As he looked out over them, a voice, the voice of Chanat, called out, ‘Hail, King Attila!’
As one, the people echoed, ‘Hail, King Attila!’
Still Attila looked out over his people, unsmiling.
After a long, uneasy silence, he summoned Chanat to his side. ‘Bring me a brand.’
Chanat rode over to the ranks of standing tribespeople and they scurried away to do his bidding. No fewer than eight smoking rush torches were soon being offered to him. He chose the one that burned brightest and returned to his king. Attila took the torch, in his right hand, pulled his horse round, rode back to the royal tent and cast the flaming brand against the white felt walls. Immediately the flames began to devour them and the wooden posts they hung from.
‘My lord,’ said Chanat coming up beside him. ‘The girl…’
‘Hm,’ said Attila, looking back at him and stroking his thin beard unhurriedly. ‘And the gold.’
He drove his heels into the flanks of his horse, and the terrified beast rose up on its back legs and whinnied, the stench of greasy burning felt already foul in its nostrils. Attila pulled his looped lasso from his belt and thrashed the poor beast mercilessly across its rump, his other hand bunched so tightly in the rope reins that the horse’s muzzle was pulled right in to its neck. His heels drove into the creature’s heaving flanks as it reared again and screamed a final protest from its half-throttled throat, and then plunged forward and through the flaming door of the tent.
The people stared. Not for a generation had they seen such things. And this, they knew, was only the beginning.
Behind the ranks of watching people, another watched. The silent Greek servant of the new king. The people watched the flaming tent. The servant watched the people. One fellow, a youth of no more than twenty, took a step forwards towards the tent, as if willing to go after his king. Orestes smiled almost imperceptibly to himself.
One wall of the tent collapsed as the wooden supports within gave way, and the roar of the flames grew more furious. People stepped back from the intense heat. Some looked to Chanat but he did not stir. Flames gouted high into the louring shield-grey sky, sparks erupting still higher, ash and scraps and tatters of blackened felt spiralling up to heaven like some deranged offering to the gods. The tent was an inferno. No man could survive it. Surely today the tribe had been visited not by a murderer or a usurper but by a simple madman.
And then horse and rider came rearing back through the flaming tatters of the tent, galloped free and skidded to a halt in the dust before the crowd. The people stared. The horse’s coat was actually smoking, and the stink of burned hair was foul in the air. The horseman’s face was blackened and his eyes blazed red from his face. A bolt of lightning came out of the sky, out of the outraged heavens, and struck the last standing tentpole of the royal tent and dashed it to the ground. The new king did not even look round, and his panting, smouldering horse did not stir. The lightning came with no thunder, they later swore, and no first few hesitant drops of rain that might extinguish the monstrous pyre behind. The collapsed tent blazed on into oblivion. The gods willed it.
Against the awesome backdrop of blood-orange fire, the blackened horseman sat and looked out again over his people. Then he pulled free the bundle that lay across his lap and dropped it to the ground. It was the young girl whom the dead king had so favoured, wrapped in a rug to save her pale skin from burning. She stumbled to her feet and stepped backwards, away from the terrifying vision of the burned horseman. He half turned and hauled on his lasso, and the people saw that he had also dragged free of the inferno the dead king’s great treasure chest. Their eyes gleamed, and not from the fire alone.
The deranged horseman, the burned king, whoever this being was, flicked his lasso and it came free of the handles of the chest. He nodded to Chanat, and the old warrior dismounted, went over to the chest and gave it a mighty blow with his axe. Something cracked inside it. He grasped the heavy lid and lifted. The chest was full to the brim with gold coins.
The smouldering horseman began to ride back and forth before his people, as a general might before the standing ranks of his men before a battle. In a strange, singsong voice, he recited: ‘What force or guile could not subdue
Through many warlike ages,
Is wrought now by a coward few,
For hireling traitors’ wages,’
They shifted uncomfortably.
His voice grew harsher. ‘But no more. A people who were once great warriors, feared from the Altai mountains to the Sea of Ravens, and to the very banks of the Danube, shall be so again. The gods are with us.’ He fixed his blazing eyes on his chosen people, and they looked back at him and seemed to feel something ignited in their souls.
‘As for the gold,’ he said contemptuously, glancing at the chest, riven-open where it lay. ‘you can have it. No true warrior glories in mere gold.’
He stopped and looked over them again and seemed to sit taller in his saddle. ‘I am Attila. I am your king. I am the son of Mundzuk, the son of Uldin, exiled for thirty summers by the word of a dead man.’ He looked at the remains of the burning tent, and then back over the faces all spellbound by this vision. Some bowed their heads as if in collective shame. But his voice surprised them, growing gentle.
‘I am your king, and you are my people. You will fight for me, and I will die for you. And we shall conquer to the shores of the western ocean, and to the islands in the Middle Sea, and none shall stand against us.’
The people with one voice gave a great cheer, and at last it began to rain.
Attila’s eyes glittered with something like amusement. Behind him, the blackened ruins of the royal tent began to hiss and smoke and settle under the heavy, battering raindrops like some great animal breathing its last.
3
He took a lance from one of the attendant warriors, speared Ruga’s severed head where it lay gaping in the dust and held it aloft.
‘Orestes,’ he said. ‘The chosen men.’
The Greek slave came riding to the front of the crowd and, as if at random, picked eight men from the crowd. One of them was the youth he had seen step forward. The other seven he had observed just as closely.
They stood expectant.
‘Your horses,’ said the king.
They ran to get them from the corral.
Attila’s gaze roved round the circle. He nodded at a fine blue tent opposite, with carved wooden tentposts and a colourful pennon fluttering from the summit.
‘Whose tent?’ he demanded.
After a pause an old man stepped forward, with wrinkled visage, soft white hair and cunning, wary eyes.
‘It is mine,’ said Attila. He nodded down at the young girl he had brought out of the flames, who was standing anxiously nearby. ‘She is yours.’
A low ripple of laughter ran through the crowd. For it was well known that the old man, Zabergan by name, was an atrocious miser who cared only for the size of his herds, for his nurtured hoards of hacksilver and his oddments of gold, and his fine blue tent. As for wives and women, he had never seen reason to go to the expense of having more than one: his old wife Kula, a terrible baggage but cheap to run. And though this gift of a young girl was coltishly long-legged and pretty, the people knew that old Zabergan would far rather have cold bars of silver in his bed than a warm young body. Dourly the old man thanked the king and glared at the poor girl as she shuffled close to him.
Attila grinned and commanded the people to depart.
The eight chosen men returned, mounted now.
The grin faded.
