now the recognised god of the world is a Jewish carpenter, and consubstantial with his heavenly father.
What twists and turns the Muse of History takes, and how the laughter of the gods echoes over our bowed heads.
3
In the morning in the first grey light before they rode out, he put them, as always, through lengthy drills and practices with horse and bow, galloping and wheeling in tight formation at his every command. Each troop of ten had its own recognised signal and moved independently. The hundred horsemen could split and gallop, reform and turn in the dust, appearing far greater in number than they really were. Their skill with the bow was already terrifying, their speed breathtaking, and their strength and endurance on that long journey unbreakable.
Likewise, each troop began to take on the character of its commander. The warriors under Yesukai were flamboyant and reckless, as were those under Csaba the Poet and handsome Aladar. They would do well in some wild headlong charge that would terrify the enemy with its fearlessness, and they would all die howling and happy. Those under the three burly brothers Juchi, Bela and Noyan were staunch and dogged, and would make a strong centre. Those under old Chanat were steady and wily, those under Candac similar. They would wait patiently on the wings until the order was given, and then swiftly cut into the flanks of the enemy, without noise or fuss, but with ruthless force and despatch, like the horns of a bull. Those under Geukchu might ride roundabout for miles, might ford some supposedly unfordable river way upstream with artful bladders made from goathides, floating over unseen in an evening mist, and fall on an enemy camp by night, cutting throats before their victims even awoke.
Tough as they were, each day they grew tougher, their minds as well as their muscles hardening like the plains under the unrelenting sun.
They rode in the louring, stone-coloured light of dawn, past huge grey boulders nestled in the grass, stained with lichen like melted coins. They passed a dead yak, grass growing tall from the eyesockets, flaps of sunbaked hide hanging from the vast bleached ribcage stranded like an upturned boat hurled far inland by unimaginable storms. Then the sun broke through the clouds on the eastern horizon, as if from a burning abyss glimpsed through fathomless deeps.
This was the great Asian steppeland, not hostile or scornful of the tiny, transient scrabblings of humanity, like the mountains with their ferocious blizzards, or the destroying, storm-riven sea. It was filled only with a vast, desolate, silent indifference. In springtime, leave a spear thrust in the ground overnight and the next day you couldn’t find it, the new grass had grown so high. The Plains of Kulundu: the Plains of Plenty.
So numerous were the antelope and the smaller, lighter cousins of the forest bison that they covered the plains in a carpet of a million chestnut hides. In summer they would come to the banks of a river and drink it dry. Those were the days, the years of God’s plenty. The city dwellers and the farmers would swallow up everything free that moves on the face of the earth, thought the warriors, gazing out over those sacred plains with a rapture that was kin to heartbreak – joyful heartbreak, because they loved so much and what they loved must pass. All things fall and cease, and nothing passes so quickly as a happy man’s life.
They hunted saiga across the limitless steppes, the vast herds of those strange trumpet-muzzled antelope which trotted faster than a man could run, and ran forty or fifty miles in an hour. Their heads held low, they snuffed up the freezing or the hot and dusty steppeland air equally through their long and tuberous noses.
As they rode along a low rise, one single antelope stood out from the herd, eyeing them. It had seen their cloaks fluttering out behind them in the wind and twitched its nose, snuffing the air strongly. Its large brown eyes looked curious but unafraid, and then it sprang forward and veered suddenly into the herd. The great herd and the small band of warriors broke into a gallop simultaneously, the horses swooping down off the rise and flying over the autumnal lion-coloured plains.
Naturally Attila had long before sent a few men, Geukchu’s troop, the long way round to lie in ambush for the panicked herd. Now they veered out from the hide of the long grass, whooping with glee, came alongside the vast panic-stricken herd and began to kill. The saiga ran faster than their horses but the hunters came in close and leaned from their saddles, their legs brushed and bumped by the fleeing animals, and fired down directly into their necks and withers. The arrows flew deep and entered their hearts. Saiga tumbled dead in the dust, front legs sprawling and snapping under their own dead weight, others skittering into them from behind, sometimes leaping free and rejoining the herd’s whirlwind flight, but sometimes tripping and cartwheeling at full gallop into the air, then crashing into the dust to lie stunned, trampled by their fellows or else quickly despatched by the horsemen.
The horsemen suffered, too, in that mad crush, but every moment of suffering was to them part of the glorious game. Their hearts were full and pumping so furiously that nothing hurt them, and they vied with each other in acts of aimless valour. One adolescent warrior, naked to the waist, the handle of his chekan, his spiked hatchet, clutched between his bared teeth, leaped from his horse and fell lengthways upon the back of a fullgrown male antelope. As he fell seized the antelope’s horns, beautiful, amber-coloured, lyre-shaped horns with deep rings, as he boasted later by the fireside, ‘so easy to hold on to’. Then the boy flung himself to one side and wrestled the bellowing saiga to the ground, though he stripped the skin and flesh from both an arm and a leg in doing so. He scrabbled out from under it, took the chekan from between his teeth, and swung the long curved spike into the saiga’s skull. He came up out of the dust grinning from ear to ear, with the antelope sagging at his feet like a weighted sack, and held its head up by a sinuous horn, laughing with victorious joy. Desert dust, streaked with his own blood and the antelope’s pungent urine, coated his right side from shoulder to shin where the stricken beast had dragged him for a while over the excoriating earth as he clung on to its furious bucking head.
Other warriors finished up similarly coated in dust and blood, or with fresh tattoos of bruises from the hard ground or from flying hooves. Teeth glinting whitely through split lips, roaring with laughter and wild delight, they dismounted and patrolled on foot, killing any wounded saiga with their long knives, as they would wounded enemies on a battlefield. The herd had long since vanished in a great cloud of russet dust that drifted across the horizon. The rest of the war party joined them and there was back-slapping and mockery in equal measure. How few they had killed! What paltry leavings! Why had they taken only the oldest and foulest of the herd? Women hunted better!
They took the choicest cuts and made camp back on the far side of the rise, facing east to be ready to greet the sun in the morning, and dined on raw liver still warm, and broke open the knuckle-bones to suck the soft marrow. They smoked more meat over the fire and gave thanks as the sweet savour rose with the smoke up to the drifting stars. They slept easy and well, dreaming of the saiga herd moving on southward over the plains for the winter, their buff coats whitening in accordance with the coming snows. When they rode on the next day after sun- up, both their panniers and their bellies were bulging.
There was a camel train of traders from Bokhara, bearded, dark-eyed, their faces closely wrapped and hidden. They rode near where the grasslands gave way to scrub and then desert, thinking they would be safer there from encounters with nomad warriors. One of them looked back as he rode; he called out and they stopped. They looked where he was pointing, and each prayed to Ahura Mazda and waited. The savages came galloping across the level grassland towards them and then reined in. Their leader rode close and inspected them. He had blue tattoos on his cheeks and the traces of three thin scars on his wide, sun-bronzed forehead, and his eyes were narrow and cruel. He smiled at them.
The traders were tall men. Their camels were the usual mangy, two-humped creatures but their horses were very fine, with harnesses decorated with charms of turquoise and smoky silver alloys. The leader of the savages asked them what news, and the traders told him, trembling, wondering what method of death he would choose for them. Crucifixion? Impaling?
But the leader waved his hand regally over them, as if he were a king, and bade them good day. He turned back to his company of bandits and they rode on east. The traders looked after them astonished. Then they looked heavenwards and gave thanks to the astonishing and unpredictable ways of Ahura Mazda and rode on west.
‘They will never make Bokhara alive,’ said Attila, turning in his saddle and looking after them. ‘This is no
