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 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.
