The Gathering of the Storm

Part III
THE HUNGVAR
1

He gave them three days.

Even during that time, as they hurried to pack, he ordered the warriors out onto the plain for ceaseless drills and exercises. Though they and their families, the women and the children, should have been weary after such long travels across Scythia, and so little rest in the Euxine pastures, nevertheless he urged them onward, still onward. Urging them with such zeal, like a contagious fire, that despite themselves they felt a surge of limitless energy.

Out on the plains he had his warriors gallop and wheel in huge formations, in battle lines over a mile long. He had them fire volley after volley of arrows at distant targets across the steppes. And he had them play the ancient games of the Huns with a new competitiveness and ferocity: the mad gallop towards a steep riverbank, the winner being he who was the last to pull up. A number of men pulled up too late and tumbled, still mounted, over the bank and twenty or thirty feet down into the river. Several arms and legs were broken, and at least two horses had to be killed, to their owners’ great grief.

‘Women come and go,’ said one, shaking his head in sorrow, ‘but horses…’

There was also the perilous rope-walk among the knives, in which each warrior had to totter along a tightrope suspended several feet above the ground, in which were set dozens of knives and daggers, their blades glinting upwards. And of course there was the furious game of pulu, played out over the steppes with spearhafts and an inflated pig’s bladder. Never before had one game been played with so many thousands of men on each side. Most never even got to see the object of all their strenuous efforts.

There were slower and gentler games of skill with their leather whips and nets and lassoes. And in the lazy mid-afternoon many of the young boys came running out from the camp, eager and red-cheeked, and their fathers went with them on earnest hunting expeditions among the reeds by the river’s edge, their five- and six-year old sons armed with child-sized bows, hunting for small birds and mice. Attila watched them go, and joked to those near him that Bleda had still been hunting thus only a year or two back.

There were more martial games towards sundown, and it was during these games, towards evening on the second day, in failing light, that Bleda was tragically shot from behind. The arrow flew cruelly true, penetrated through his back, beneath his left shoulder, and pierced his heart. None could say for certain whose bow it had come from. His wives put on a good show of lamentation, and he was buried with full if expeditious funeral rites.

Later that evening, Orestes heard Little Bird singing at the edge of the camp, holding a small brand and waving it back and forth over his head as he danced with slow footsteps in the dust. The Greek remained silent to listen and heard the words of the low chant. Little Bird sang of great brothers of the past. He sang of two called Cain and Abel, and of another two called Romulus and Remus. In each case, one brother had killed the other…

Orestes went over to Little Bird and warned him softly not to sing too loud. But the shaman in his gentle slow-stepping trance seemed hardly to hear him or to heed his warning. He only murmured that there would be many more such songs to be sung before this tale was over. And he continued to sing long into the night, long after his flaming brand had expired in a grey wisp of smoke.

At night the shamans maddened themselves with hemp-smoke baths in their sweat-lodges, and danced and clubbed their drumskins with the thighbones of goats. The dry ground lapped up the blood and the molten fat of the sheep led bleating to the sacrifice, and the flames towered into the sky from the pyres and the altars. Sparks flew higher still, the dark horizon of the steppes lit up for travellers to see from far off in the night. Any lonely travellers seeing that sight from afar off out on the steppes would have shuddered, and, hearing that sound, would have turned back and returned home another way.

For it was the sound of the Hun nation on the point of riding out against the whole world.

It felt like the first day of autumn, late on that dying day when they finally departed. The skies were low and streaked grey and harried with the wind.

Bayan-Kasgar was still having his armour polished by one of his women when Attila rode near.

‘How far is this Rome?’ the general demanded. ‘How many days in the saddle?’

‘Days?’ repeated Attila sardonically. ‘Weeks. Many weeks’ hard riding, far to the west, far from your beloved homelands. And then there will be long wars, and dangers I cannot even describe to you.’

‘You make a poor salesman,’ growled Bayan-Kasgar.

‘But honest,’ said Attila, heeling his horse onward.

So the people loosed their guyropes, dropped their tents, dragged free the central tentpoles and packed up the smokey black felt walls in rolls bound with rawhide and stowed their tentpoles on their wagons. They drove their cattle and their sheep and horses together and began to roll off in a desultory column to the west that very day. With them went the wagons and their drovers: thirty feet wide from wheel to rumbling wheel, bearing barrels of salted meat, bundles of tentcloth and ten thousand arrows apiece. Those ships of the plains with their canvas sides billowing like sails, their huge axletrees creaking, the great wooden wheels groaning like beasts dragged unwillingly to work. As the camp emptied, Attila gave orders for the royal palace to be fired, none knew why. It was still burning, far away, low on the horizon, a strange second sunset, when the people vanished over the curved horizon to the west and into the sunset’s silent holocaust.

So began the great migration of the huge new nation of confederate Hun tribes under the sovereign rule of Attila. They passed westwards over the storm-lashed plains of Scythia, fording the wide rising rivers under the rolling clouds of autumn. After many weeks they came to the Kharvad mountains, which the Gothic peoples call the Harva?a, and the Romans call the Carpathians. In the first falling snows they came up through precipitous dark rocky passes, the drovers and cattlemen already complaining bitterly that it was too late in the year for such long journeys in such terrain, and they should have stopped and found winter pasture as best they could east of the mountains. But Attila and some of the men who had ridden with him on his legendary gathering of the tribes, into far greater mountains than these, only smiled. They had known worse. And he drove them on without mercy. Never a moment of rest, under the rule of his furious, restless, vengeful energy.

Cattle stumbled and fell by the roadside, and were either lashed to their feet again or abandoned there. The great column of men and women, children and animals, creaking ox-carts and mounted warriors, moved on up the passes under the softly falling snow, wrapped and cowled in their woollen blankets, passing in eerie silence, every hoof-fall and footfall and wagon-roll muffled by the thick snow. The passes behind them were strewn with the humped bodies of dying cattle like dark boulders, the soft flakes falling and melting on their still warm bodies.