valley, their high and faraway mew as filled with longing as a gull’s. These were the only living creatures they saw for three days. There was no snow and no wind and the air was clear and the skies at night were dazzling with stars. But anyone foolish enough to stay outside and gaze admiringly heavenwards soon lost his ears and fingers.

It was so cold that the little flagons of Chinese wine they had plundered turned to viscous syrup. You could have eaten it like honey, except it would freeze your tongue. They descended again to the treeline, but it was no warmer, and even as they rode, living trees at the edge of the forest exploded with a crack like a giant’s bullwhip, and one horse reared in fright and came down and broke its leg. Their bones broke like brittle ice in this cold. Rocks cracked apart likewise, and when they chopped logs for firewood the wood gave off blue sparks like iron. Their exhaled breath fell to the ground in a whispering shower of crystals. They felt both wonder and terror at how the strange the world was.

It was madness to ride on like this, in this punishing cold. Already some men were now riding two to a horse because they had lost so many of the animals, and some of those men had lost fingers. But it was harder to go back than to go on. Ahead, so said their implacable leader at the head of the column, lay a mountain kingdom that would soon be theirs for the taking.

They came off the mountains and over a gravel plateau riven with dirty grey ice and low ridges and kames of sand and loess, where long ago, when the world was warmer and the gods kinder, some lost river had sloughed its way over the plain and moved rocks the size of funeral mounds. Or perhaps it was a river of ice. Perhaps it would have taken a frozen river of ice to move such boulders. The warriors looked and wondered and shivered. But in their dreams they saw the plain as it once might have been: only delicate skim ice on the midnight-blue river, birds calling, a bittern clinging to the reeds, and a breeze in the farther grass, creatures moving and alive and beautiful.

But this was now the bleakest of terrain, dour and lifeless, and the spirits of the warriors were at their lowest. The cold grey plateau was unforgiving, the wind cut like a knife through bearskin and wolfskin cloaks, through their long, tight-belted quilted coats, and through the hides of the horses. The horses’ chests laboured and they breathed with difficulty, their poor hides stretched taut over their skinny ribs. No grass grew here. It was hard to imagine that grass had ever grown in such a desolate world. And there was little fodder, and what was left was going fast, and two thousand horses in winter can die as easily as flies if they are not fed.

That night, when they camped in the bitter cold, their tent doors turned to the south where a watery sun shone by day and mocked their hopes, Attila’s chosen men and Sky-in-Tatters and some of the chief men of the Kutrigur Huns came to him in his modest tent and said that the warriors were losing faith. They could not go on like this.

The king said nothing. Instead Little Bird appeared unbidden nearby and began to sing. His old cracked lute sounded gentle, and his voice was soft and low. He sang of how, in the older days, a blue wolf and a fallow deer came from across the grey seas, in the innocent dawn of the world, and on the slopes of Burkhan Khaldun, the holy mountain, at the head of the running Onon river, they coupled and the fallow deer soon bore a human child. Tengri, the Lord of the Sun, and Itugen, the Lady of the Moon, shone down together at the moment of his birth, and were like two lamps of equal and miraculous brightness in the sky. The child born under sun and moon was Astur, the All-Father, by whom man and woman were made.

It was the oldest story of the People, and in the bitter night on the comfortless plateau, the chiefs and captains forgot their complaints, drew close to the fire and listened with half-closed eyes.

The god-child Astur, laughing with glee and squeezing the little figures out from wet clay, made Batacaqican the first magician, and Tarkan the Mighty, and also Manas, the great hero. He gave Manas a horse fit for a hero, with legs of bronze and hooves the size of a burned-out campfire. The horse had eyes like a raven’s, his muscles rippled like a river, he fed on cornflowers and pasqueflowers and windflowers and only the sweetest spring grass. After Manas died fighting in the great war against the frost-giants, his horse took his wife, Kanikei, and their baby son, Semetai, and galloped all night through the starlit sky to bring them to the Plains of Plenty. And there Semetai grew up to be the wisest of all the kings of the People.

Little Bird fell silent, and the chiefs and captain nodded and their heads drooped and they slept.

The next day they rode on, climbing up from the bitter gravel plain with its scouring wind and into the mountains again. It was another day’s ride, and late afternoon with the sun razing in low from the west, when they felt their bones growing warmer. The plateau felt far behind them, and these mountains somehow caught the heat more, as well as being sheltered from the north. They came up over a ridge and there before them was a wide, shallow valley some half a mile across, green with winter grass. The horses pulled away from even the strongest riders and grazed it down to its yellow roots.

They camped there for the night.

As darkness fell, Attila went to Sky-in-Tatters and roused him. The chief grumbled bitterly, but the implacable king said there was something he wanted to show him. Sky-in-Tatters wrapped himself in his cloak and stumbled outside and saw that the other chosen men were all mounted up and ready. He got onto his horse and they rode away north across the grassy plain, leaving the camp far behind.

They rode for nearly an hour and rose up on the other side of the shallow valley, climbing over low green, snow-flecked hills. The horses were tired and they rode slowly. Finally they were climbing up stony paths over bare mountainsides, and could look back on the valley behind them dotted with campfires. Above them the sky was studded with silver and the bright coin of the moon, and there was no wind. You could almost say it was mild.

At last Attila climbed up a ridge and stopped, and the chosen men and the Kutrigur chieftain came up alongside. Sky-in-Tatters gasped. He was still in his tent, dreaming. This could not be.

Below them the mountains fell away again, and down there, under the great canopy of the night, lay another valley vast and ringed by mountains and hidden from the world. In the silverblue moonlight he could see it distinctly. The broad valley stretched east to west, perhaps as much as twenty miles long, and down it ran a bright silver river. But the most astonishing thing was the wall of mountains opposite them, some five miles distant. For the wall, almost sheer and bathed in moonlight, was also studded with stars, red and orange stars, like fires. Screwing up his eyes, it seemed to Sky-in-Tatters that he could make out…

‘This cannot be,’ he said.

Attila turned to him and his teeth shone white in the moonlight. ‘The Valley of Oroncha, the kingdom of the god-king, Tokuz-Ok, Nine Arrows.’ His teeth showed even more. ‘A more martial name than he deserves.’

Sky-in-Tatters gaped. ‘How do you know this? You have not been here before. It is not possible.’

Attila did not answer. Instead he said, ‘I also know that the kingdom of Tokuz-Ok is a great kingdom. The Oronchan people are many. You know how farmers breed. Look at this valley by daylight tomorrow and you will see a lush, well-watered valley full of orchards, grainfields, meadows and pastureland. His people are many, many thousand. His army is numerous.’

‘Army?’ snorted a grizzled voice behind. ‘An army of farmers? Ruled by their wives, and with hoes and pitchforks for weapons?’

It was, inevitably, Chanat.

‘An army of as many as twenty thousand men,’ said Attila. ‘It is possible. And the mountainside that you see opposite, dotted with fires, which you do not believe? That is their city. It clings to the mountainside like a raven’s nest, and is as safe. It is warmed all day by the sun, and never feels the north wind. The whole valley catches the sun likewise, and the mountains are its windbreak. No invading army could ever take that city. They would have to be mounted on eagles.’

Sky-in-Tatters felt a surge of excitement, despite himself. An army of farmers, but an army of twenty thousand! There was no limit to their power if they commanded such an army. This bandit king, this Attila – the power in him, the intelligence as sharp as a knife, the certainty of success. Sky-in-Tatters could taste victory on his tongue like honey.

‘How can we conquer this kingdom?’

Attila was already pulling his horse round and heading home. ‘Where strength will not,’ came his voice out of the darkness, ‘guile will serve.’