Attila shook his head. ‘We were not followed. The Kutrigur will attack us precisely when I want them to - and in disarray.’
Chanat gazed steadily at his lord. He knew his lord was telling the truth, though he did not know how.
They slept.
The next day the villagers feasted them. It was the most pitiful feast they had ever known. They chewed and swallowed slowly, and exchanged looks and their expressions were much moved. They ate strips of nameless meat so dry they thought it would crack their teeth, and sour arak, and morsels of aarul cheese they had brought themselves, and they heartily pronounced it the finest meal they had ever eaten. The villagers beamed with pride.
Later the old woman, the priestess, took a sheepish adolescent boy by the hand and led him three times round a campfire whilst murmuring inaudible incantations. At each revolution of the fire she tossed a handful of grain into the flames, and the sound of her voice rose a little and then subsided again.
In the evening when they sat by the fireside Attila asked her what the ceremony was for. ‘For a wife?’
‘A wife! Is a wife such good luck?’ She rocked backward and cackled. ‘Maybe. Maybe to bring him a wife, to bring him good luck of any kind - rain on a dry day, a newborn calf, anything, any favour that the gods let drop from heaven.’ She eyed them slyly. ‘Perhaps you are the good luck he will have. Perhaps his good luck is to see the destruction of our enemies.’
‘Tell us what you know of your enemies. Tell us about the Kutrigur Huns, the Budun-Boru.’
The old priestess stirred the fire with a thin stick, prodding stray embers back into the centre.
‘By their names you shall know them,’ she said. ‘They have such names as Red Craw and Black Ven, Snakeskin and Sky-in-Tatters, Pebbletooth, Half-Ear, Bloody Midnight and Hawk-in-the-Rain. These are not the names of human beings. These are the names of demons out of hell.’
Attila jerked his head towards the dead warrior bound to his high stake. ‘Demons are not so easily killed as that.’
The old woman licked her lips and grinned slyly. ‘Perhaps you, too, are demons, but stronger demons than they.’
She gazed back into the firelight. Her smile faded. She said again that the Kutrigurs were not human beings, they were demons in the shapes of men.
‘Let me tell you about that people.’ She spat into the fire. ‘About that people, and about my own dying people.’
There was a long silence while the old woman called her story back to memory. When she spoke her voice was low and had great authority.
‘We believed that we were the whole human race, my people. There were no others. In the time before time, when Naga, the Great Mother, first lay with Ot-Utsir, the Cause of the Years, and bore us out of her womb, her children. When we first encountered others, crossing the great sand sea, we believed they were animals, not like us. Now we know we were wrong. But about the Kutrigurs we were not wrong. They are still not human beings. The Great Mother, on the day she made that tribe, dropped her clay in a bed of evil flowers: nightshade and ivy ... bracken to a horse. That is what the Kutrigurs are made of. Poison runs in their veins, snakes nest in their hair. Their nails are claws. They are the neglected offspring, the evil children, of Naga and Ot-Utsir, and it delights them to be so. For evil is like a potent drink. When you first drink it, you are sickened. But after a while you desire more, your appetite for it waxes, and you need more, and then more ...
‘We ourselves, we the tribe of Human Beings, are afflicted now with the curse of the Kutrigurs. The Great Mother has visited us in anger and we do not know how or why.
‘There was a girl—’ The old priestess stopped.
She was breathing rapidly - they could see her thin chest moving - and her face was bowed very low. Her fists were clenched tight upon her knees. They waited for her. She raised her face a little and went on.
‘In the days when we were still a great people, when we had more horses in our corrals than we could count, there was a girl, a beautiful girl.’ She swallowed. ‘She was like a bird, a sunbird, and her husband was like an eagle. She ... One day she rode out onto the plains with her son, her little red-cheeked son. The boy had seen two summers, two winters. Choro, he was called, for he would have been a great leader. He was too small then even to put his plump little arms right around his mother’s waist.’ She laughed a sudden, grief-stricken laugh.
They waited.
‘Her little boy. He held on to his mother as best he could with his pudgy fists. She took him out onto the spring plains to see the antelope. He loved to watch the animals - all children do. Her husband had said, “Take care. Take care of our son, for he is our firstborn and our only child.” And she had laughed and said she would take care. She had no fear, she threw back her lovely head and laughed. She was a sunbird.
‘They saw many antelope, and the girl took her slender bow, for she was a skilled archer, and she shot a hare and also a partridge for hearth and home. On their return they saw a lone deer, but the girl did not slay it, though she might have done. She was a sunbird.’
There was another long silence.
‘As the girl rode away for home she thought she heard something whistle in the air, and she was afraid. She rode harder, faster, driving her heels into the belly of her pony. But something was wrong. Some horror had come upon her. It was the whistle of an arrow that she had heard. Even as she fled like the wind across the steppes for home, another arrow whistled and struck with a smack.’ The prestess smacked her tongue up into the roof of her mouth, and the sound made the warriors flinch. ‘The girl felt a pain in her back, but the pain in her heart was greater, a horror in her heart. She called out to her son as she rode but he made no reply. She reached back with one hand, reins bunched tight in the other, and felt for him, and he was lolling back like one dead. The arrow had passed straight through the body of the infant, killing him instantly, and passed on into the girl’s own flesh. Not deeply, though deep enough. But it was not her own wound that wounded her to her heart.
‘She reined in her horse with a cry that echoed across the steppes like a howling wind, and she endured the unimaginable horror of reaching back and grasping that arrow in her fist, and wrenching it back by the flight out of her own body, and holding on to the dead body of her son as she almost fell from the horse, a wound in her back near her spine. Her dress was sticky with her own blood and the mingled blood of her son, as once their blood was mingled in her womb. Then in life, now in death.’
The weatherbeaten warriors who sat around her sat in silence, and some of their grim faces were furrowed with bright tears.
‘She lifted the dead body of her son to the ground, broke the head off the arrow and pulled the shaft from his body, and she kissed his face - quite without expression he was, he had died so young. She should have closed his eyes but she could not bring herself to do so. She passed her hand over his face, over his eyes, and looked into them, and they were wide open but there was nothing there any more. The light had gone out of them. She held him to her breast and wept.
‘When she looked up, horsemen were gathered around her. They dragged the dead infant from her and they put a few more arrows into him to make sure, though there was no need. And they threw her to the ground, wounded as she was, and each of them used her as he inclined. Afterwards they hitched up their breeches and spat on her and laughed and took her horse and rode away.
‘Such, great warriors, are the ways of the Budun-Boru, the People of the Wolf.’
The fire burned low. The night air was still and cold.
‘They are the demons that you say they are,’ said Chanat at last.
‘They had none to oppose them. They still have not, perhaps.’
‘The girl,’ said Attila. ‘Did she live?’
The old woman smiled a bitter smile. ‘Oh yes, she lived. She lay out on the ground a day and a night, and then she rose and found her son’s tiny body cold in the long grass and she bound it in cloth and carrying it in her a
rms she walked all the way back to the camp of her people. And she thought her heart would break.
‘But when she came into the camp of her people, and her strong husband came running to her, her eagle, her lion, his dark eyes flashing, his white teeth shining and his black hair flowing, so glad to see her again, and he saw with his own eyes the bundle that she carried in her arms in its bloodstained cloths.
‘Then her heart did break.’
She looked up at her listeners, and as one man they looked away, unable to bear her gaze.
‘It has not mended from that day to this.’
Their hearts were heavy. In their ears hummed a song of ash.
‘The man,’ said Attila at last, his voice very low. ‘Her husband.’
‘He never spoke to her again. He never forgave her. The next day he rode out alone against his enemies, against all pleading. She never saw him again after that day.’
The old woman bowed her head and there was a long silence. At last she shifted and turned, still crosslegged on the dirt floor of the hut. She reached back and pulled aside her cloak and shawl, unknotted her robe and pulled it apart. There in the dying firelight, beside her bony spine, they saw the puckered outline of an old arrow wound, and they understood. She pulled her coverings round her once more and turned back to them.
She signalled for the bowl of arak, drank deep from the bowl and set it down again. Her eyes were watery in the orange light.
‘Surely grief is great in this world,’ she said at last. ‘And I am not so old as you might think. Old age knocks on some doors sooner than others.’
The warriors took deep draughts of arak. They had nothing to say, nothing to offer. She had travelled far, much farther than they might ever travel.
‘And yet are we to rail at the gods, to blame them?’ she resumed, her voice stronger again. ‘For they made the Kutrigurs as they are, and we cannot know why. There are other tribes as terrible, in the eastern deserts, in the forests to the north. Our eyes are shut to their ways. So should we blame the gods for making us out of the suffering clay and setting us upon the suffering earth, knowing what our destinies will bring each of us? Are we to wail like children and be forever hating and resenting the gods as a foolish child does its parents? Are we to be forever cursing and bewailing our destinies like children? For does not a mother bring forth her child in a welter of blood, both of them weeping, and she knowing full well what grief and suffering and finally what death her child will have to endure? She is, as it were, bestowing these things upon her child as she bears it. And yet do we say wrong when we say that that mother loves her child? Would die for it, if she could?’ She nodded and smiled an inexpressible smile. ‘Oh yes. There are few mothers on earth who would not die for their children. Such is the way of a mother.’ She nodded again.
‘There was an old woman who taught me much when I was young, a priestess in her turn, who walked and talked often with Mother Naga. One day we walked out and we came to a young hare pinioned by a younger eagle, which had stooped on it and caught it and now stared at it as if stupid, not yet knowing how to kill. The first hare it had ever caught, perhaps. And so the hare had not been killed cleanly, as a full-grown eagle would do, but was in agony, stuck to the earth by the eagle’s claws, and it screamed. It screamed. And I, still a child then, with never a crack in my heart, I turned to the old woman whom I loved, and asked why the Great Mother did not come and save the poor hare. How could Naga let the hare suffer so? She turned to me and touched my head, and in that moment, in my childish way, perhaps I thought that this old woman was Naga herself. And she said, her voice so soft and gentle as I can hear it even now, she said that the Great Mother was not in some far distant heaven watching over all. She was no cold Queen of Heaven, no lofty princess, no artful, conspiring Cause of the Years. She was here, now. She was with us, suffering. She was in the hare. She was in the hare’s scream.’
The old woman nodded. ‘I believe it is so.’
The warriors drank and pondered and then slept.
6
THE TRIBUTE, IN WEIGHT NOT LESS THAN A MAN
Attila was up for the dawn as it broke over the earth.
He stretched his arms and his chest and grinned into the rising sun. It was a good day for fighting.
By that first light he rode round and inspected the village and the wide rocky plateau on which it stood. The attack would come soon.
Orestes was soon at his side. ‘So they have not tracked us yet?’
Attila looked out towards the slate horizon. ‘Or they have not yet chosen to. Do they even know about us?’
‘If they had followed us immediately and attacked us in the night?’
‘It would have been glorious.’ He turned to his Greek blood-brother and laughed. ‘We would have been massacred to a man, of course. But it would have been glorious!’
Orestes turned away, shaking his head.
‘But it did not happen. I knew it would not. They will attack when I am ready for them. Not before.’ He looked away across the plateau again.
‘Get the men up,’ he called after Orestes. ‘And the rest of the village.’
He ordered the villagers to take their few oxen down to the valley and rope up thorn scrub and drag it back to the village. He ordered the children out onto the plateau to gather rocks and stones, as big as they could carry, ‘and no smaller than your own heads’, which he had them drop round the perimeter of the village in a great circle. The rocks lay scattered in the dust, only inches high.
‘A powerful defence, my master,’ said Little Bird, nodding his topknot solemnly, ‘if they attack on mice.’
‘Go and gather thorns,’ said Attila.
‘I?’ Little Bird’s voice was high-pitched with indignation. He touched his fingertips delicately to his chest and gave a sarcastic, incredulous little bow. ‘I? Am I a mere shrub-gathering peasant like these dung-bespattered yokels?’
Attila drew his bullhide lasso and advanced on him.
Little Bird went to gather thorns.
Attila had them drag the thorns within the circle of the rocks, and bind them all together with strong ropes in a smaller inner circle, except for one narrow section which he had them rope together separately, to be dragged in and out of its gap like a thorn gateway. He demanded more thorns, stacked wider, higher. They brought more, and then he wanted more. They had to travel further down the valley each time, grumbling, hands and wrists bleeding from long thin scratches, vulnerable with their thin, exhausted, slow-moving oxen, eyeing the far horizon as they returned to see when a line of black clad horsemen would appear up over the rim of the world and their deaths would be assured.
Next he addressed the tired villagers. ‘I take it you have spades? Hoes?’
The people nodded dumbly.
‘Bring them.’
Attila’s men looked at each other doubtfully. Spades and hoes won no wars. They were wielded by mere farmers, drudges of the earth. No nomad ever wielded a spade. Farming was good for the Goths. But not for Huns.
Attila ordered them from their horses and into line and pointed them towards the heap of crude farmers’ tools.
‘Noble warriors,’ he said, ‘it is high time you leaned how to dig a hole.’
Finally, when they had dug to the point of exhaustion, there was one more task. He had his men unload some mysterious bundles wrapped in canvas that each carried slung from his packhorse. The villagers saw that each packhorse had carried all this way three long, fire-hardened staves, cut from the northern forests. This was a treeless country and the sight of so much wood astonished them. But it was not for burning.
He had the children bring pitchers of water from the acrid lake and pour it out to soften the cracked and adamantine earth. When the ground had softened sufficiently, he showed them himself, wielding a long iron-headed mallet, and with a flurry of mighty blows, how it was just possible to drive each stake into the ground at a cruel angle. He had them set the stakes in a circle inside the thorn brake
.
‘Inside, my lord?’ queried his men, puzzled.
‘Inside,’ he said. ‘The stakes are not for burning, but the thorn brake will burn only too well.’ He looked away. ‘Sooner or later.’
They did not understand him but, grumbling, they did all that he said. This madman, muttered the villagers amongst themselves, had already slain one of the warriors of the Kutrigur, as if to annoy them. You might as well annoy a hornet’s nest, or a herd of buffalo, run at them defenceless and naked, waving your arms and hallooing. What hope was there in that? What sense? He had slain a Kutrigur and then returned here for refuge. In their joy they had held a night-time feast, but now in the cold daylight they began to wonder again, and to doubt. He was a madman, with that sardonic smile, that harsh laugh. He loved adversity. Like a shaman who talks backwards, rides backwards on his horse, weeps when other men laugh, laughs when other men weep.
Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Page 19
