fighting and feasting until world end. Mundzuk never passed through the portals of death like men of mortal flesh.
But after a while King Ruga began to tire of hearing the people sing Mundzuk’s praises, and made his displeasure known. Nowadays few in the tribe remembered so much as Mundzuk’s name. Three decades was a long time among a people where a woman, so they said, was old at twenty.
The aged warrior remembered, gazing out across the plains towards the grave-mound. And although his old, watery eyes, squinting into the dry steppe wind, could make out little of the strange horseman’s form or features, something about the way he sat, so still and strong, made him shiver. As still and strong as a stone. Time was when the Hun warrior would have kicked his horse forward without a moment’s hesitation and galloped over to the intruding stranger, pulling an arrow from his quiver and knocking it to his bow as he rode. Who was this lone spectre from the steppes who came and sat his horse on the very grave-mound of one of the dead Kings of the People and asked no leave? Chanat was old now, and he hesitated to pull back that powerful bowstring. He would ride back to the camp and tell what he had seen. Soon enough he would die in battle like a man. He prayed to the gods for such a death every night. But not today. Not in a lonely skirmish out on the steppes with an unknown horseman, and none to witness or hymn his passing.
On the mound, the horseman turned his head a little, and seemed to stare fixedly towards the old warrior. Chanat couldn’t see his expression. His eyes were old and weak. But the horseman bristled with a fierce, still energy, waiting to be unleashed. The wind ruffled his horse’s cropped mane, and the horseman’s dark hair whipped back and forth across his face. There was energy even in the way his fist held his rope reins bunched. Even in the way he gripped his horse’s flanks between his thighs. There was something in it of stone and iron, and nothing so soft as flesh.
The stone horseman raised his right arm and flicked his hand, just once, in a gesture of unmistakable command. He let his arm drop again and looked away, waiting. The old warrior could do no other but the stranger’s bidding. He who had obeyed no man’s word but King Ruga’s for thirty years or more, heeled his pony and rode towards the mound.
The stone horseman turned back as he approached and looked down at him evenly. The warrior came to a halt before him. He looked up into the horseman’s face a little while, fighting against belief. But no! It could not be!
The horseman was perhaps in his middle forties. He wore a short fur cloak knotted at his throat with a knot of rawhide. The cloak must once have been as glossy and dark as a mink’s pelt, but was now grey and dusty with the dust of the plains. On his head a pointed felt kalpak, a cap in the Hunnish style, was drawn down low over his wide brow. His hair fell thick and dark and streaked with grey over shoulders ridged with muscle. His dark eyes glittered beneath his brows, but any humour there was of the fiercest and most sardonic kind. His nose was strong and bony, and told of beatings and batterings received over many long years. His mouth was set extraordinarily hard, and his chin was covered in thin wisps of greying beard. He wore bright gold rings in his ears. His copper- skinned arms appeared beneath his cloak, bare to the shoulder but for two bands of silver, high round his biceps. His muscles were large and as hard as stone. His forearms were corded with thick veins and bunched with more sinew, as strongly shaped as a blacksmith’s but a good deal more scarred. His right arm, especially, was as lined and crosshatched as a butcher’s chopping board.
Beneath the dusty cloak he wore only a battered jerkin of black leather, knotted down the front, and below that crossgartered breeches and tattered deerskin boots. From a thick leather belt round his waist hung a Hunnish chekan, a short hatchet with a curved and spiked iron head, and a blackened rope lasso. At the other side hung a fine sword, more of Persian or Byzantine than of Hunnish make, with elaborate gold scrollwork in the handle and a scratched leather scabbard that betrayed a shape something like a Spanish blade, with a sinuously swelling then tapering blade and a long, lethal point. Crossways on his back he carried a leather quiver of arrows and the short, lethal sprung bow of the steppes. His hands were bunched into fists on the pommel of his crude wooden saddle, knotted and gnarled with thick veins, the hands of a very strong man. The skin was as weathered and aged as the wind-furrowed skin of his face. All told of a man who had endured years of ice storms and bitter desert winds and maddening noonday suns, and ridden on unbeaten, unbowed.
‘So,’ said the stone horseman, his voice a soft rasp. ‘Chanat. Still alive.’
Chanat said nothing. For an old man, it was true, was nothing but a burden and a shame to his people; he should have died sword in hand on some bright, bloody battlefield long ago.
‘I, too,’ said the horseman. ‘Still alive, and come home to claim my own.’
It was him after all. Chanat looked up again. It was him.
There was another horseman approaching from the east. This other was about the same age, perhaps a year or two younger. He rode a small bay mare. Battered and travelstained as the other, but lighter in his saddle, his eyes keen and darting, his head bare and his narrow, almost monkish skull balding on top, the fair hair cropped close at the sides. His stubbled cheeks and chin as well as his colouring said that he was no Hun, but he too carried a short Hunnish bow and two quivers on his back, cross-strapped. Even after all this time, Chanat thought he remembered him. The slave-boy, a Greek, one of those fair-skinned Greeks. His master’s faithful servant through all those exiled years of who knew what mysteries, horrors and griefs. The servant bowed his head to Chanat. Chanat nodded back.
‘Chanat,’ said the stone horseman. ‘Go to the camp. Bring us a spade.’
Chanat frowned. ‘A spade, Prince Attila?’
‘Attila Tanjou,’ he replied. ‘King Attila. King.’
Twice Chanat was questioned as he rode out of the camp carrying the spade across his saddle. Both times he ignored the questioners and rode on haughtily. In his heart, in his whole chest and throughout his stiff old frame, he felt the burn and surge of such excitement as he had not felt in years. His master had given him his orders. Nothing else mattered. A master who commanded respect with the crook of his little finger. Such a master as he had longed to serve all his life. Not that guzzling old degenerate back there in his royal tent, in his tunic of soft white Anatolian wool and his gifted purple robes of Byzantine silk. His ironbound chests full of Imperial solidi: massy gold coins stamped with the legends of alien religions and the heads of foreign kings. With wine stains in his beard, snoring with his head in some captive young girl’s lap, while the swords and spears hung rusting from the tent-posts. There atop the grave of Mundzuk sat a true commander of men, haughty and unhesitating in his pauper’s vestments of beaten peltry and dusty hide: a Tanjou. A King.
Chanat rode out past the bored and curious watchmen, for all the world ready to thwack them across the skull with the flat of the spade if they should dare to try and stop him. They didn’t. The lean, grim-faced old warrior still commanded respect in this sleepy camp of the Huns.
He held the spade out to the King. His King. How many more offerings he would willingly make to him, not excluding the spilling of his thin and ancient blood.
‘Orestes,’ said the King.
The fair-skinned Greek took the spade from Chanat and slipped gracefully from his horse.
Attila rode down from the mound on the eastern side and looked back. ‘Dig there,’ he said, with a jerk of his capped head.
‘You are going to break open one of the mounds of-’
Under the King’s sudden, ferocious glare, even Chanat stumbled for a moment. But then he pressed on. This was a King who would not resent a man speaking his mind, if his mind was true.
‘One of the mounds of the Buried Kings?’
‘The mound of Mundzuk,’ said Attila. ‘The mound of my father.’
A shadow passed over Chanat’s face but he said nothing. They sat back and watched until Orestes had dug through to the heart of the mound, clearing the black chernozem earth from around the heaped burial stones. Attila himself dismounted and knelt beside the long cairn of stones, and removed them one by one with utmost delicacy. He paused for a long while before reaching in. Brushing aside the fallen earth within, he laid his warm palm flat on the cold bone forehead of his father and prayed for his forgiveness and understanding. He knelt a long while, then reached his other hand in, and seemed to be tugging at the forlorn and soiled skeleton itself. At last with a gasp he pulled free, got swiftly to his feet and vaulted back onto his horse. The two men, the tough Greek servant and the wiry old warrior, took it in turns to replace the stones and heap the earth back into the gaping wound that had been rent in that sacred earth and then laid back the turf. Finally, they tamped it down with the flat of the spade and all was as before.
