retreating wagons. ‘Little Bird himself waits humbly for the master!’
Little Bird took refuge from the disconsolate tribe among the children, whom he loved. They sat around him cross-legged, tiny children with their perfectly round Hun faces and rosy cheeks and wide eyes, while he spun them such tales – of mountains that fought each other by spewing burning molten rock and huge boulders out of their mouths; of mammoths that tunnelled underground as fast as horses gallop, and so caused earthquakes in the world of men.
Then he stopped abruptly, and leaned over sideways in his extraordinary way, touched his ear to the ground, and opened his eyes wide with astonishment. The children’s eyes grew wider still. Little Bird said that he could hear ants fighting, two whole miles away. He sat up. ‘Over there,’ he pointed, ‘on the other side of that hillock. Can’t you hear? It is a terrible fight. They are fighting bitterly over who should be king of the hillock. By nightfall many of the bravest ants will be dead.’
The clever children laughed at this nonsense, while the foolish and gullible children looked sad and anxious for the ants. Though perhaps the sad and anxious children were not so foolish after all. Those who think, laugh. Those who feel, weep.
Little Bird told them another story to console them, about a family of mice with whom he was on friendly terms, who were great travellers. They sailed on the Sea of Ravens in seashells, and travelled over the snowbound wastes in winter on little sleds made from blades of grass.
When the children had finally curled up and fallen asleep beside the campfire, Little Bird sighed and took himself away and sat high on his favourite sandy bluff, looking out on the dark sea of grass, and sang: ‘When hunger bites us daily and the wind blows from the north,
And the saiga in their autumn coats go by,
And only sickness stays with us,
Then Little Bird the Wise
Sits apart and talks with his only friend, the sky.’
The next morning Little Bird was seen trembling by a dead dung-fire in the early dawn, and one of the women asked him if he was sick.
‘Nightmares, nightmare upon nightmare,’ said Little Bird, staring fixedly into the powdery ashes of the dead fire. ‘Dreaming of snakes again. Snakes coiled about my throat and about my head. About my heart.’ He closed his eyes and his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘They will be the death of me.’
2
The hundred men with Attila at their head rode eastwards for seventeen days and seventeen nights, crossing the Iron River well north of its marshes and its hundred mouths and passing by the vast flat salt-sown shore north of the Sea of Ravens. Then they turned south.
Already the grasslands were beginning to fail and fade beneath their horses’ hooves, and the short golden season of autumn was rushing past, fleeing before the oncoming winter. Deer fled before them like ghostly ancestors, and there were the light tracks of wolves in the sand among the dying grasses. Sometimes they came upon haunting reminders of where tents had previously stood: pale yellow rings in the grass, among windblown middens and scatterings of the bleached white bones of animals. Tattered nomad bands of nameless peoples, perhaps their distant kinsmen, perhaps their enemies, who had vanished into the endless eastern steppes, with no more substance left to them than the shadow rings of their tents in the withered grass.
They came down into a shallow canyon in late afternoon, passing great strewn boulders copper-coloured in the setting sun, filed down a narrow stony path and saw reeds and stunted trees below; the air was cooler and smelt of streams. In a silent valley already out of the sun they passed through a cool green curtain of willows and watered their horses and rested.
The next morning they climbed up out of the canyon on the farther side, through a thin copse of orange pine, the ground strewn with fragile needles and the air full of resin, and they rode on.
At noon their leader called a halt near a high cairn of tumbled stones. The men let their reins drop and their shoulders sank and they sagged in their saddles, and the horses leaned and tugged at the thin grass at their feet. Attila swung his leg over his horse’s head, jumped to the ground, walked over to the high cairn and climbed it, as graceful and easy as a child. He pulled off his battered felt kalpak, scooped his fingers through his dark shaggy hair streaked iron grey, his mouth set hard in that characteristic, sardonic, world-mocking smile, and gazed out to the far horizon. As far as the eye could see the wind shimmered softly through the sunfaded grass, which billowed like a feather-grey ocean, and beneath his feet it soughed through the little caverns and passageways among the cairn of rocks. To the south, as he squinted into the brightness, the grass looked yellow, and the horizon was blurred with dust where the steppeland finally ebbed away to desert. Far to the north and east, maybe a tint of green, the rich dark green where the silent pine forests started. But maybe not. No man can see as far as he thinks he can, not even a king.
He turned to jump down, and there from the direction they had come rode a single horseman. He remained on the cairn and watched and waited. The warriors followed his gaze. The lone horseman shimmered and came on.
After many minutes the figure grew in size, and then they could hear the swish of the horse’s legs through the grass and see the horseman’s tattooed face. Finally he stood before them.
‘So,’ said Attila, jumping down from the cairn. ‘Little Bird. The world’s madman.’
‘It is I,’ confirmed Little Bird grandly, giving a little bow of his head. ‘Life was dull in the camp. There was a danger I might have lived for ever and grown as old and useless as old Chanat.’
Attila grinned and remounted and gave the order for them to ride on.
Little Bird came alongside him. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘there was a woman.’
Attila glanced sideways and raised an eyebrow.
‘At first it was sweet to lie between her thighs. But soon she became to me a deep pain in the fundament both morning and evening, as if I were passing stools the size and shape of wagon-spokes.’
‘A hazard of the amorous temperament,’ said Attila gravely.
‘But war will bring relief,’ said Little Bird.
At dusk in the fading light one of the pack-horses stumbled in a marmot hole. The men instantly drew their knives, their mouths already savouring fresh horsemeat roasted on a slow fire, but Attila forbade them. Little Bird went over to the animal, which stood patient and shivering with pain, fresh dung lying pungent between its hindlegs, a foreleg crooked and resting on the rim of its hoof. The shaman spoke in its ear and stroked his hennaed hand over the horse’s fetlock. He murmured over and over words that none who heard understood.
In the morning the horse was healed.
They crossed a desolate plain where the heavy grey sky over their heads suddenly came alive with the cries of wild geese. The cries startled and then comforted them with the sense of living creatures in company with them in this wilderness. The geese passed on and their cries faded away and the air grew silent around again and the men slumped down a little in their cloaks and bowed their heads and rode on. The sky overhead was a darkening grey, a beaten iron shield, but along the horizon was a seam of silver light that seemed to seep in from an enchanted world beyond, as if they rode under a giant lid, claustrophobic, shut off from grace. Their fear grew continually, and their courage grew to meet it. All of them were quite prepared to die, and half expected it, this far from home and they so few in number. But they would go down fighting.
And then, standing alone and many days from its herd and from its native woodland, for no reason that they could discern, they saw an auroch: a massive white bull, one of the wild cattle that roamed freely in the birchwoods far to the north. The mountainous white beast stood like a statue, like a creature from heraldry, amid a pile of broken rocks, with an arrow buried deep in its withers. Again here was good meat for the taking, but the men knew that the uncanny creature was somehow removed from them and forbidden. They squinted and saw that the arrow was of no shape they recognised.
It would not be long now.
