The Gathering of the Storm

14

The Huns waited two more days, growing impatient. On the dawn of the second day, they had a visitor, though not the one they wanted.

When they rose in the morning, on the edge of the camp they saw a bold little man with darting eyes, sitting in a donkey cart with his wife and two children, surrounded and indeed quite hemmed in by sacks of barley loaves, apples, cheeses, crude clay pots and flagons. It was one of the locals, who had heard of their presence and seized the opportunity for some trade. A couple of the Kutrigurs went over to cut the family’s throats and take their supplies. Orestes saw what was about to happen and cantered over and hailed them off, so impressed was he by the fellow’s irrepressible mercantilism, not to mention his insane courage.

‘Friends, yes?’ the little grocer called over to them, nodding eagerly. ‘I bring you good things.’ He rubbed his belly.

‘Farmers,’ harrumphed Chanat, reining in his horse close to Orestes, ‘come to sell us food. Merchants.’ He hawked and spat lavishly. ‘Coin-hoarders, spade-wielders, earth under their nails. House-dwellers with brats in the sacks, middens in their midst and shit on their doorstep, counting out their-’

Orestes could not help laughing at this tremendous and poetical diatribe. Then he went over to the farmer in his donkey cart and paid him in coins of Chinese silver for his wares.

‘Bread?’ Chanat sneered at him as he came back. ‘Bread? A man who eats bread is made of bread – and crumbles like bread, too.’

Orestes munched cheerfully. ‘Delicious,’ he mumbled. ‘Reminds me of my boyhood.’ Chanat’s scowl made him laugh so much that he sprayed the old warrior in detested crumbs.

The farmer and his family were driven over to Attila. The farmer dismounted warily from the cart and bowed low before the king.

Attila bade him stand straight. ‘You are bold.’

‘Bold makes gold,’ chirruped the little man sententiously.

‘Prudent stays poor.’ He turned and rummaged in his donkey cart. His wife sighed, found what he was looking for and handed it to him. He passed it on to the nomad king. It was revolting, sugary sticky stuff, apricots or something. Attila thanked him and passed the pot on to Orestes.

‘Fruit from the forest,’ said the farmer. ‘Very dangerous to collect. ’

‘How so?’

‘Bears live in the forest.’

‘And other tribes?’

‘The Chinchin!’ exclaimed the little man.

Attila waited patiently.

The Chinchin, he said, were a people only two feet tall and covered with thick dark hair all over. Their knees did not bend and they progressed by little leaps, their legs held together. ‘Like this,’ said the grocer, and demonstrated the gait of the Chinchin himself.

‘We hunt them by leaving out dishes of sweet fruits, such as this’ – he pointed to the one he had given Attila – ‘or else we leave out dishes of wine for them among the trees. They become intoxicated with the wine, merrily crying, “Chinchin! Chinchin!” and then they fall asleep and we put them in bags and bring them home to cook. Their flesh is very good.’ He rubbed his belly and nodded vigorously and smiled.

‘You have actually seen these fabulous people yourself?’

‘Oh yes,’ the man assured him.

‘And eaten them?’

‘Oh yes. Delicious!’ But he sounded more hesitant now. His wife looked away.

Attila took a slow step towards him. ‘You have hunted and eaten them yourself?’

‘Well…’ said the Oronchan gourmet. He sighed. ‘Well, no. I have not. No. Not myself. But it is among the legends of the people. I do not doubt it.’ He looked at the nomad king anxiously. ‘Surely you do not doubt it?’

Attila did not reply. Instead he thanked the visitor for his gift, and gave him safe passage through the camp to sell his wares.

Once the merchant was gone, Attila looked sideways at Orestes. ‘We will not recruit the Chinchin into our army, I think.’

Orestes shook his head. ‘Best not.’

On the third day, Bayan-Kasgar rode into the camp alone and sought audience with Attila in his tent.

They sat on low stools. The general planted his fists on his knees.

‘So,’ said Attila. ‘I take it one arrow was sufficient.’

The general grunted and said, ‘Rhubarb leaves.’

Attila looked questioning.

‘A plant we eat – parts of it. None of it is to my taste, in truth, but the leaves are poisonous: a powerful laxative. Fatal in quantity.’

‘Hm. It must have been a messy death.’

‘Fitting,’ grunted the general. ‘He was a swine.’

A scintilla of humour passed between them. They clasped hands, and laid their other hands on each others’ arms and swore fealty unto death.

Thus the Huns of Attila, already united with the Kutrigur Huns, were further united with the people of the valley of Oroncha, and their emperor, Bayan-Kasgar, Beautiful Wolf.

Attila said he would prefer to call him Beyaz-Kasgar, or White Wolf. He told the old general that he had many virtues; but beauty, alas, was not among them. Bayan-Kasgar acknowledged the truth of this ruefully, but said that a man’s name was not a thing that could be lightly changed.

When Attila grew to know him better and they had shared a bowl or two of koumiss, the nomad king called him Ravent-Yaprak, which is to say, Rhubarb Leaf. But only Attila dared to call him that. The general might be into his seventh decade but his temper was that of a young bull.

He brought with him more warriors than they could number, some mounted on the slain god-king’s herd of two thousand prancing white horses, in whom the blood of the Horses of Heaven clearly ran. Many more rode horses of a more common but sturdy breed, skewbalds and piebalds and dusty bays and stocky little greys. A horde of farmers, suddenly taken with the spirit of adventure, wanted to learn again the ancient arts of their fathers with arrow and bow, shield and flashing sword. Young men not yet married, and more eager to fight than marry. And older men, husbands and fathers, bidding bitter wives and tearful children farewell at the cottage gate, and riding away torn between guilt and excitement. Before long the excitement triumphed, and any remaining guilt was irritably dismissed or forgotten amid the headlong rush of galloping horses and the wide and limitless freedom of the plains.

The union of the Black and the Kutrigur Huns had been forged in bloody battle. But the union of their conjoined forces and the people of the valley was effected only by guile, threat and shrewd judgement of men, and with the loss of only a single and unlamented life.

Attila led them north in the bitter early months of the new year, and they were reunited with the rest of the Kutrigur people, the women and children, and with Juchi and Bela and Noyan and their eight hundred horsemen. They rode for two famished but strangely exhilarated weeks until they found pasture in a great depression in the midst of the desert where moisture collected and green grass grew all the year round. The yellow-eyed nomad king had known it was there, none knew how. Other nomads were camped there already when the great army hove in view, but they did not linger, and soon many thousands of horses were grazing the grass to its roots.

Soon other bands of nomads came to join them, having heard fantastical tales of a mighty army of Asiatic peoples, and a great quest, and a commander and king who shone with the favour of heaven, against whom no man or empire could stand. Some bands numbered no more than a dozen, some several hundred, and the spring grass struggled to grow fast enough to feed the horses’ many thousands of mouths. Horses and weapons and goods were amicably traded, marriages were made, and even the hardiest warriors grumbled in their tents at night at the din of all the wailing newborns in the night. And so, by fame and alliance, courtship and copulation, the numbers of the people grew and grew.

Each people formed its own regiment, but learned its discipline and took its orders from Attila and his chosen men. When not drilling they played the furious, competitive games of the steppe peoples. Picking up tiny gold rings from the grass at full gallop, or lunatic wrestling matches between two men each mounted and galloping side by side. Trying to steal kisses, and more intimate forfeits, from young maidens who rode armed with long whips with which they lashed their pursuers mercilessly. The lashing they gave with their tongues was even worse.

Then it was time to break camp for the last time, and begin the long journey west, for the first signs of spring were appearing everywhere and the horses and livestock could forage as they went. Early clover and vetch, sainfoin, corn spurrey and slender oatgrass coloured the warming plains.

‘To Rome!’ cried Attila, raising his sword high. ‘Even to the shores of the Atlantic!’ His numberless thousands of warriors gave a great shout, most having no clue what ‘Atlantic’ meant but liking the grandeur of the word.

Little Bird, sitting his pony close to the king, did not shout with them but only gave a heretical sigh amidst all this martial rejoicing. ‘All the same, I would have liked to have seen China, my father,’ he said. ‘Before I died.’

‘You will see China,’ said Attila, wrenching at his reins. His voice was fierce, but Little Bird’s voice was soft and melancholy.

‘Only in dreams,’ he said. ‘In a dream, I climbed to the top of a high hill from where I could see all of China.’ He spoke now in his sing-song rhythmical lilt, as if reciting a poem. ‘The hanging gardens of the emperor’s summer palace, the jade streams singing, the glimmering bird-girls in their leaves of silk and gold.’

He stopped and smiled at Attila.

Attila said nothing in reply to Little Bird’s haunting words, so rich and strange, of such sad omen.

The shaman’s eyes were silver pools, quite inscrutable.

‘Ah, but China is vast,

You will never see it all.

The mountains are high, the emperor is far away.

The emperor is forever far away.’