The fire burned low. The night air was still and cold.
‘They are the demons that you say they are,’ said Chanat at last.
‘They had none to oppose them. They still have not, perhaps.’
‘The girl,’ said Attila. ‘Did she live?’
The old woman smiled a bitter smile. ‘Oh yes, she lived. She lay out on the ground a day and a night, and then she rose and found her son’s tiny body cold in the long grass and she bound it in cloth and carrying it in her arms she walked all the way back to the camp of her people. And she thought her heart would break.
‘But when she came into the camp of her people, and her strong husband came running to her, her eagle, her lion, his dark eyes flashing, his white teeth shining and his black hair flowing, so glad to see her again, and he saw with his own eyes the bundle that she carried in her arms in its bloodstained cloths.
‘Then her heart did break.’
She looked up at her listeners, and as one man they looked away, unable to bear her gaze.
‘It has not mended from that day to this.’
Their hearts were heavy. In their ears hummed a song of ash.
‘The man,’ said Attila at last, his voice very low. ‘Her husband.’
‘He never spoke to her again. He never forgave her. The next day he rode out alone against his enemies, against all pleading. She never saw him again after that day.’
The old woman bowed her head and there was a long silence. At last she shifted and turned, still crosslegged on the dirt floor of the hut. She reached back and pulled aside her cloak and shawl, unknotted her robe and pulled it apart. There in the dying firelight, beside her bony spine, they saw the puckered outline of an old arrow wound, and they understood. She pulled her coverings round her once more and turned back to them.
She signalled for the bowl of arak, drank deep from the bowl and set it down again. Her eyes were watery in the orange light.
‘Surely grief is great in this world,’ she said at last. ‘And I am not so old as you might think. Old age knocks on some doors sooner than others.’
The warriors took deep draughts of arak. They had nothing to say, nothing to offer. She had travelled far, much farther than they might ever travel.
‘And yet are we to rail at the gods, to blame them?’ she resumed, her voice stronger again. ‘For they made the Kutrigurs as they are, and we cannot know why. There are other tribes as terrible, in the eastern deserts, in the forests to the north. Our eyes are shut to their ways. So should we blame the gods for making us out of the suffering clay and setting us upon the suffering earth, knowing what our destinies will bring each of us? Are we to wail like children and be forever hating and resenting the gods as a foolish child does its parents? Are we to be forever cursing and bewailing our destinies like children? For does not a mother bring forth her child in a welter of blood, both of them weeping, and she knowing full well what grief and suffering and finally what death her child will have to endure? She is, as it were, bestowing these things upon her child as she bears it. And yet do we say wrong when we say that that mother loves her child? Would die for it, if she could?’ She nodded and smiled an inexpressible smile. ‘Oh yes. There are few mothers on earth who would not die for their children. Such is the way of a mother.’ She nodded again.
‘There was an old woman who taught me much when I was young, a priestess in her turn, who walked and talked often with Mother Naga. One day we walked out and we came to a young hare pinioned by a younger eagle, which had stooped on it and caught it and now stared at it as if stupid, not yet knowing how to kill. The first hare it had ever caught, perhaps. And so the hare had not been killed cleanly, as a full-grown eagle would do, but was in agony, stuck to the earth by the eagle’s claws, and it screamed. It screamed. And I, still a child then, with never a crack in my heart, I turned to the old woman whom I loved, and asked why the Great Mother did not come and save the poor hare. How could Naga let the hare suffer so? She turned to me and touched my head, and in that moment, in my childish way, perhaps I thought that this old woman was Naga herself. And she said, her voice so soft and gentle as I can hear it even now, she said that the Great Mother was not in some far distant heaven watching over all. She was no cold Queen of Heaven, no lofty princess, no artful, conspiring Cause of the Years. She was here, now. She was with us, suffering. She was in the hare. She was in the hare’s scream.’
The old woman nodded. ‘I believe it is so.’
The warriors drank and pondered and then slept.
6
Attila was up for the dawn as it broke over the earth.
He stretched his arms and his chest and grinned into the rising sun. It was a good day for fighting.
By that first light he rode round and inspected the village and the wide rocky plateau on which it stood. The attack would come soon.
Orestes was soon at his side. ‘So they have not tracked us yet?’
Attila looked out towards the slate horizon. ‘Or they have not yet chosen to. Do they even know about us?’
‘If they had followed us immediately and attacked us in the night?’
‘It would have been glorious.’ He turned to his Greek blood-brother and laughed. ‘We would have been massacred to a man, of course. But it would have been glorious!’
Orestes turned away, shaking his head.
‘But it did not happen. I knew it would not. They will attack when I am ready for them. Not before.’ He looked away across the plateau again.
‘Get the men up,’ he called after Orestes. ‘And the rest of the village.’
He ordered the villagers to take their few oxen down to the valley and rope up thorn scrub and drag it back to the village. He ordered the children out onto the plateau to gather rocks and stones, as big as they could carry, ‘and no smaller than your own heads’, which he had them drop round the perimeter of the village in a great circle. The rocks lay scattered in the dust, only inches high.
‘A powerful defence, my master,’ said Little Bird, nodding his topknot solemnly, ‘if they attack on mice.’
‘Go and gather thorns,’ said Attila.
‘I?’ Little Bird’s voice was high-pitched with indignation. He touched his fingertips delicately to his chest and gave a sarcastic, incredulous little bow. ‘I? Am I a mere shrub-gathering peasant like these dung-bespattered yokels?’
Attila drew his bullhide lasso and advanced on him.
Little Bird went to gather thorns.
Attila had them drag the thorns within the circle of the rocks, and bind them all together with strong ropes in a smaller inner circle, except for one narrow section which he had them rope together separately, to be dragged in and out of its gap like a thorn gateway. He demanded more thorns, stacked wider, higher. They brought more, and then he wanted more. They had to travel further down the valley each time, grumbling, hands and wrists bleeding from long thin scratches, vulnerable with their thin, exhausted, slow-moving oxen, eyeing the far horizon as they returned to see when a line of black clad horsemen would appear up over the rim of the world and their deaths would be assured.
Next he addressed the tired villagers. ‘I take it you have spades? Hoes?’
The people nodded dumbly.
‘Bring them.’
Attila’s men looked at each other doubtfully. Spades and hoes won no wars. They were wielded by mere farmers, drudges of the earth. No nomad ever wielded a spade. Farming was good for the Goths. But not for Huns.
Attila ordered them from their horses and into line and pointed them towards the heap of crude farmers’ tools.
‘Noble warriors,’ he said, ‘it is high time you leaned how to dig a hole.’
