themselves for the killing. Their womenfolk had decorated their warriors further, with great care and pride, and sent them off into battle with much dancing and ululation, bidding them come back covered in the blood of their enemies or else their own. ‘Let no man come back to us unbloodied!’ the women sang.
Now they rode down upon this insolent little band of nameless and unknown enemies. They were decorated with scars and weals of paint, with dots and lines scratched out at needlepoint by their women, ink poured drop by delicate drop into the oozing cuts. Dressed in feathers and furs, their reins were hung with the severed heads of their enemies or any other they had happened upon, knotted by their own hair. They rode bedizened with offcuts of Chinese silk and the bloodied vestments of slain priests and the incongruous floating muslin veils of maidens, from ransacked cities, now similarly bloodied and soiled and wrapped round thick wrists or powerful biceps as spoils of war and emblems of victory. Bracelets of hares’ feet and capes of buffalo hide were tied at their throats. Wolfskins and wolf pelts being of great totemic power, the highest warriors among them wore headdresses of wolves’ heads, jaws set perpetually agape, and necklaces of severed wolves’ ears. Others wore fur kalpaks stuck with the dyed antlers of deer, and long tresses of captured women’s hair tied vainly into their own.
Their faces were tattooed and gaudily painted with white and ochre and red, cheeks and foreheads patterned crimson with fearsome devices drawn with knifepoints dipped in the blood of beetles crushed in mortars by their women. Upon their broad hairless chests were etched grinning suns and moons and blue faces with writhing snakes for hair, and upon their dusty backs were bloody handprints slapped by their fellows. Their horses’ flanks were decorated with birds and fish and bright yellow ochre chevrons and reddish handprints, some printed from real hands severed from the bodies of their groaning vanquished.
Some wore the dark blue turban-cloths of slaughtered Persians artlessly wrapped round their heads or throats, some wore rawhide helmets stuck with the horns of bulls or saiga, embossed with strange designs of occult power. They clutched bunches of arrows in their fists, and clenched more between their filed and sharpened teeth, for some of them were cannibals. And some had coloured their lips and around their mouths a brilliant carmine red, to that end as if to suggest to their enemies that there were others lying dead already, as if their mouths were still laced with blood from the last massacre, where they fallen on the slain and drunk wildly.
Thus they came howling, and from behind their pitiful thorn brake Attila and his men saw that some among the enemy rode perversely naked but for bangles and bracelets straining round their thick wrists, spurring their horses onward with sparkling anklets of costly looted jewellery, like murderous mounted whores. Some wore nothing but leather belts round their waists, circled with hatchets and daggers and scalps tied thereto by the bloodcrusted fronds of their own hair. Further scalps and heads festooned these, and they clutched evil curved picks and lariats of crude nettle-rope, their very flesh stuck with shards of broken glass, bright beads, jewels. Some were already in a state of excitement, panting and with eyes half closed as they approached another slaughterous climax.
And Attila’s men behind the thorn brake knew how they would die if they were captured alive, in what foul manner, and how slowly.
Such was the legion of thousands that came howling down upon them that day, their appearance and noise abominable, drumming up clouds of dust through which they erupted terrible and demoniac. And behind them came many of their women and older children, readying themselves with little knives and daggers for the final despatches to be made upon the groaning battlefield after the fury of battle was done.
Among them came also the witch Enkhtuya.
Attila’s little army looked out aghast at this monstrous horde and tried to assure themselves that they had faced worse in the past and triumphed – though just for the moment they could not recall when. They steeled themselves as best they could and trusted to their king.
Orestes glanced sidelong and saw Attila with his bow gripped in his left hand, his face raised, that old sardonic grin flickering about him even now; that laughter in the face of death, as if to lose like this were no loss but, against such absurd and impossible odds, in this nameless wasteland, with a final shout of laughter for your last gasp, a kind of despairing victory.
Orestes shook his head. ‘Lose the smile, in Hades’ name,’ he growled. ‘You’re making me nervous.’
‘I was just thinking,’ said Attila with equanimity, his smile growing broader by the second.
‘Thinking what?’
‘I was just thinking: imagine how the legions of Rome will react to a sight such as this, to this legion of howling horribles. They have faced many enemies, but they have never faced anything like the Kutrigur Huns in full rampage.’
Orestes shook his head. ‘First things first,’ he said. He plucked up his first arrow from the ranks of them stuck in the earth at his feet, and nocked it to the string.
‘Not until I give the order.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ muttered the Greek with a certain sarcasm.
Attila nodded towards the horror rushing on them in fury and dust. ‘Observe.’
The Kutrigur had galloped easily over the featureless plateau beaten flat by the years and the wind and even the pitiless sun. The miserable huddle of their foes stood behind their contemptible thorn brake, less than a hundred in number, peering out over the rim like marmots peering out of a burrow. There was laughter amid the howling, and some of the warriors bit their lips bloody in their excitement.
‘Now,’ said Attila.
The front rank of the Kutrigur horses had come galloping among the rocks strewn on the hard, unforgiving earth, lying almost camouflaged in the pale desert dust. One, a single horse, took a tumble, and the rest slowed and reeled upward and began to step carefully. Their enraged riders beat them with lariats, belts and whips, but the horses could no more gallop through this slew of rocks than a camel can gallop over sand dunes. Warriors coming up behind drove their horses onward in an unabated gallop into the stalled front rank and they began to cram powerlessly together.
Attila raised his right arm. His eighty men watched him, not their enemy.
He waited. Then he saw one warrior strike out at one of his fellows, who veered sideways and almost fell from his horse. He slammed into a third warrior, whose horse bucked with indignation and then came down painfully on a rock, its rear leg hobbling.
Attila dropped his arm. ‘Now!’ he roared.
The eighty bowmen were gathered round only one side of the thorn brake. The Kutrigurs in their red rage and incompetence had not even encircled them, but packed together in one jostling, milling band.
‘They have no experience of attacking a fortified position,’ said Orestes.
Attila nodded. ‘Not even one as pitifully fortified as ours.’
The arrows came at their appointed rate upon them, each bow-man firing a dozen a minute, arcing high into the eternal blue sky and then falling down through the air and down through helms and hauberks and cuirasses of oxleather, through brain and flesh and bone. They fell like rain. A thousand arrows fell upon the Kutrigurs in the first minute, by which time hundreds were wounded and at least a hundred dead. Horses reared and rampaged, biting each other in their agony and madness.
At last, from somewhere behind the ranks of the chaotic beleaguered horsemen, came a voice of authority. Somewhere the old, grim-faced chieftain, with his pockmarked cheeks and nose battered flat, was giving his orders. The flanks of the jostling horsemen began to move out, and the warriors to separate. Those on the left flank began to gallop after all. Gaps appeared between them. Arrows began to fall from the sky and hit the dust. More and more failed to find their target. The horsemen scattered further apart, found their space. And then all began to gallop. They thinned out and moved, faster and faster. Not towards the thorn brake, over the treacherous slew of rocks, but round it. They set up a warcry and moved as fast as dust-demons round the brake, and the eighty men’s arrows missed their whirling targets more and more. Then the Kutrigurs began to nock arrows to their own bows and fire back. Their discipline was poor and their marksmanship little better, as had already been divined by testing. But so many, firing so prolifically… Their arrows began to tell.
Attila nodded grimly. He had expected as much.
He ordered his men to keep low and keep firing.
Through the pell-mell and melee of dust and galloping hooves, they glimpsed further Kutrigur warriors lassoing the last of the livestock, the droop-eared goats and the skinny-ribbed cattle, and dragging them to the ground and killing them. They set torches and burning brands to the huddled huts of the village and flames roared into the sky.
