thousand! There was no limit to their power if they commanded such an army. This bandit king, this Attila – the power in him, the intelligence as sharp as a knife, the certainty of success. Sky-in-Tatters could taste victory on his tongue like honey.
‘How can we conquer this kingdom?’
Attila was already pulling his horse round and heading home. ‘Where strength will not,’ came his voice out of the darkness, ‘guile will serve.’
13
At dawn Attila rode into the kingdom of the god-king alone.
He rode unarmed and slow. He came down from the mountains and then over the grassy slopes flecked with snow, and the rising sun cut in from the east low over the mountaintops and warmed the valley as he had said.
The green hillsides levelled out and he rode through orchards and meadowlands, and past small clusters of thatched huts with bee skeps on the broad shelves of thatched bee sheds in their bare winter gardens. People stopped and stared at him but no one challenged him. The country was running with silver streams, and water wheels clacked beside cressbeds. This peaceful, settled existence reminded him of long ago, and Italy. How could people live in one valley all their lives, as if in scorn of the rest of the world God made?
There were many people in the fields already, and others rose from their pallets to see the foreign horseman in his long quilted coat and strange pointed hat. There were farmers yoking their oxen up, and housewives in their yards, throwing woodash out onto their winter vegetables and rebuilding the smoored fire that had smouldered all night in the hearth. Children herded geese down to the streams, and old men wrapped in blankets sat on doorsteps with rheumy eyes, drinking hot chai from clay bowls. People were everywhere, clustered thickly, thousands of them; like corn ripe for harvesting.
After a slow walk through the rich farmland, the mountains ahead began to tower up, dark and forbidding, and he emerged onto a bare road that led to a great gate. The gate was open, and the road twisted and ran up the side of the ascending cliff to another. From here upwards, built clinging to the sides of the mountain and linked only by the most precipitous paths, were the palaces of noblemen, the temples of priests, the monasteries of monks and, above them all, the palace of the god-king himself.
The peacefulness of the mountainside city amused him. Monks with shaven heads, in rust-red robes, stopped and bowed, then scampered away before him. Women carrying heavy baskets on their heads stopped and gawped, then looked away and hurried on. Only at the top of the road at another broad gateway flanked by grey stone towers did two guards step forward, block his way with their long pikes and demand to know his business. This was clearly not a city accustomed to war.
He stopped, and looked at them, and Chagelghan signalled his contempt for the hard manmade stones beneath his hooves by lifting his tail and manuring them liberally.
‘I seek an audience with the king,’ said Attila.
The men objected, politely and at length.
‘I had a dream of nine arrows,’ said Attila, ‘and then a tenth arrow, which flew and broke all the other nine.’
The men stammered and stared at each other, and one ran to talk to his lieutenant. The lieutenant peered out of a little booth, then sent the guard running up the steep hill to another authority. And so, by slow and bureaucratic degrees, this strange yellow-eyed nomad savage was admitted higher up into the city, past magnificent carved and painted temples releasing incense and the tinkling of tiny bells into the still morning air. At last, with deepest respect, they asked him to dismount, and ushered him through a small postern gateway of ornate stonework.
Within was a covered terrace, looking out southwards over the valley. The view was magnificent. Attila turned his back on it, leaned against the balustrade and crossed his arms and waited. Who ruled over this view? Who possessed it?
‘A dream you say? Well, well,’ said a voice, high-pitched and excitable. Through a doorway at the opposite end of the terrace stepped a large robed figure. His round face was beaming and sottish, his nose half eaten away at the nostrils. He wore a bizarre piece of headgear, a crown of beaten gold which radiated out in horizontal spokes from around his skull. Stepping through the door he had knocked it askew and now he paused to straighten it. ‘Well, well,’ he said again.
Behind the syphilitic god-king came a character of a different stamp, a short, squat, burly, white-haired general of some sixty years, unarmed but in a full coat of mail. His nose was blunt, severally broken, but undevoured by plague or disease. His long white moustache was carefully combed and his eyes were bright and unyielding. He stood just within the doorway and kept his eyes on the visitor.
The god-king lifted the hem of his robe, exposing small feet encased in bejewelled kidskin slippers, and took little steps over to the visitor. He smiled. His few remaining teeth were not good: grey shards collapsing drunkenly into each other. His lips were painted vermilion, and from the fat, elongated lobes of his ears hung heavy gold rings. As befitted a god-king, his robe was the colour of the sun, except under the armpits where it was a little dark and greasy. His stomach was a wobbling mound when he moved, and his head, crowned with the gold crown of the sun, was a bald dome with rolls of fat round its base. He stopped a few paces from the silent visitor in his long grubby coat and looked over the terrace, making an odd hissing sound. Beneath them was a wider terrace where numerous pubescent concubines with crippled feet sat around prettifying themselves and awaiting his command.
Attila did not look or stir.
The god-king hesitated and beamed at him again. The heavenly father of his people, and the earthly father of inbred dozens. He had already forgotten about the dream. He was uncertain why this visitor was here.
‘Come!’ he commanded, and beckoned him over to the back of the terrace. Here a colonnade of stone pillars gave way to a row of doorways leading off into darkened chambers, hollowed out of the very rock itself.
Attila stepped into the gloom after the god-king, and heard the tough old general close behind.
‘Bayan-Kasgar!’ called the god-king from inside the gloomy chamber. ‘Bring us more light!’
Attila and the god-king waited patiently, standing opposite each other in the gloom. Attila could feel the little knife nestling coldly against the skin of his belly. The old general was gone. The chamber was very still. The god- king smiled at him fixedly, then wiped a little tear of pus from his nose with the back of his ringed hand. He did not deserve to survive. The whole kingdom did not deserve to survive.
‘Bayan-Kasgar,’ repeated Attila. ‘Beautiful Wolf. Wolf-like, maybe, but… beautiful?’
The god-king stared uneasily at the stranger. What an odd thing to say. He wondered if he ought to call more guards. How was he supposed to know what to do? Where was his chamberlain? Why was he on his own now? He felt very annoyed. To mask his annoyance he burst into a peel of high-pitched giggles. The stranger laughed along with him, and took a step towards him.
Then dear Bayan-Kasgar returned at the head of a troop of guards carrying tall, elaborate bronze candelabra which they set on the ground. Attila realised the size of the chamber for the first time, a vast lumber-room of accumulated stuff as appeals to sedentary emperors everywhere. Like that ardent collector in Rome. Stuff. God- kings always accumulated stuff, to weigh them down. Perhaps to give them the comforting illusion of a gravity and substance that they could never in their mere selves possess. The kings of settled people who had never learned, or had wilfully forgotten, that the more you have, the less you are.
He nodded admiringly, and the god-king giggled again and began to show him round his collection.
In the dim candlelight Attila expressed his heartfelt admiration for the god-king’s outlandish treasury. His tortoiseshell boxes of musk and ginseng root from neighbouring tribal overlords; his tall vases full of the brightly coloured feathers of vanished birds; his cedarwood chest of gold nuggets from Bei Kem. The god-king stooped wheezily over the chest, picked up one of the rough nuggets between pudgy forefinger and thumb and put it to his mouth. He turned back to Attila, grinning idiotically, sucking the nugget like a child sucking a plum. After he had sucked it a while to his satisfaction, he drew it from his mouth, smacked his lips and handed it, looped with saliva,
