struggled to grow fast enough to feed the horses’ many thousands of mouths. Horses and weapons and goods were amicably traded, marriages were made, and even the hardiest warriors grumbled in their tents at night at the din of all the wailing newborns in the night. And so, by fame and alliance, courtship and copulation, the numbers of the people grew and grew.
Each people formed its own regiment, but learned its discipline and took its orders from Attila and his chosen men. When not drilling they played the furious, competitive games of the steppe peoples. Picking up tiny gold rings from the grass at full gallop, or lunatic wrestling matches between two men each mounted and galloping side by side. Trying to steal kisses, and more intimate forfeits, from young maidens who rode armed with long whips with which they lashed their pursuers mercilessly. The lashing they gave with their tongues was even worse.
Then it was time to break camp for the last time, and begin the long journey west, for the first signs of spring were appearing everywhere and the horses and livestock could forage as they went. Early clover and vetch, sainfoin, corn spurrey and slender oatgrass coloured the warming plains.
‘To Rome!’ cried Attila, raising his sword high. ‘Even to the shores of the Atlantic!’ His numberless thousands of warriors gave a great shout, most having no clue what ‘Atlantic’ meant but liking the grandeur of the word.
Little Bird, sitting his pony close to the king, did not shout with them but only gave a heretical sigh amidst all this martial rejoicing. ‘All the same, I would have liked to have seen China, my father,’ he said. ‘Before I died.’
‘You will see China,’ said Attila, wrenching at his reins. His voice was fierce, but Little Bird’s voice was soft and melancholy.
‘Only in dreams,’ he said. ‘In a dream, I climbed to the top of a high hill from where I could see all of China.’ He spoke now in his sing-song rhythmical lilt, as if reciting a poem. ‘The hanging gardens of the emperor’s summer palace, the jade streams singing, the glimmering bird-girls in their leaves of silk and gold.’
He stopped and smiled at Attila.
Attila said nothing in reply to Little Bird’s haunting words, so rich and strange, of such sad omen.
The shaman’s eyes were silver pools, quite inscrutable.
‘Ah, but China is vast,
You will never see it all.
The mountains are high, the emperor is far away.
The emperor is forever far away.’
15
The great army looped northwards and towards the time when the days grew as long as the nights, they met the edge of the northern forests where the spring grasses were lush and green, and followed their path westward that way. There remained patches of shrinking snow in the shady hollows, but in such threshold places, between forest and steppe, as between land and sea, there is always good hunting.
At times, with the sun setting low in their eyes, it seemed as if autumn had returned in all its majesty, the branches of the trees burning gold in the dying blaze. And at times the jaws of winter snapped at them still, and sharp flurries of wolf-weather returned. The king was always urging them on into the night, the children exhausted, asleep in the wagons. Sometimes they looped northwards to find fords across the great rivers of that country, riding through the midnight forest, snow aslant, wolves tracing them, shadows through the firs, the most mournful howls echoing across the starlit sky. Beyond the wolves, other figures moved through the forest, watching them, pushing through the towering pines as a man walks through grass: vast, nameless beings more powerful than any wolf that ever lived.
But spring came on steadily, and each day they drew further west out of the iron jaws of central Scythia, and towards the rich pastures beside the Euxine Sea. They rode through long, damp grass beside the forest’s edge with dewladen bittercress brushing their horse’s hocks. They came through the country of gentle, brown-eyed woodland people, who used jawbones of pike to tattoo their bodies with numberless waves and spirals. They lived in bark- covered tepees, said Little Bird the Wise, though only the children believed him. The adults scoffed and laughed to hear the mad little shaman talk of woodland people who ate moss, and in winter rode through the snow on reindeer with bridle and saddle. Still farther north there were people who hunted seals with obsidian-tipped spears, and roofed their huts of ice with the ribs of whales.
At the riversides the Huns stopped to water their horses among the broadleaved poplars. This was a land so mild and gentle and filled with birdsong that it seemed to them like some great king’s private hunting park. They sometimes glimpsed the people of the woodlands, who had long since glimpsed them through the trees: a horde of hellish horsemen, armed to the teeth, eyes as restless as those of hungry wolves. The woodland people had watched them approach for a while with big, mournful eyes, hidden in their bird-skin capes, and had slipped quietly away, taking to their coracles and their leaf-shaped canoes and vanishing northwards into the safety of the deep and endless forest.
There were the pale green shoots of wild onions, the aroma of wild thyme beneath their horses’ hooves. A stream of snowmelt so young that it flowed in a streambed merely of flattened green grass, padded and silent, the world so bright and young, as if new made by the All-Father’s unseen hands in the night. There are no words for expressing the joy of spring after such winter bitterness as is felt by all nomads and wanderers. Not for them the safety of stone houses. Not for them steaming hypocausts and heated floor-tiles. Only a dung-fire and a horseblanket between them and the killing cold.
Their hearts soared like hawks, bursting with love for the land.
They surprised a black bear one day bumbling out of the woods. When they had speared her and rolled her over in the grass and prayed to the Little Sister’s spirit for forgiveness, they found she had milk in her teats. She had hidden her cubs under moss, knowing she must die that day. But they searched and found the cubs and killed them, too, their fur so fine a gift for a pretty girl. But one cub they kept alive, wet-nosed and wide-eyed, with huge and floppy paws, and he came along with them after that. They packed up the meat from the rest of the cubs and the mother and went on. Little Bird carried the cub on his lap when he began to tire, and the cub slept and then urinated on him lavishly by way of thanks.
‘Tell me about Rome,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, lying back in the firelight after gorging too heavily on bearmeat. He belched and rubbed his bulging belly.
Attila sat cross-legged and looked into the fire. He spoke slowly and softly: ‘By a King of Kings from Palestine
Two empires were sown,
By a King of Terror from the east
Two empires were o’erthrown…’
Despite his groaning belly, Sky-in-Tatters sat up, or at least raised himself on one elbow. ‘Explain.’
‘This is a prophecy, a Roman prophecy. The first lines refer to that fiery Jew they call the Christ, the King of Kings, who sowed the empires of Heaven and Hell. In the empire of Rome, he is their god.’
‘He is a great warrior?’
‘He preaches peace. Preached. He is dead now, though they believe he lives.’
‘In heaven?’
‘In heaven. Palestine is… a desert country far to the south. The tribe there is called the Jews. Now this dead god-king is worshipped by all the empire of Rome.’
‘Though they are not Jews?’
‘No.’
Sky-in-Tatters was looking more and more baffled. ‘But they in Rome – Romans…? They do not follow his preaching? They are great warriors?’
‘Not bad.’
Sky-in-Tatters shook his head. ‘My heart is heavy for them. They are confused.’
Attila went on, ‘This Christ taught that we should forgive our enemies.’
Sky-in-Tatters threw back his head and laughed. ‘When all men know that the sweetest pleasure in life is to