Attila: The Gathering of the Storm

by William Napier

  ‘Chanat,’ said the stone horseman. ‘Go to the camp. Bring us a spade.’

  Chanat frowned. ‘A spade, Prince Attila?’

  ‘Attila Tanjou,’ he replied. ‘King Attila. King.’

  Twice Chanat was questioned as he rode out of the camp carrying the spade across his saddle. Both times he ignored the questioners and rode on haughtily. In his heart, in his whole chest and throughout his stiff old frame, he felt the burn and surge of such excitement as he had not felt in years. His master had given him his orders. Nothing else mattered. A master who commanded respect with the crook of his little finger. Such a master as he had longed to serve all his life. Not that guzzling old degenerate back there in his royal tent, in his tunic of soft white Anatolian wool and his gifted purple robes of Byzantine silk. His ironbound chests full of Imperial solidi: massy gold coins stamped with the legends of alien religions and the heads of foreign kings. With wine stains in his beard, snoring with his head in some captive young girl’s lap, while the swords and spears hung rusting from the tent-posts. There atop the grave of Mundzuk sat a true commander of men, haughty and unhesitating in his pauper’s vestments of beaten peltry and dusty hide: a Tanjou. A King.

  Chanat rode out past the bored and curious watchmen, for all the world ready to thwack them across the skull with the flat of the spade if they should dare to try and stop him. They didn’t. The lean, grim-faced old warrior still commanded respect in this sleepy camp of the Huns.

  He held the spade out to the King. His King. How many more offerings he would willingly make to him, not excluding the spilling of his thin and ancient blood.

  ‘Orestes,’ said the King.

  The fair-skinned Greek took the spade from Chanat and slipped gracefully from his horse.

  Attila rode down from the mound on the eastern side and looked back. ‘Dig there,’ he said, with a jerk of his capped head.

  ‘You are going to break open one of the mounds of—’

  Under the King’s sudden, ferocious glare, even Chanat stumbled for a moment. But then he pressed on. This was a King who would not resent a man speaking his mind, if his mind was true.

  ‘One of the mounds of the Buried Kings?’

  ‘The mound of Mundzuk,’ said Attila. ‘The mound of my father.’

  A shadow passed over Chanat’s face but he said nothing. They sat back and watched until Orestes had dug through to the heart of the mound, clearing the black chernozem earth from around the heaped burial stones. Attila himself dismounted and knelt beside the long cairn of stones, and removed them one by one with utmost delicacy. He paused for a long while before reaching in. Brushing aside the fallen earth within, he laid his warm palm flat on the cold bone forehead of his father and prayed for his forgiveness and understanding. He knelt a long while, then reached his other hand in, and seemed to be tugging at the forlorn and soiled skeleton itself. At last with a gasp he pulled free, got swiftly to his feet and vaulted back onto his horse. The two men, the tough Greek servant and the wiry old warrior, took it in turns to replace the stones and heap the earth back into the gaping wound that had been rent in that sacred earth and then laid back the turf. Finally, they tamped it down with the flat of the spade and all was as before.

  They remounted and drove their horses up onto the long barrow. The King held his right arm up over the mound, and in a low keening voice repeated a part of the great Hunnish prayer for the burial of the dead.

  Then they heeled their horses and rode forward, down the steep slope of the grave-mound and towards the quietly smoking camp of the Huns.

  Nearing the camp, Attila reined in his horse and his two men stopped beside him.

  He turned to Chanat. ‘He was buried without his horses, without his wives or his slavegirls.’ His voice grew in intensity. ‘Without one gold ring for his journey.’

  Chanat could not look him in the eye.

  ‘Speak,’ rasped Attila.

  With a look of pain, Chanat said softly, ‘Oh, do not ask me, Tanjou. Do not ask me about the dead.’

  Attila looked to the far horizon. As if he would cut the throat of the horizon itself. Then they rode on.

  2

  THE BURNING TENT

  The Hun camp lay near a bend of the wide River Dnieper, which by the Greeks is called the Borysthenes. Its headwaters rise far to the north among the frozen mountains, and even at the end of the burning summer it still flows wide and serene through the grasslands towards the Euxine Sea. There the Huns had lazed all summer long, drying and salting perch, feasting on the great sturgeon of the river, shooting wildfowl, and hunting the plump grass-fed saiga antelope as they came down to the water at dusk to drink. Once the summer had been the season for war and the winter for peace. Now it was a long time since the Huns had been at war, even with their tribal neighbours, and peace lasted all the long year round.

  At the entrance to the huge sprawl of the camp, the watchmen looked uncertainly at Chanat and his new companions. One of them reached out and seized the rope reins of Orestes’ horse, and the Greek halted without protest. But Attila rode on in, and when he fixed his eyes upon the watchmen none dared stop him. He came to the Royal tent and lowered his head, kicked his horse and rode straight on in between the tentflaps, appearing in the great outer chamber still mounted. Two warriors levelled their spears at him and one demanded his name.

  ‘Nameless-under-a-Curse,’ he said, swinging one leg forwards over the head of his horse and slipping to the ground. He made towards the curtained inner chamber. One of the two warriors stepped before him and then doubled up in an instant, bowed over Attila’s bright sword-blade in his stomach. He lurched backwards and sat down, bleeding heavily. The other warrior came at him with his spear held low but Attila broke the spearhaft in two with a ferocious sideswipe of his sword, stepped in close alongside the warrior and drove the blade underarm between his ribs. He walked on, never pausing, wrenching the sword-blade free as the warrior fell dead behind him.

  He grasped the curtain to the inner chamber, fine Byzantine silk, and pulled it to the ground and trod it underfoot. There was King Ruga, stumbling up from his couch, a young girl kneeling at his feet. The king stared blearily at the newcomer. He had grown fat in the intervening years, but was still an impressive figure in his early sixties, with his full beard so unlike the typical Hunnish, and his powerful, rounded shoulders. But his snub nose was as purple as vintage wine and his eyes were puffy and bloodshot. He glanced down at the girl and gave her a kick, sending her scurrying away, then looked up again at the figure before him. For all his wine-sodden trembling, he showed no fear.

  ‘Who sent you?’ he demanded roughly.

  ‘Who sent me?’ Attila smiled. ‘Astur. Astur sent me.’

  Ruga stared.

  The stranger reached up and pulled his kalpak back from his wide, sunburned brow, and the old king saw three faint, reddish scars. The scars on the stranger’s cheeks were blue-dyed and delicate, done in babyhood by his mother no doubt. He was clearly one of the people. But the scars across his forehead were not of the custom of the country. Except for traitors condemned to exile and death.

  Attila stood in stony silence before him, his sword-blade dripping. Ruga seemed oblivious, baffled, and then, astonishingly, joyful. He stepped forward and threw his bearlike arms around him. ‘My boy!’ he cried. ‘After thirty years, you have come back! Surely Astur sent you. Surely Astur watched over you and sheltered you under his wings for thirty years!’

  He let go and stood away from him. He began to babble. ‘I never believed I should see you again, when I sent you away according to the law and custom of the tribe. For not even a king may overrule the law of his people. Remember that, my boy, when you come into your kingdom. But oh, Attila, I would have given you everything—’

  ‘You slew my father,’ said Attila. He held out his left hand and opened it palm upwards. ‘Here is the arrowhead I took from his skeleton today. From his miserable and unaccompanied grave.’

  Ruga stared at
him, blear-eyed, faltering. Finally he turned and sat on the couch. ‘Sit beside me,’ he said.

  Attila stood before him.

  ‘Attila,’ said the old king. He reached out a plump, palsied hand as if to touch his face, his traitor’s scars, but let it fall again. He took a deep breath and exhaled. ‘Mundzuk was not a man to revere. He was killed, yes. And there was none to dispute the killing with me.’

  Attila’s eyes blazed but he could say nothing.

  ‘Memory is strange, and imagination often mimics it.’ Ruga shook his head almost with sorrow. ‘You know the law of the tribe. After Bleda, your elder brother, was born, Mundzuk never lay with your mother again. In the grave-mound his bones now lie alone. Yes, embrace me, boy. For I—’

  Attila fell forwards upon the king’s neck and threw his arms round him.

  Ruga wept at such a homecoming, such an effusion of grief and happiness. ‘My boy,’ he said, ‘my boy . . .’ His voice, broken with emotion, caught in his throat. Then it stopped altogether and nothing came from his open astonished red mouth but an empty gasp.

  Attila pulled back and set his hands round the old man’s neck, the arrowhead that killed Mundzuk still clutched in his left hand. With a grip like the jaws of a wolf he forced the arrowhead slowly into the gagging king’s throat.

  ‘You lie,’ he said softly.

  Ruga’s mottled hands fluttered over the hands that bulged with muscle round his neck, but they were as ineffectual as moths. His slippered feet scrabbled upon the reedmat for purchase, and his eyes turned upwards beseechingly. Attila pressed harder, the arrowhead pushing through the king’s fleshy wattles and penetrating his windpipe, blood oozing between his murderer’s fingers, frothing with bubbles that arose from collapsing lungs.

  ‘My boy,’ wheezed the dying king. ‘My son ...’

  Attila laid one hand across Ruga’s forehead and pushed his head back, and with the thumb of his other hand he pushed the arrowhead deeper into the gory throat. The tip of the soiled and rusting arrowhead grated against the spinal column, and then with a final vicious shove it broke through and the old king was dead. Attila shucked his thumb free from the garish hole. Blood gouted out after it, then slowed to a trickle and ceased.

  Attila stood back, perspiring, his hands glistening with blood, his eyes fixed on the dead man before him. His chest heaved and he looked like a man who was still locked in combat. He shook his head violently. Drawing his sword, he grasped a hank of the old king’s faded hair and sliced his head off.

  He walked out into the main audience chamber, remounted his horse, which had stood waiting and watching patiently this butchery, pulled it round and rode back out of the tent.

  Outside, in the natural arena formed by the circle of tents of the chief Lords of the Tribe, at the very centre of the camp, he cast the severed head with its astonished open mouth into the dust and sat and waited. Slowly the horrified people gathered. Men with soft stomachs and open mouths like the dead king’s, women with big, frightened eyes nursing infants, grubby children crawling forward between their parents’ legs to see. No more than a few hundred people in all, and many more men than women. For childbirth had winnowed the women year by year, but for a generation now there had been no wars to winnow the men. A ragged, dusty, peaceful, gentle people.

  As he looked out over them, a voice, the voice of Chanat, called out, ‘Hail, King Attila!’

  As one, the people echoed, ‘Hail, King Attila!’

  Still Attila looked out over his people, unsmiling.

  After a long, uneasy silence, he summoned Chanat to his side. ‘Bring me a brand.’

  Chanat rode over to the ranks of standing tribespeople and they scurried away to do his bidding. No fewer than eight smoking rush torches were soon being offered to him. He chose the one that burned brightest and returned to his king. Attila took the torch, in his right hand, pulled his horse round, rode back to the royal tent and cast the flaming brand against the white felt walls. Immediately the flames began to devour them and the wooden posts they hung from.

  ‘My lord,’ said Chanat coming up beside him. ‘The girl ...’

  ‘Hm,’ said Attila, looking back at him and stroking his thin beard unhurriedly. ‘And the gold.’

  He drove his heels into the flanks of his horse, and the terrified beast rose up on its back legs and whinnied, the stench of greasy burning felt already foul in its nostrils. Attila pulled his looped lasso from his belt and thrashed the poor beast mercilessly across its rump, his other hand bunched so tightly in the rope reins that the horse’s muzzle was pulled right in to its neck. His heels drove into the creature’s heaving flanks as it reared again and screamed a final protest from its half-throttled throat, and then plunged forward and through the flaming door of the tent.

  The people stared. Not for a generation had they seen such things. And this, they knew, was only the beginning.

  Behind the ranks of watching people, another watched. The silent Greek servant of the new king. The people watched the flaming tent. The servant watched the people. One fellow, a youth of no more than twenty, took a step forwards towards the tent, as if willing to go after his king. Orestes smiled almost imperceptibly to himself.

  One wall of the tent collapsed as the wooden supports within gave way, and the roar of the flames grew more furious. People stepped back from the intense heat. Some looked to Chanat but he did not stir. Flames gouted high into the louring shield-grey sky, sparks erupting still higher, ash and scraps and tatters of blackened felt spiralling up to heaven like some deranged offering to the gods. The tent was an inferno. No man could survive it. Surely today the tribe had been visited not by a murderer or a usurper but by a simple madman.

  And then horse and rider came rearing back through the flaming tatters of the tent, galloped free and skidded to a halt in the dust before the crowd. The people stared. The horse’s coat was actually smoking, and the stink of burned hair was foul in the air. The horseman’s face was blackened and his eyes blazed red from his face. A bolt of lightning came out of the sky, out of the outraged heavens, and struck the last standing tentpole of the royal tent and dashed it to the ground. The new king did not even look round, and his panting, smouldering horse did not stir. The lightning came with no thunder, they later swore, and no first few hesitant drops of rain that might extinguish the monstrous pyre behind. The collapsed tent blazed on into oblivion. The gods willed it.

  Against the awesome backdrop of blood-orange fire, the blackened horseman sat and looked out again over his people. Then he pulled free the bundle that lay across his lap and dropped it to the ground. It was the young girl whom the dead king had so favoured, wrapped in a rug to save her pale skin from burning. She stumbled to her feet and stepped backwards, away from the terrifying vision of the burned horseman. He half turned and hauled on his lasso, and the people saw that he had also dragged free of the inferno the dead king’s great treasure chest. Their eyes gleamed, and not from the fire alone.

  The deranged horseman, the burned king, whoever this being was, flicked his lasso and it came free of the handles of the chest. He nodded to Chanat, and the old warrior dismounted, went over to the chest and gave it a mighty blow with his axe. Something cracked inside it. He grasped the heavy lid and lifted. The chest was full to the brim with gold coins.

  The smouldering horseman began to ride back and forth before his people, as a general might before the standing ranks of his men before a battle. In a strange, singsong voice, he recited:

  ‘What force or guile could not subdue

  Through many warlike ages,

  Is wrought now by a coward few,

  For hireling traitors’ wages,’

  They shifted uncomfortably.

  His voice grew harsher. ‘But no more. A people who were once great warriors, feared from the Altai mountains to the Sea of Ravens, and to the very banks of the Danube, shall be so again. The gods are with us.’ He fixed his blazing eyes on his chosen people, and they looked back at him and se
emed to feel something ignited in their souls.

  ‘As for the gold,’ he said contemptuously, glancing at the chest, riven-open where it lay. ‘you can have it. No true warrior glories in mere gold.’

  He stopped and looked over them again and seemed to sit taller in his saddle. ‘I am Attila. I am your king. I am the son of Mundzuk, the son of Uldin, exiled for thirty summers by the word of a dead man.’ He looked at the remains of the burning tent, and then back over the faces all spellbound by this vision. Some bowed their heads as if in collective shame. But his voice surprised them, growing gentle.