The Gathering of the Storm

16

But there was no celebration when the horsemen returned.

Attila rode first into camp, at full gallop, and made straight for the royal palace. Someone tried to hail him as he sped past, but he took no notice. It was Bleda, open-mouthed at his brother’s return – he had been getting accustomed to kingship.

Attila pulled Chagelghan to such a violent halt that the horse skidded forward several yards on its rump, and was off and striding away before the poor beast had its feet. As the king approached the palace, Queen Checa emerged. She was gaunt and hollow-eyed, and her face had the grey pallor of sorrow. He ran to her, but she could not bear to look at him, could not bear him to touch her, as if her guilt were a contagion.

It was Ellak, their second son. He was dying.

‘We all have to die one day,’ said Little Bird jauntily, playing with the cub nearby.

Attila stopped in mid-stride, and for an instant it seemed as if he might at last turn on the shaman and slay him where he stood. But then he walked on into the palace after his wife.

Little Bird pushed in between them. ‘Let me see.’ After a few moments of pushing and prodding he stood back again. ‘The boy just needs rest,’ he said, ‘and boiled milk. It’s something he ate.’

The bear cub chewed his finger. Little Bird set him down.

And then there was another figure in the shadows by the doorway. It was Enkhtuya.

‘The child will die,’ she said in a soft hiss.

Little Bird cuffed the cub away and stared angrily at the ground.

The witch glided over, her footsteps not making a sound. ‘Unless he drinks innocent blood.’

Attila looked at her long and hard. Then he nodded. ‘Take it.’

Bending swiftly, her long hand swooping like a falcon, Enkhtuya seized the cub by the scruff of its neck.

‘No!’ cried Little Bird, leaping round. ‘She shall not have it, curse her and her stone-eyed snakes!’ He rounded furiously on Attila. ‘How dare you give her the nod over me! She is not our holy thing, she is no one’s, she is unholy in her very soul, that cub is under my star and my protection, if she dares-’

Attila roared for silence.

Little Bird stood chewing his lip wrathfully, eyes darting.

Attila nodded to the witch. ‘Take it,’ he said again. ‘Heal the boy.’

Little Bird stood aghast, mouth still working furiously. Then he said softly, ‘You have chosen.’ And he vanished into the darkness.

Enkhtuya worked her will over the groaning boy while his mother and father and brothers and sisters looked on, and in the shadows Orestes kept watch. She waved a smoking branch of fir over the perspiring, prostrate form, and she burned spruce resin on a flat stone, and made a maddening drone deep in her throat like a swarm of angry wasps. She grew frenzied and, rolling her eyes, began to flog the invisible demon out of the boy with ferocious lashes of the fir branch. In her other hand she produced a little knife with a point like a needle and she pricked the infected boy in the chest and belly, feet, head and hands. Ellak’s lips turned blue even as they watched. He groaned and twisted, then struggled and arched his back and gasped for breath as his mouth filled with blood.

But it was not his blood. Enkhtuya had raised the bear cub high over his head, and with her little knife had slashed open its throat. The cub went limp almost instantly, and bright young blood cascaded over the boy’s face. The witch let the knife drop to the ground and in her long, fleshless hands she twisted and squeezed until the last drop had been wrung from the cub’s corpse. Finally the boy on the couch choked up blood from the back of his clenched throat, and then with a whistling wind from his lips the spirit of the demon fled. He sank back exhausted. Beneath the mask of blood, his lips began to turn a natural pink again. Enkhtuya dropped the bloody mitten of black fur to the ground, turned on her heel and walked out of the palace without another word. Only Orestes watched her go. Checa and Attila stood holding each other, looking over their living son.

The camp lay under an uneasy stillness all the next day. Towards evening the king reappeared from his palace and stood with his forearms crossed and without expression. Then he smiled.

The whole camp erupted into wild celebration, both of the return of the men and of the life of the king’s son. Ellak would live! And a great host of kindred Huns had come to join them from the east! Everything was in a state of ferment and excited chaos. The enveloping darkness was warded off with fires burning everywhere, and a babel of dancing and drinking and rejoicing had errupted, with men retiring somewhat hurriedly into their tents with their wives, not to be seen for another day and a night. It was even joked, more by the women at the riverside than by the men, since men do not find such jokes so comical, that a number of passionate encounters took place that night in the fevered darkness between women and men not, by the strict light of day, actually each other’s husbands and wives. In nine months’ time, the women chuckled, there would be born a greater than usual batch of ‘festival babies’.

When, after this night of reunion and celebration, the dawn broke there was a strange air of hesitancy in the camp. One or two early risers dragged themselves from their blankets and wandered among the last of the smoking fires. They stood a little wearily and looked out over the vast encampment, an hour’s walk or more from end to end. Suddenly it all seemed unreal, insubstantial. A madman’s dream…

They had returned and gathered at the same time of year as they had left. It was nearing the end of summer. For tens of thousands of them came the question: what next? Talk of empire and conquest was all well and good, but…

There was nothing but this man. Quite a man, they acknowledged, quite a king. But there was nothing besides him except a few square miles of scratched grassland, corrals of tired horses, summer’s end, a summer passed so fleetingly as they had galloped home westwards that they felt they had hardly had time to warm themselves by it. A general lassitude and weariness of nature, the flowers already thirsting and drooping their overgrown heads, the very opposite and apogee to the youth and promise of spring. Impossible that one man’s vision, however powerful and vivid, could energise and inspire a whole nation of kindred peoples. Not now, not at this sleepy, dusty end-time of the year, when the thoughts of men and animals alike were turning to the comfort of winter pastures, shelter from the coming winter blizzards, and long, long nights of sleep under dark furs.

Had they come all this way on nothing but a fool’s errand?

It looked a great gathering. Ruga’s tribe of Black Huns had numbered perhaps four thousand, with maybe a thousand warriors. With the coming of the kindred clans, they had been as many as ten or twenty thousand, and now, though no man could count, they were many more than that again, with tens of thousands of men-at-arms alone. A mighty army, but soon it would be a hungry one. Like the sheaves of an unimaginable harvest, the tents of Attila’s many peoples stretched almost as far as the eye could see. A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? Who could tell? Who could number them? And they grew afraid of their own numbers.

So in the dismal dawn, the world looked very different to the revellers, the many chieftains and princelings, the captains of the bands and the bandit-kings, and their world-empire looked very far away.

Attila came out of his palace, folded his arms before him, and said that there was to be a great council, and he would speak to them. They asked when, and he smiled and said, ‘Now.’ He ordered that all the chiefs of the various peoples, Bayan-Kasgar, and Kouridach, and Charaton, and Sky-in-Tatters, and all his chosen men and the captains of his regiments, assemble before him. The rest of the people would crowd close as best they could.

There was a certain amount of covert grumbling at their host’s lack of consideration. ‘Much koumiss, much sleep,’ went the Hun proverb, but this tyrant had allowed them no more than two or three hours under their blankets. He himself, Attila, whom they had seen with their own eyes the night before, draining bowl after bowl of koumiss and never wavering or slurring for one moment, was now riding around among the tents, apparently all the better for so little sleep, grinning, his teeth flashing wolfishly, his gold earrings dancing in the early sunlight, and calling out to them each by name, which he remembered perfectly.

‘Empires are not won by late sleeping!’ he roared at the tent entrances, leaning down from his saddle. ‘Shake your old bones, Bayan-Kasgar! You will never become rich and beautiful by lying there in your tent breaking wind! To the council ring! There is war to be planned!’

Then he vanished in a cloud of dust to torment Sky-in-Tatters, who was still sunk in boozy slumber between his two favourite wives.

Poor Bayan-Kasgar, feeling very far from a beautiful wolf this morning, crawled out from his tent, ratcheted himself upright and looked blearily out on the world.

He gazed out over steppes with that burnished silver horizon, strange for late summer, already promising cold to come. Overhead the sky was slate-grey and heavy, bad for headaches. Amid the tents the dung fires still smoked forlornly, and in the corrals the horses stood with dew on their backs and their damp heads hung low. Everywhere, roused unwillingly from sleep by their leader’s tireless and furious energy, men were awakening with foul tongues and parched throats, bitter stomachs, throbbing heads, as tired as men of a hundred. After less than three hours’ sleep, tempers were frayed.

But they stumbled obediently from their tents nonetheless, knowing that this king’s decree, of all decrees, would brook no argument. Within their tents, many wives turned over again and sighed with relief and slept.