The Gathering of the Storm

6

When they arrived back at the Hun camp he was all authority and pragmatism again.

He made it clear only now that he had led the raid upon Tanais in order to kidnap the two merchants, so that he could take them back to the camp and force them to teach some chosen men the languages of the empire, and then send those men out into the empire as spies. They were astonished at his brazen confidence.

Such were the beginnings of Attila’s spy network, which in time was to stretch across almost all the known world, from the Christian kingdoms of Georgia in the east to the Gaulish shores of the cold Atlantic Ocean. Although his network never rivalled in sheer size and complexity that which reached out from the secretive courts of Constantinople and spread like probing, wavering tentacles into every important meeting-place and household in the empire, nevertheless for a barbarian king to have access to such a fund of information about his enemy was power indeed, and quite beyond the imagination of any other barbarian dreamer in his smoky tent.

Attila ordered the bruised and beaten Byzantine merchants to be efficiently bandaged, fed and watered, and rested, as you would a valued pair of stolen horses. He admired, curtly, the labour and the craftsmanship that had built his magnificent wooden palace in just eight backbreaking days, and he took possession of it at the head of his five wives.

Queen Checa walked alongside him and looped her arm through his as they ascended the steps and entered through the carved wooden doors of the palace. It was against all custom for a wife to walk beside her husband in such a way. But Queen Checa was no customary wife.

The following morning Attila appointed an overseer for the spies he would send out. It was Geukchu. He had his cunning counsellor select twenty men and, to the surprise of many, twenty women of the tribe, and isolated each group in a separate tent on the edge of the camp, where they would be taught to speak, understand and even write Latin and Greek. To the fury of the men, the women performed far better than they did, and seemed to derive pleasure from learning the operations of the strange shapes and squiggles that their reluctant instructor, Zosimus, drew with chalk on slate.

At unannounced times Attila himself visited the tents of the frightened pedagogues, and addressed the pupils sharply in either tongue. For he spoke both perfectly like a Roman, to the mystification and wonder of his people. They replied, stumbling at first, and then with increasing confidence as the weeks wore on.

One day Attila found that Geukchu had brought the two groups together, the men and the women, and ordered them to communicate with each other in the learned tongues. He asked him why.

‘In his bitterness,’ said Geukchu, ‘perhaps one or other of the kidnapped merchants might have been teaching our people wrongly, so that they would be found out when they travelled into the empire. But this way we can be sure they have learned the same and correctly.’

Attila smiled sardonically. ‘Wise Geukchu, to suspect every man of being as devious as himself.’

Geukchu brushed aside the backhanded compliment. ‘But why, my lord, could you not simply teach our people the two imperial languages yourself, since you speak both so learnedly and fluently?’

Attila eyed the flatterer. ‘I have other things to do.’

It was midwinter and the steppes were hidden under six inches of snow now for four long, bitter months. In Scythia, they say, there are really only two seasons, one of fire and one of ice. For mild spring and autumn are both so brief in that land of extremes that they are hardly noticed. The people’s black felt tents were laden with snow, and at times showed no more against the endless snowbound plains than stoats in their ermine.

One evening Attila called the twenty men and the twenty women to him in his fine new wooden palace, and gave them each a heavy purse of gold. But he ordered them otherwise to dress plainly. And then he sent them south, in the depths of winter, joking that they would appreciate the sunshine of the Mediterranean lands.

The women and the men went some as husband and wife, or brother and sister, or some in seeming family groups, and the king took care that none should go alone. And he sent them out south and west to the great cities of the empire, some to Sirmium, and some to Constantinople, to Ravenna and Mediolanum and Rome itself, or far to the west, to Treverum and to Narbo, or far south into the heat and dust of Antioch and Alexandria – strange destinations for those horse-people of the steppes! He told them to find work as scribes or servants for wealthy and powerful men, insinuating themselves wherever they might into the households of senators, patricians, landowners, bishops, prefects; and to describe themselves only as ‘easterners’ if asked about race and homeland. When they had important information, insofar as they could judge, they were to quit their masters at night-time and in secret, and sail home for the steppelands, never trusting a written message to any third party – in fact, never committing anything to paper.

From the distant ports of Massilia and Ravenna, Aquileia, Thessalonika, Alexandria and Antioch they would sail east again, through the Bosphorus and north to the shores of the Euxine Sea, stepping ashore at Tanais or Ophiusa or Chersonesus like the surviving Argonauts at Pagasae, bearing the Golden Fleece. And then upriver and finally by horseback to the camp of the Huns and the palace of Attila himself, where they would give him the treasure of their knowledge and he would bless them and bestow on them goblets and rings of gold beyond their dreams or imaginings.

With mingled fear and excitement, the spies left on their long and arduous journey.

As for the two Byzantine merchants, they had served their purpose. Attila never forgot or forgave their insolence to him on that dark night outside the gates of Tanais. They had learned now but alas, they had learned too late. On the morning of the spies’ departure, he ordered Yesukai and Aladar to take them down to the banks of the river. There they were ordered to kneel shivering in the long, frosted sedge, and the two warriors clubbed them to death, the most ignominious death for any man. Their bodies were rolled into the river, where they floated briefly amid the skim ice, the cracked eggs of their empty skulls trailing air bubbles, the grey roe of their brains floating in a greasy slick behind, steaming gently in the dawn in the freezing waters.

All that winter Attila waited, and into spring, when the ice on the river slowly thinned and vanished, smoking under the rising sun, and the snow melted away from the boundless land and the steppes turned as brilliant green under the sun as a kingfisher’s wings.

He waited in his solitude and his dreaming. Like the wolf, or the spider. Like the Iron River, the slow and steady and implacable Volga itself, for which, some say, he was named. But no man, I believe, will ever know the true meaning of his name.

In the royal palace, the wooden walls echoed to the sound of not one but two newborn infants, both daughters of the king. And in the tent of the king’s concubines, another score or more new lives were made. Attila himself named the boys. The girls were named by their mothers. Such names those proud, flushed women gave them as Aygyzel, meaning Beautiful Moon, and Nesebeda, meaning Everlasting Happiness, and Sevgila, meaning Beloved.

Out on the plains each day, throughout the bitterest winter winds, and then more willingly in springtime, his band of warriors, numbering as yet only a few hundred, galloped and wheeled under command, and learned to stop at an invisible barrier signalled by their commander’s call. They learned to fire their arrows at unimaginable speed, and the few bowyers and fletchers left among the people with the art still in their hands and eyes were set to work with a vengeance once more. His band of warriors grew strong, and, more important, confident in their strength. They began to long for battle to try their skills, and the strength of their souls.

One day one of the twenty chosen women returned, and went into the palace. It was many hours before she came out again, and she returned to her patient husband and her children with a pouch bulging with gold rings and a rare smile on her face. After that more came home, all that summer, bringing Attila the information that he wanted, and more.

At last all forty spies had returned, not one having run into danger through his own folly or failed in her mission. Thus he learned what he needed to learn, and daily grew stronger. The people too, the women as much as men, sensed this strange, growing power and energy among them and smiled more fiercely. The women sang their ancient harp-songs again, praising their men curtly for feats of arms, but scorning them lavishly and at length for weakness or doubt.

Their implacable king settled back upon his plain wooden throne in his wooden palace and, smiling, considered. For now it was time. The years pass, he thought, and all things ripen into sweetness. And there is a time, there is a time, to pluck the sweet ripe fruit of Rome. Or rather, to knock it from the tree and trample on it, for it is grown overripe and rotten and is no good to man or beast. And it is time. For I have counsel and strength for war. I shall make my people strong, and a mighty name among the nations. They shall no more be a laughing-stock, nor a footstool under the feet of foreign kings. Do not even the Christians in their holy book say that there is a time for love, and a time for hate, a time for war and a time for peace? Behold, my hand is strong; and I make my lands ready for war. From those sorrowful boyhood years of penal servitude in Rome, he could quote the Romans’ scriptures back at them as fluently as the Devil.

He smiled. Now it was a time for war. The gods must, after all, be entertained. Like their creature, man, straining forward in the arena to see the action… the gods, too, must be entertained.