the Desert Kingdom, over lifeless saltpans, and into the Kyzyl Kum, the Red Sands, a blistering sandscape spiked with lonely stands of coarse sandyellow grass. They saw occasional oases, gravel deserts, watercourses, herds of haggard horses. The riders bowed their heads in their hoods and remembered that drought is always the nomad’s greatest enemy. Why did they ride east into this world of desert and drought? So that they could increase their numbers, and then turn west for the green pastures and gentle woodlands of Europe. Let that day come soon.

In the furrows of the sand and its dunes carved by the hot wind, the sorrowing men read prophecies of long sleeps and sudden awakenings. The sand blinded their pawing horses, which whinnied mournfully, red sand thick in their manes and in their long eyelashes. Beneath the sands hereabouts, they said, lived a bloodworm that spat acid; headless, eyeless, lurking underground, a thing of horror.

They rode over a high, stony plateau, and in a wide hollow beside a dying lake four bony cows stood disconsolate with withered udders on the hard, cracked shores of sunbaked mud. Some bareboned villagers were sluicing grey water into a trough for a huddle of flyblown sheep with long, scrawny necks, the wool shedding in hanks from their heads and necks from disease. Some of the younger warriors prepared to take the sheep for meat, anyhow, putting arrows to their bows, but Attila stayed their hands.

The people stood and stared, the young naked, the old toothless, the children caked in mud, flies at their eyes and noses, passively awaiting some event from heaven over which they had not even the power of prayer. Their eyes followed these horsemen from another world but blankly and unblinking, as if they could not see them at all.

After being asked about the Kutrigur Huns, which questions they greeted with sullen silence, one or two of them began to speak brokenly, interrupting each other. Their language was strange but Attila understood it well enough.

They said they had been raided many times by the horsemen in black. Their winter stores had been dragged off, their best livestock slain. Some of those evil riders had tipped slain livestock down their wells. Why did they do this? They were not their enemies. Why such cruelty, even to strangers? Surely there was no justice under the sun.

An old woman came forward from amongst the wretched villagers, leaning heavily on a stout stick, her face cracked and fissured by sun and wind like the cracked mud by the lakeshore. She addressed Attila angrily, fearlessly, as if in argument with him already.

‘For years we have been at the mercy of that people,’ she said. ‘Where they camp now, east, down by the river, we are forbidden to take water. Only this bitter lake is ours now, as if the gods made the river for them alone.’ She thumped her stick in the dust. ‘Did the gods do so?’

‘They did not,’ Attila said. ‘The rivers were made by the gods for all men alike and without distinction. Every land was made for the nomad riders of the world. The Western Lands were not made by the gods to be an empire for Rome, yet they shut out the poor of Asia from their green pastures and gentle woods and guard them as jealously as misers in their caves. The forests of Europe, the plains and the great rivers of Scythia, the mountains of Asia – they were all made alike without fence or demarcation for all men alike and without distinction.’ He spoke over his shoulder for his followers as well. ‘Remember this when you come into your kingdom, when you look on the great walls and towers and the numberless armies of Rome and your hearts freeze within you.’

One or two of the younger warriors laughed nervously at his words. One or two.

‘But that is not the worst,’ said the old woman, shaking her stick and setting it in the dust again. She would not let this nomad king go until she had spoken. She demanded he listen to her. ‘There is the tribute we must pay them, every eighth day. We must take a carcase that we have hunted, in weight not less than a man, or else we must take one of our own sheep or cows. Every eight days.’ She thrust her hand out, palm open and empty. ‘What have we left? Four cows, some broken-winded oxen, a huddle of goats, some sheep – aye, and some blowfly with ’em. How can we continue to pay this tribute and not end by paying with our lives? The winter is coming. Already our children and infants sicken with hunger. But they do not care, those people, the Budun-Boru. They are devils – devils born of devils.’

Attila considered, then gave orders for two of the packhorses to be unladen, and he distributed amongst the poor villagers aarul, some fat hunks of mutton on the bone and some goat meat. They stood and looked up silently, as if pleading for they knew not what, exhausted, their eyes as dry as dust.

He gave the order for his men to turn about and they rode round the north side of the wretched lake and onward.

As they rode away Chanat said, his voice bitter, ‘They will have to break camp and move.’

‘The world is wide,’ said Attila. ‘All the tribes are on the move.’

‘And the great tribes trample the little as they ride.’

Attila nodded. ‘They will bump into the defences of the empire, as the Goths did before them, and starve and die there in their vast, ragged camps on the banks of the Danube, looking across into the promised land of Europe.’

They glanced back one last time. In the eye of a reddening sandstorm from the south-west, the tattered villagers stood looking after them with hopeless longing, too weak to move, hands clutching the smaller withered hands of their offspring standing by their sides, sheltering from the coming sandstorm in their parents’ shadows. Emaciated children naked but for coverings of fine dust, the sun going down on them, the shadows lengthening. And then they would be lost to sight over the rim of the earth as if they had never been.

‘The world is as it is,’ said Attila. ‘And it will not be made otherwise. ’

‘And yet…’ said Chanat.

Attila wrenched at his reins. Even Chagelghan seemed to hesitate, looking back pitifully into the sandstorm in some sudden and unequine access of remorse.

‘We did not ride out to be nursemaids to the wretched of the earth,’ growled Attila. ‘Those are not our people.’

‘But we could shelter from the storm among them,’ said Chanat. ‘And perhaps tomorrow…’

‘Chanat,’ said Attila with a sigh. He bowed his head so low that his chin rested on his chest. ‘Your kingly nobility and magnanimity make my bowels ache.’

‘Chanat is as he is,’ said the old warrior, grinning delightedly, ‘and he will not be made otherwise.’ He pulled his horse round once more and rode back into the coming storm.

Little Bird lingered nearby. ‘My lord Widow-Maker is growing a heart!’ he sang in his piping, childlike voice above the rising wind. ‘But have a care, my lord, have a care! The larger and softer your heart, the easier the target for your enemies’ arrows.’

They took shelter in the lee of the village huts with their cloaks wrapped round their faces and their heads dropped low to keep out the scouring red sands. But Attila and Chanat and Orestes were pulled into one tattered hut by the old woman with the stick. She shooed them into the darkness of her hut, latched the door and threw some fresh faggots on the fire in the centre of the hut. They sat around it cross-legged in the smoky gloom, listened to the howling wind, and drank the fermented ewe’s milk – she called it arak – that she passed around in a cracked bowl.

As the fire crackled into life again, they saw she was very old. She still seemed sprightly, though, and her bright little eyes, hard and enamelled like a snake’s, still twinkled in her wrinkled visage. Her cheeks were furrowed and crisscrossed crazily with deep wrinkles, like land ploughed in darkness by a lunatic. But when she pulled her shawl back off her head they saw she still braided her long white hair with a few coloured braids like a vain young girl, and they smiled.

Attila passed the bowl to her courteously.

‘So,’ he said, ‘the Kutrigur, the raiders. How many are they?’

She took a long drink and smacked her lips, which were thin and withered with age and the desert wind. She smiled. Then she took another, set the bowl down and wiped her lips with the corner of her shawl.

‘How many?’ she said. She held her arms wide. ‘Many.’

He knew what that meant. It meant there was no word in her language for such a great number.

‘For each of us,’ he pressed her, ‘how many of them?’

She picked up the bowl again, emptied it, and ordered Orestes to fill it up from the leather pitcher in the corner. Orestes looked at Attila. Attila looked amused. Orestes did as he was ordered.

‘How many for each of you?’ she said. ‘Enough.’ She cackled. ‘Ten of them for each of you.’

‘A thousand.’

Вы читаете The Gathering of the Storm
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату