horses, and skilled with the lance. Csaba with his fleet three hundred occupied the right flank, where there was more space between the column and the first low foothills of the mountains to the south. Behind were the troops of Chanat, and of Geukchu and Candac, bows readied and arrows to the string.
Attila sat at the forefront of his army, Orestes a little behind him to his right, and Sky-in-Tatters to his left.
He held his men steady and motionless as the main ranks of Chinese cavalry began to walk and then trot towards them, red banners gradually taking shape and billowing out behind them as they moved faster and faster over the frost-hard grass. The watching Huns would always remember this moment as one of great beauty as well as terror. Neither the Kutrigurs nor the Black Huns had ever faced such a massed professional army in the open field before. Attila himself only smiled into the sun, as if all the training and drilling, grouping and regrouping, had been in preparation for this, and the day were already won.
For to empire-dreamers and lovers of war, there can be no sight more beautiful in the morning sunlight than ranks of mounted warriors, their pennants fluttering from the spearhafts in the breeze, the silvery winter light glancing from bronze helms and damascened scabbards and rippling chain-mail hauberks, horses champing and tossing their heads, manes flying. The immemorial cult of war to which men of heroic blood have been devoted since they first looked out unblinking on the world and understood that life was vain but death could make it glorious; and that war was the supreme rite of Death, the oldest and the greatest god of all.
Attila raised his hand and dropped it in one swift and easy movement, supremely confident. The whole battle was conducted this way, as if against a gang of insolent boys rather than a five thousand-strong column of the Northern Wei. The arrows did their work, falling accurate and lethal into the close-packed ranks of armoured warriors, their armour merely useless weight against that stinging rain. Men reeled and fell and the snow cushioned their falling, as it muffled their cries and the cries of their horses. Indeed, the whole brief battle was muffled in near silence, an eerie and unreal encounter upon that desolate snowbound plain, ringed about by the white and watching mountains. Red banners trembled and tottered and fell and lay stretched and motionless against the white snow. Iron arrowheads burst armour casings and bone lap-pings alike, and sprays of blood dotted the powdered snow as red as bryony berries in that slow midwinter massacre.
As the Chinese attack slowed and jostled and struggled to maintain formation, the heart of Attila’s army did the strangest thing. It melted away. The Chinese armoured knights now came on again with a vengeance, spurring their horses forward into a gallop, only to find that the ranks of barbarian horsemen they galloped against were no longer there. But the barbarian arrows kept coming. The heart of Attila’s army had turned and fled, it seemed. But as they galloped away, as fast as the Chinese pursued them, they continued to fire volley after volley of arrows back into the massed ranks of the oncoming enemy. The volleys were perfectly judged, and fell murderously time after time, like clouds of black hawks stooping on their prey. The Chinese pursuers trying to fire after the retreating Huns in their turn, found that their arrows fell relentlessly short. It was like trying to pursue a ghost, but a ghost armed with weapons of iron.
Meanwhile, Attila had ordered the horns of his army to separate from the main body – another outrageous deviation from the Chinese rule-book of war which left them baffled. An outnumbered army in the open field, under attack, must always stick together and keep formation. Unity is its only hope. But not this evanescent army with its deadly arrows. The wings commanded by Aladar and Csaba moved outwards like the horns of the buffalo, Aladar to the left and Csaba to the right, howling a war-song, racing out over the snow-dusted grass and arcing round on their wild ride, cantering far beyond the exposed flanks of the Chinese army and then moving up from a canter into a full-tilt and furious gallop, slicing back like scythes into the enemy’s undefended sides.
Until the very moment of their attack, Attila dared to have his own retreating archers continue to drop volley after volley of arrows onto the stricken ranks of the Chinese. Only when Aladar and Csaba came with a hundred yards, fifty, did he finally give the signal for the murderous rain to stop. And not one of his own galloping men was hit. The warriors of Aladar and Csaba slammed into the flanks of the Northern Wei, swords whirling in the bright air, and began to roll them up into one single mound of the dead.
Attila called a halt to his main body of men and turned them round again and settled them. Immediately behind him, the eight hundred warriors of Juchi, Bela and Noyan, the solid heart of his little army, were as frustrated as their champing horses at this waiting, longing to move forward into the attack. But there was nothing for them to do. The six hundred warriors who comprised the two scything wings were handling it all on their own, and there was nothing for the rest but to watch. Even Sky-in-Tatters looked on in disbelief and laughed. This was what Huns could do at their best, drilled and lethal. It was almost too easy.
The warcries of the Hun cavalry carried across the snow, and the spectacle of their mad courage, their shocking contempt for death, panicked the Chinese and they lurched back and into each other pell-mell. Any formation or room to manoeuvre was gone now, and everything was confusion and entanglement and steady slaughter.
Finally Attila gave the order, and the rest of his army surged forward to finish the work. There were units of footsoldiers behind the melee of dying Chinese cavalry, and they needed mopping up. None of them had even been engaged in the battle, although sturdy drawn-up footsoldiers could often be the best defence against a wild mounted attack.
Attila lay almost flat upon his horse’s outstretched neck, his sword held out forwards like a lance, and its long sinuous tip went straight into the open crimson mouth of a Chinese knight in mid-cry, ripping out again sideways through his jaw, Chagelghan barely slowing his charge all the while.
Geukchu and Candac had taken their troops round to surround the Chinese rearguard and prevent any escape, and to finish off the bewildered, milling footsoldiers. A secondary order had been to take at least two senior Chinese officers alive. It was a while before Geukchu could find any. Eventually he lassoed one, a squat Chinese captain with grey moustaches, and dragged him away from the battlefield, bellowing, as he would have dragged an unruly steer from the herd. He stood with his sword to the man’s neck, and the man turned with the cruel hemp rope tight around his bound arms, and watched grim-faced as his comrades struggled even to draw their swords in the press, and were cut down in wave after wave, like summer grass before the reaper.
The horses reared and screamed, throwing their riders and trampling them underfoot, panicked and horrified, as horses are, to see that they had trampled other living creatures to death. Horses slammed sideways into each other, and men were trapped between horses, dragged from their fine-tooled leather saddles, squeezed lifeless between sweating flanks, falling to their knees and crawling, abjectly searching for dropped weapons, stumbling over fallen comrades, slithering on slicks of blood coating the cold hard earth. Others crawling free, hoping to flee away from the horror over the plain, were brought down by a single thrust from a lance, or a single straight-flying arrow, fired on the turn from horseback with negligent ease.
Huns were already dismounting and walking on foot, to make the final despatch easier.
A young Wei soldier, a boy of fifteen, lay unable to move in the snow, his legs numb, looking out sidelong across the plain, his left cheek freezing. His sad brown eyes saw not this plain of death but his father’s house. The hearth-fire, the cedarwood rice-chest, the small carved figures of the ancestors in their niche. Outside, the duckpond, and his mother throwing grain to the ducks. The longnecked white ducks stretching forwards eagerly. He felt someone standing close behind him, and his fingers crawled forwards in the snow as if for grasp, but still he only saw his village with its rising woodsmoke, his home. Little children clapping. His sisters, his brothers. His mother flapping her white apron. The dog with his long tongue out, laughing. The goldfinch in his cage of willow twigs, and the green shadows of spring under the willows.
The boy’s head was lifted off the ground and dropped back, and his big brown eyes, still open wide and looking out across the snow-white plain, were lifeless and saw nothing more. Aladar had taken his scalp.
Hiding under the collapsed palanquin at the very heart of the slaughter, the rich yellow watered silk now speckled and streaked here and there with red, they found a Wei monk on all fours.
Attila reached down and dragged the silk canopy off him, rolled it up roughly and tossed it to Sky-in-Tatters. ‘First loot,’ he said.
Then he stooped down to the half-concussed monk and shook him hard.
‘Xioung Nu,’ murmured the monk, sitting back on his haunches and looking up at Attila with fluttering eyelids. ‘Xioung Nu.’
‘Hunnu,’ said Attila. ‘Your ancient enemy.’ But the monk did not understand this harsh, barbaric language, spoken from the back of the throat. He looked up expectantly at the other fearsome Hun warriors standing around him. They were sweat-stained and some even blood-stained, with long black moustaches, and strands of their long
