‘I have spoken in judgement,’ said Sky-in-Tatters. ‘We ride out in spring. The day of the first windflower, and not before.’
They rode out three days later, Sky-in-Tatters rueful and silent. This yellow-eyed bandit king’s powers of persuasion were very great.
Before they went east, Attila broke away from the huge, lumbering train of oxen and wagons and numberless horses, and rode alone back to the high plateau. He found the villagers huddled under mere awnings amid the blackened ruins of their huts. He sought out the old priestess. She emerged and offered him bread and salt. He declined.
‘We ride east,’ he said.
‘In winter? That is folly.’
He sighed. ‘I have had this argument before.’
She pulled a face. Other villagers gathered curiously around.
‘The river is yours. It is restored to you.’
The people stared at him in astonishment, and then at each other. Then they began to babble and laugh, and they moved forward to embrace their saviour’s legs, his horse’s neck, anything. He heeled Chagelghan gently backwards and bowed.
‘The river is yours, as it always was,’ he said. ‘Your gods be thanked.’
The old priestess was regarding him curiously.
‘You can even eat fish again,’ said Attila, ‘if you must.’
She almost managed a smile. ‘You do not like fish?’
‘As lovers do the dawn, madam.’ He grinned and yawed his horse furiously round and several villagers leaped aside to avoid him. ‘As lovers do the dawn!’ He bunched the reins tight in his fists and his biceps bulged and he drove his heels into his horse’s flanks and roared a grating ‘Yah!’ and Chagelghan gathered himself upon his thick, squat haunches, reared and surged forward. In a flurry of dust and powdery snow, horse and rider vanished across the desolate plateau.
The villagers rushed about like excited ants. By nightfall they would be restored to their beloved riverside. They would pick up driftwood there, coming down from the northern forests, and soon build themselves new huts. Then they would drink and feast and praise their gods and their Mother Naga as never before. Only one figure stood still among the commotion. The old priestess hunched over her knobbly stick, gazing out eastwards over the plateau, her thin lips moving as if in prayer.
Many among both the Black and the Kutrigur Huns looked back on that winter ride into the east as they might on an uncertain dream. Always at their head, face bowed to the snow and the blizzards of daggers and ice, rode that single, solitary, implacable figure, hunched over in a black bearskin, refusing to countenance any other way.
How many of them died on that trail of ice and snow, it was hard to say. Enough men buried their women by the wayside, enough women buried their children as well as they could beneath cairns of ice, to have caused an angry rebellion. But there was none. The yellow-eyed bandit king had spoken, and it was as if a far higher authority had spoken, an authority no man could gainsay.
They rode over frozen rocklands and stones, and through the cruel Dzungarian gap, a fifty-mile corridor of brutal wind that they called the buran, howling between the holy Altai Mountains and the towering Tien Shan, the Mountains of Heaven. As they passed by Attila made a sign of sacred respect towards the High Altai, as if he knew them for a second home. He had been there long, it was said, in his time. But what gods, what shamans, what occult rites he had seen or known in those distant mountains, no man can say.
In summer those mountains were a land of green and plenty, crocuses breaking from the brown earth as the days warmed, and pistachio and walnut forests growing on the southern slopes. But they passed by on the northern side, and in winter, and there was no warmth or respite for them.
Hunting was sparse and the animals were lean. At times they caught great bustard on the grasslands ringed by the mountains, which ringed them about and watched like cold, indifferent heavenly spectators over the vast, treeless plain. Occasionally their outriders glimpsed ibex, corsac fox, even the rare and magical sight of the snow leopard pacing slow and silent over the drifts upon the lower slopes. Camped by frozen rivers, where they had to smash the ice with picks to reach water, they were joined after dark by other animals drawn to the river: wild dogs, grunting brown bears, the last fleet-footed, high-strung Asian cheetahs.
The cold and leaden skies were patrolled by black vultures and imperial eagles, watching them in their turn. They buried their dead deep.
11
They had been out upon the vast plain ringed by those towering mountains for seven days, and with their wagons and oxen and the arduous river crossings they were doing only ten miles a day, perhaps a little more. It was clear cold day, with a little powdery snow underfoot, the air crisp, a sickle of moon high in the cold blue sky.
At the head of the great trundling column, Geukchu of the hawk-eyes slowed his horse almost to a standstill and stared. Attila raised his hand and the column stopped.
They waited. There was nothing. Geukchu continued to stare eastwards. Impatient young Aladar came galloping up.
‘My eyes are half the age of yours, Geukchu!’ he cried. ‘And I see nothing.’
Geukchu ignored him. Time passed. Chagelghan harrumphed and tossed his big ugly head. Attila pulled him up.
Geukchu said, ‘There. Like a drift of smoke on the horizon. There is another column approaching us.’
Attila stared, too. Nothing. ‘It is the wind,’ he said, ‘stirring up the snow.’
Geukchu shook his head. ‘No wind blows so steady. It is a column.’
Orestes spoke, though none had noticed him come up behind them; even his horse trod lightly. ‘It is a column.’
Some time later, Attila said, ‘It is a Chinese column, a column of the Northern Wei.’ He looked round at his men and his eyes gleamed and danced. ‘Good practice.’
He gave low orders to Aladar and Geukchu and they pulled their horses back and began to supervise the men. The women and children were led further back and left undefended among the wagons.
Attila and Orestes sat side by side.
‘Just like old times,’ murmured the bare-headed Greek.
‘The emperors of the Northern Wei were Toba people once, a steppe people.’
Orestes nodded. ‘And now look,’ he said. ‘How quickly Chinese silk and civilization weaken them.’ He added sardonically, ‘Syphilization.’
The Chinese general rode under an embroidered yellow palanquin, reclining upon one elbow. Then one of his horsemen came riding to him, and he was suddenly sitting very upright indeed.
The two armies drew up opposite each other. A mile or more still lay between them. The numbers of the Northern Wei were perhaps four or five thousand, every one a trained man-at-arms.
Attila had long since broken all his warriors into divisions under his chosen captains, mingling Black Hun and Kutrigur together and setting them competing against each other, striving to outdo each other in valour on the field. Like proud regiments, like the Roman legions themselves, quite dissolving any former ties they may have had to each other or to their people, and fixing all their loyalty upon their own band and their captain. On his far left wing, Aladar rode at the head not of a pitiful little troop of ten, but of more than three hundred bristling mounted warriors. They were the youngest and most hot-blooded, their horses the fastest, all bunched and rippling haunches, deep chests enclosing mighty hearts and lungs. Aladar’s warriors were the finest of them all, and they knew it. They knotted black pennants behind their spearheads and crimson bands round their upper arms.
The three brothers, Juchi, Bela and Noyan, commanded some eight hundred in the centre, on the heavier
