The Gathering of the Storm

2

At last they came down into the wide flat plain of Trans-Pannonia. They set fire to whatever forlorn, huddled villages they came across, and drove the wailing inhabitants away across the plain into the swirling snow. But most of the people of that country had already fled westwards, having heard dreadful rumours of the approach of fur-clad Scythians, appearing down from the ominous Kharvad mountains, the abode of witches and werewolves, hidden in mist and snow for half the year.

The Huns continued westward on the heels of the refugees, razing the villages and clearing the whole plain of the Hungvar. For they called it by this name again already: the Domain of the Huns, their home. They torched the pitiful reed huts, driving the bewildered and terrified Sarmatian or Ostrogothic villagers out from their firesides into the bitter winter nights, to flee half naked with their infants in their arms. There was no resistance.

One freezing dawn they returned from an all-night raid and saw among the ashes of a village they had burned the night before, an idiot child sitting there among the still smoking ashes to warm itself, quite naked, seemingly oblivious of its plight. The child was perhaps five or six years in age, its head too big for its body and misshapen, and its face covered in rheum and snot, but not it seemed from weeping. Its upper lip was scaly and crusted with dried phlegm, and the underlid of one eye was swollen with some infection. The sores on its face and body were painful to look at. The child shivered among the ashes, covered in their grey dust, as if tethered like a scapegoat, or like a tiny penitent or bedesman crouching there in atonement for the sins of the world.

If the gentleness of a people is measured by how they treat their sick, their crippled and insane, this had been a gentle village once. Not for them the swift despatch of malformed infants to the rubbish heap, as the Romans do with what they call a koprios: a dunghill child, stashed in an old winejar and buried in a midden. Or as the Spartans did with their unwanted and rejected. Their sickly whelps and weaklings cast into the ditch beside the road to Messenia that they called the Apothetae, the Dumping Ground, and left to die in that abyss among a litter of tiny bones, blinking and gazing heavenwards to die of thirst and unimaginable agony, bewildered from the moment of their birth to their innocent death. Not once in their curt and crippled lives knowing one smile, one touch of gentleness, one look of love.

What gods made such a world where such things pass?

Among the Huns it was at least customary for such as this idiot child to be quickly and mercifully slain, and one of the warriors was already drawing back his bowstring to that end, to despatch the pitiful creature as one would a sickly lamb. But someone darted forward from among the warriors. It was the witch Enkhtuya, and to their astonishment she plucked up the idiot child and set it on her horse, and climbed up again behind it. They waited a little to see if she would hold her snakes to the child’s ash-grey flesh but she did not. The men exchanged looks as if to say that perhaps the witch had some kindness in her dried-out scrap of a heart after all. And then they rode back to camp.

Enkhtuya played with the child. She gave it all her attention, and lavished upon it her vast knowledge of herbs and medicines, and before long its sores healed. She shaved its scalp, and marked it with the image of two entangled snakes in midnight-blue ink. The child could not see, but it appeared very proud of this new decoration.

She could not make it whole, of course. Its head was too large and heavy a burden for its small sloping shoulders, and lolled at times when the child was tired, and its belly was always swollen. It never spoke, and one side of its face remained all wrong, as if collapsed from within. But with the other half of its face, when Enkhtuya dallied and played with it, it smiled. It even laughed, an odd, hiccupping laugh.

One morning, Orestes went down to the sleepy banks of the River Tisza in the soft grey drizzle, though the day was promising fair. Among the reeds he saw Enkhtuya and the idiot child a little downstream. He stopped and watched, as was his custom.

She was bathing the child in the warm shallows, and at the same time playing with and teasing it, as was her custom. The child laughed. It loved to play. She stepped into the river, up to her shins, then her knees, and pushed the child a little further in. The child felt the waters deepening around it, but Enkhtuya smiled and made encouraging sounds, and the child laughed trustfully again.

Orestes wanted to turn again and go back to the camp. Something was not right. Something was happening here that he did not like, though it was not his business. But he stayed and watched. He could not turn away.

Now the witch Enkhtuya took the child’s hands in her own long, lean hands, and lifted it high out of the water. She was much stronger than her fleshless frame suggested. The child screamed with delight and kicked its feet. Enkhtuya stepped in deeper, the river water up to her thighs now. She began to swing the child back and forth over the water, in wider and wider circles. Orestes looked down, as if ashamed, and then up again. The child screamed and kicked. It swung in one last great arc.

And then he was released, and flew backwards, and there was a big splash as the child landed far out in midstream, his oversized head bobbing amid the wavelets, the laughter choked off in his throat.

Orestes could not move.

The child was carried along by the rapid current out in midstream, crying out desperately, raising its arms, rising and sinking again time after time. It was not laughing or playing, it was drowning, and he watched with impotent horror. He thought of Little Bird’s hysterical antipathy to this woman, this creature, and his mind gave him grim forebodings.

Enkhtuya, too, watched the child, and laughed to see it pulled away in the current. She stood tall, with her face raised to the rising sun, and held her long dark hands up to her chest, her neck. She softly caressed her throat and her gaunt, sallow face as she watched the child drowning before her eyes, those uncanny pale-blue eyes huge and rapt and moist with pleasure. The child was gone, it was drowned. The sacrifice to the rivergod was done. The witch had saved it and lavished care and affection upon it and made it a thing of value, and then she had tired of it, and offered it up to the rivergod, and very much enjoyed the spectacle of its destruction. She was almost gasping with pleasure at the child’s final cries, her breastless chest heaving with deep sighs, her lips apart, her eyes half closed. The child gasped, too, its lungs filling with water, its arms flailing, not understanding. The big head bobbing beneath the water, bubbles erupting from its clenched lips, its small deformed body falling, falling through the clear sunlit water, descending down and down, dragged by the current still along the gravel bottom of the riverbed through tapered waterweeds slimy and emerald green until finally it settled there, insensible, lifeless.

And then there was a sudden backwash and a watery commotion and the spluttering idiot child was miraculously bobbing close to the bank, making a kind of paddling motion and pulling itself up onto the mud like a primitive amphibian.

After a moment of astonishment, Enkhtuya shook her head. The rivergod had rejected the sacrifice as unworthy. Then she went over to the child and pulled it to its feet. The child was blubbering and weeping, and she laughed and wiped the water from its naked body with the edge of her hand, and wiped the snot from its nose with the hem of her robe, as gently as a mother would have done. Then she took its malformed hand in hers and led it back to the camp.

Orestes looked back over the implacable and indifferent river that had played thus with the child and then cast it aside. Today the river had decided not to kill. Enkhtuya did not oppose the dictates of the river or the earth. But Orestes felt something coming off the surface of the river, as cold as an evening mist. The day was warm and promising fair. But there among the tall reeds and rushes, Orestes the inscrutable, imperturbable Greek, shivered uncontrollably, as if he had just been vouchsafed some vision he had rather not.

Later that morning, if any had been watching, they would have seen Orestes walk determinedly into Attila’s tent. After a few minutes they would have heard the king’s voice raised in wrath, and then seen Orestes emerge from the tent and stride away, white-lipped with fury.

Later, they might have seen Orestes and Little Bird talking privately together, over by the horses. Then after a little the two men falling silent, hanging their heads as if in sorrow.

Attila decreed that another fine wooden palace should be built for him and the royal family, and his people worked for many days and with great labour to that end.

Little Bird became more and more insolent. At the campfire one evening, with the king himself close by, he began to sing one of the tales of Tarkan, the ancestral hero of all the wide-wandering Hun people. Tarkan, he sang, was a man both foolish and wise, like many kings and rulers. At first he would live only in a tent. But then he became so mighty, and his fame so celebrated, that Astur his father made him a house to dwell in, built of fine wood, with lintels of purest gold, and walls panelled with ivory, and set with jasper and chalcedony and every kind of rare gem. A magnificent house, a palace, the equal of any that the settler peoples boast of. But Tarkan the Tent-Dweller lit his fire inside, in the middle of the house, and fell asleep beside it after too much koumiss, and woke up in the midst of an inferno! He ran out weeping and bellowing, falling into the rain and the mud and kicking his legs and complaining bitterly to Astur that he had given him such a death-trap for a dwelling. And Astur spoke to him out of heaven and said, ‘Foolish hero, I gave you the finest house that god ever gave man. But like all the wide-wandering Hun peoples for ever after, you will have no house to dwell in, but be always a tent-dweller and a keeper of flocks and a nomad upon the earth, despising the farmers and the towns, and despised likewise by those who dwell therein.’

At which another voice cut in, and it was the voice of Attila. ‘And they shall be your enemy, and you shall be their enemy. And there shall be warfare perpetual between nomad and settler across every part of the world and for all time until the war at the end of the world.’

As if he had won a round in a battle of the bards, the king vaulted to his feet, clapped the dust from his clothes and retired to his proud new wooden palace, unperturbed. The chieftains and the chosen men left around the fire laughed.

But Little Bird did not laugh. He said, ‘And they shall take up snakes.’ Then he added, so softly that only Orestes heard, ‘And they shall make sacrifices of innocent blood.’