‘We have not seen them, my lord, since they rode out this morning. ’
‘With the horses,’ added another.
He nodded. ‘Good. Then to your stations.’
7
Attila, Chanat and Orestes sat their horses behind the thorn brake, looking out.
Across from them lay the straggling ruins of the once prosperous village. They had herded what livestock they could into the thorn corral, and the silent villagers sat with them. The rest of the livestock remained outside and would soon be slain by their attackers.
‘When I was a boy,’ said Chanat softly, ‘I dreamed often of a glorious death on some bright battlefield.’
The other two looked at him curiously. Chanat was not a man much given to reminiscence.
‘My brothers and I,’ said Chanat. ‘Four brothers I had, and I have buried them all. We played at being warriors, out on the steppes the livelong summer day. And we all dreamed likewise. As a man, I outgrew such foolish dreams. But now in old age – though the battlefield looks hardly as bright and heroic as it did in my boyhood dreams – those boyhood dreams of a battle-death come again.’
Attila said gently, ‘Our boyhoods made us all.’
Bare under heaven lay the sorrowful village of that dying people. Not a spot of shade, not a tree. The flat salt desert only, and the wretched dying lake. The occasional passing herds too far and fleet for them. Their best hunters all long gone, hunted into extinction themselves by greater, crueller hunters. The cold winter to come and then a little grass in the hollows, perhaps. An existence pitiable, threadbare, a people clinging to their own lives by a thread, to the skin of the parched earth like fleas clinging to a dog’s hide. To be brushed away indifferently at any moment and indifferently by a greater power, into oblivion, into empty air.
‘A small thing it is we fight for,’ muttered Chanat. ‘A few yards of grey desert.’
‘We fought for a smaller thing this morning,’ said Attila. ‘A single life.’
‘You were fools.’
Attila laughed. ‘Your gratitude embarrasses me, Chanat.’
The old warrior coughed and spat.
‘I knew you’d resist,’ said Attila. ‘I actually had my hand on the butt of my lariat, ready to knock you cold.’
Chanat eyed him.
‘You’re such an old mule, you would have started arguing – in the very shadow of our enemies.’
Chanat grunted. ‘It’s possible.’
‘And then we would all have been killed.’
‘As I said, you were fools.’
Orestes said in his quiet voice, his hands clasped, his clear blue eyes still fixed straight ahead across the empty plateau, ‘Do you never do anything foolish yourself, wise Chanat?’
‘Only when a woman’s involved,’ growled the old warrior. And he stalked away to the other side of the corral.
Attila and Orestes exchanged smiles.
They shared a flask of water and wiped their mouths.
The cold blue sky above them. A stillness. All the world waiting. Only the goatbells sounded in the oppressive silence as the animals moved and grazed among the scrub, happily oblivious. Death was coming.
‘This reminds me of many times before,’ said Attila. ‘This waiting. ’ His forehead was beaded with sweat.
Orestes nodded. A runnel of sweat ran down his own forehead and over his nose, despite the coolness of the day. You never conquer the fear before a battle. He swiped the sweat away with the back of his hand.
‘The time we fought on foot on the green plains of Manchuria,’ murmured Attila, ‘because our horses were sick, do you remember? And the time we fought the forest kings, who wore wreaths of leaves for armour?’
Orestes smiled his faint smile. ‘And when we stood at arms beside the Yellow River, and you fought with a spade because your sword was broken.’ He shook his head. ‘So much fighting we have done together, have we not? And now it is come to this: a flyblown village beside a dying lake, in a land not yet given a name.’
Attila brooded. Then he said, ‘There was a time in Italy, when I was still a boy and a hostage with the Romans, when we came under attack from Romans. They wanted me dead.’ His lips curled as he said these words.
‘But other Romans saved you.’
‘There was one good Roman. A young officer.’
‘There are good Romans, then?’
‘One or two.’
‘And the boy in your uncle’s camp? Aetius?’
Attila said nothing.
They drank again.
‘Before I came to you,’ said Attila, ‘you and your sister, in your Apennine cave and then in that haunted valley.’
‘I have not forgotten.’
‘Nor I.’ His voice was soft and low.
‘Four will fight for the end of the world,
One with an empire,
One with a sword,
Two will be saved and one will be heard,
One with a son
And one with a word.’
There was silence, and then Orestes said, ‘There is much that we do not understand.’
‘There is much that we will never understand,’ said Attila. ‘But war is a great teacher.’ He touched his hand to the hilt of his sword, his beautiful inlaid sword which had been given him by a Roman general, and which he had shown to his people as the Sword of Savash. They had believed. Did he himself believe? Who can say? Who can say what a man like Attila truly believed?
He nodded towards the far horizon.
Orestes looked, and it seemed to him that the horizon itself was astir. As if it were smouldering, and the smoke was dust. He wiped the sweat from his face again.
‘An ordinary raiding party would number only a few dozen,’ mused Orestes. ‘That is no few dozen. That is no ordinary raiding party.’
‘Two thousand will come. They want revenge. And we want them all to come.’
Orestes let out a long, hissing sigh. ‘You’re crazy. With all due respect and that, my lord. But you are madder than a monkey’s tail.’
Attila said nothing for a while, his flint gaze set on that distant, smoking horizon. His eyes narrowed, his earrings flashed in the sunlight. He said softly, not turning, ‘With respect, old comrade, we want them all to come, so that their camp will be left unguarded.’
And then the People of the Wolf came howling in.
They came howling in with an animal music which grew louder and more terrifying as they approached at full gallop. Yowling and yikkering, whooping and screaming, they came riding out of the dust across the plateau. They erupted in a thunder of hooves and drums, spears held aloft, arrows already notched to bowstrings.
The old priestess had underestimated when she had said that there were a thousand of them, maybe two.
Many wore next to nothing, and what they wore was purely decorative, for they had taken time to dress
