Attila: The Gathering of the Storm

by William Napier

  They rode south and east until they met the shores of the Maeotis Palus, which is to say the Marsh of the Scythians, which in the barbarian tongue is called the Sea of Azov. It is a haunted place.

  The waters were low after the long, hot summer. As they rode in the brackish shallows to cool their horses, they set off flocks of the little dun sandpipers that gathered along the fertile mudflats, gorging on tiny shellfish before their autumn flight far eastwards over the Sea of Ravens and so on to the sunlit lands of India for winter, when all of Scythia would be in the grip of the devils of ice and frost.

  ‘So,’ said Orestes at his master’s side. ‘Greeks.’

  Attila said nothing for a long while. Then looking ahead still he said, ‘It is not only swords and spears that give us power over the world. It is also facts. So much of what men have invented is but to hide from the facts. Religion is a coverlet to muffle the spiky facts. But the facts of the world were made by God, religion was made by men.’

  ‘And the truth?’

  ‘Aha,’ said Attila, turning to Orestes, his eyes dancing. ‘The truth. The truth is far otherwise than what men in their dreams and coverlets imagine.’

  They rode on.

  ‘Here is a fact,’ said Orestes after a while. ‘Your brother Bleda is already plotting against you.’

  ‘Of course he is,’ said Attila evenly. ‘Do you think I am a fool?’

  ‘Heaven forfend, Great Tanjou,’ said Orestes with exaggerated obsequiousness.

  Attila looked at him askance. ‘Forgo the flattery. That’s Geukchu’s domain.’

  Orestes smiled. ‘But did you know that Bleda has already sent a messenger with a letter to Constantinople?’

  He enjoyed a brief moment of satisfaction. Attila, for once, was taken by surprise.

  ‘My brother ... a letter . . . ?’

  ‘To request their help, and their gold, in regaining what is rightfully his, as the elder brother and lawful King of the Huns.’

  ‘My brother!’ cried Attila again, and this time he seemed nothing but delighted. He even dropped his reins and clapped his hands with glee. ‘He couldn’t plot an overthrow in a marmot burrow!’ He laughed, he roared. ‘Oh, my stupid brother, how you shall entertain us with your plans and plottings!’ He actually wiped a tear from his eye with the back of his hand. How good it would be to monitor this unfolding conspiracy. How pleasurable to spy on his brother’s manoeuvrings, as clumsy as a camel’s in a bazaar. How sweet to savour such knowledge and power. To wait and finally to pounce upon that slow-brained fool, and dismember him for his impertinence and folly.

  ‘Keep me informed,’ he said, his laughter at last subsiding. ‘Please.’

  ‘Should we not send out to kill the messenger?’

  ‘No,’ said Attila. ‘Not at all. It’s a fine way for the empire to hear of my return.’

  ‘The empire?’ said Orestes, quietly and wonderingly, as if he had almost forgotten that word in his thirty years’ of wandering.

  ‘The empire,’ repeated Attila. As if he had not forgotten the word or the thing behind it. Not one whit. ‘Rome.’

  They rode hard all day and into dusk, setting camp after dark some miles inland from the mosquitoes and fever of the Marsh. They chewed salt beef and drank weak koumiss and slept on the ground under their horse blankets. Each of them awakened in the dull hours before dawn to roll tighter into his coverings, the damp arising now from the dark earth beneath them to chill their bones with the whispered assurance of the shivering winter to come.

  In the pewter dawnlight he had them already roused and mounted and practising their bowshots at stand and at full gallop.

  They rode eastwards all that second day in silence. Formed up like a skein of wild geese behind their enigmatic king, seen by the eagles far above their bowed heads as a tiny black v moving slowly over the infinite plain.

  Far off they saw the dustcloud of a saiga herd, and a buzzard planed low towards them, swept over their heads near enough for them to see its unblinking amber eyes, and then glided on. They flushed a startled hoopoe from the long feathergrass at their horses’ feet, and on a low, close-cropped rise to their left they saw a marmot sitting up on its back legs regarding them, but it vanished into the ground before they could nock an arrow to the bow. They each cursed inwardly at the thought of even a few mouthfuls of its dark, oily meat. They saw no other game. On the third day they came through dry thornbrakes to a brackish inlet of the Marsh, half hidden by sallow and broken alder, and they tethered their horses and waited.

  Three nights from home, far out on the great plain. Waiting there by the sluggish, midge-specked water of the inlet for the herds, to come out like knives to hack at vulnerable hocks. But no luck. Not a chance. Shadows of birds. No herd came. And this the third night yet. Out of the night’s cliff they hollowed a little cave of firelight. The wind as if in winter had blurred their eyesight. Their eyes like ice deflected the warmth of the fire. Their hearts yawed and flickered feebly like the flames in the downdraft from the shallow swale above, when they saw that their king was gone, alone on the plain. He stood with his head thrown back, his arms outstretched, murmuring words under the moon. Then he was gone altogether. The night was still, the wind dropped. The stars burned. All the world was still. Their heads were heavy, their brains hummed a song of ash. When a trembling deer stepped into the firelight, which they took and killed for God’s and their bellies’ sake.

  They rode through long dry grass as pale as hay all the next day. Towards evening they reached low hills of bitterspar and came up through a shallow valley and crested a green rise, and there in the dusk they could see the distant torchlights of the Greek trading-station of Tanais. Low wooden houses, landing-stages, long logwood wharves, and the great river itself, stretching away limitless in the gloom. A dusty road followed the course of the river northwards, and men walked it or rode small ponies and rackety wagons.

  A manmade inlet alongside was clogged with the dark shapes of logs, felled and rolled down far to the north. For the forests of Scythia were limitless, while already the oak woods and chestnut woods, the cypress woods and cedar woods in the mountains of Greece and Cappadocia were growing bare. But such trading-stations as this dealt most profitably of all in rich furs, in the late winter and spring, when pelts were at their thickest: the dark of mink, the russet of sable, marten, beaver. From the mountains to the east came goatcombs of cashmere, straw-pale and greasy to the touch, for the mills of the empire, to be made into the finest robes for the lords and ladies of Byzantium. And from the north, down the great Scythian rivers, came long, shallow-drafted boats with whorled prows, crewed by blue-eyed, bearded northmen, carrying casks of precious Baltic amber.

  A little trading-post such as this, on the very edge of the empire, where the last homely lights finally gave way to the endless dark of the barbarian plains, might seem vulnerable to attack. But there had been a generation of peace now, and many of the tribes were foederati, allies or even paid auxiliaries of the Emperor of the East in Constantinople. The little torchlit town lay calmly beside the wide, slow river.

  Attila hazed his men backward off the rise until they could just see the road but were themselves hidden.

  ‘Is there no garrison in the town?’ whispered Orestes.

  Attila’s gaze remained fixed on the little outpost of empire below. ‘Probably.’

  It was almost dark, and some of the men would have been asleep in their saddles were it not for fear of their lord, when from the shadows of the town emerged a longer column. There were perhaps half a dozen mounted men, and then a painted carriage, with a further dozen or so men, women and children on foot behind. From the way they walked, a slow shuffle with shoulders bowed, it was clear that some if not all were manacled. But it was too dark to see clearly. The only colours were the cloudy blue and grey of twilight, the only lights the flickering of torches at the gates of the town and the flash of the troopers’ spearheads as they moved like leaves in the wind and caught the fir
st moonlight.

  Attila gave no word, no signal. He heeled his horse forward and rode down the slope towards the road. His men, their bellies cold with fear at this attack, held their horses back and waited unseen behind the rise, watching him go, the only sound the swish of his horse’s legs through the tall, dry feathergrass.

  One of the mounted troopers saw him approaching in the half-light and called a halt, but without alarm. They turned and held their spears ready.

  Attila rode forward.

  ‘Halt there!’ called one of the troopers, pulling round and riding over to him; evidently their lieutenant. Attila ignored him but made towards the carriage.

  At the sound of the lieutenant’s command, the drapes of the carriage twitched back and a face peered out. The well-fed city face of a Greek merchant. He almost yelped when, only feet away, he saw a mounted barbarian with knotted hair, wearing only breeches of cross-gartered deerskin, his silhouette in the darkness spiky with weapons.

  The barbarian addressed him: ‘Linguam loquerisne latinam?’

  The merchant, Zosimus by name, stammered that of course he spoke Latin. But he was surprised that . . . ?

  ‘Μιροσ μιλατγ Εληνικα?’

  The merchant could hardly believe his ears. A polyglot barbarian, a savage bare to the waist but for his gold earrings and his horrible tattoos of midnight blue, his silver armlets banded tight around biceps as hard as stone. This fierce-eyed creature without knowledge of the law, of letters or any of the other appurtenances of civilised life, addressing him out of the Scythian darkness first in the language of Cicero, then in that of Demosthenes - for all the world as if he had been raised by the finest grammarians and rhetors in the empire, rather than by some bejewelled barbarian woman in a felt tent stinking of leather and sweat and horse-dung fires!

  The lieutenant came alongside the barbarian and shook him roughly by the shoulder.

  ‘Back off, Top-Knot,’ he growled. ‘This column is on imperial business, and it’ll be the worse for you if—’

  ‘Μιροσ μιλατγ Εληνικα?’ repeated the barbarian, neither raising his voice nor shifting his gaze from the astonished merchant.

  ‘And Greek, too, naturally,’ blurted Zosimus. ‘But I fail to see why I should bandy words with a malodorous painted savage such as yourself. Now do as this good man suggests and—’

  Attila glanced back over his shoulder at his four companions, now only some twenty or thirty yards away in the dusk. Now he used the language of his people.

  ‘Kill the soldiers,’ he called.

  And they came galloping over the rise.

  He himself did not stir as the arrows flew around him. His horse whinnied and stepped delicately backwards as one of the humming arrows grazed just over its nose, but its rider sat as comfortably as if he were watching a mere game. It was all over in a matter of seconds. One trooper rested gently in his saddle with an arrow through his heart, his head drooping forwards like a flower in autumn. The others toppled sideways or lay dead in the dust beside their horses’ hooves. Attila walked his horse among the dead and counted. Then he turned to his men, milling around close by.

  ‘Six men with sixteen arrows,’ he said. ‘A reasonable performance. ’

  Then he saw a horse standing trembling with an arrow buried deep in its withers. Its forelegs seemed about to buckle but it gave a great heave of its ribcage, blood frothing from its nostrils, and remained standing.

  ‘Which one of you shot the horse?’

  After a moment’s hesitation, Yesukai raised his fist.

  Attila rode over to the young warrior and put his face very close to his.

  ‘Don’t - do - that - again,’ he said, his eyes burning.

  Yesukai could not speak.

  Attila rode back and pulled up before the wounded horse and drew his chekan, his short spike-hatchet. He pushed himself forward on his saddle, swung hard, and buried the long iron spike deep in the horse’s forehead, just above the eyes. As the priests would sacrifice the finest horses for a royal burial. He pulled the hatchet free and the horse collapsed and lay dead in the dust.

  He gave orders for the other five cavalry horses to be taken, then rode back to the carriage and looked in at the cowering merchant. There were two other men in there with him.

  One of them, with a petrified, thin-lipped smile, quavered, ‘My lord, I . . . I . . . These two, they are merchants, but I am a lawyer.’

  ‘A lawyer?’ said Attila, staring at him.

  ‘Indeed, yes.’ The smile grew sickly. ‘With connections in the highest courts in the empire.’

  ‘I hate lawyers.’

  A knife appeared in his hand, and he reached from his horse and drew the blade across the lawyer’s long, lean throat. The man’s head fell forwards instantly upon his sodden chest.

  The two merchants were dragged shrieking from the carriage and gagged and trussed up and sat on two of the captured horses, and they turned away westwards for home as the darkness deepened around them. At the last moment, Attila turned back and eyed the dozen or so silent, horror-struck men and women and children in their chains behind the carriage. None of them had moved amid the carnage.

  Attila said to them, ‘I once knew a boy and a girl who were runaway slaves.’ He looked down at each of them in turn. ‘The girl was not seven summers, and she died. Her name was Pelagia. A Greek girl. But even she had more fight in her than you.’ His horse tossed its head, teeth bared, as if in contemptuous agreement. ‘Free yourselves,’ he said to them.

  And he left them there, their armed guards slain but themselves still manacled, standing with mouths agape on the darkening road.

  As they rode west, Aladar came alongside him and said, ‘My lord, the lawyer - he was a shaman? One Who Knows?’

  ‘No,’ said Attila with a shake of his head. ‘Not a lawgiver, a dispenser of wisdom. A law-maker: a petty haggler in courts full of like hagglers. A man who lays chains on other men’s souls, who harvests souls for gold. In the Empire of Rome such men are highly regarded, and become orators, senators, politicians.’

  ‘Politicians? Politicians are like kings.’

  ‘No.’ He grinned sardonically. ‘Politicians are nothing like kings.’

  They rode on.

  After a while he said, ‘In Rome they have laws that forbid the people to ride in a carriage though the town after dark. Any who do so are punished.’

  ‘But surely such contemptible laws are ignored?’

  ‘No, they are obeyed.’

  Aladar tried to comprehend this lunacy, then roared with laughter at his failure. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ said Attila, ‘they believe themselves to be free men under the law.’

  ‘The lawyer, he bullied the people that way?’

  ‘No doubt.’

  Aladar scowled. ‘I would have cut his throat myself.’

  After midnight they slept for four hours, and in the cold before dawn they rode on beside the Maeotic Lake.

  The soldiers from the garrison at Tanais came after them as the sun rose behind them over the dark lake and the sky glimmered low and white and silver. Attila halted them and swung them round to face east, a tiny skein of wild geese on the wide sands. They watched silently for a while as the brightly armoured troop of imperial cavalrymen galloped towards them. They would be upon them soon.

  They beat the two trussed merchants unconscious and hobbled their horses, then kicked their own horses into a gallop. Csaba and Aladar veered left of the oncoming horsemen, while Attila led Yesukai and Orestes right into the shallows, all four keeping moving as they nocked, aimed and loosed their arrows from a distance already lethal.

  Attila roared instructions as they rode: ‘Hit the front horses!’

  Arrows hummed in the bright air and two horses stumbled, one going down in an explosion of sand. Over that sprawl of horse and man, another two troopers tripped and fell. The others came on, twenty or more of them. Two troops from a cavalry ala of eighty or so, in
light armour, with long, deadly lances held low. The un-armoured and outnumbered Huns eluded engagement, constantly reforming and then melting aside, galloping furiously beyond the Romans’ flanks and firing arrows behind them as they fled, or seemed to flee, then taking the higher ground the troopers had just abandoned. Ceaselessly the thin arrows hissed in the fiery dawnlight and slipped through thin chainmail hauberks and cuirasses and burrowed into chests and stomachs, and burst through again, men toppling ungainly to the ground.

  The troopers milled in confusion, most of them stuck with arrows in shoulders or thighs, blood trickling thin and watery over bright steel. Their lieutenant yelled to them to form up and close in with swords drawn, but they had lost all hope of closing with so ghostly a target. Again the barbarian horsemen wheeled down off the ridge into the burning early sun and then back, whooping with joy, turning on the spot almost at full gallop in a slew of sand and stone. Their brute-headed horses were driven back upon their squat, powerful haunches as they turned at a tight gallop, then rose up again and drove forward, straight out of the blinding light from the sun. Everything stinging and hurting and dazzling for the blinded cavalrymen as their assailants came skimming across the lakeshore, flying through the dreamlike shallows, the sluggish waters kicked up into arcs of quicksilver by flashing hooves, spangles of spindrift bright in that luminous morning. The ceaseless swish of arrows curving down through the bright air. The lost soldiers were in disarray, feeling the nooses and nets descending over their heads and shoulders, their horses crippled under them, their forelegs bound by hemp lassoes weighted with leaden hooks cast by these howling invisibles. The air was filled with the flash and dazzle of the mocking sunlight, and whoops of victory and nodding topknots and flying ribbons, wild white-teeth yells and blue tattoos fiercely pulsing. The Roman horses cruelly hobbled and spancelled, kneeling suddenly on the shining mudflats as if in penitence and hopeless supplication, and then the copper-skinned horsemen riding in alongside each baffled cavalryman, knocking aside his sagging lance and despatching him with a single thrust of dagger or spear. Sometimes the wretched cavalryman would raise an arm in a last gesture of defence, at which a Hun sword would slice straight through hardened leather vambrace and forearm both and lop them clean off, then despatch the rider. Men were turning and toppling all around, rolling forward over their horses’ lowered heads and dropping softly into the mud, the silvery water of those shining levels stained red by sun and blood, speared horses sighing and sinking into oblivion. The lieutenant was now just a headless trunk on the sand, gouting blood. The last few cavalrymen now seemed to wait like cattle for slaughter, or like a stricken herd of game surrounded by numberless and nameless predators. While the naked warriors laughed and chattered throughout the killing, as if engaged merely in some joyous ritual celebrating the endless wonder and changefulness of creation.