The Gathering of the Storm

13

At dawn Attila rode into the kingdom of the god-king alone.

He rode unarmed and slow. He came down from the mountains and then over the grassy slopes flecked with snow, and the rising sun cut in from the east low over the mountaintops and warmed the valley as he had said.

The green hillsides levelled out and he rode through orchards and meadowlands, and past small clusters of thatched huts with bee skeps on the broad shelves of thatched bee sheds in their bare winter gardens. People stopped and stared at him but no one challenged him. The country was running with silver streams, and water wheels clacked beside cressbeds. This peaceful, settled existence reminded him of long ago, and Italy. How could people live in one valley all their lives, as if in scorn of the rest of the world God made?

There were many people in the fields already, and others rose from their pallets to see the foreign horseman in his long quilted coat and strange pointed hat. There were farmers yoking their oxen up, and housewives in their yards, throwing woodash out onto their winter vegetables and rebuilding the smoored fire that had smouldered all night in the hearth. Children herded geese down to the streams, and old men wrapped in blankets sat on doorsteps with rheumy eyes, drinking hot chai from clay bowls. People were everywhere, clustered thickly, thousands of them; like corn ripe for harvesting.

After a slow walk through the rich farmland, the mountains ahead began to tower up, dark and forbidding, and he emerged onto a bare road that led to a great gate. The gate was open, and the road twisted and ran up the side of the ascending cliff to another. From here upwards, built clinging to the sides of the mountain and linked only by the most precipitous paths, were the palaces of noblemen, the temples of priests, the monasteries of monks and, above them all, the palace of the god-king himself.

The peacefulness of the mountainside city amused him. Monks with shaven heads, in rust-red robes, stopped and bowed, then scampered away before him. Women carrying heavy baskets on their heads stopped and gawped, then looked away and hurried on. Only at the top of the road at another broad gateway flanked by grey stone towers did two guards step forward, block his way with their long pikes and demand to know his business. This was clearly not a city accustomed to war.

He stopped, and looked at them, and Chagelghan signalled his contempt for the hard manmade stones beneath his hooves by lifting his tail and manuring them liberally.

‘I seek an audience with the king,’ said Attila.

The men objected, politely and at length.

‘I had a dream of nine arrows,’ said Attila, ‘and then a tenth arrow, which flew and broke all the other nine.’

The men stammered and stared at each other, and one ran to talk to his lieutenant. The lieutenant peered out of a little booth, then sent the guard running up the steep hill to another authority. And so, by slow and bureaucratic degrees, this strange yellow-eyed nomad savage was admitted higher up into the city, past magnificent carved and painted temples releasing incense and the tinkling of tiny bells into the still morning air. At last, with deepest respect, they asked him to dismount, and ushered him through a small postern gateway of ornate stonework.

Within was a covered terrace, looking out southwards over the valley. The view was magnificent. Attila turned his back on it, leaned against the balustrade and crossed his arms and waited. Who ruled over this view? Who possessed it?

‘A dream you say? Well, well,’ said a voice, high-pitched and excitable. Through a doorway at the opposite end of the terrace stepped a large robed figure. His round face was beaming and sottish, his nose half eaten away at the nostrils. He wore a bizarre piece of headgear, a crown of beaten gold which radiated out in horizontal spokes from around his skull. Stepping through the door he had knocked it askew and now he paused to straighten it. ‘Well, well,’ he said again.

Behind the syphilitic god-king came a character of a different stamp, a short, squat, burly, white-haired general of some sixty years, unarmed but in a full coat of mail. His nose was blunt, severally broken, but undevoured by plague or disease. His long white moustache was carefully combed and his eyes were bright and unyielding. He stood just within the doorway and kept his eyes on the visitor.

The god-king lifted the hem of his robe, exposing small feet encased in bejewelled kidskin slippers, and took little steps over to the visitor. He smiled. His few remaining teeth were not good: grey shards collapsing drunkenly into each other. His lips were painted vermilion, and from the fat, elongated lobes of his ears hung heavy gold rings. As befitted a god-king, his robe was the colour of the sun, except under the armpits where it was a little dark and greasy. His stomach was a wobbling mound when he moved, and his head, crowned with the gold crown of the sun, was a bald dome with rolls of fat round its base. He stopped a few paces from the silent visitor in his long grubby coat and looked over the terrace, making an odd hissing sound. Beneath them was a wider terrace where numerous pubescent concubines with crippled feet sat around prettifying themselves and awaiting his command.

Attila did not look or stir.

The god-king hesitated and beamed at him again. The heavenly father of his people, and the earthly father of inbred dozens. He had already forgotten about the dream. He was uncertain why this visitor was here.

‘Come!’ he commanded, and beckoned him over to the back of the terrace. Here a colonnade of stone pillars gave way to a row of doorways leading off into darkened chambers, hollowed out of the very rock itself.

Attila stepped into the gloom after the god-king, and heard the tough old general close behind.

‘Bayan-Kasgar!’ called the god-king from inside the gloomy chamber. ‘Bring us more light!’

Attila and the god-king waited patiently, standing opposite each other in the gloom. Attila could feel the little knife nestling coldly against the skin of his belly. The old general was gone. The chamber was very still. The god-king smiled at him fixedly, then wiped a little tear of pus from his nose with the back of his ringed hand. He did not deserve to survive. The whole kingdom did not deserve to survive.

‘Bayan-Kasgar,’ repeated Attila. ‘Beautiful Wolf. Wolf-like, maybe, but… beautiful?’

The god-king stared uneasily at the stranger. What an odd thing to say. He wondered if he ought to call more guards. How was he supposed to know what to do? Where was his chamberlain? Why was he on his own now? He felt very annoyed. To mask his annoyance he burst into a peel of high-pitched giggles. The stranger laughed along with him, and took a step towards him.

Then dear Bayan-Kasgar returned at the head of a troop of guards carrying tall, elaborate bronze candelabra which they set on the ground. Attila realised the size of the chamber for the first time, a vast lumber-room of accumulated stuff as appeals to sedentary emperors everywhere. Like that ardent collector in Rome. Stuff. God-kings always accumulated stuff, to weigh them down. Perhaps to give them the comforting illusion of a gravity and substance that they could never in their mere selves possess. The kings of settled people who had never learned, or had wilfully forgotten, that the more you have, the less you are.

He nodded admiringly, and the god-king giggled again and began to show him round his collection.

In the dim candlelight Attila expressed his heartfelt admiration for the god-king’s outlandish treasury. His tortoiseshell boxes of musk and ginseng root from neighbouring tribal overlords; his tall vases full of the brightly coloured feathers of vanished birds; his cedarwood chest of gold nuggets from Bei Kem. The god-king stooped wheezily over the chest, picked up one of the rough nuggets between pudgy forefinger and thumb and put it to his mouth. He turned back to Attila, grinning idiotically, sucking the nugget like a child sucking a plum. After he had sucked it a while to his satisfaction, he drew it from his mouth, smacked his lips and handed it, looped with saliva, to the visitor. Attila shook his head in polite demurral. The god-king looked momentarily sulky, and dropped it back in the chest. But he soon cheered up again when he showed off to the visitor his suits of Chinese armour, and his long swords in decorated scabbards. Attila’s hand settled on one of the sword-hilts and then released it. Bayan-Kasgar stood not far away to his right. His troop of guards looked on from the doorway.

‘In my stables down in the valley I have a thousand white camels, and two thousand white horses,’ said the god-king, speaking very rapidly and excitedly. Attila said he should like to see these white horses, perhaps even to ride them, but the god-king rattled on, oblivious.

He had three hundred wives and two thousand concubines, and also some boys, and one of them was black from head to foot, can you imagine that? Except for the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, and his pinky pinky tongue! And every new moon he, Tokuz-Ok, Lord of All the World under Heaven, created fire out of nothing, in the temple of Itugen, behind a little curtain. After he had blessed a bare stone, he came back out and two monks went in. A little later they emerged again and they carried the stone burning brightly with magical fire that he had created. It was a monthly miracle. Like a lady’s…

‘Itugen,’ repeated Attila. ‘The Lady of the Moon.’

‘And of the earth,’ said the god-king, trying to sound solemn. ‘It is she who blesses our crops and lades our orchards in summer.’

He returned to his treasures, wondering secretly what marvellous new treasure this visitor might have brought in tribute for him. He showed the visitor a ten-pound lump of amber from the shores of the frozen sea, and bags of pearls from Indian rajas, and at the back of the chamber, leaning against the bare rock wall, a pair of walrus tusks. Beyond that in the darkness was a little arched doorway that led into yet another chamber. The candelabra were brought in, and the god-king went on to show the visitor a chest full of gently rotting furs, of fabulously rare white beaver, and blue sable, and black panther. That great fur was more of a faded grey now, and motheaten, and as the god-king pawed at it, it gave off weightless tufts which rose and spiralled and fell noiselessly through the soporific candelit air.

The god-king also showed him manuscripts in scrolls in red and gold lettering, which he said had fluttered down from heaven like birds, and stone tablets from the west from ancient vanished kingdoms with carved angular script, and then in another chamber a menagerie of stuffed animals, including a sloth, a boa constrictor, and a tiger with obsidian eyes.

Attila admired them all with great sincerity, and the god-king led him back out onto the terrace. He looked out over his little kingdom and beamed.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what tribute have you brought me, stranger?’

‘My men,’ said Attila, ‘will bring you a fitting tribute.’

The god-king turned to Attila and his big pasty face seemed to pale a little. ‘Your… men?’

Attila said nothing. He merely nodded towards the distant mountains overlooking the valley from the south. The god-king turned and his knees trembled and his throat went very dry. All along the mountaintops to the south, little black figures bristled against the brightening sky. Hundreds of them. Thousands… The god-king made an odd little squeaking noise in his throat.

Bayan-Kasgar stepped up. ‘What is this?’ he rasped. ‘I will have you-’

Attila looked round at him curiously. ‘The tribute is on its way,’ he said. ‘It will take many men to carry it here.’

The old general began to speak angrily again, but Tokuz-Ok ordered him to be silent. The god-king could not be disobeyed. Bayan-Kasgar stepped back, and look down at the stone terrace floor, fuming silently. He must send out the order to his divisions to arm at once.

‘It must be a mighty tribute,’ said the god-king.

‘Sackloads and sackloads,’ said Attila. ‘Wagonloads.’

The god-king clapped his hands together and looked heavenwards, then without a word of farewell he tripped away across the terrace, through the door at the end and was gone.

The troop followed him. Bayan-Kasgar raised his head and stared at the visitor one more time. Then he turned on his heel and marched out after them.

As he reached the archway, he felt a powerful forearm clamp round his neck and he was dragged backwards, his heels scraping over the stone. He was hauled into the nearest chamber and flung up against the wall with that forearm still around his neck like a vice, half-throttling him. There was also a cold knife-blade at his throat for good measure. He tried to speak but could not. This was no dreamer of dreams who knew how to fight like this. Bayan-Kasgar cursed him in his heart.

The nomad savage leaned close to the old general and whispered in his ear, ‘He is no king.’ Then he released him.

Bayan-Kasgar turned, rubbing his neck, and stared at the savage, who held his knife out low towards him. One hasty move, he knew, and he would be bleeding to death on the stones. But soon the troop would return. Any moment now.

‘He is no king,’ hissed the savage again. ‘Nine Arrows! One arrow will break him. He is no king, and he is certainly no god. You know that you despise him.’

‘He is the seventeenth son of the son of heaven,’ rasped the general. But there was a fatal uncertainty in his voice, something both hesitant and ironic. Attila smiled to hear it. The general went on doggedly, ‘You cannot destroy the city, no matter how many men you command up there on the mountaintops.’

‘We cannot destroy the city, but we can lay waste the land, the whole Valley of Oroncha, and you will starve. You know this is true.’

Bayan-Kasgar said nothing.

‘One arrow,’ Attila said again. He stepped close and in a flash the knife-blade was at the general’s throat again. He moved like a snake, this one. He spoke very rapidly but the general heard and remembered every word. ‘You will kill him. You will make yourself emperor. You will join with us and ride out with us and we will conquer all who stand against us and I will give you a great empire. You will return to this valley wondering that you waited so long. You and your sons will be the mightiest of emperors of this country.

‘You worship Itugen, the Lady of the Moon, and Astur, and you remember the deeds of Manas. You were Huns once.’

‘We came from the southern deserts, long ago,’ said the general vaguely. ‘We warred with China.’

‘And you shall again. Join with us.’

‘We are farmers now.’

‘I will make warriors of your farmers yet.’

Bayan-Kasgar looked doubtful. ‘We are a settled people. How blessed this valley is, see for yourself. We cannot abandon it.’

Attila grew impatient. ‘Your women and children and your old men can farm it till you return. Any clod can turn a clod. Raise your divisions and ride with me. You will return. It will not be long. A year, two years of campaigning, and you will return a great conqueror. Your name will live for ever. This trash’ – he gestured contemptuously about – ‘you will use to stoke your fires, or you will melt it down into coin stamped with your likeness. You will inherit not a valley but an empire.’ His eyes burned. Bayan-Kasgar could feel the heat of those eyes on his very skin.

‘I have no sons,’ he murmured. ‘My wife is dead.’

‘Take another.’

‘The law forbids it. Only the emperor can take more than one wife.’

Attila did not deign to reply to this absurdity. Instead he stepped back and slashed his knife in two lightning diagonals before the old general’s eyes, as if bewitching him and blessing him in a single sign.

‘Kill him,’ he said. ‘Then come to me.’

With another movement of snakelike swiftness he was at the door, looking back, holding up his forefinger as one final prompt to regicide. Then he was gone.

The troop of guards reappeared a few moments later, peering into the gloom of the chamber, blind as bats.

Attila rode down from the mountainside city unmolested. He bade farewell to the women washing at the stream, to the children netting for minnows in the back pools. And, farther off, to the manaschi in his cloak of blue-black velvet and gold embroideries, standing beneath the bare-branched peach trees in the orchard, chanting the endless lays.