The waters were low after the long, hot summer. As they rode in the brackish shallows to cool their horses, they set off flocks of the little dun sandpipers that gathered along the fertile mudflats, gorging on tiny shellfish before their autumn flight far eastwards over the Sea of Ravens and so on to the sunlit lands of India for winter, when all of Scythia would be in the grip of the devils of ice and frost.
‘So,’ said Orestes at his master’s side. ‘Greeks.’
Attila said nothing for a long while. Then looking ahead still he said, ‘It is not only swords and spears that give us power over the world. It is also facts. So much of what men have invented is but to hide from the facts. Religion is a coverlet to muffle the spiky facts. But the facts of the world were made by God, religion was made by men.’
‘And the truth?’
‘Aha,’ said Attila, turning to Orestes, his eyes dancing. ‘The truth. The truth is far otherwise than what men in their dreams and coverlets imagine.’
They rode on.
‘Here is a fact,’ said Orestes after a while. ‘Your brother Bleda is already plotting against you.’
‘Of course he is,’ said Attila evenly. ‘Do you think I am a fool?’
‘Heaven forfend, Great Tanjou,’ said Orestes with exaggerated obsequiousness.
Attila looked at him askance. ‘Forgo the flattery. That’s Geukchu’s domain.’
Orestes smiled. ‘But did you know that Bleda has already sent a messenger with a letter to Constantinople?’
He enjoyed a brief moment of satisfaction. Attila, for once, was taken by surprise.
‘My brother… a letter…?’
‘To request their help, and their gold, in regaining what is rightfully his, as the elder brother and lawful King of the Huns.’
‘My brother!’ cried Attila again, and this time he seemed nothing but delighted. He even dropped his reins and clapped his hands with glee. ‘He couldn’t plot an overthrow in a marmot burrow!’ He laughed, he roared. ‘Oh, my stupid brother, how you shall entertain us with your plans and plottings!’ He actually wiped a tear from his eye with the back of his hand. How good it would be to monitor this unfolding conspiracy. How pleasurable to spy on his brother’s manoeuvrings, as clumsy as a camel’s in a bazaar. How sweet to savour such knowledge and power. To wait and finally to pounce upon that slow-brained fool, and dismember him for his impertinence and folly.
‘Keep me informed,’ he said, his laughter at last subsiding. ‘Please.’
‘Should we not send out to kill the messenger?’
‘No,’ said Attila. ‘Not at all. It’s a fine way for the empire to hear of my return.’
‘The empire?’ said Orestes, quietly and wonderingly, as if he had almost forgotten that word in his thirty years’ of wandering.
‘The empire,’ repeated Attila. As if he had not forgotten the word or the thing behind it. Not one whit. ‘Rome.’
They rode hard all day and into dusk, setting camp after dark some miles inland from the mosquitoes and fever of the Marsh. They chewed salt beef and drank weak koumiss and slept on the ground under their horse blankets. Each of them awakened in the dull hours before dawn to roll tighter into his coverings, the damp arising now from the dark earth beneath them to chill their bones with the whispered assurance of the shivering winter to come.
In the pewter dawnlight he had them already roused and mounted and practising their bowshots at stand and at full gallop.
They rode eastwards all that second day in silence. Formed up like a skein of wild geese behind their enigmatic king, seen by the eagles far above their bowed heads as a tiny black v moving slowly over the infinite plain.
Far off they saw the dustcloud of a saiga herd, and a buzzard planed low towards them, swept over their heads near enough for them to see its unblinking amber eyes, and then glided on. They flushed a startled hoopoe from the long feathergrass at their horses’ feet, and on a low, close-cropped rise to their left they saw a marmot sitting up on its back legs regarding them, but it vanished into the ground before they could nock an arrow to the bow. They each cursed inwardly at the thought of even a few mouthfuls of its dark, oily meat. They saw no other game. On the third day they came through dry thornbrakes to a brackish inlet of the Marsh, half hidden by sallow and broken alder, and they tethered their horses and waited.
Three nights from home, far out on the great plain. Waiting there by the sluggish, midge-specked water of the inlet for the herds, to come out like knives to hack at vulnerable hocks. But no luck. Not a chance. Shadows of birds. No herd came. And this the third night yet. Out of the night’s cliff they hollowed a little cave of firelight. The wind as if in winter had blurred their eyesight. Their eyes like ice deflected the warmth of the fire. Their hearts yawed and flickered feebly like the flames in the downdraft from the shallow swale above, when they saw that their king was gone, alone on the plain. He stood with his head thrown back, his arms outstretched, murmuring words under the moon. Then he was gone altogether. The night was still, the wind dropped. The stars burned. All the world was still. Their heads were heavy, their brains hummed a song of ash. When a trembling deer stepped into the firelight, which they took and killed for God’s and their bellies’ sake.
They rode through long dry grass as pale as hay all the next day. Towards evening they reached low hills of bitterspar and came up through a shallow valley and crested a green rise, and there in the dusk they could see the distant torchlights of the Greek trading-station of Tanais. Low wooden houses, landing-stages, long logwood wharves, and the great river itself, stretching away limitless in the gloom. A dusty road followed the course of the river northwards, and men walked it or rode small ponies and rackety wagons.
A manmade inlet alongside was clogged with the dark shapes of logs, felled and rolled down far to the north. For the forests of Scythia were limitless, while already the oak woods and chestnut woods, the cypress woods and cedar woods in the mountains of Greece and Cappadocia were growing bare. But such trading-stations as this dealt most profitably of all in rich furs, in the late winter and spring, when pelts were at their thickest: the dark of mink, the russet of sable, marten, beaver. From the mountains to the east came goatcombs of cashmere, straw-pale and greasy to the touch, for the mills of the empire, to be made into the finest robes for the lords and ladies of Byzantium. And from the north, down the great Scythian rivers, came long, shallow-drafted boats with whorled prows, crewed by blue-eyed, bearded northmen, carrying casks of precious Baltic amber.
A little trading-post such as this, on the very edge of the empire, where the last homely lights finally gave way to the endless dark of the barbarian plains, might seem vulnerable to attack. But there had been a generation of peace now, and many of the tribes were foederati, allies or even paid auxiliaries of the Emperor of the East in Constantinople. The little torchlit town lay calmly beside the wide, slow river.
Attila hazed his men backward off the rise until they could just see the road but were themselves hidden.
‘Is there no garrison in the town?’ whispered Orestes.
Attila’s gaze remained fixed on the little outpost of empire below. ‘Probably.’
It was almost dark, and some of the men would have been asleep in their saddles were it not for fear of their lord, when from the shadows of the town emerged a longer column. There were perhaps half a dozen mounted men, and then a painted carriage, with a further dozen or so men, women and children on foot behind. From the way they walked, a slow shuffle with shoulders bowed, it was clear that some if not all were manacled. But it was too dark to see clearly. The only colours were the cloudy blue and grey of twilight, the only lights the flickering of torches at the gates of the town and the flash of the troopers’ spearheads as they moved like leaves in the wind and caught the first moonlight.
Attila gave no word, no signal. He heeled his horse forward and rode down the slope towards the road. His men, their bellies cold with fear at this attack, held their horses back and waited unseen behind the rise, watching him go, the only sound the swish of his horse’s legs through the tall, dry feathergrass.
One of the mounted troopers saw him approaching in the half-light and called a halt, but without alarm. They turned and held their spears ready.
Attila rode forward.
‘Halt there!’ called one of the troopers, pulling round and riding over to him; evidently their lieutenant. Attila ignored him but made towards the carriage.
At the sound of the lieutenant’s command, the drapes of the carriage twitched back and a face peered out.
