Attila: The Gathering of the Storm

by William Napier

  ‘You fought like lions today, and sent many a warrior of my people to his grave. But our old and our young, our women and our virgins, and even the tents and the corralled horses of our camp, you left untouched.’

  ‘It is our usual way.’

  Sky-In-Tatters grunted. ‘You are not the biggest fools I have ever met.’

  Attila smiled.

  Finally Sky-In-Tatters pushed himself up in the saddle, raised his spear and shouted a declaration to his ranks of exhausted and bewildered men.

  ‘From this day onward,’ he cried, ‘there is neither Black Hun nor Kutrigur Hun! There are only the Huns. And it is as we have heard. We shall be a great nation on the earth!’

  The fifteen hundred horsemen, despite exhaustion and injury and a longing for sleep rather keener, at this moment, than any longing for conquest or empire, responded with a mighty shout which was heard for many miles over the treeless steppes, and set even the golden jackals in their lairs shivering with fear.

  9

  GOOD MEDICINE, BAD MEDICINE

  Sky-in-Tatters took possession of Red Craw’s tall tent at once, and indicated that Attila should take his rest there, too. Seeing that he was wounded, he offered him a couch and sent out for a medicine woman.

  The bandit king lay down gratefully on a sheepskin.

  ‘We are the same people, you and I,’ said Sky-in-Tatters. Attila said nothing. ‘We are kings among men. And our men are no more desert Huns or steppe Huns, or, to the east, the Huns of the mountains. We Huns shall be one people, and we shall be the terror of the earth.’ He passed Attila a beaker of koumiss and gulped another down.

  ‘The villagers you fought so hard to defend,’ he went on, ‘those slaves. Why did you fight for them?’

  Attila laid back his head and closed his eyes.

  Sky-in-Tatters went on, ‘We know of your people, Uldin’s people of old, and how you forged west. We thought you had vanished over the rim of the earth, dared its uttermost bounds, and paid the price.’ He nodded grimly. ‘How wrong we were, and what a price we paid today.’

  There was a movement at the tent door and Sky-in-Tatters stood. ‘Your medicine woman. I shall leave you.’

  The woman knelt at Attila’s side, saying not a word, keeping her face bowed low. She very carefully unlaced his leather jerkin and pulled the sodden material gently off his chest. Her heart sank. The arrowhead was buried deep. No blood bubbled on his lips, so the arrow had not pierced his lung, but it was perilously close. He would have to be strong.

  ‘Push,’ he grunted. ‘Right through.’

  She reached for a long, thin steel bar. She would have to be strong, too.

  It was many minutes later that she was finally able to sew up the garish exit wound with horsehair and a fine needle, and poultice both entry and exit wounds with boiled herbs, and bind his chest with fine white linen bandages.

  How strong he would have to be.

  Suddenly an iron grip on her slender wrist made her cry out in shock and pain.

  He raised himself. ‘Do not try to poison me as you pretend to heal me, woman. You will not succeed. I will live, despite your poisons. And I will kill you.’

  She did not doubt him.

  Poison or no, the king grew steadily weaker. The arrow had gone deep, and pushing it free had caused much agony, much loss of blood. Perhaps there was infection. It did not yet stink in the way that said the gods had marked a man for death, even though the arrow itself was long gone. But he was fighting. His face was pale, and then he was racked by fever. They fed the fever as best they could, piling thick sheepskins over him until his face was bloodlessly pale and drenched in sweat, like ice melting in the sun. They made him drink only the freshest, sweetest water straight from the river, taken upstream each morning at dawn.

  Still the fever raged, and at times he ranted: mysterious and terrible words, verses that sounded like prophecies of the apocalypse. He muttered and raved about a king of terror, and the fall of burning cities, of a great lion, an eagle, and a rough-haired slouching beast who would yet come into his kingdom and exact vengeance for twelve long centuries of sin. The woman mopped his brow and made him drink and pitied him his nightmares.

  Little Bird came to visit him. His king could barely see him.

  ‘There is poison,’ he murmured, ‘but it came not from the woman’s hand.’ He choked a little and spat. ‘Where were you in the battle? I had forgotten you.’

  ‘Where was I?’ said Little Bird. ‘Surviving. That’s where I was.’

  Attila almost managed a smile. He looked sidelong at Little Bird and saw an old man, sad-eyed and weary. He forgot how old the shaman was, he always seemed so ageless. But not now.

  He held his hand out and Little Bird took it, like a son taking the hand of his father on his deathbed. The thick, snaking, ropy veins were fallen flat and gone, as if there was no blood left in him. Nevertheless, when Little Bird spoke, his voice remained sprightly and careless, such were the contradictions of his heart.

  He said he had learned that Sky-in-Tatters was in fact one of the sons of the old chief, Red Craw.

  ‘The eldest?’

  Little Bird shook his head. ‘But the eldest to live.’ His eyes glittered. ‘He is not the only great chief to have killed his father. I heard a rumour of it.’

  ‘Peace, Little Bird,’ croaked the dying king. He was like a very old man. Little Bird could not cease from his cruel barbs and pointed jests, for it was in his nature and in the nature of his wisdom to speak thus, yet even as he joked he bowed his head and wiped the tears from his cheeks to see his Father brought low like this, laid at death’s door on a bloodstained sheepskin bier, breathing painful rasping breaths, his chest arched, his ribcage straining, his lungs, his veins, his unbreakable iron body filling up with poison and decay. Soon death’s door would open and dust-grey hands would reach out and take him, and the door would close and he would be gone for ever. Then Little Bird himself would have no more reason to live than if the sun itself were suddenly snuffed out like a candle in the sky. For he would never live to see another king like this, and all his days would be lived in shadow.

  Clouds rolled overhead. The circle of sunlight on the floor of the tent was eclipsed and darkened.

  Orestes sat with him all day and all night, too, and hardly seemed to sleep. Sometimes Attila cried out, choking, and coughed up matter from his infected lungs.

  Orestes roared at anyone else present to get out of the tent. Then he wept, ‘My brother,’ and cradled his king’s head. Attila’s breathing was laboured and terrible to hear, and his face green and liverish.

  One visitor would not be frightened off, however. She came marching through the camp with her stick and a single pitcher of water, ignoring every cry and question. It was the old priestess from the village.

  ‘How did you know he was sick?’ asked Orestes.

  ‘In a dream,’ she said a little crossly. ‘How do you think? Now, out of my way.’

  She spoke to the king in a low voice, and then she drew off his bandages and used the water to wash his wounds.

  She nodded at the pitcher she had brought. ‘From the lake,’ she said. ‘There’s no pleasure in drinking it, but it salves all wounds, drives away all infections of the flesh.’ She grinned her one-toothed grin. ‘God alone knows what he put in it!’

  Orestes sniffed the water cautiously. ‘Salts,’ he murmured. ‘Saline compounds, incarnatives . . .’

  The priestess looked at him askance. ‘Long words won’t help your lord now. Pass me those wrappings.’

  The wounds seemed to heal faster under the old priestess’s ministrations, but the fever remained and the king grew weaker. The infection was inside him now. The old woman stayed with him - Orestes permitted it - and prayed over him tirelessly, day and night.

  Now, there was among the Kutrigur Huns the witch Enkhtuya, a sorceress, a seer, and a handler of snakes.

  Orestes and Little Bird were sitting with their dying king one evening.
The fire in the centre of the tent burned low. There was a commotion at the tent door and then there she stood within, smiling at them, her dark skin shining in the firelight.

  When Little Bird set eyes on her, his reaction was that of a madman. He hissed and wailed, and leaped to his feet, sending his little three-legged stool flying. He screamed and capered and stopped and stared and then screamed and capered again. He yelled at her to ‘Get out! Get out!’ But Enkhtuya only stood and smiled the more.

  Little Bird ran back and tore wildly at Attila’s arm and screamed that she must be turned out, she must be killed, her eyes were set with iron like a snake’s and her innards were nothing but a twisted nest of snakes. ‘Listen to me, not her, listen to me!’ he screamed, his mouth almost at the king’s ear. ‘She will not heal you! She heals only to harm! Turn her out, I say, or the Snake of Anashti will devour you and all your people!’

  Attila groaned. ‘Get the witch out of my sight.’

  ‘Yet the time will come, and soon,’ said Enkhtuya in her strange voice, high and whining like a stinging insect. She clawed the air as she was removed. ‘The time will come,’ she said, ‘and you will listen.’

  And it was as Enkhtuya said. Twice more she appeared in the king’s tent, and each time the king was nearer death. On the third day he did not order her to leave. Little Bird went berserk.

  Orestes was on his feet and pulled the shaman back, locking his arms behind him. Little Bird tried to kick his shins, but Orestes raised him painfully by his own twisted arms and then dropped him to the dusty floor.

  ‘Peace, fool,’ he growled. ‘Give your master some peace.’

  But Little Bird would not be silenced. He lay there babbling with anger and fear, curled up on the ground like an unborn child, lying on his side with his knees clutched up to his chest. Orestes gave him a kicking, until the little shaman leaped to his feet, dashed across the tent, fell to his knees and scrambled out through the tent flap.

  Orestes looked again at the newcomer. He had glimpsed her previously, far off, walking among the tents, and wondered who she might be. Even Attila turned his head, sallow, thin, beaded with sweat.

  She was an extraordinary figure, very tall - taller than most of the men in her tribe - and very thin. Her tawny hair, dyed that colour, perhaps, was twisted up and resined and knotted on top of her narrow head, making her look even taller. Her cheekbones were as sharp as those of a corpse, her lips very thin. Her age was indeterminate. She was very dark in complexion, and her skin was like honey, not the sweet, pale honey of Hymettus, but the darkest chestnut honey, gleaming and shining in the firelight. But her eyes were a pale, piercing blue, as blue as ice in slanting winter light. Everything about her was uncanny, wrong, and Orestes himself was uncertain of her. His deep, silent scrutiny of men and their hearts over the years had taught him much, and forewarned him now that this was no ordinary visitor.

  Impossible to say even what race she was, with that dark, gleaming skin and those pale-blue northern eyes. And though she was a woman there was no gentleness or hint of maternal kindness in that flat and bony breast. All practitioners of the occult arts know the uncanny power of that which cannot be defined. They practise their craft and cast their spells at crossroads, which are neither one road nor another, and at midnight, the witching hour, which is neither one day nor another. In Enkhtuya, who seemed to incarnate this shadow and uncertainty in her very self, neither quite dark nor fair, woman nor man, this power seemed magnified a hundredfold.

  Round her throat she wore a twisted snakeskin, and round her skeletal wrists and arms she wore further snakeskins twisted into torcs. The scales of the sloughed skins stuck to her own skin here and there and gleamed dully, and in uncertain light or in the soft light of the fires at night among the tents it looked almost as if her own skin were as scaly as that of her beloved snakes. She carried two live snakes in a little leather pouch around her waist, fearfully venomous. Sometimes she took them out and toyed with them, stroking their curling bodies, nuzzling them against her sunken cheeks and purring like a child with a kitten. They would stare at her with their unblinking obsidian eyes and flicker their grey tongues, and none came near Enkhtuya while she had those snakes in her hand. Perhaps they never bit her. But some said that they bit her often enough, for you can no more train a snake not to bite than a dog not to bark, and that it was only that Enkhtuya was under the protection of the moon goddess, and impervious to their venom.

  Others were not impervious, however: not the prisoners whom the Kutrigurs sometimes tied to stakes at the edge of the camp, and not the wounded and dying still groaning on the field of battle. Through the smoke and in the dusk, Enkhtuya could often be seen like some angel from death’s dominion, carrying her beloved snakes. Kneeling like a gentle nurse beside the wounded and dying, holding her snakes out as if they were little ministers of healing. Squeezing them just behind their heads to make them angry, she would kneel by a wounded warrior of an alien tribe, and hold the snake to his lips as if she were some demonic shadow of a medicine woman kneeling at the side of a sick man to give him a cup of water. Her eyes shone with delight as she watched the snake coming closer and closer to the dying man, the man scrabbling powerlessly in the dirt, perhaps the stump of a severed arm waggling as he sought purchase in the dust to crawl away from this nightmare apparition. At last she would put the snake directly on to him, and smile as it sank its fangs into his lips, his cheeks, his eyes . . .

  Enkhtuya was indeed a sorceress, and she knew well how to harm as well as heal.

  Now she knelt by the side of another dying man. She said not a word, for she knew as well as any monarch that silence is power. But Orestes said to her, ‘I am watching you.’

  She turned and gazed on him full with her ice-blue eyes, and even Orestes felt something shiver in his soul. Then she nodded. She understood him. She worked carefully.

  She produced a small pot containing a foul and choking mix of honey, salt, mutton fat and the juices of certain steppeland flowers, and she forced this noxious paste into Attila’s mouth. Soon he choked, and kept choking.

  ‘I am watching you,’ repeated Orestes.

  She worked on.

  As the dying king choked still on the foul paste, she lowered her head and put her ear to his chest. She moved her head a little and listened again. Finally she listened longest in his right side, near the original arrow wound: a long, rattling, gruelling râle.

  She sat straight again, slipped her hand inside her robe and pulled out a long, lean knife. She leaned close to the barely conscious king and seemed to sniff, like an animal. Then she neatly sliced open his bandages, positioned the tip of the knife between his ribs, near the old arrow wound, and drove it into the lung. The king arched and gasped, and there was a whistle of air.

  She looked up at Orestes from under her black brows.

  ‘If it runs pale, he lives,’ she said. ‘If it runs thick and yellow, he dies.’

  ‘Is that the extent of your sorceress’s powers?’ retorted Orestes savagely.

  She ignored him, and slowly drew the knife from the deep, narrow wound. Pus bubbled out after it.

  Orestes’ shoulders sank and he bowed his head.

  It ran as clear as water from a spring.

  She soaked up the pus with an absorbent linen cloth. She let it run again, and cleaned it again. Finally she made a little plug with a further roll of linen and sealed the wound.

  She stood abruptly and walked out of the tent, saying as she went that she would return tomorrow.

  Orestes slept where he sat, his head resting at the foot of his master’s bed.

  She was as good as her word. Each day at morning and evening she performed the same gruesome operation, and each day the pus ran a little less. By the third day, the king’s fever had broken. His breathing was careful and laboured with his good lung, but the other was healing fast.

  Enkhtuya made poultices and plasters of mullein and clover leaves, boiled hulwort, horehound, flax seed moiste
ned with the juice of houndsberry and woad. Attila coughed violently for a couple more days. But on the seventh day after Enkhtuya had come to him, he was up and on his feet when Orestes entered the tent.

  ‘You need rest!’ he exclaimed.

  Attila turned on him, snatching down his sword from where it hung on a tentpost, drawing it from its scabbard and swinging it at Orestes all in one swift, easy movement. Orestes ducked only just in time to avoid serious injury.

  He stood straight again. ‘Christ in heaven!’

  Attila sheathed his sword and grinned.

  10

  HUSBANDS AND WIVES

  At first there was discontent and opposition among his own men at the thought of joining with the Kutrigur Huns.