country for traders or merchantmen. The fools.’
They rode across scrubland and desert, ‘wild Chorasmia’, to the Greeks, and a day later came to remote oilfields where black pitch soaked through the barren sands to the surface, some of the tarpits smoking perpetually. The horses stood and eyed the lakes of oil with suspicion.
Sometimes this pitch ignited of its own accord and burned for days or even years, as Herodotus says it does in the deserts of Parthia. The Persians call it rhadinake, and even that clever, sly and untrustworthy people find no use for this black and unctuous pollution. It kills the crops, poisons the air, is death to both man and beast, and it burns without extinction, tall amber flames bursting sheer out of the ground, seen in the starlit nighttime for many miles around. But in daylight it was a very different sight: a black, smoky and hellish place, death to everything that lives and breathes.
Nevertheless, Attila saw some use for it, and without further explanation, had four of his men dismount and gather large leather panniers full of the black ooze, to their disgruntlement.
He urged his men on into that unhallowed place, which lay in perpetual twilight even though the midday sun shone on all the world around. The sun burned only weakly through the pall of dense smoke, the horses lowered their heads and half-closed their eyes and their nostrils. The air was dark and choking, the light sulphurous and smoky. The stench of seeping or burning oil was foul, and there was not a sound but for the soft footfalls of their horses in the sand. There were demons here. At any instant a warrior might feel his horse sinking beneath him, the hushed, leaden air rent briefly with the beast’s screams. Man and horse would fall into a lake of pitch, sinking down and down into everlasting darkness, limbs outstretched, mouths open and gasping silently in the blackness, warrior still mounted on his drowning horse, the two of them united in hellish bond, falling for ever to the centre of the dead and midnight world.
Soon after this monstrosity of nature they came across a monstrosity of men. It was the merchants from Bokhara, laid out for them across their path as if for welcome. They must have been captured many miles to the west and brought here. Games were being played. Their evil kin, the Kutrigur Huns, were taunting them, with an eye for the theatrical.
Some of the merchants still groaned alive on their stakes. Chanat dismounted, drew his knife and brought an end to their suffering. He wiped the blade clean on one of their blue silk robes and remounted, looking disgusted. Impaling was a rare punishment among the People, reserved for the most grievous of crimes such as the ravishing of a royal wife or daughter, base treachery or the dishonouring of a burial-ground. But the Kutrigur impaled for recreation, for reasons of humour. They were jackals among men, and, like all cruel men, cowardly as well as cruel. The People of the Wolf.
Chanat leaned from his horse and spat. ‘Death take them.’
‘Men do as they do,’ said Attila. ‘It is not the gods who prevent them.’
The line of impaled merchants led them deeper into the uncertain light of the oilsmoke, their horses whinnying in fear, their lungs smarting. At times they thought they saw dark shadows moving through the fog around them, behind them, but they said nothing, not wanting to strengthen their fears with words. They killed some more who hung in the fog dying their foul slow deaths. The Kutrigur had impaled them with great craftsmanship, sharpening the staves to a fine point first and greasing them with animal fat. Then they would have taken their time to ease the point of the stave into each naked captive crouched in the sand, so as not to kill him, the point entering slowly over some time, gently pushing aside the internal organs, the liver and spleen, intestines and stomach and lungs as it progressed. Then the tormentors would cut a deep slice at the shoulder so that the greased stake could slide out again, and they would bind their captive’s feet to the stake and his arms behind him likewise so that he would not slide down, and then they would set it upright in the ground, and there the impaled wretch would hang for two or three days before his longed-for death.
A little further on they came to stouter stakes bearing the severed heads of the merchants’ camels, the ragged red flaps of their necks hanging down and dripping. The Kutrigur despised camels. The horses they had taken, and the plunder.
When they emerged from that smoky twilight valley and rode over scrubland, some of them broke into a mad gallop to shake off their uncleanness and disgust. Then, abruptly, they reined in and looked up.
On a low ridge of dusty chaparral to the north-east two Kutrigur tribesmen were sitting their ponies, spears held above their heads in defiance. Then they turned their ponies and vanished down the far side of the ridge.
Attila kicked his horse into an instant, furious gallop after them, scornful apparently of death or worse, and reared to a halt on the crest of the ridge and looked beyond. His men came up behind him, and surveyed the shallow valley that lay before them. The two horsemen had vanished over a farther ridge. Below, a huge ring-camp was burned into the dying grass. The Kutrigur Huns were gone.
A few miles further on they came upon further scenes of horror. A stunted thorn in a dry gully, a few last withered berries, deep red as ox-blood. Impaled on the long black thorns, were human hands, raggedly severed at the wrist. They stopped and stared, almost unable to comprehend this new atrocity. Eventually Attila spurred forward and examined the hands. Marmoreal white, unreal, a ragged ribbon of blood and skin around each wrist, they were small hands. Nearby, another thornbush was draped with intestines in grey and glistening coils.
‘They are afraid of us,’ said Chanat, trying to discern some good. ‘They are trying to frighten us off, as if they do not wish to fight us.’
‘They are not afraid of us,’ said Attila. ‘They are testing us to see whether we are afraid of them.’
He gave the signal and they rode on. Most now rode with bows and a few arrows clutched ready in their fists. They had felt a fierce joy when hunting the saiga, and a burning pride in being alive throughout this journey, even in the harshest landscapes. But now they were hunting men, and where men are, there is also the light of good and the shadow of evil, and their hearts were grave and solemn and dutiful.
4
The desert night is always cold, but now the desert days grew cold as well. The wax and wane of one more moon, and the days would be at their shortest, the nights long and cold, hospitable only to witchcraft and the demons of the night.
There was grey gravel desert, and then some dying greenery by the shores of a steel-grey lake. It would be snowing up in the Tien Shan mountains and on the peaks of the Tavan Bogd, the Five Kings. But here, after brief autumn rains and occasional hail, it was dry and forlorn and cold.
The Kutrigur had left other signs for them: dropped feathers, tufts of horsehair caught on thorns, a spatter of blood on a pale-grey rock, like unnatural rust-red lichen, haunting and inexplicable. A deer lay recently slain beside the trail, part butchered but left with fresh meat on its shoulders, a little ragged from the beaks of birds but substantial nevertheless.
‘Looks good to me,’ said young Yesukai.
Attila shook his head. ‘Our kinsmen in their black cloaks do not leave gifts for their enemies. Eat that and you’ll soon be as dead as the deer.’
‘Ah.’ Yesukai nodded, and they rode on.
They rode over desolate saltflats, setting off clouds of little pied birds pecking for shellfish. Stark and solitary greygreen thistles grew out of the crusted earth. Afar off, over the plains, they saw a single round white tent, a nomad ger, flaring like Greek fire against the dark sky. And so onward, eastward ever eastward, drawn deeper into the wasteland as some strong disillusioned men are drawn into self-destruction. They had long since forded the Amu Darya, the Oxus, and the Syr Darya, the Jaxartes, and passed through the low green Hills of Ulutau, and by Lake Tenghiz, and seen the snow-white Tien Shan rise to the south, and passed by the vast still waters of iron-grey Lake Balkhash where monsters lived. In those marshy plains their horses swishing through the long sodden grass set the plovers calling over the wetlands, and startled the coots in the reedbeds; they heard the heron’s harsh cry and saw its tufted head among the tufted grassheads. The sun went down in fire through the reeds where they camped, bars of molten copper on the river.
They were weakening with hunger, but each day they came upon those hungrier than they. They rode into
