the tip of the knife between his ribs, near the old arrow wound, and drove it into the lung. The king arched and gasped, and there was a whistle of air.
She looked up at Orestes from under her black brows.
‘If it runs pale, he lives,’ she said. ‘If it runs thick and yellow, he dies.’
‘Is that the extent of your sorceress’s powers?’ retorted Orestes savagely.
She ignored him, and slowly drew the knife from the deep, narrow wound. Pus bubbled out after it.
Orestes’ shoulders sank and he bowed his head.
It ran as clear as water from a spring.
She soaked up the pus with an absorbent linen cloth. She let it run again, and cleaned it again. Finally she made a little plug with a further roll of linen and sealed the wound.
She stood abruptly and walked out of the tent, saying as she went that she would return tomorrow.
Orestes slept where he sat, his head resting at the foot of his master’s bed.
She was as good as her word. Each day at morning and evening she performed the same gruesome operation, and each day the pus ran a little less. By the third day, the king’s fever had broken. His breathing was careful and laboured with his good lung, but the other was healing fast.
Enkhtuya made poultices and plasters of mullein and clover leaves, boiled hulwort, horehound, flax seed moistened with the juice of houndsberry and woad. Attila coughed violently for a couple more days. But on the seventh day after Enkhtuya had come to him, he was up and on his feet when Orestes entered the tent.
‘You need rest!’ he exclaimed.
Attila turned on him, snatching down his sword from where it hung on a tentpost, drawing it from its scabbard and swinging it at Orestes all in one swift, easy movement. Orestes ducked only just in time to avoid serious injury.
He stood straight again. ‘Christ in heaven!’
Attila sheathed his sword and grinned.
10
At first there was discontent and opposition among his own men at the thought of joining with the Kutrigur Huns.
‘Imagine what terror we will strike into the hearts of our enemies now!’ said Geukchu. ‘With such great numbers! My lord, what strength in unity we shall have!’ But it was impossible to tell if Geukchu was sincere.
‘Let us hope,’ chirruped Little Bird, his meaning both sarcastic and insincere and sincere all at once, as always. ‘Let us hope that we do not pass by a clear lake on our journey. Our reflection would surely kill us with terror! And let us hope, also, that our pleasant amity with our Kutrigur kinsmen lasts. Civil war is always so messy and-’
‘Peace, fool,’ Attila cut him off. ‘We march under one banner.’
‘And one king?’
‘There can be only one king.’ Attila glared at Little Bird. ‘And another thing. I will not have you throwing your barbs at the chieftain, Sky-in-Tatters.’ Little Bird’s eyes glittered with malicious expectation at the thought of taunting that ox-like fool, but Attila narrowed his eyes and pointed his forefinger at him. ‘Understand. You can throw your barbs at me all you like, I care not. Words are just words. But men like Sky-in-Tatters do not take kindly to such humiliation. Words frighten them. And you will not break up this fragile alliance of our two tribes with your mischief.’
Chanat sat cross-legged in the dust. He did not look up, his long shaggy greying hair half-concealing his face. He spoke quietly but clearly.
‘My lord, the Kutrigurs are not our people. Their ways are not our ways. Their customs…’ He turned aside and spat into the dust, and they all knew to which customs he was referring. ‘Their customs are not our customs.’
‘Nor are the customs of…’ Little Bird shivered and could not say her name. ‘Nor are the customs of the witch my customs.’
‘She saved my life.’
‘Yet she smells of death.’
Attila stroked his thin beard and ignored Little Bird, but he looked steadily at Chanat with glittering eyes, every fibre tensed like steel.
‘You are telling me,’ he said very softly, ‘that I am mistaken?’
Chanat looked up and returned his king’s gaze. ‘I am. My lord, I beg you, let us return another way and leave these people. They are not our kin, they are not our people, and I fear that their customs and their dark name will follow us to the ends of the earth. Shake them off as a dog shakes off its fleas.’
The atmosphere was tense with opposition. Any moment the king could have flared out in fury. The silence was exhausting.
At last Attila gave his judgement: ‘The Kutrigur Huns, our kinsmen, stay with us.’
There was a moment’s silence, then Chanat drove his knife-blade into the dust, got to his feet and walked away into the darkness.
Beside a campfire he saw the witch, Enkhtuya, cooking a gobbet of meat on a stick. It looked like a heart.
Enkhtuya did not come back to Attila. His dressings were changed again by the woman who had ministered to him that first day. She was gentle, and she breathed on her cupped hands to warm them before she unwrapped his dressings. She was not so young, but her hands were still soft.
‘You have a husband?’
She kept her head down low and did not meet his eyes. ‘He was killed. Not in the battle,’ she added hurriedly. ‘Last winter.’
‘Hm.’
When she had finished, he ran his hand under the hem of her deerskin dress and caressed the back of her thigh.
She looked away with her head bowed low. But she did not move.
Later, as she left the tent, she dared to look back at him and murmur, ‘You are feeling better, my lord?’
He turned and growled after her and she fled.
Already, what had been an uneasy truce between enemies was growing into something else. Though it had seemed impossible that men who had seen their brothers, father and sons slain by these arrogant intruders should end serving shoulder to shoulder with them in battle, now it began to seem that it might come to pass. A unity might be forged. The Kutrigurs loved war and conquest more than they loved hatred and revenge. Though cruel and barbarous in their customs, they were not without a rude nobility.
Attila talked for long hours with Sky-in-Tatters. Him, too, he found more amenable than at first. The bull- necked chieftain had no cunning, and no insight into men’s hearts, but he was strong, simple and candid, and Attila began to warm to him.
Out on the wintry plains, in a dusting of snow, he began to observe and then to lead the Kutrigurs in field exercises.
Sky-in-Tatters would remain chief of the Kutrigurs, of course. In matters of tribal law and punishment, in the arranging and approving of marriages, in the burial of the dead, he would remain supreme authority among his people. But in matters of warfare, he gave way, acknowledging the newcomer’s superiority. And he who rules in war rules in everything.
Attila’s men numbered ninety-one, of the chosen band of one hundred who had originally set out. Many of the wounded Kutrigurs had died groaning in their tents, bewailed by women dishevelled and cloaked in ashes. But many more had mended. The number of their combined men-at-arms still stood at over two thousand, their horses at four times that number. Their ambition was limitless as the sky.
And so by the common mingling of the two tribes, by the growth of ordinary comradeship, by the Hun nations’
