tight gallop, then rose up again and drove forward, straight out of the blinding light from the sun. Everything stinging and hurting and dazzling for the blinded cavalrymen as their assailants came skimming across the lakeshore, flying through the dreamlike shallows, the sluggish waters kicked up into arcs of quicksilver by flashing hooves, spangles of spindrift bright in that luminous morning. The ceaseless swish of arrows curving down through the bright air. The lost soldiers were in disarray, feeling the nooses and nets descending over their heads and shoulders, their horses crippled under them, their forelegs bound by hemp lassoes weighted with leaden hooks cast by these howling invisibles. The air was filled with the flash and dazzle of the mocking sunlight, and whoops of victory and nodding topknots and flying ribbons, wild white-teeth yells and blue tattoos fiercely pulsing. The Roman horses cruelly hobbled and spancelled, kneeling suddenly on the shining mudflats as if in penitence and hopeless supplication, and then the copper-skinned horsemen riding in alongside each baffled cavalryman, knocking aside his sagging lance and despatching him with a single thrust of dagger or spear. Sometimes the wretched cavalryman would raise an arm in a last gesture of defence, at which a Hun sword would slice straight through hardened leather vambrace and forearm both and lop them clean off, then despatch the rider. Men were turning and toppling all around, rolling forward over their horses’ lowered heads and dropping softly into the mud, the silvery water of those shining levels stained red by sun and blood, speared horses sighing and sinking into oblivion. The lieutenant was now just a headless trunk on the sand, gouting blood. The last few cavalrymen now seemed to wait like cattle for slaughter, or like a stricken herd of game surrounded by numberless and nameless predators. While the naked warriors laughed and chattered throughout the killing, as if engaged merely in some joyous ritual celebrating the endless wonder and changefulness of creation.
Csaba and Aladar had dismounted and were tramping happily through the shallows, taking scalps. Plain iron helmets lay half drowned in the clouded water, and men curled up or strangely skewed on the mud with their heads sliced asunder, their foreheads fronded with blood, their faces covered and cauled with scarlet, their opened skulls releasing a pearl-grey curd upon the waters. Csaba sang a song of victory. Aladar threw back his head and laughed and held out his right arm weltered with blood to the shoulder. He shook out his fistful of scalps and drops of blood wheeled and arced in the glistening sunlight like some dark molten mineral spewed from the volcanic earth and then fell and dissolved into the waters below as if they had never been.
They left the slain horses and the bodies and the severed limbs lying in the crimson foam at the water’s edge and rode on, hallooing with wild triumph. The two Byzantine merchants stirred and groaned, still bound and slung like baggage across the saddles of the captured horses. Csaba had a deep cut across his forehead which had nearly sliced into his eye and was bleeding heavily, but he seemed not to notice. Attila had a bad gash across his upper arm, a flap of skin hanging loose and blood flowing out and down over his forearm. The battle done and their wild victory gallop pulled to a halt, he stopped and tied it closed with a strip from one of the merchant’s robes. He ordered Csaba to do the same. Then he looked his men over.
They gazed back at him with something like adoration. Their king. Their undefeated, indefatigable king. Their first blood, first victory. How they longed now for more. For the appetite for victory, as for fame or gold, is inexhaustible. The hunger grows with feeding.
Attila smiled. ‘Homeward,’ he said.
They spoke not another word all that hard day’s riding. But at night, beside the campfire as they ate, he addressed them.
‘Some men worship right and wrong, or make good and evil their gods and their goals,’ he said. ‘I believe in life and death. The question is not “Is it right?” but “Does it make me feel more alive?” This is at the heart of everything! This is the pattern and template by which the gods have made the earth. To be a birthingbed for life, and yet more life! Even the wheyfaced moralists in their pulpits or the conniving lawyers in their airless courts of law, busy censuring every man around them, do so because it makes them feel more alive. It augments their power over others. And so the herdlike many allow them to do so and believe in them.
‘Do not allow them. Only the weak and the slaves allow this.
You are your own arbiter and none may judge your deeds but you yourself. Another may no more judge you than the clothes you stand up in. Have you lived? That is the deathbed question. That is the only question. Had you the courage to be yourself, to fulfil your desires? “Vengeance is wrong,” say the Christians. “Forgive, forgive,” they murmur amid their pale clouds of incense, guilt-stricken, their eyes raised in penitence to heaven, their white hands as soft as candlewax, their bodies bowed in reverence before their god, in their gloomy temples filled with the chants of eunuchs.
‘Forgive?’ he cried, his voice suddenly harsh. ‘What is that to the sweet joy of vengeance? There is life! To wreak bone-crushing vengeance on one’s ancient enemies is the sweetest, most life-giving joy. It fills you with sweet laughter, it bathes all the world in a golden light, it makes you glad to be alive. Everything we do should make us glad to be alive, make us rejoice in the life that is given us. Nor should you be anxious that your vengeance and your triumph is the ruined one’s defeat. Behold, I give you a mystery. It is his triumph, too. His dark triumph, his apotheosis, the fulfilment of his destiny, to be crushed by a superior, god-ordained might that he could no more oppose than he could oppose the black wings of the storm over the steppes. All men must die; and kings and slaves look brothers in the grave. He can do nothing to save himself from this punishment and this burning, this day of doom, so he goes to his destruction unflinching, a hero, shouting defiance into the face of the storm until the end, until he is cut down like a flower by the scythe, to be sung and hymned evermore for his broken nobility. Nothing so noble as broken nobility.
‘I remember my father, Mundzuk.’ He nodded and was silent a moment. ‘His face is before my face. I remember him – how he was cut down by the treachery of Ruga and the corroded gold of Rome. Was he a lesser man because that foul Ruga cut him down in his prime and his manhood? Was he defeated by this, was his life made null and void and his bloodline ever after a thing of contempt and a laughing stock? It was not! He was glorious in death, and in his broken nobility.
‘But is this not a mystery? And is the realisation of this not the most intoxicating liberation of thought and deed? Is it not eternal delight? When this truth breaks through the clouds, it melts all ice of sanctity, and a clean wind blows away all ashen penitence. Why, this could unchain the very shackles of sanity! To know how free we truly are, that there is nothing… I shall go mad, by the gods, there is a such fire inside me!’
He leaped to his feet and began to pace around, his fists clenched, the muscles in his arms bunched, beating the air in front of him.
‘Life gives life. Energy gives energy. If only all men had the courage to be truly alive! Then none would fail, and though there would be death there would be no loss. There would be only heroism, nobility, glory in the world that is, the world of dreams, for this is what the All-Father intended. He gave us life, that we should learn to live. You will not learn to live by bowing your head and your ears before the watery whey-thin words of those pallid preachers in those great stone coffins cold as the grave that they call their sacrosanct churches and place of worship. Those catafalques, those charnel-houses, full of blood-stained statues of gibbeted saints. They would drain away life itself from the world. Energy is eternal delight. Sooner murder an infant in the cradle than nurse unacted desires. Then you will be a beacon to other men and they will truly love you. It is not the whey-faced moralists whom men love. In their secret hearts men hate them and the way they guard their desires and keep censorious watch over the locked and bolted cellars of their dreams. It is those who radiate energy and life, who spread laughter, who enact desire, who break the chains and unbolt the cellars, who take the coarse stuff of the earth and twist it into coloured cloth all the colours under heaven. This is why the stories of the people are of love and battle and death. It is not tales of unacted desires that draw people, but energy, conflict, passion. Here is the fire of life. But the Christians talk only of the water and the bread of life, as insipid and cold as their own souls. I give you the meat and the wine of life! They do not understand, the Christians and the moralists and the paper tyrants in their offices and their courts of law. It must be a weak-spined slave with a backbone of straw who can be bowed or broken by the edicts of paper tyrants. Throw them off! They steal men’s very souls.
‘The Greeks before Christ understood, and their stories were sad and marvellous, tragical and true. They were a clever people. For a great people harbour the tales even of their own woe, even of the tragedies and desolations of their own people, their own family, their own seed. They nurse their griefs and treasure them in stories, and relay them at night by the campfire to the sorrow of their listeners. And the listeners feel more alive at hearing the sorrowful tale. Here is the mystery: they feel more alive, and they flock to hear yet more, sorrow and heroism, grief and laughter, wreckage and triumph, all commingled and twisted together as in the skein of life itself. And the teller, too, unlocking his word-horde and passing around the dully gleaming coin of his own sorrow, the tragedies that have befallen him from on high or from the world that is, he is magnified and made great and
