The Gathering of the Storm

15

The great army looped northwards and towards the time when the days grew as long as the nights, they met the edge of the northern forests where the spring grasses were lush and green, and followed their path westward that way. There remained patches of shrinking snow in the shady hollows, but in such threshold places, between forest and steppe, as between land and sea, there is always good hunting.

At times, with the sun setting low in their eyes, it seemed as if autumn had returned in all its majesty, the branches of the trees burning gold in the dying blaze. And at times the jaws of winter snapped at them still, and sharp flurries of wolf-weather returned. The king was always urging them on into the night, the children exhausted, asleep in the wagons. Sometimes they looped northwards to find fords across the great rivers of that country, riding through the midnight forest, snow aslant, wolves tracing them, shadows through the firs, the most mournful howls echoing across the starlit sky. Beyond the wolves, other figures moved through the forest, watching them, pushing through the towering pines as a man walks through grass: vast, nameless beings more powerful than any wolf that ever lived.

But spring came on steadily, and each day they drew further west out of the iron jaws of central Scythia, and towards the rich pastures beside the Euxine Sea. They rode through long, damp grass beside the forest’s edge with dewladen bittercress brushing their horse’s hocks. They came through the country of gentle, brown-eyed woodland people, who used jawbones of pike to tattoo their bodies with numberless waves and spirals. They lived in bark-covered tepees, said Little Bird the Wise, though only the children believed him. The adults scoffed and laughed to hear the mad little shaman talk of woodland people who ate moss, and in winter rode through the snow on reindeer with bridle and saddle. Still farther north there were people who hunted seals with obsidian-tipped spears, and roofed their huts of ice with the ribs of whales.

At the riversides the Huns stopped to water their horses among the broadleaved poplars. This was a land so mild and gentle and filled with birdsong that it seemed to them like some great king’s private hunting park. They sometimes glimpsed the people of the woodlands, who had long since glimpsed them through the trees: a horde of hellish horsemen, armed to the teeth, eyes as restless as those of hungry wolves. The woodland people had watched them approach for a while with big, mournful eyes, hidden in their bird-skin capes, and had slipped quietly away, taking to their coracles and their leaf-shaped canoes and vanishing northwards into the safety of the deep and endless forest.

There were the pale green shoots of wild onions, the aroma of wild thyme beneath their horses’ hooves. A stream of snowmelt so young that it flowed in a streambed merely of flattened green grass, padded and silent, the world so bright and young, as if new made by the All-Father’s unseen hands in the night. There are no words for expressing the joy of spring after such winter bitterness as is felt by all nomads and wanderers. Not for them the safety of stone houses. Not for them steaming hypocausts and heated floor-tiles. Only a dung-fire and a horseblanket between them and the killing cold.

Their hearts soared like hawks, bursting with love for the land.

They surprised a black bear one day bumbling out of the woods. When they had speared her and rolled her over in the grass and prayed to the Little Sister’s spirit for forgiveness, they found she had milk in her teats. She had hidden her cubs under moss, knowing she must die that day. But they searched and found the cubs and killed them, too, their fur so fine a gift for a pretty girl. But one cub they kept alive, wet-nosed and wide-eyed, with huge and floppy paws, and he came along with them after that. They packed up the meat from the rest of the cubs and the mother and went on. Little Bird carried the cub on his lap when he began to tire, and the cub slept and then urinated on him lavishly by way of thanks.

‘Tell me about Rome,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, lying back in the firelight after gorging too heavily on bearmeat. He belched and rubbed his bulging belly.

Attila sat cross-legged and looked into the fire. He spoke slowly and softly: ‘By a King of Kings from Palestine

Two empires were sown,

By a King of Terror from the east

Two empires were o’erthrown…’

Despite his groaning belly, Sky-in-Tatters sat up, or at least raised himself on one elbow. ‘Explain.’

‘This is a prophecy, a Roman prophecy. The first lines refer to that fiery Jew they call the Christ, the King of Kings, who sowed the empires of Heaven and Hell. In the empire of Rome, he is their god.’

‘He is a great warrior?’

‘He preaches peace. Preached. He is dead now, though they believe he lives.’

‘In heaven?’

‘In heaven. Palestine is… a desert country far to the south. The tribe there is called the Jews. Now this dead god-king is worshipped by all the empire of Rome.’

‘Though they are not Jews?’

‘No.’

Sky-in-Tatters was looking more and more baffled. ‘But they in Rome – Romans…? They do not follow his preaching? They are great warriors?’

‘Not bad.’

Sky-in-Tatters shook his head. ‘My heart is heavy for them. They are confused.’

Attila went on, ‘This Christ taught that we should forgive our enemies.’

Sky-in-Tatters threw back his head and laughed. ‘When all men know that the sweetest pleasure in life is to destroy our enemies, rape their women, and steal their gold!’ He reached for the flagon.

‘It was the Romans themselves who put him to death.’

Sky-in-Tatters drank from the flagon and wiped his mouth. ‘Now my head is beginning to hurt. And it isn’t the koumiss.’

‘They put him to death four centuries back, and then realised they’d killed God.’

Chanat said, ‘No man is God.’

‘There was a Greek wise man,’ put in Orestes from the edge of the circle, ‘who said that if horses pictured god, they would picture him as a horse.’

They all chuckled.

‘These Greeks,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, ‘they are not the biggest fools I have ever heard of.’

‘They are conquered by Rome now.’

Sky-in-Tatters pondered. ‘And the other verse. This King of Terror from the east…’

Attila’s eyes shone and he said nothing.

Geukchu said, ‘Perhaps he will overthrow even heaven and hell itself, Your Majesty.’

Attila didn’t look at him. Geukchu shrank back into silence. ‘Rome and China,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, a slow smile dawning on his face. ‘That makes two empires.’ He raised the flagon of koumiss again and took a long, long draught.

A broad river they forded in silvery light, and a rocky defile colourful with larkspur, and then down another sunbaked slope of clattering scree and over a stony plain of malachite and slate, warm fumes of rosemary and lavender and chives rising amid the horses and the leather. It was summer now, sunbaked, and they had ridden the long trail back west for many months, the sun hot on their forearms as they turned and headed south amid a chorus of oxlips and cowslips and anemones and musk orchids, lilac cornflowers and yellow broom and white clover, white windflowers and purple pasqueflowers, with insects rising and falling murmurously among the open flowerheads.

There were silver poplars and rose-coloured rocks, rocks along the river valley, this river that ended at home. Rocks crumbling under the generations of ice and wind, brown earthbanks crumbling into the mighty river. Horses strained up the farther side, wagons clattered over the gravel strands and up shallow slopes to the plains again. The plains that hereabouts were dotted with mighty kurgans, the tombs of the ancient, bearded, blue-eyed Scythians, silent monsters asleep in the long grass.

As for Attila, the fierce joy in his heart was boundless. He could barely hold himself down in the saddle; he kept pushing himself up on his fists, looking afar off for the camp of his people. Orestes noticed and teased him for it. Only Orestes could. He even dared to mention the name of Queen Checa. But it was true. Their joy was boundless, their future without check or limit. They had done it. It was an unbelievable feat, this vast project of unification. They had ridden out across the steppes at the onset of winter, eastwards over the Iron River. They had ridden thousands of miles into the heart of Scythia, to the very shadow of the Great Wall itself. They had united Hun peoples, the Kutrigur and the Black Huns, and joined with another great people, the Oronchans. They had massacred an entire Chinese armoured column for good measure and good practice, and they had been joined by several thousand more nomad and distant kinsmen as they journeyed home. Ahead of them now, ahead of so great and powerful an army, lay only more conquest, and then the ultimate prize. None could stand against them.

Even in these last days, as they approached their homeland, more came to join them. Some had come before, a year ago, hearing of the finding of the Sword of Savash, and then drifted away disconsolate when Attila rode east. They came back, laughing with astonishment, those tribute kings and petty princelings, rulers over tiny, scattered bands of White Huns from the shores of the Caspian, under their king, Charaton; and Kouridach, the great, bow-legged chieftain of the Hepthalite Huns from beside the Aral Sea.

Charaton made to dismount from his horse when he came before Attila, by way of submission, but Attila stopped him. So Charaton sat his horse, and told him that he, even he, had had an embassy from the Byzantines. They had not dared to raise their eyes towards him, they said, for fear that they should be dazzled by his effulgent brilliance. And then the Byzantine ambassadors had offered him a bribe to ally with them, but Charaton had declined their offer, ‘though,’ as he admitted ruefully, ‘it cost me dear.’

Attila told him not to repine. ‘We will be before the gates of Constantinople soon,’ he said, his eyes glittering. ‘Then Constantinople and all its wealth will be yours.’ He stroked his beard. ‘Soon now.’

It was dawn on the last day of their journey, which had lasted two hundred days. By nightfall they would be back among their tents and their women.

Attila assembled them in their regiments and ranks and told them that they were the greatest army the world had ever seen.

‘A great war is coming, and a great empire is falling,’ he said.

‘And all of you – Black Huns and White Huns, Red and Yellow and Hepthalite Huns, Kutrigurs and Oronchans, people of the mountains and the valleys and the plains – all of you will have glory for yourselves and your descendants in this war. Only follow me and you will be great. For the time of the Hun nation has come.’

The shout might have been heard in the camp. But they would be there by nightfall anyway. He looked over his ranks of men, tens of thousands strong now, and the wagons without number. Then he turned and raised his head high, and they rode on home.

Little Bird galloped half a day ahead, alone but for his bear cub.

The women clamoured round him for news when he rode into the camp, and he drove them almost to distraction by not answering a single one of their questions. Several even struck out at him in their anguish but he dodged them and skipped away, laughing.

When the sun went down, the women were still gathered around him in forlorn hope of news that made sense. He dropped down and sat cross-legged at the fireside and raised his eyebrows at them.

The earth was rumbling.

He leaned sideways at an extraordinary angle and put his ear to the ground. He waggled his topknot merrily and grinned, still canted sideways as if he were made all of flesh and had not a bone inside him. Then he snapped upright again and looked around at the troubled women, his hands resting on his knees where they poked through the ragged holes in his grubby breeches. They waited, fit to scream.

‘These baleful borborygmi in the deep earth’s bowels,’ he pronounced, ‘presage either the return of my mad-eyed master at the head of a million horsemen, or the end of the world.’ His black eyes danced with malevolence. ‘Or perhaps… both!’