in the courts of Rome, it seems.’ He settled back in his throne and narrowed his eyes again. He stroked his tangled beard.
‘Lord Mundzuk, son of Uldin. Yes. I, too, am a son of Uldin, and the brother of Lord Mundzuk.’
Attila waited in agony, though in his heart he knew what was to come.
‘The great King Uldin,’ said Ruga, ‘died only lately, in his bed, his women at his side, and full of years. Only days later, Mundzuk was killed in an accident while out hunting. A single arrow… ’ Ruga shrugged. ‘The will of the gods. And who are we to question it?’
The boy bowed his head. His father, the all-knowing, all-powerful god of his boyhood world. The noble Mundzuk, beloved of women, admired by men. His reign over his people would have been great and long. And Attila had not even said farewell to him before his long and bitter journey, had not had his dying blessing on his head…
‘He is buried in a fine grave-mound,’ said Ruga, ‘a morning’s ride to the east.’
Attila did not move; he could not. His eyes were tight shut so that the tears could not flow.
‘Go now.’
At last the boy got to his feet and turned all in a single movement, so that Ruga should not see the tears springing from his eyes. As he approached the door of the tent, Ruga called after him, ‘The Romans maltreated you, you say?’
The boy stopped. Without turning, he replied, ‘They tried to kill me.’
‘You lie!’ roared Ruga, aflame with anger again, springing from his throne and pacing down the tent. He was a big man, but swift. ‘They would not dare so to insult their allies the Hun people.’
Then Attila turned, and although his face was streaming with tears his eyes were steady on the narrow eyes of his uncle. He said, ‘I do not lie. They tried to kill me. They tried to make it appear I was killed by the people of Alaric the Goth, so that you would turn against the Goths, the enemies of Rome, who are now their allies.’
Ruga stared at him and shook his head as if to clear the fog of bewilderment from his brain. He knew the boy spoke the truth. It burnt from his eyes with a light no liar could summon.
‘Those Romans,’ he muttered at last. ‘They think like vipers.’
‘They kill like vipers, too.’
Ruga looked at Attila again and saw him as if for the first time. He saw a certain quickness and strength, and of a sudden he admired him as well as fearing and resenting his return.
He laid his big hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Get some new clothes, see the women. And then go to the grave-mound of your father.’
Attila turned and left, Orestes trotting anxiously after him.
Ruga beckoned to Bulgu. ‘Bring me Chanat,’ he said.
A few moments later a tall, lean Hun stepped into the tent, naked to the waist, his hair long and oiled, his moustache black and resplendent across his high-coloured face. He showed no surprise or dismay at the command of his king. He bowed, and left the tent, and went to the great wooden corral to find his horse.
Heavy grey clouds rolled down from the north, and a bitter wind swept before them, as the boy rode out on his white mare, Chagelghan, to find the grave-mound of his father. He rode with his head bowed, and even the mare’s head hung low. The wind whipped around them, and then it began to rain. They rode east.
The vast and treeless steppe was obscured by hanging curtains of rain. The grass was flattened by the gusting wind from the north, and horse and boy both turned their faces away for respite and shelter. After some hours’ riding the rain abated, and a watery sun came out. Still far away across the steppe, the boy saw a break in the endless flat horizon, and it was the mound where his father lay buried.
He came to the mound and dismounted and sat cross-legged on the top. He raised his face to the last of the raindrops falling from the Eternal Blue Sky, and held his hands out wide, and he wept for a long time.
It took him all afternoon to ride back to the camp, and it was dusk by the time he returned. He went down to the river’s edge to wash away the dust and sorrow that clung to him. The riverbank was steep, but he slipped carelessly from his horse in his grief and exhaustion, and almost fell into the deep water. It was cold and he gasped and came back to life again. He stripped off his clothes, tossed them up onto the bank and sank under the water. When he came up again for air, the world was dark and silent around him, and he could hear nothing but the soft paddling of the sandpipers making their springtime nests even in the last moments of twilight. Making their nests, raising their young.
He began to shiver with cold and grief again, and started to scramble back up the bank. But it was steep and slippery, and his wet body made it more slippery and muddier still, and he slithered back helplessly into the water. He looked up, and there was the Roman boy, Aetius, at the top of the bank, looking down at him without expression, his horse standing close behind him. Attila’s eyes flashed with anger, but Aetius seemed impervious to it. He knelt down and held out his hand. After some hesitation Attila reached out and grabbed it, and Aetius hauled him up the bank; he was strong. He picked up Attila’s clothes and handed them to him. Attila pulled them on: cross-laced leather breeches, a coarse woollen shirt and a fur jerkin belted round the waist. They said no word to each other. Then Attila went over and got onto his horse as best he could, with his cold, stiff, trembling limbs.
The Roman boy mounted, too, on his taller bay mare, and they sat for a while and looked across the darkening steppe.
At last Aetius said quietly, ‘My father died the summer before last. I have never seen his grave.’
They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then Aetius wheeled his horse round alongside Attila’s and they rode back into camp side by side.
For a week more Attila was permitted to mourn the death of his father, then it was time for the ceremony. He had known that it would come soon…
He was grooming Chagelghan with a bristle brush when one of the warriors came cantering over. He reined in and waited for Prince Attila to speak first.
Attila jerked his head in enquiry.
‘It is time,’ said the warrior. ‘Your uncle the king and the holy men have decreed it.’
The boy nodded. He patted Chagelghan on her flanks, and whispered into her flicking ears one last time.
It was time for the ceremony of manhood and the Kalpa Olumsuk: the Death of the Heart.
It reminded Aetius of a Roman triumph, the way the people formed up alongside the wide ceremonial way to the Stone, while the boy processed between them. But the singing of the harsh, pentatonic songs and the wailing and keening of the women was anything but Roman. And the grim-faced priests of the tribe who followed behind, the front of their heads shaven and then pasted with blood-red paint, naked to the waist, wearing belted kilts hung with feathers and animal skulls, reminded him in no way of the well-born patricians who served as priests in the Christian churches of Rome.
Attila led Chagelghan close behind him, and his expression betrayed nothing. Any emotion except rage was unfit for a man.
Aetius had asked what the ceremony entailed, but none would tell him. It was his own slaveboy, the brown- eyed, soft-voiced Cadoc, who said something to him about it.
‘For many people, to become a man you must know your heart. But for the Huns, to become a man you must kill your heart. You must kill the one thing in the world that you love most.’
Now Aetius pushed through the crowd of chanting and ululating tribespeople, and watched in dawning horror as Attila drew his treasured mare to a halt before the great grey Stone at the end of the processional way. For the last time he patted her smooth white flanks. The crowd fell silent. There was a terrible tension in the cool spring air, and a sombre silence as once more they witnessed this ceremony that turned a boy into a man.
Attila kept his eyes downcast. His horse stood patiently by. At last he reached up and drew the long, curved sword from the scabbard that hung at his back. Without a moment’s hesitation, all in the same swift movement, he brought the bright clean blade down upon Chagelghan’s patiently bending neck. Her front legs gave way and she stumbled to her knees, her big velvet eyes looking stricken and pained, not understanding. The boy brought the sword down again with all his might and with a terrible cry. The deep wound he had cut into the mare’s neck went far deeper this time, and her spinal chord was severed. She sank down into the dust and oblivion. The boy cut down once more, and again, and again, crying words no one could understand, until at last the head was completely severed from the slashed and ragged neck. He tossed the bloody sword upon the Stone, and knelt before it. The crowd erupted into wild cheering and ululation.
Two men of the tribe seized the kneeling boy and dragged him to his feet. They raised him up so that he sat
