lashed at its last remnants with their long lariats, catching the thorns and dragging them away. The ditch filled with horses and men, footsoldiers taking axes to the fire-blackened staves and splintering them into pieces, and the finest of the Kutrigur cavalry riding in, still fresh for battle.
‘Aladar!’ yelled Attila desperately. ‘Get your men over here. Hold this gap whatever happens!’
Aladar and his men sprinted across the circle and did more than hold the gap. Aladar fell on the lariat ropes with his dagger and cut them, and his men fell to their knees in the very shadows of their enemies’ rearing horses and fired arrows straight up into the horsemen. One Kutrigur half slipped from his stumbling horse, but regained his feet. He drew his long, curved sword and faced Aladar. Aladar ran at him sidelong and with a single backhanded swipe of his sword took off the top of the man’s skull, which spun away through the air like a bone dinner-plate. The man stood stock still, his eyes wide, astonished. His brains oozed over the top of his opened skull like grey porridge bubbling over the rim of a cauldron. Aladar spun on his heel and cut back across the man’s stomach, opening his belly. The doomed man remained alive long enough to see his own seal-grey guts slip to the ground before him, like a mass of writhing eels. Then he fell dead upon them.
Nearby, Yesukai passed his hand over his face and his chest heaved, and fresh, bright blood seeped from under his arm. The arrow had penetrated further than it seemed.
Orestes pulled further back from the collapsing furnace of the thorn brake and looked at Attila, the whites of his eyes shining in his soot-blackened face. He said nothing. What was there to say? They had fought their way through war-torn Italy together when they were yet boys, evading Goths and Romans alike. They had buried a third child, Orestes’ own flesh and blood, his beloved little sister Pelagia, and had walked on unbeaten. They had escaped a Roman legionary city and crossed the Danube under fire. Since then they had fought across Scythia, and as far as the wide, sandy shores of the Yellow River and across the emerald green grasslands of Manchuria. At other times in their long brotherhood they had fought across the parched plains of Transoxiana, and in the mountains and the precipitous passes of Khurasan, against the might of the Sassanid Kings. And they had fought in strange and unholy battles amid the ruins of the Kushan Empire, and sometimes they had fought for Indian princes and at other times they had fought against Indian kings, and they fought for both gold and glory. And now it had come to this, in a land, as Orestes said, not yet named. They had faced poor odds before, but none so terrible as this. The day was at last against them.
Attila knew what Orestes’ thoughts were, and the thoughts of all his failing men. He turned and strode among them, his sword whirling and flashing over his head, his stride that of a conqueror. He proclaimed to them in a voice that carried even above the din of battle that this was not how it would end. This was not his destiny, to end here, nor was it theirs. Their destiny was still to ride against Rome and to destroy it, and then to ride against China. For all the world was theirs. He said that he had heard word of it from Astur the All-Father, and it would not end here, and not now. And though each and every warrior knew well in his heart that this was exactly where it ended, and that their time was come and they would go down fighting amidst this blaze of thorns, under the arrows and blades of the Kutrigurs, nevertheless, at the same time, somehow they still believed in him.
He shouted a brief command and instantly his weary but well-drilled men did as he ordered. They abandoned the broken line of brake and staves and moved backwards. Now, to huddle together in a desperate last stand about the wooden tent of slats would apparently have been the best sense, but there they would have made a good, single target for the Kutrigurs’ murderous arrows. Instead Attila’s order was that each gather into his own small troop of ten, or however many of that ten remained alive, and fight as a mobile unit.
It was a cunning stroke. The Kutrigurs were unable to fire their arrows into the mass because there was no mass, and they might well hit their own. As they came riding in, yelling and whooping over the smoking ruins of the thorn brake, they were obliged to attack each small unit separately. And as they attacked one, they themselves were savagely attacked on the flank or rear by another. It was a military tactic of small extent but great effect. The strength and swordsmanship of Attila’s men, and their fanatical comradeship towards both each other and their visionary king took a terrible toll, and the bodies of Kutrigurs piled up at many times the rate of their own. Though none but one man there knew it, the tiny units of Attila’s men were fighting like miniature Roman legions; and against the milling, bewildered, clumsily close-packed cavalry of the Kutrigurs, they were proving just as unbreakable.
Smoke and dust filled the air, and cries more like those of animals than of men. A weariness descended over the fighting crowd, slaughterous drudgery of stab and despatch, stab and despatch. How much longer could they go on? It would be weariness that killed them, not the valour or strength of their enemies. It is almost always thus for a warrior. It is tiredness that kills.
Attila and Orestes and his closest men fought back to back near the eastern edge of the circle, trying to draw in towards the centre. But their attackers kept coming. They couldn’t move, couldn’t reposition. It was all they could do to stay alive.
Attila cried a warning, and Orestes turned and saw a Kutrigur almost upon him, a tall, lean fellow with his long hair scooped upwards and cemented with white clay, his face splashed and printed with fresh blood, his beribboned spear raised. Orestes held his longsword out horizontally and made as if to sweep it sidelong into the warrior’s belly. The warrior pulled up, lowered his spear and held it out two-handed and vertical in an artless blocking stance. Thus he could break his attacker’s stroke and then swiftly turn his spear, even if the shaft was broken, and drive it into his side. But Orestes had his adversary just as he wanted him. He was making one of his favourite moves, in his usual, expressionless silence, as if practising swordplay with a friend.
The moment the warrior’s spear tilted downward into the defensive, Orestes changed his stroke and in a single fluid movement he swept his sword-blade up over the warrior’s head, switched the position of his hands on the hilt even as the sword flashed through the air, and then brought it back down, left-handed and with punishing force, across the back of his adversary’s legs, slicing through his hamstrings, his muscles, and halfway through the bone.
He drew the sword free and straightened up and held it right-handed once more. The bewildered warrior’s legs buckled as if the muscle had been stripped out of them entire at that lethal stroke, and he sank to his knees in a pool of his own spreading blood, still not understanding what had happened, what had gone wrong. He would never understand. But the gods had given the nod that day, and granted death his request. For death makes the request regarding every man, each and every day. And the day dawns when the gods give the nod to death for each and every man.
Orestes drove his sword into the man’s torso and pulled it free again. He planted his foot in the small of his back and booted his lifeless body into the burning thorn brake.
It had been more like an execution than an even fight.
But they were losing. No matter how ferociously they fought, how bravely and with what murderous skill, it was certain that they should lose. A dozen of them lay dead already; two or three times that number bore scarlet wounds. Their weariness almost overwhelmed them even as they fought on, unyielding. Their enemies were numberless: for every howling savage they killed, two more took his place. And the day wore on.
Attila still strode among his men, marshalling them, ducking random spear-thrusts, impatiently swirling and cutting a man almost in half at the waist when he came at him, snarling, as the king was trying to order his men to turn their other side. He roared to them and then they took heart from it and fought more bitterly yet. But they were losing.
The sun was going down at last on that short cold winter day, and still they fought, warriors becoming no more than unreal, flame-rimmed silhouettes against the sunset, puppets of the gods in lethal shadowplay. There was a nightmare beauty to the field of blood: the sky of fiery orange, warriors groaning and buckling, falling back into their comrades’ arms and dying there, warriors crying out curt battle laments before leaping into the fray once more to take what lives they could before being cut down and sent below in their turn.
High above, against the enflamed sky, a skein of wild geese passed over, black shadows likewise against the setting sun, and some warriors stopped amidst the carnage and looked up at them and could think of nothing, no words to express what they felt when they saw those silent blackwinged forms pass overhead distant and serene heading west into the flaming dying sun.
Three things happened in quick succession. Chanat groaned, turned away from the line of battle and took shelter amid the handful of his fellow warriors. Attila, before his own men’s horror-struck eyes, dropped his head and clutched his chest. Then he dropped his sword as well, and reeled a little, and as he reeled, they saw that he had been hit by a black-feathered arrow. It was no minor wound to be battle-dressed, patched and forgotten. The arrowhead was sunk in between his ribs, though not on the heart side, in dense chest-muscle. Attila broke the shaft
