The Gathering of the Storm

3

He took a lance from one of the attendant warriors, speared Ruga’s severed head where it lay gaping in the dust and held it aloft.

‘Orestes,’ he said. ‘The chosen men.’

The Greek slave came riding to the front of the crowd and, as if at random, picked eight men from the crowd. One of them was the youth he had seen step forward. The other seven he had observed just as closely.

They stood expectant.

‘Your horses,’ said the king.

They ran to get them from the corral.

Attila’s gaze roved round the circle. He nodded at a fine blue tent opposite, with carved wooden tentposts and a colourful pennon fluttering from the summit.

‘Whose tent?’ he demanded.

After a pause an old man stepped forward, with wrinkled visage, soft white hair and cunning, wary eyes.

‘It is mine,’ said Attila. He nodded down at the young girl he had brought out of the flames, who was standing anxiously nearby. ‘She is yours.’

A low ripple of laughter ran through the crowd. For it was well known that the old man, Zabergan by name, was an atrocious miser who cared only for the size of his herds, for his nurtured hoards of hacksilver and his oddments of gold, and his fine blue tent. As for wives and women, he had never seen reason to go to the expense of having more than one: his old wife Kula, a terrible baggage but cheap to run. And though this gift of a young girl was coltishly long-legged and pretty, the people knew that old Zabergan would far rather have cold bars of silver in his bed than a warm young body. Dourly the old man thanked the king and glared at the poor girl as she shuffled close to him.

Attila grinned and commanded the people to depart.

The eight chosen men returned, mounted now.

The grin faded.

The men shivered under the glare from those leonine eyes.

‘And your bows,’ he rasped.

His voice scoured the air between them, and some wanted to protect their ears with their hands at the sound. Then they broke and trotted bemusedly back to their tents, their horses almost tripping each other in their riders’ hurry to bring forth their bows. They returned with faces flushed like scolded schoolboys’.

Attila lined them up and demanded to know their names.

‘Yesukai,’ said the first, bright-faced, eager. He was the young man Orestes had seen move towards the burning tent after Attila. Attila regarded him. Even now, as he gave his name, he looked as if he wished to step forward, impatient with youthful energy. Hurried, impulsive, courageous, loyal. Attila nodded. He would die young.

Attila stepped his horse sideways.

‘Your name?’ he rasped again.

The second was Geukchu. He had cautious, intelligent eyes, a slightly crooked mouth, and was about the same age as Attila. Untrustworthy, certainly; but one who could use his brains.

There were three brothers: Juchi, Bela and Noyan, the three sons of Akal. Young and powerfully-built, expressionless, shy. They would never command armies, or the love of beautiful women; but they would fight and die for each other in battle. They were strong together.

There was Aladar, the tallest there, on the tallest horse. Lean but muscular, grave and handsome, with his long black oiled hair and his fine moustache. The women would go crazy over him.

‘How many wives in your tent, man?’

Aladar smiled faintly. ‘Seven too many.’

He would never have peace from women, this one. But there were enough scars on his arms to tell his king that this was no mere tent-lounger, wanting only to lie all day and all night with his seven wives while they covered him with their kisses, caresses, and fatal invisible chains.

There was Candac, a little plump around the middle but with powerful arms and a certain resolution in his round, well-fed face. This one might after all have the trick of command. He would die old.

And there was Csaba, who looked frail and dreamy and no doubt liked poetry and played a lute he had had since childhood. Probably just the one wife, whom he adored beyond embarrassment, kissing and embracing her even in public view. Attila knew the type. One moment he might be singing lullabies to a kitten. The next he would be going berserk on the battlefield, the limbs of his enemies flying, his head full of quite another kind of poetry. Half mad, for certain. But the half mad could fight, strong scarred arms or not.

Attila nodded again. Orestes had, as always, chosen well.

They rode out onto the plains under charcoal skies and beating rain. It was still only mid-afternoon on that tumultuous day, but it was as dark as a winter dusk. Some of the men looked askance at being led out into such a downpour, some of them bare-headed. But their leader showed no sign of hesitation. With his burned horse steaming in the rain, his face barbarically streaked with rain and smuts from the fire, he had ridden into and out of, like some creature protected by heaven, his sardonic eyes glittering under the dripping brow of his black felt kalpak, none felt inclined to question his leadership.

His silent foreign manservant slave rode uncomplaining just behind him, head bare and half bald, his skull shining wet. And then Chanat, the aged warrior of the tribe, his long hair a coarse grey mane still streaked darkly here and there, his long moustache luxuriant, a darker grey over his wide, set mouth. He was now in his seventh decade, perhaps, his eyes weakening, his hearing not so sharp as it was, but his body as lean and wiry as ever. His broad forehead bore deep wrinkles. All aged fast in the bitter cold of winter and the blistering heat of summer on those steppes, where the winds blew forever across the swaying and shimmering grasslands. But Chanat’s deepset eyes burned bright with inner fire again, and brighter than ever now as he rode proudly behind his new king. His big fist clutched his bow without a tremor, and he no longer doubted that he could draw it as well as any there. The copper torc still held tight around his muscular throat and nothing about him showed the slackness or defeat of age.

Attila pulled back beside him. ‘The one called Aladar. He is a son of yours.’

Chanat smiled proudly. ‘How did you know?’

‘He’s almost as handsome as his father.’

‘Almost.’ He ruminated. ‘That was a good night when he was begotten.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Attila.

The king rode with the long lance over his shoulder, the mangled burden of old king Ruga’s head impaled on the end, dripping pink rain. At last he stopped and twirled the heavy burden around as if it were no more than a straw, and stuck the butt of the lance into a marmot hole in the ground. The severed head with its gaping mouth, its fine earrings still hanging from its lobes, its remnants of hair plastered flat to the great skull, silver raindrops beaded in its beard, stared back at them through the grey bars of rain.

Attila pulled his horse round and hazed them back fifty yards or more.

‘Now!’ he bellowed into the wind and the rain. ‘A tenth of the gold in the chest to the first man to hit the target!’

With reluctance and even dread at first, but then with increasing, yelling competitiveness, their blood stirred by the barbarity and goldlust of the scene, the men milled around and took turns at trying to hit the head. None could do it. The wind played havoc with the flights. While they milled and fired, their arrows flying far to left or right or slithering through the wet grass and lost, Attila pulled back and observed.

After some minutes he rode forward, pushing his horse between the others. He seized a bow and a single arrow from Candac, the plump but tough-looking man on a white gelding. The eight chosen men fell back and watched as the king nocked the arrow to the bow and in one smooth, rapid movement, barely pausing to sight along the shaft, let fly. The bowstring hummed and the arrow flew askance then curved slightly in the prevailing wind, veered inwards and punched straight through the ghastly head on the lance, fell out and curved down into the sodden grass beyond.

The men stared.

He tossed the bow back into Candac’s lap.

‘One day, you will all shoot as well as that,’ he said. ‘One day soon.’

Then he wheeled and turned back towards camp.

The head would remain impaled on the lance out on the plain, as a lesson for men and a breakfast for the crows.

When the storm had abated and the clouds broken apart to show the blue sky again, he drove them out onto the plain once more. One of the wives called out that her husband would be no good for honouring her as she deserved that night: he would be tired out.

He called them to a halt and looked over them. Then he heeled his horse furiously and galloped back and forth, like a commander before a battle rousing his men, hurling his bitter words into their faces.

‘How do the Chinese call us?’ he roared. ‘How are we known in their records? How do they name us in their ancient annals?’ He pulled up violently before them and spat the words of insult full in their faces. ‘The Waste Wanderers! The Milk Drinkers!’

The men flinched and their faces darkened. They knew how despised they were in the cities of the civilised world, in the golden heart of China: that country whose very name it was ill fortune for any Hun to speak. Or far away in the mysterious empires of Persia and Rome, of which they had heard such strange tales.

‘In Rome,’ he roared, ‘how are we described in the histories of those swollen-headed tyrants of the western world? “A vile, ugly and degenerate people” – in the books of one Ammianus Marcellinus. Were he not dead already, he would be the first to be skewered lengthwise on a stake when we enter Rome!’

The men muttered their approval.

‘To the Chinese, we are “the Stinking Ones”. We drink nothing but milk and eat nothing but meat, they say, and we stink like animals and they wrinkle their delicate noses at us. In Chinese, our very name is traduced! And we Huns, we Hunnu, we the People, become the Xioung Nu. And what does this make us in the language of the Chinese? The Bad Slaves!’

Their blood boiled within them. Their horses champed and whinnied, stepping their forefeet nervously in the long wet grass. Voices rose from the huddled men in an angry, buzzing murmur.

He rode in dangerously close to Csaba and fleered in his face, ‘Are you a slave?’

Csaba yelled back at him in defiance.

‘O Stinking Ones!’ Attila roared out over them. ‘O Accursed Wanderers of the Earth, despised outcasts from the Great Wall to the Western Sea. Offspring of the Devil, Spawn of Witches and the Demons of the Wind, know how deeply you are hated! And how is that immemorial hatred to be repaid? With nice politicking, with polite debate?’

The men scowled their response.

He goaded them. ‘With gifts of silk and gold to our natural, god-ordained masters in Byzantium, perhaps? With solicitous, smooth-tongued embassies? With meek and slavelike acceptance, with humble abasement, as befits such stinking slaves as we?’

Already swords were unsheathed from their leather scabbards and raised aloft, blades flashing in the blue air.

‘How is this lofty contempt best countered, my beloved people? My Stinking Ones?’

Even as he spoke, he snatched his recurved bow from his shoulder and nocked an arrow to its string faster than the eye could see, and loosed it into the startled midst of them. His aim was sure and the arrow flew straight and struck Geukchu squarely on his buckler. The warrior looked down startled, but it was a light draw and the arrow did not make headway.

Attila pulled himself up in his saddle and roared out over the heads of his men, weapon held high, ‘By our horses and our bows the world will know us!’

The men chorused back the ancient Hun war-cry, and the earth trembled under them as they curved and galloped away over the steppes in the rush of their fury.

He brought them back to him and marshalled them and drilled them for the rest of that day and on into the dusk, telling them that soon they would be drilling warbands of their own. He mocked them and poured scorn upon them, goading them into ever more competitive zeal. He commanded them to see how fast they could fire a dozen shots. The chosen men snatched and strained back at their quivers, fumbling for single arrows, eyeing the nocks in the ends of the arrows before fitting them carefully, sighting along their arms, drawing back the bowstring steadily. Most took two or three minutes to fire their dozen arrows. At standstill.

At last in his impatience he surged forward. One hapless warrior, burly, sausage-fingered Juchi, was still struggling to fire his last arrow. Attila struck out with his fist and dashed arrow and bow together to the ground. Juchi’s horse flared its nostrils and trotted backwards into the mass of warriors behind. They laughed. Juchi scowled.

Attila seized twelve arrows in his left hand.

‘Now watch,’ he said, suddenly going quiet. ‘Orestes,’ he called over his shoulder.

The Greek rode away some distance, thrust his long spear into the ground and hung his buckler loosely by its leather strap from the butt.

All watched, transfixed.

Attila took his bow in his left hand, the dozen arrows still bunched up in the same fist. He turned sideways on to them. He did not eye the arrows, he seemed only to touch them, to feel the nock with his thumb. He drew each arrow out of his fist and into the string, and straight back against the straining curve of the bow in one long, easy movement. He let fly, and was already drawing the second arrow from his fist and nocking it afresh. The first arrow struck the tossing buckler dead centre. He wasted no time pulling the string back to his cheek and trying to sight along the arrow, but held the bow at an angle nearly sideways and pulled the string into his chest. To his heart. Drawing the bow thus meant no chance of it getting caught or bumping into his thighs or saddle.

‘At what point does a galloping warrior loose his arrow?’

They stared back dumbly.

‘Only when all four of his horse’s hooves are off the ground. Only then does he inhabit a tiny moment floating through the air, smooth and free, when the arrow flies true. Loose an arrow when your horse is bumping over the hard ground and you are jolting in the saddle, and you will miss.’

The men looked at each other. Some grinned. Now he was testing their credulity.

Then suddenly he was at a gallop, circling the buckler on the spear at a furious pace, his horse low and straining into its bit, ears flat back, teeth bared, and their king in his animal fury likewise. They saw as he blurred by them how he continued to pull and loose the arrows in swift, easy movements and how each arrow flew and struck the swinging buckler on its strap. Some, staring closely as he fired, could have sworn that what he said about firing in that split second when his horse was entirely in the air, free of the hard ground, was quite true…

He pulled up and looked back. The buckler was stuck with eleven arrows. The twelfth had split the spear-haft.

From drawing the first arrow to firing the last had taken perhaps thirty seconds. No, even less – their faces were blank with disbelief. He had fired an arrow every three seconds or so, at stand and at full gallop, it made no difference. It seemed an almost supernatural performance.

He looked over them, his chest heaving, a wide smile on his face now. ‘Oh my Stinking Ones,’ he said gently, ‘you too will learn to shoot like that. And you will be the terror of the earth.’

‘My brother Bleda?’ Attila said to Chanat as they rode back.

‘In his tent.’

‘Bring him to me.’ They rode on. ‘And Little Bird?’

Chanat shook his head. ‘He still lives. He’s not been seen all summer. But he’ll be back.’ He nodded. ‘Now he will be back.’

Bleda had grown fat, and most of his hair had fallen out, but his expression was the same as ever. Greedy, sleepy, conniving, resentful, sly.

Attila embraced him warmly.

‘My brother,’ slurred Bleda. He was already drunk, for it was after sundown. ‘A great return. I always longed to see that traitor slain.’

‘And now we rule together,’ said Attila, holding his arms tightly and shaking him. ‘We two brothers, we two sons of Mundzuk. We shall rule the people together, for there is much to do.’

Bleda looked into his younger brother’s burning eyes, and it crossed his mind to say that he didn’t want to rule the people. He would rather stay in his tent with the new young girl he had bought recently with a gift of gold from Ruga. Circassian she was, and her body was so smooth. When she-

‘But first,’ said Attila, striding away from him and then back again, clapping his hands together. ‘Organisation.’

Bleda sighed.

After dark, and a few mouthfuls of meat but no wine, Attila walked out with Chanat among the tents of the people. The king wore no crown or diadem, no rich Byzantine robes of purple silk, but only his battered leather jerkin and crossgartered breeches, his rough deerskin boots.

‘My lord,’ began Chanat. ‘Your slave, Orestes. He addresses you by your familiar name. I have heard him. It is not right.’

‘Slave?’

‘Your… servant.’

Attila shook his head. Orestes was not his slave any more, nor his servant. Even the words ‘friend’ or ‘bloodbrother’ were inadequate. There was no word for what Orestes was to him.

‘Orestes can call me what he likes,’ he said. He glared at Chanat. ‘And only he.’

The old warrior could not approve, but he said nothing.

Towards the edge of the great circle of tents they pulled up and looked over the corral of the horses. There were perhaps a thousand of them; squat, ungainly beasts, with huge heads and thick necks, barrel chests and short, sturdy legs. As fast as deer, as tireless as mules.

‘There lies the strength of the Huns,’ murmured Attila.

‘By our horses and our bows the world will know us,’ said Chanat.

The horses whinnied and snickered in the corral, snuffing the night air, the low moon of the first hours of darkness casting a low silver light along their backs and over their coarse, cropped manes. Attila turned his face to the sweet horse smell of them and inhaled.

A voice came to them through the night air, and on such a night as this, of promise and expectation, it struck Attila as a dreary and mournful song. He turned and stepped nearer the tent where the music came from. It was a woman’s voice, soft and low. He moved silently though the darkness and saw her sitting in the entrance of a humble tent, an infant asleep in her arms. Another child of two or three lay asleep on some blankets close by, and three or four other women sat behind and around her in a semicircle. She sang: ‘Though the grass will shoot from the land

He is not grass, he will not come to my calling,

Though the waters will rise from the hills,

He is not water, he will not come to my calling

Oh the jackal lies in your bed,

The raven broods in your sheepfold.

Only the wind plays the shepherd’s pipe,

Only the north wind sings your song,

Oh my husband…’

The woman’s voice faltered and stopped and her head fell in sorrow onto her breast and her infant looked up wide-eyed at her. One of the others close by reached out her hand and laid it on the singer’s shoulder.

‘Who is she?’ whispered Attila.

‘The woman of one of the two guards you killed in Ruga’s tent.’

Attila frowned. He had forgotten them.

He went up to the tent and stood silently. After a while the women looked up and some of them started. But not the widowed woman.

Attila gestured over his shoulder at Chanat.

‘Woman,’ he said, ‘here is your new husband. Be content.’

She stared up at him through tear-bright eyes. Then she slowly got to her feet, her infant still in her arms. She stepped in front of him and spat on the ground almost between his feet.

She said, ‘You slew my husband and burned his body to ashes without burial. You left me a widow and my children helpless orphans. My heart is broken like an old pot, it is in a hundred pieces on the hard ground. My tears have all cried out and dried and still my sorrow within me would cry out a river. Now you treat me as you would a cow, and give me to this ancient bull here with his old dog’s breath and his wrinkled ballbag. But I am not to be so easily given. Leave my tent and go back to your own bed, with your bloody sword for company through the cold night. And may the gods judge you harshly.’

Chanat stepped towards her, but Attila held his arm out across the warrior’s chest.

The woman stared a little longer at the king, contemptuous and unafraid. ‘How many more will you slay likewise, my lord widow-maker? I know minds and hearts such as yours, and they are no mystery to me. O great Tanjou! Khan of all the kingdoms under heaven! Great king of everything and nothing!’

She spat again, then turned swiftly and went back into the tent and pulled it closed behind her.

‘My lord!’ protested Chanat, but Attila shook his head.

‘Words, words, words,’ he said.

They walked on.

‘In the face of desert storms, the lion’s teeth, armies of tens of thousands,’ Attila said, ‘one may ride without fear. But in the face of a widow’s anger…’

‘Such a woman would be a good hot ride,’ said Chanat. ‘And a good mother of warriors. A pity her desire was not stirred by the thought of my wrinkled ballbag.’

‘A pity indeed,’ said Attila.

Passing another tent nearer the heart of the camp, they heard a young girl’s screams and an old man’s impotent bellowing. Then the girl herself almost fell out of the grubby, mean-looking tent at their feet. Her hair was torn out in clumps, her face beaten and bruised, and her tunic half ripped from her back. After her stumbled an old man, gasping with fury, his eyes bulging, and spittle in his skimpy beard. He stopped and pulled up when he saw the king.

‘How did you come by her?’ rasped Attila. ‘I gave her to Zabergan.’

‘Zabergan sold her to me,’ said the old man. ‘He is my cousin. I gave a good price.’

‘And now you beat her?’

The old man smiled conspiratorially. ‘The more it is beaten, the tenderer the meat.’

‘How do you beat her?’

‘With this,’ said the old man, brandishing a knobbly stick. He came closer to them, and his breath was hot and thick with koumiss and lust. ‘On her back,’ he said, almost whispering, ‘on her firm young buttocks, and on her soft young thighs-’

‘How? Like this?’ said Attila. And in a blink of an eye he had snatched the stick from the old man’s grasp and hurled him to the ground. Chanat thought he heard something old and brittle crack as he hit the hard ground. Then Attila was standing astride him and belabouring his skinny, bony back with all his might. Under the rain of blows the man could do nothing but curl up and whimper for mercy. Attila stood straight again, snapped the stick over his upraised thigh and dropped the two halves into the dust.

He pulled the girl to her feet and looked her over briefly. ‘Go to the Compound of the Women. Tell them I sent you. They will clean you up well enough. You are mine now.’

The girl stared at him, rabbit-eyed.

‘Go,’ he said, giving her a shove.

She went.

‘Sorting out my people’s domestic troubles!’ he growled, looking after her. ‘I had my mind on higher things when I dreamed of being king.’

Chanat guffawed. ‘You are kind to women.’

They walked on, leaving the old man in the dust.

‘Kind?’ Attila grunted. ‘Kindness has nothing to do with it. I want good warriors out of that one’s womb.’

In the morning, a widow in a tent at the edge of the camp near the corral of the horses, her face etched and exhausted with grief, came to her door to find the silent Greek on horseback, holding out a fine silver vase. She took it and looked inside. There were some ashes. She turned without a word and vanished back into her tent.

At dawn, Attila and his chosen men were already out on the plain for target practice.

‘You will learn how to shoot as well as your king shoots,’ he told them, ‘or your fingertips will bleed away in trying.’

He left them and rode on with Chanat and Orestes.

Orestes’ big hare eyes darted left and right across the steppes, as if expecting the shadow of the Erinyes themselves to come up over the horizon: those clotted avengers from Tartarus with blood spilling from their eyesockets and snakes twined in their hair, as they had come to another older Orestes. Come as before to avenge the murder of parent or uncle by the outraged prodigal child.

But then Orestes always looked guarded and uncertain. Or certain only of the uncertainty of the world. He had come back from his thirty years of wandering with his master through the unknown wastes like a man who trusts in the stability of nothing. Except of his own heart.

Finally Attila reined his horse in, and the three sat and gazed at the far horizon.

‘My father…’ he began.

‘Do not ask, I beg you,’ said Chanat. ‘Oh, do not.’

‘Ruga had no sons or daughters.’

Chanat looked away. ‘He was injured in his stones. When he was twenty summers or so.’

The grey sky of the steppes was paling and warming in the sun. From afar off came the high chatter of spotted susliks. Dust on the far horizon, perhaps a herd of saiga antelope. Perhaps only devils of the wind.

‘Before that, Ruga and my mother…’

‘Oh, do not ask, my king.’

The sky lightened from shield grey to pale and then to daylight blue. Like the fine blue silken robes that King Ruga had worn when he gasped and died.

Attila turned and nodded to Orestes. The Greek already knew his mind, as always. They did not even need to speak in a private language, these two, as old friends do. They barely needed to speak at all.

Orestes heeled his horse and rode on, veering southwards towards the settlements beyond the low hills.

‘Might I ask who, my lord?’

Attila gazed at him unblinkingly. ‘My family,’ he said.

In late afternoon two days later, after many miles of riding, Orestes came back into the camp, dusty and weary, with a strange procession of women and boys. The older boys, well into their second decade, rode horses of their own, but the younger, and the women, rode in a covered wagon, peering from the back at the unfolding camp.

The camp gazed back in curiosity and then in astonishment. There were arguments about how many there were, but general agreement was that there were six sons and as many daughters, and then again as many wives.

Attila commandeered two more fine tents in the heart of the camp, and into one trooped his six sons. Their ages ranged from seventeen or so down to four or five, and the youngest wept as he parted from one of the women. Attila sat his horse and watched them go. Into another tent trooped his women. In time, the people learnt that they comprised five wives and eight daughters, and they marvelled anew. For a king to have five wives was nothing. But for one who had been a vagrant in the wastes of Scythia for thirty years to have five wives, and to keep such a family together, defended from every brigand that passed by, was scarcely imaginable. What strength must have defended them. What ferocity…

As the stature of the sons and the beauty of the daughters well attested, the wives themselves were no cast-offs from some foul-smelling brigand’s harem. The older were as haughty as queens, and the younger were as young as his eldest daughter. Surely their new king was a great king.

At the head of the wives walked one who was perhaps as old as her husband. Her step was graceful and serene. Her eyes were large and dark, her hair loosely braided. Her gown was a simple brown woollen robe, and her only decorations were two modest gold earrings, and a fillet of fine gold round her brow. She was tall and slender as a queen, but her fine, handsome face told of long hardship and desert wanderings, and no soft years in a royal palace for her. She already had many delicate wrinkles around her beautiful eyes, her skin was drawn across her wide, high cheekbones, and her long dark hair was greying at her temples.

The king called out, a word that none understood. The woman stopped and looked across at her lord and master, and smiled with a smile of covert triumph. She walked over to him, and into his fine blue tent behind. The rest of the wives – younger, prettier, still of childbearing years – watched her go. And then they went on into the new tent of the king’s wives.

‘What is the first wife’s name?’ Chanat murmured to Orestes.

Orestes didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, with a small smile, ‘She is called Checa. Queen Checa.’

Long after dark she lay on her back beside her husband, her face streaked with perspiration, her hands folded, a smile on her lips as playful as a young girl’s.

‘Oh great tanjou,’ she whispered, looking across at him and widening her eyes beseechingly. ‘Oh my great lord, my strong lion, my ravisher, my fierce king and conqueror. Did you miss me these last few days?’

‘Hnh,’ grunted Attila, his eyes closed.

Checa laughed.

When she awoke an hour later he was gone.

For his blood was up and his time had come and the strength and surge of his blood knew no bounds and his hunger for the world was limitless. He strode out onto the plains alone and unarmed and held his arms wide under the stars and prayed to his father Astur, who made all and watched all. He asked for nothing in his prayer. He had all he wanted for now, and all else that he wanted he would soon have, too. He closed his eyes and smiled up into heaven and his only prayer was to feel the presence and power of his father Astur and be bathed in the silver starlight that God made even before he made the earth from a clot of blood.

He returned and went into the tent of the women and pulled them to him. Among them was the girl he had rescued from Ruga’s tent and given to Zabergan. Still bruised from the brute who had beaten her, she came to him shyly. And when dawn came up over the eastern steppes, five more concubines lay on their backs with their hands on their bellies and uncertain smiles on the lips, wondering if they might now be carrying a son of the new king.

The king was gone already. He had slept two hours that night and it was enough, more than enough. Sleep made him impatient. ‘Time enough to sleep in the grave,’ he growled, toeing Orestes grumblingly out of his blankets. Now, as dawn came up, they were already out on the plains, a dozen miles out from the camp and still at full and furious gallop, Attila yaa-ing and roaring, Orestes jolting in the saddle and laughing at the pitiless energy of his master, a fast-moving dustcloud of saiga ahead of them and the king with teeth bared like a wolf that was ready to devour the whole herd.

For he had waited thirty years to come into his kingdom. Riding the solitary grasslands and the dustlands and deserts farther east, shoulders hunched and head bowed against the scouring sands and the blistering loneliness. But one soul stayed with him through it all and would not leave his side, though at times he commanded him to and flung his loyalty back in his face with bitterness. Orestes stayed there by his side, no more to be cleaved away from him than his own shadow.

In some distant, hidden valley in the far White Mountains – so the story went among the fascinated and gossiping people who now called him their king – he had carved out a bandit kingdom, and drawn men to him. And wives. The wives had come with him, back west to his heartland in the pastures by the Euxine Sea. And the men – perhaps they still waited for him far to the east.

Now the three desert decades were over, and it was time for it to begin. He could not have returned earlier, all the tribe would have been against him. But he had served his traitor’s exile, cut off from his people, his shamans and his gods, and now it was time. Time to come into his kingdom, and ride out against the world that had so belittled and humiliated him. He had survived scorn and abuse, beatings, half-killings, silence and contempt, as must any tribeless man with none to defend him or fight with him. He had been a mere bandit leader, though the son and grandson of kings. For the world is not a just place; or it is just only to the powerful.

When he rode out into the wilderness, a broken-hearted boy all those years ago, none had believed him truly a traitor. But Ruga’s sentence that bright morning had expressed the will of the gods, and none might go against it. Had any in the tribe spoken with Attila or taken him in as their secret guest during years of his exile and ostracism, they would have been punished terribly. None would have so transgressed. Now he was back, an aura of miracle about him in that he had survived so long alone and tribeless in the wilderness, with only his silent, watchful, mistrustful foreign slave and his ragged, mysterious family for company. Surely the gods must have watched over him, for such survival would not have been possible otherwise.

There are many such tales among other peoples, of mad kings driven into the wilderness to live like animals: King Nebuchadnezzar of the Jews, who turned aside to eat grass like the oxen, and whose body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws. Or one-eyed King Goll of the Celts, who fled from the field of battle not from cowardice, but maddened by that blood-red rage which grips men amid carnage. I heard a fragment of the haunting Song of King Goll sung long ago by a brown-eyed Celtic boy: And now I wander in the woods

When summer gluts the golden bees,

Or in autumnal solitudes

Arise the leopard-coloured trees;

Or when along the wintry strands

The cormorants shiver on their rocks;

I wander on, and wave my hands,

And sing, and shake my heavy locks.

The grey wolf knows me; by one ear

I lead along the woodland deer;

The hares run by me growing bold.

They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.

Attila was no such sorrowful king nor idle folk tale. He was a living myth to his people, dressed in flesh and blood, back from the wilderness to dwell among them, and they beheld his glory.

World-bestriding conquerors are furious in their youth, and as impatient as youths even if they make old age. Alexander had conquered the world by twenty-nine. Hannibal faced and destroyed the flower of Rome in the field when he was but thirty, and Caesar chafed bitterly at not having brought the world to its knees before him by the same age. Attila was one with these men of world-hunger. But he was in his forties before he even tasted power. Some say he could have exercised that iron will of his and deposed Ruga far earlier taking the crown of the Huns and setting it on his own broad head. One glare from those leonine eyes, and not a man of the tribe would have dared oppose him. But Attila was wiser than that. He knew that patience is the nomad’s greatest weapon. He watched. He waited. And when he finally rode back into the camp of his people, it seemed that he not only had might but right on his side, having been preserved in the wilderness for so long. What trials and tribulations he must have faced there. And so his return only seemed the more extraordinary, the more miraculous. All the warriors of his tribe then believed in him, in a way they had never believed in Ruga, or even tough old Uldin before him. He was consort of the mountains, he was friend of the desert and brother of the waste places. There blew through him that same invisible wind that blew from heaven and coloured the shamans’ dreams. With him at the head of their armies, none could oppose them. That was what they believed, and he knew it. ‘An army that believes in something – anything – will always defeat an army that believes in nothing.’

His army would believe in him.