their valour or despair will answer our call.’
‘I once knew two brothers called Valour and Despair,’ said Little Bird. ‘Twins they were.’
Attila ignored him. ‘Whoever will answer our call will ride with us against the Western Empire. We shall be such an army as the world has never seen, our horsemen as numberless as the sands of the Takla Makan. We shall ride west, and we will destroy Rome and raze it to the ground and every vestige of it that stands. Not one stone shall rest upon another, for they have hated and despised and insulted our people from the beginning. Finally, when our own empire stretches from that far grey sea they call the Atlantic, which is the western border of Rome, eastwards across all of Asia to the very shadow of the Great Wall – then we will turn on our most ancient enemy of all. Our immemorial enemy, generations before the name of Rome was heard of among the Huns. The empire of China.’
The word hung in the air like a curse. Little Bird hissed at it and looked away, wincing. The other men barely dared look at each other. The cursed word. The word never to be spoken. Their nemesis in ancient times. ‘The empire to the east’, they customarily called it, if they referred to it at all. Never ‘China’. That word hurt their eardrums, soured their palates, ached in their skulls even as they heard it. A word under a curse. The rune of ancient catastrophe.
‘Our power then will be very great,’ he said. ‘China will fall, and the whole world be ours.’
The men tried to take in his words, to digest his vision. Chanat said afterwards that he felt as if he was trying to swallow a whole cow.
An empire of the Huns, encompassing the whole world from the ruins of Rome to the ruins of China. It was beyond imagination.
Attila talked to them of their past and of their future, their god-given destiny. He conjured in their imaginations images of once-great Hun cities laid waste by the armies of China in ancient times. For once they were kings, he said, and lived in majestic cities, within a wide northern loop of the Yellow River, in a rich and well- watered land called the Ordos.
‘I dispute this,’ growled a low old voice.
It was Chanat.
The others drew in breath at his insolence, but Attila smiled and listened. His fondness for the fearless old warrior was very great and he gave Chanat free rein.
‘I dispute this talk of cities,’ said Chanat. ‘We were born on horseback. You know the myths of our people.’
Attila inclined his head. ‘Perhaps, perhaps not,’ he said. ‘But that China is our ancient enemy you would not dispute.’
Chanat pondered, stroking his long grey moustaches, then shook his head and said gruffly, ‘That I would not dispute.’
At this Little Bird took from his cloak a strange, battered instrument with a single string. He plucked at it softly and changed the note by bending the wooden frame of the instrument one way or another, from a low drone note to higher, more insistent and mournful tones. And he recited one of the ancient lays of the people from that time, in his hypnotic and haunting voice which was not quite singing and not quite speaking, this little riddle of a shaman who was not quite man and not quite child, not quite mad and not quite sane, and who sat backwards on his horse as often as forwards.
He sang of a great king, Tumen, who gave his eldest son, Motun, to a neighbouring tribe as a hostage, and favoured his second son as his heir. Then, wanting Motun dead, Tumen attacked this neighbouring tribe, but Motun escaped and returned home. Tumen greeted with him with false smiles and feasting, plotting in his wicked heart all the while to kill his own son. But the son was plotting in his turn to kill his own father, and his plan was dark indeed: he would make all his men as guilty of regicide as he, so none could rebel.
First he drilled his men cruelly. ‘Shoot whatever I shoot,’ he cried, ‘and death to any who hesitates!’
Then he went hunting. Every animal he shot, his men shot too. Saiga were stuck like porcupines, wild boar lay dead like giant hedgehogs. Then he raised the stakes. He turned his bow on his own favourite horse, one of the Heavenly Horses. Some men hesitated and he promptly had them executed. Then Prince Motun turned his bow on his favourite wife – again, some men did as he did, and some hesitated. Again, he had those weak ones killed. Finally he turned his bow on his father’s most treasured horse. More arrows; none wavered.
Then on a hunting expedition he rode behind his father and nocked an arrow to his bow and shot him in the back. His father reeled in his saddle, agonised, astonished. The rest of Motun’s men, so drilled in obedience now that they did not hesitate, did likewise. In an instant King Tumen lay dead on the ground, his body so stuck with arrows that there was no room for one more.
Motun had the remains of his father burned and scattered to the four winds, taking only his flensed skull as a drinking goblet. He became a great king, and conquered and united many tribes. Such were the beginnings of the Hun kingdom in the northern bend of the Yellow River, in the land known as the Ordos.
Little Bird laid down his instrument. ‘Many kingdoms have been born out of feuding families,’ he said. ‘I have even heard it related that Rome was born when a warrior, Romulus, slew his brother Remus.’ The little shaman looked at Attila and smiled.
‘But the kingdom of Motun did not endure,’ said Attila. He scowled into the firelight. ‘Though he ruled over thirty walled cities throughout Mongolia and Xinkiang, and our people, the Khunu in the ancient tongue, were equal in pride and glory to the empire of China, and though Motun ruled at his capital, called Noyan Uul, with a rod of iron, upon the Mountain of the Lord, nevertheless they were despised by China. Although the Khunu meant only ‘the People’ to them, to the Chinese it sounded like Xioung Nu, which means ‘the wicked slaves’ in the language of China, and they flung this insult in their faces.
‘War broke out between them, and the Chinese brought down fierce warriors from Manchuria, and there were many years of war, and treachery undid them. In the end the thirty majestic cities were laid waste, and the proud towers and palaces of Noyan Uul were burned to the ground, and the few Khunu who had not gone to their deaths in battle were sent broken and starving out into the wilderness. Many are the peoples who have been ‘abolished’ by empires like China. They drifted westwards into the void of Central Asia and were lost for ever.’
He nodded slowly, still gazing into the fire. ‘And there we Khunu became a mythical, insubstantial people of the wastes, impoverished bands of wilderness wanderers, tent dwellers, cannibals, so it was said, preying upon settlers’ children like vagabond dogs. Scavengers in sandblown rags and tatters, the offspring of witches and demons of the wind. Well, let them believe it, if it serves to chill their bones.
‘They were our fathers.’
So Attila spoke, so the Hun mythology went, and who was to say that it was not the truth? He knew from his boyhood the tale of how the father of Rome, pious Aeneas, defeated by an ancient enemy, fled westwards from crumbling Troy, carrying old Anchises on his broad shoulders. Were not the parallels and echoes uncanny? You heard in those echoes the laughter of the gods.
Then there was Emperor Titus, who destroyed the temple of Jerusalem and drove the Jews out into the world to be a nationless and accursed tribe of wanderers for ever. Just so, like the Trojans or the Jews, the Huns’ forefathers had fled westwards from their crumbling cities, whose very names were now lost in the desert sands, but for towering and majestic Noyan Uul. And as the Greeks were the doom of the Trojans, and the Romans the doom of the Jews, so the Chinese were the doom of the wandering Huns. But it is hard to be a wanderer, and a nomad’s life is much bitterness and wordless endurance.
Once there was a tribe that appeared in the empire of Rome: the Ampsivarii, they were called, and they were nomads. Tacitus tells the entire story of that nation in two curt, typical sentences. ‘In their protracted wanderings, the exiles were treated first as guests, then as beggars, then as enemies. Finally their fighting-men were exterminated and the young and old distributed as booty.’ Of the Ampsivarii, we know not a jot more.
It was almost the same story with the Jews. Trajan considered exterminating that entire troublesome and bellicose tribe, stiff-necked and superior and proud in their own conceit as the ‘Chosen People’. But surely it would be madness to think you could exterminate a whole people? Then remember the Ampsivarii, now forgotten, along with their language, their customs, their gods. Or remember the Nasamones of the Libyan shore. No, you do not remember them, nor does History herself. They have vanished as if they never were. For once they rebelled against paying taxes to Domitian, and that cruel emperor promptly ordered them exterminated, man, woman and child. When it was done he declared simply, ‘I have stopped the Nasamones existing’ – as if he were a god! Which, of course, he was: a divine Caesar. So perhaps Trajan could have done the same to those irritating Jews after all. But
