destroy our enemies, rape their women, and steal their gold!’ He reached for the flagon.
‘It was the Romans themselves who put him to death.’
Sky-in-Tatters drank from the flagon and wiped his mouth. ‘Now my head is beginning to hurt. And it isn’t the koumiss.’
‘They put him to death four centuries back, and then realised they’d killed God.’
Chanat said, ‘No man is God.’
‘There was a Greek wise man,’ put in Orestes from the edge of the circle, ‘who said that if horses pictured god, they would picture him as a horse.’
They all chuckled.
‘These Greeks,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, ‘they are not the biggest fools I have ever heard of.’
‘They are conquered by Rome now.’
Sky-in-Tatters pondered. ‘And the other verse. This King of Terror from the east…’
Attila’s eyes shone and he said nothing.
Geukchu said, ‘Perhaps he will overthrow even heaven and hell itself, Your Majesty.’
Attila didn’t look at him. Geukchu shrank back into silence. ‘Rome and China,’ said Sky-in-Tatters, a slow smile dawning on his face. ‘That makes two empires.’ He raised the flagon of koumiss again and took a long, long draught.
A broad river they forded in silvery light, and a rocky defile colourful with larkspur, and then down another sunbaked slope of clattering scree and over a stony plain of malachite and slate, warm fumes of rosemary and lavender and chives rising amid the horses and the leather. It was summer now, sunbaked, and they had ridden the long trail back west for many months, the sun hot on their forearms as they turned and headed south amid a chorus of oxlips and cowslips and anemones and musk orchids, lilac cornflowers and yellow broom and white clover, white windflowers and purple pasqueflowers, with insects rising and falling murmurously among the open flowerheads.
There were silver poplars and rose-coloured rocks, rocks along the river valley, this river that ended at home. Rocks crumbling under the generations of ice and wind, brown earthbanks crumbling into the mighty river. Horses strained up the farther side, wagons clattered over the gravel strands and up shallow slopes to the plains again. The plains that hereabouts were dotted with mighty kurgans, the tombs of the ancient, bearded, blue-eyed Scythians, silent monsters asleep in the long grass.
As for Attila, the fierce joy in his heart was boundless. He could barely hold himself down in the saddle; he kept pushing himself up on his fists, looking afar off for the camp of his people. Orestes noticed and teased him for it. Only Orestes could. He even dared to mention the name of Queen Checa. But it was true. Their joy was boundless, their future without check or limit. They had done it. It was an unbelievable feat, this vast project of unification. They had ridden out across the steppes at the onset of winter, eastwards over the Iron River. They had ridden thousands of miles into the heart of Scythia, to the very shadow of the Great Wall itself. They had united Hun peoples, the Kutrigur and the Black Huns, and joined with another great people, the Oronchans. They had massacred an entire Chinese armoured column for good measure and good practice, and they had been joined by several thousand more nomad and distant kinsmen as they journeyed home. Ahead of them now, ahead of so great and powerful an army, lay only more conquest, and then the ultimate prize. None could stand against them.
Even in these last days, as they approached their homeland, more came to join them. Some had come before, a year ago, hearing of the finding of the Sword of Savash, and then drifted away disconsolate when Attila rode east. They came back, laughing with astonishment, those tribute kings and petty princelings, rulers over tiny, scattered bands of White Huns from the shores of the Caspian, under their king, Charaton; and Kouridach, the great, bow-legged chieftain of the Hepthalite Huns from beside the Aral Sea.
Charaton made to dismount from his horse when he came before Attila, by way of submission, but Attila stopped him. So Charaton sat his horse, and told him that he, even he, had had an embassy from the Byzantines. They had not dared to raise their eyes towards him, they said, for fear that they should be dazzled by his effulgent brilliance. And then the Byzantine ambassadors had offered him a bribe to ally with them, but Charaton had declined their offer, ‘though,’ as he admitted ruefully, ‘it cost me dear.’
Attila told him not to repine. ‘We will be before the gates of Constantinople soon,’ he said, his eyes glittering. ‘Then Constantinople and all its wealth will be yours.’ He stroked his beard. ‘Soon now.’
It was dawn on the last day of their journey, which had lasted two hundred days. By nightfall they would be back among their tents and their women.
Attila assembled them in their regiments and ranks and told them that they were the greatest army the world had ever seen.
‘A great war is coming, and a great empire is falling,’ he said.
‘And all of you – Black Huns and White Huns, Red and Yellow and Hepthalite Huns, Kutrigurs and Oronchans, people of the mountains and the valleys and the plains – all of you will have glory for yourselves and your descendants in this war. Only follow me and you will be great. For the time of the Hun nation has come.’
The shout might have been heard in the camp. But they would be there by nightfall anyway. He looked over his ranks of men, tens of thousands strong now, and the wagons without number. Then he turned and raised his head high, and they rode on home.
Little Bird galloped half a day ahead, alone but for his bear cub.
The women clamoured round him for news when he rode into the camp, and he drove them almost to distraction by not answering a single one of their questions. Several even struck out at him in their anguish but he dodged them and skipped away, laughing.
When the sun went down, the women were still gathered around him in forlorn hope of news that made sense. He dropped down and sat cross-legged at the fireside and raised his eyebrows at them.
The earth was rumbling.
He leaned sideways at an extraordinary angle and put his ear to the ground. He waggled his topknot merrily and grinned, still canted sideways as if he were made all of flesh and had not a bone inside him. Then he snapped upright again and looked around at the troubled women, his hands resting on his knees where they poked through the ragged holes in his grubby breeches. They waited, fit to scream.
‘These baleful borborygmi in the deep earth’s bowels,’ he pronounced, ‘presage either the return of my mad- eyed master at the head of a million horsemen, or the end of the world.’ His black eyes danced with malevolence. ‘Or perhaps… both!’
16
But there was no celebration when the horsemen returned.
Attila rode first into camp, at full gallop, and made straight for the royal palace. Someone tried to hail him as he sped past, but he took no notice. It was Bleda, open-mouthed at his brother’s return – he had been getting accustomed to kingship.
Attila pulled Chagelghan to such a violent halt that the horse skidded forward several yards on its rump, and was off and striding away before the poor beast had its feet. As the king approached the palace, Queen Checa emerged. She was gaunt and hollow-eyed, and her face had the grey pallor of sorrow. He ran to her, but she could not bear to look at him, could not bear him to touch her, as if her guilt were a contagion.
It was Ellak, their second son. He was dying.
‘We all have to die one day,’ said Little Bird jauntily, playing with the cub nearby.
Attila stopped in mid-stride, and for an instant it seemed as if he might at last turn on the shaman and slay him where he stood. But then he walked on into the palace after his wife.
Little Bird pushed in between them. ‘Let me see.’ After a few moments of pushing and prodding he stood back again. ‘The boy just needs rest,’ he said, ‘and boiled milk. It’s something he ate.’
The bear cub chewed his finger. Little Bird set him down.
And then there was another figure in the shadows by the doorway. It was Enkhtuya.
