‘Perhaps twenty.’
Attila looked at Chanat. ‘Perhaps two thousand, she says.’ Chanat grimaced. ‘My lord, we cannot-’
Attila smiled faintly. ‘We stay, as you desired, brave Chanat. But do not be anxious. Thorns make strong allies.’
Chanat frowned.
Attila said to her, ‘When do they return? The raiders?’
She shook her head. ‘It is ours to go to them. In two days’ they are due another tribute.’ She spat into the fire with impressive force, and the fire sizzled and cowered under her bitterness.
‘Two days,’ said Attila. ‘Then tomorrow we will go and find a carcase for them.’
The old woman looked puzzled.
Attila laughed.
The next day was still after the storm, the high tableland parched and sandblasted, looking like the coat of a mangy wild dog and more desolate than ever. Attila took four of his men, Orestes and Chanat, Yesukai and Geukchu, and they rode slowly eastwards towards the low country and the river where the Kutrigur were camped. It was very cold.
They came down off the high stony plateau onto a flat plain of grey grass dotted with stone cairns like the petrified stumps of trees of some long-vanished forest. The bitter wind keened among the cairns and the rose-grey light of dawn was no more than a chill ribbon of sky on the far horizon. They rode trailing long shadows that flickered and danced upon the grass, and they moved uneasily among the cairns, the memorial ovoo s of nameless nomadic people, decorated and hung with coloured plaits of wool, scapulae of sheep and skulls of birds, rocks with strange patterns etched into them, whorls and ridges and curlicues, as if the shapes of ancient seashells were trapped within them.
Then there arose on their right hand sharp mountains of dark-grey shale, with late yellow and purple bindweed and vetch still clinging to life in the sunwarmed crannies. High on the slopes of the mountains they saw a file of Bactrian camels crossing from left to right, ruminating on cud as they went. The horsemen stopped and watched the creatures, their big soft feet noiseless on the flat stone, their aristocratic melancholy, their threadbare nobility, enduring here on nothing amid the wind and the stones.
They crossed the desolate grassland and filed down a narrow gully with ominous high shale walls dark and shiny with water, and then out into a wide, shallow valley and there was the river and there by its edge was the largest camp they had ever seen.
They waited until near dusk, when the winter sun was almost touching the dark rim of the world and its blood-red light ran along the horizon. They silenced their horses with gags of thick rope tied round their muzzles and knotted inside their mouths; the horses bucked their heads and flared their nostrils angrily but in merciful silence. Then they trotted them askance and veered round near the camp under the shelter of a low rise scoured up out of the valley floor by the river in some ancient, boiling flood.
They dismounted and crawled to the top of the rise.
The camp was some three or four hundred paces off, and must have numbered a thousand tents or more. The wind had dropped, and they could hear distant cries and the whinnying of horses. There were men walking among the tents, flickering campfires, children running to and fro, women cooking or nursing. Some women were bringing water back from the river, in huge pitchers on yokes across their shoulders. Stands of spears at the corners of the camp had black leather bucklers hanging from them. Beyond, in the gloom, was a corral of many thousands of horses.
A single star shone above, a single wandering planet almost ahead, over the vast camp. Mercury on his silent course. A flurry of muted black and white shapes downriver was some lapwings taking to the air over the darkening mudflats.
And then another flurry of wings nearby. Yesukai had crawled into a covey of partridges and they had finally taken to the air, as reluctant to leave their warm nests as a hare its form. Their wings whirred in the dark air as they glided away along the ridge to safety. But not before eager Yesukai had nocked an arrow to his bow, rolled over on his back and, still rolling, loosed the arrow at a flying bird. Orestes hissed angrily but too late at the young warrior. Yesukai had learned his bowcraft well and his arrow struck home. The dying partridge tumbled out of the sky, its bright white throat and underwings catching brilliantly the last of the failing sunlight in the west.
Yesukai grinned.
Orestes looked down at the camp.
Attila was already watching.
In the dusk, on the nearside of a camp, a single warrior was looking towards them.
They couldn’t see his face at this distance, but he was burly in build and dressed in black or dark colours. He walked a few yards in their direction, uncertainly, narrowing his eyes. He had heard the partridges take to the air, and turned in time to see one of them fall, flashing out of the sky. He stopped a little way out of the camp, stared a while, then turned and went back.
Orestes sighed and bowed his head, cradling it in his hands.
Attila kept watching.
The warrior passed out of sight behind a wide low tent, and re-emerged a few moments later leading a horse.
Attila looked at Orestes.
Orestes looked at Attila.
Both men looked at Yesukai.
‘You have eel-shit for brains,’ said Orestes.
‘What?’ said Yesukai, startled. ‘What?’ And he started scrambling up the slope to see what they could see.
‘ Stay – down,’ said Attila over his shoulder, in such a tone that Yesukai stayed down.
Attila turned back.
The warrior had mounted and was trotting purposefully towards them. As he came nearer they saw that he wore black leather breeches and boots, and a black leather jerkin loosely knotted, which showed his thick, powerful arms. He held a spear low in his right hand, the reins taut in his left. His long, straight hair was raven-black against the last of the sun, and his broad high-cheekboned face cleanshaven but for a thin moustache that hung down long and finely combed. His eyes were fixed on the rise where they lay.
Attila scrambled back.
‘Mount up,’ he ordered. ‘Here comes our offering.’
The instant the warrior crested the rise, he was hit from both sides by whirling ropes. There was a danger the nooses would knock each other askew, but Attila and Orestes threw them with split-second timing, one and then the other, so that the two nooses settled over his head and round his throat in close succession before he could cry out. They spurred their horses apart so that the leader ropes tautened round the high pommels of their wooden saddles, and the warrior’s neck was half cut through. At the same instant Chanat put an arrow into the horse’s heart and it collapsed, its mouth open, but dead before it could bellow out its pain. It hit the grass and tumbled away down the slope, the Kutrigur warrior pulled free and dangling with his feet barely touching the ground, still caught round his neck by the tight ropes. Yesukai rode in and drove his spearpoint into the warrior’s heart but it was not necessary.
While the rest of them removed the nooses from the dead man’s neck and loaded his hefty corpse across one of their horses, Attila dismounted and crawled back up through the grass to inspect the camp.
Nothing stirred. He continued to watch for some while. Still nothing stirred.
He vaulted back onto Chagelghan and they cantered away, the slain warrior tied tight across the rump of Orestes’ peacable horse, his eyes still open, his head lolling weighty and half loose from his neck, leaking black, bruised blood.
5
