The men shivered under the glare from those leonine eyes.
‘And your bows,’ he rasped.
His voice scoured the air between them, and some wanted to protect their ears with their hands at the sound. Then they broke and trotted bemusedly back to their tents, their horses almost tripping each other in their riders’ hurry to bring forth their bows. They returned with faces flushed like scolded schoolboys’.
Attila lined them up and demanded to know their names.
‘Yesukai,’ said the first, bright-faced, eager. He was the young man Orestes had seen move towards the burning tent after Attila. Attila regarded him. Even now, as he gave his name, he looked as if he wished to step forward, impatient with youthful energy. Hurried, impulsive, courageous, loyal. Attila nodded. He would die young.
Attila stepped his horse sideways.
‘Your name?’ he rasped again.
The second was Geukchu. He had cautious, intelligent eyes, a slightly crooked mouth, and was about the same age as Attila. Untrustworthy, certainly; but one who could use his brains.
There were three brothers: Juchi, Bela and Noyan, the three sons of Akal. Young and powerfully-built, expressionless, shy. They would never command armies, or the love of beautiful women; but they would fight and die for each other in battle. They were strong together.
There was Aladar, the tallest there, on the tallest horse. Lean but muscular, grave and handsome, with his long black oiled hair and his fine moustache. The women would go crazy over him.
‘How many wives in your tent, man?’
Aladar smiled faintly. ‘Seven too many.’
He would never have peace from women, this one. But there were enough scars on his arms to tell his king that this was no mere tent-lounger, wanting only to lie all day and all night with his seven wives while they covered him with their kisses, caresses, and fatal invisible chains.
There was Candac, a little plump around the middle but with powerful arms and a certain resolution in his round, well-fed face. This one might after all have the trick of command. He would die old.
And there was Csaba, who looked frail and dreamy and no doubt liked poetry and played a lute he had had since childhood. Probably just the one wife, whom he adored beyond embarrassment, kissing and embracing her even in public view. Attila knew the type. One moment he might be singing lullabies to a kitten. The next he would be going berserk on the battlefield, the limbs of his enemies flying, his head full of quite another kind of poetry. Half mad, for certain. But the half mad could fight, strong scarred arms or not.
Attila nodded again. Orestes had, as always, chosen well.
They rode out onto the plains under charcoal skies and beating rain. It was still only mid-afternoon on that tumultuous day, but it was as dark as a winter dusk. Some of the men looked askance at being led out into such a downpour, some of them bare-headed. But their leader showed no sign of hesitation. With his burned horse steaming in the rain, his face barbarically streaked with rain and smuts from the fire, he had ridden into and out of, like some creature protected by heaven, his sardonic eyes glittering under the dripping brow of his black felt kalpak, none felt inclined to question his leadership.
His silent foreign manservant slave rode uncomplaining just behind him, head bare and half bald, his skull shining wet. And then Chanat, the aged warrior of the tribe, his long hair a coarse grey mane still streaked darkly here and there, his long moustache luxuriant, a darker grey over his wide, set mouth. He was now in his seventh decade, perhaps, his eyes weakening, his hearing not so sharp as it was, but his body as lean and wiry as ever. His broad forehead bore deep wrinkles. All aged fast in the bitter cold of winter and the blistering heat of summer on those steppes, where the winds blew forever across the swaying and shimmering grasslands. But Chanat’s deepset eyes burned bright with inner fire again, and brighter than ever now as he rode proudly behind his new king. His big fist clutched his bow without a tremor, and he no longer doubted that he could draw it as well as any there. The copper torc still held tight around his muscular throat and nothing about him showed the slackness or defeat of age.
Attila pulled back beside him. ‘The one called Aladar. He is a son of yours.’
Chanat smiled proudly. ‘How did you know?’
‘He’s almost as handsome as his father.’
‘Almost.’ He ruminated. ‘That was a good night when he was begotten.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Attila.
The king rode with the long lance over his shoulder, the mangled burden of old king Ruga’s head impaled on the end, dripping pink rain. At last he stopped and twirled the heavy burden around as if it were no more than a straw, and stuck the butt of the lance into a marmot hole in the ground. The severed head with its gaping mouth, its fine earrings still hanging from its lobes, its remnants of hair plastered flat to the great skull, silver raindrops beaded in its beard, stared back at them through the grey bars of rain.
Attila pulled his horse round and hazed them back fifty yards or more.
‘Now!’ he bellowed into the wind and the rain. ‘A tenth of the gold in the chest to the first man to hit the target!’
With reluctance and even dread at first, but then with increasing, yelling competitiveness, their blood stirred by the barbarity and goldlust of the scene, the men milled around and took turns at trying to hit the head. None could do it. The wind played havoc with the flights. While they milled and fired, their arrows flying far to left or right or slithering through the wet grass and lost, Attila pulled back and observed.
After some minutes he rode forward, pushing his horse between the others. He seized a bow and a single arrow from Candac, the plump but tough-looking man on a white gelding. The eight chosen men fell back and watched as the king nocked the arrow to the bow and in one smooth, rapid movement, barely pausing to sight along the shaft, let fly. The bowstring hummed and the arrow flew askance then curved slightly in the prevailing wind, veered inwards and punched straight through the ghastly head on the lance, fell out and curved down into the sodden grass beyond.
The men stared.
He tossed the bow back into Candac’s lap.
‘One day, you will all shoot as well as that,’ he said. ‘One day soon.’
Then he wheeled and turned back towards camp.
The head would remain impaled on the lance out on the plain, as a lesson for men and a breakfast for the crows.
When the storm had abated and the clouds broken apart to show the blue sky again, he drove them out onto the plain once more. One of the wives called out that her husband would be no good for honouring her as she deserved that night: he would be tired out.
He called them to a halt and looked over them. Then he heeled his horse furiously and galloped back and forth, like a commander before a battle rousing his men, hurling his bitter words into their faces.
‘How do the Chinese call us?’ he roared. ‘How are we known in their records? How do they name us in their ancient annals?’ He pulled up violently before them and spat the words of insult full in their faces. ‘The Waste Wanderers! The Milk Drinkers!’
The men flinched and their faces darkened. They knew how despised they were in the cities of the civilised world, in the golden heart of China: that country whose very name it was ill fortune for any Hun to speak. Or far away in the mysterious empires of Persia and Rome, of which they had heard such strange tales.
‘In Rome,’ he roared, ‘how are we described in the histories of those swollen-headed tyrants of the western world? “A vile, ugly and degenerate people” – in the books of one Ammianus Marcellinus. Were he not dead already, he would be the first to be skewered lengthwise on a stake when we enter Rome!’
The men muttered their approval.
‘To the Chinese, we are “the Stinking Ones”. We drink nothing but milk and eat nothing but meat, they say, and we stink like animals and they wrinkle their delicate noses at us. In Chinese, our very name is traduced! And we Huns, we Hunnu, we the People, become the Xioung Nu. And what does this make us in the language of the Chinese? The Bad Slaves!’
Their blood boiled within them. Their horses champed and whinnied, stepping their forefeet nervously in the long wet grass. Voices rose from the huddled men in an angry, buzzing murmur.
He rode in dangerously close to Csaba and fleered in his face, ‘Are you a slave?’
