black unkempt hair still plastered across their grimy cheeks. Their reddened swords were still in their hands. He said a prayer in his heart.
Then he reached inside his orange robe and pulled out a little ivory plaque of carved openwork and prayed to it. He prayed to the Lord Buddha, and spoke in his language of the Buddha Sakyamuni, and traced his fingers over the Buddha sitting peacefully beneath the sala trees with his disciples. He touched his fingertips softly to the ivory figures.
Attila took the little ivory plaque from the monk, who watched him anxiously. He touched his filthy, broken fingernails to those delicately carven faces. He ran his stubby, battle-scarred fingers over those serene figures beneath their ancient trees.
‘Buddha,’ he said softly.
‘Buddha,’ said the monk, nodding with great eagerness. ‘Buddha Sakyamuni.’
Attila squatted down beside the monk, and the monk pointed to each of the Buddha’s disciples in turn. ‘Manjusri,’ he said. And ‘Samatabhadra,’ and ‘Mahakasyapa,’ as if those names so dear to him and so alien to his captors were talismans of power that might save his life even in the midst of this nightmare. At each name the Hun chieftain nodded thoughtfully, and the monk began to look more and more hopeful. ‘Buddha,’ he said again, his eyes pleading.
Attila remained squatting, looking at the delicate ivory plaque and stroking his thin grey beard. Then he shook his head. ‘I do not know this god.’ He smiled at the monk, a little regretfully, drew his dagger from its sheath on his broad leather belt, took hold of the monk by his sparse topknot and cut his throat. He stood up and sent the little ivory plaque spinning through the air to Chanat.
‘Might make a good knife-handle,’ he said.
In the cold white light, there was Enkhtuya passing over the battlefield with her snakes, a tall gaunt figure moving silently among the dying and the dead.
Sky-in-Tatters looked on, still disbelieving. Already his men were calling it the Battle of Forty Breaths, it was over so quickly. Some four or five thousand Chinese warriors had lost their lives on this battlefield in the space of an hour. Among the Huns, fewer than fifty were dead. He turned to Attila, his eyes shining. ‘Let us ride on. Nothing can stop us now. They fell before us like men already slain. Now all the riches of China lie before us – gold and pearls, silks and ivory, and tiny barefoot girls with high-arched brows.’
Attila slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘this was an easy battle but it would take more than our two thousand to destroy China.’ He looked up. ‘Or Rome. Our power may be great, but our time is not. Rome first.’ He nodded. ‘Then we will come back for China.’
Geukchu drove over the captured Chinese officer at spearpoint. Csaba brought him a head in a soggy sack, the head of the general who only half an hour before had lain under his palanquin, enjoying his ambling, well- protected tour of the emperor’s northern borders.
Attila loosed the rope from round the man’s burly chest and arms, and handed him the sack. ‘You alone are free to go. But you will take this to the emperor and tell him that the Xioung Nu will yet return.’ He added, ‘The bad slaves,’ and spat.
The officer looked him in the eye, nodded, and took the sack. Attila signalled for him to be given a horse, and the officer mounted, tied the sack to the pommel of his saddle. He rode away east, shrank to a wavering black figure on the vast snowbound plain and was gone.
They burned the Chinese dead like dogs, and the few of their own men they had lost that morning with appropriate honours and lamentations. The Kutrigur women and children walked among the dead and expertly stripped them of any valuables left on them. They gathered as many arrows as they could, both Hun and Chinese, and three wagonloads of swords and helmets and spears. Only the heavy, unwieldy rectangular infantry shields of the Chinese footsoldiers were useless to these horse-warriors, but they loaded them up anyway for barter or scrap. Some of the Hun warriors now wore battered hauberks and jerkins of lamellar armour, but most continued to disdain such cumbersome apparel, continuing to believe in the virtues of hardened but lightweight leather. The women dismembered other bits of armour and wore the bright little plates of bronze as earrings, or threaded them on strings for necklaces. The children hoarded little bags of bright plates eagerly, and the boys fought for them and the girls played elaborate games for them.
It was mid-afternoon before they left the battlefield. They rode for a while and then stopped to eat. Some of the children cheekily bartered weapons for food.
Then they turned south and left the battle plain, and ascended into the foothills of the mountains called the Qilian Shan. They camped for the night in a cold valley, and by midnight fog had settled in the hollows and chilled their hobbled horses to the bone, more so even than the distant, muffled howling of the wolves. But at the fireside in their tents, reliving the glorious day and the Battle of Forty Breaths in glittering detail, the warriors’ hearts still burned within them.
12
The next day the fog slowly lifted in the low sunlight forking in from the east between the mountains, and they saw how great those mountains were. These people of the steppes had never seen anything like them, although they were among the legends of the People. The summits of the mountains were lost in the still further summits of white air, towering cloud-capped palaces of sun-white clouds. It seemed a blasphemy almost to breathe in the sight of them.
There were valleys where the sun rested and stayed and the snow fled in that false spring. Forks of sunlight raked the yellow grass, and then there was some game, and they would gallop off in a mad hunt, yelling and hallooing, their crazed winter quest briefly forgotten. At night they gorged on half-cooked antelope meat and fell asleep with stomachs groaning with pleasure and pain.
There were a few villages, their livestock brought into their own huts for the winter. The villagers gaped at the approach of the two thousand horsemen, the four- or five-thousand-strong tribe of people on the move. But the passers-by took nothing, looted nothing. Many of them looked gaunt and hungry, but they did no plunder. Near one village, a grubby little girl standing high on a grey precipice of rocks with a herd of droop-eared goats saw them pass by in the valley below, and in the half an hour it took them all to pass not a single other villager set eyes on them. In the evening the girl told her mother and father that she had seen an army that afternoon, more than she could count, armed with bows and arrows and spears and very frightening. Her parents told her not to tell tall stories. She insisted that it was true, and her parents sent her to bed without any supper.
In the morning the father went down to the valley to check his snares and saw the numberless hoofprints at the upper end of the valley where the army had drawn together into the pass, and he stood and reeled and stared. Then he took the hare he had caught, climbed back up to the village and ordered his wife to give the little girl an extra egg for breakfast. He felt he needed an extra egg himself. And he wondered what sort of an army passes by without commandeering all the grain and meat and livestock in a village.
They ascended into a silent and alien world of barbed white peaks and pine forests as dark as pitch, as dark as the oil that bubbles out of the Chorasmian desert sand. There were glaciers that hung like robes of purest mother-of-pearl from haughty mountaintops, and snowcliffs that tottered above them as they wound their way along precipitous paths, the wind blowing gusts of snowdust off the cliffs and into their streaming eyes. Their horses stumbled blindly, the sweat on their necks and bellies freezing into crystals of ice.
They rounded the frozen lower slopes of a vast mountain blazing a luminous fiery red above them in the dying sun, a single crystal of ice a mile high. A terrible abyss lay to their right that none dared look into. They kept their heads down and eyes ahead like blinkered horses, frightened of what lay alongside. And then one of the wagons tilted and gave a low groan and slid freely sideways across the icy path pulling the two drafthorses with it. The animals spread their shaggy hooves wide, surprised, unafraid, not understanding. They continued to slide, and the heavy wagon laden with Chinese infantry shields slid over the side of the path, tilted a little and then fell away into the noiseless abyss below. The horses likewise. The people tiptoed forward and peered over the edge of the precipice. They saw the wagon falling silently into the abyss, its wheels slowly turning, and the horses pawing at
