customs houses, established no river crossings and toll-roads and imposts, decreed no payment of taxes to idle parasites in their pristine white robes in their gorgeous palaces. He made us free as he made all men free. He forged no chains for us, his children. His delight is not in the lifeless laws of the Romans, in the debates of their senators and the petty decrees of their courts. I have seen these Romans myself, and I would have you remember it well. With the clear and undimmed eyes of my childhood I saw those contemptible pygmies of men in their cities. I smelled the stink of their fetid streets. How dare you conflate their pompous pronouncements in their courts of law, their paper bills and levies of taxation, with the will of the everlasting gods! How dare you!
‘I have seen their chests and bribes of gold, my brothers!’ He gave the chest a furious kick. Its ironbound lid flew open, and they saw that it was filled with dully shining coins. His burning eye fell on Bleda, and Bleda looked away. ‘That is all their power amounts to!’ He slammed the lid shut again. ‘I know all, all! Their bribery of Ruga, their collusion in the murder of Mundzuk, my father, this you know – you all know – as I, too, know the truth of it. Shuffle with guilt you may, but then cast it off! You wonder: do I not hate my people? Do I not scorn them for their cowardice and passivity? Where have been the glorious battles and triumphs of the Huns these past three decades, during my long and bitter exile when I laboured and suffered in the wilderness? No, I do not scorn them. I love my people as a king must love his people if he would lead them with all conviction. And I would cover them in glory. They are a great people. They are an untamed horse-people of the plains, and they will come down on Rome like wolves on the fold.’
His voice grew still more in strength, a booming, rumbling bass reverberating in every head there. Abruptly he took a stride forward, set one mighty hand round the throat of old Kouridach and shook him. The others were astonished but powerless, immobile. Even had he torn into the old chieftain’s neck and ripped his head from his shoulders there and then, as it seemed to them in his frenzy he might do, none would move. He had killed many a man with his bare hands before. Now he shook Kouridach like a thing of rags, like an old pelt, words still pouring from him in violent oratory the while, and then let him drop back onto his stool and turned away, still ceaselessly carrying them all forward on his torrent of baleful words. Not persuading them by any sophistry, but battering them into submission with sheer rhetoric, with an almost divine anger at their stupidity, their smallness of spirit and pettiness of mind. Whether or not they agreed with him in their intellects, their hearts swelled and burned within them at his words. They would do his bidding. They could do no other but follow this storm-force of nature, powerless as husks of wheat driven before the wind.
He released the choking Kouridach and turned away.
‘Do not mutter to me, old Kouridach of the once-proud Hepthalite Huns, that Astur the All-Father has pronounced and approved the imperium of Rome, or decreed that she was destined to decide the fate of the world since before the world began. Astur did not bid us obey Rome’s paltry man-made laws, or hoard its gold in lieu of our own glory. Then who? Who is this power you so dread, which forbids us from pasturing our horses on the European plain where we have pastured them many a winter before as in my grandfather King Uldin’s time?
‘I will tell you of this power. I lived under its shadow, when I was a helpless child, and I have spied on and patrolled that power through the many eyes of my spies since my return. The power you dread is a whining puppet-emperor called Valentinian – the drooling offspring of incest and wine – and his mother, Galla Placidia her name, a cold, green-eyed monster with icicles for teats. That inbred buffoon, her son, I shall slaughter like a diseased sheep before his mother’s very eyes. This royal family is my bane, they hunted me through Italy like an animal, they slew my father: my curse is upon them. I shall cut them and their seed off for ever, their blood and their lives are forfeit. You Hun princes who dread him, how dare you dread him! Him and his armoured footsoldiers who move like snails over the battlefield and are marshalled like so many performing beasts of burden. Who are these Romans to dictate to us where we may pasture our horses and pitch our tents?
‘You speak of the Emperor of Rome as if he were Astur himself.
‘Blasphemy!’ The fist crashed down yet again. The voice scorched the air and their ears burned with his words.
‘You sit and puzzle and ponder like old women over who made the laws and dictates of Rome. Who established it as lord of the earth, robed in imperial purple. You propose to settle on the Hungvar in all timidity, if at all, with the permission of Rome. And you will allow Rome to be your rule and ruin. To tax your kin and kine, as Rome taxes and leeches the lifeblood from all its subject peoples, using that tax to pay its legions to oppress you further! Do you not see? Do you not see a great evil? Yet you would bend your necks to this yoke? A tariff on your horses’ every footfall, a capitation on every ewe in your flock, your very breath excisable. Because this is the fiat and firman of the gods?
‘Blasphemers!
‘It is Astur and the gods above who made the earth and forged the chains of the mountains, who established the bounds of the lands under the sun and poured in the tumultuous seas from their earthen vessels. Have you not heard? Have you not heard the poets and the shamans tell it often enough by the campfire in the night, or were you too drunk with koumiss to open your ears?
‘Have you not understood the will of him who made the jaws of the leopard? Him who forged the iron hooves of the warhorse, who crumpled the Five Kings in his hand, who brought us into this world which he made from a clot of his own blood. Who stretches the sky over our heads as a canvas, who spits forth lightning, who roars in the thunder, whose tears are the rain that drums the plains into an impenetrable mist. Who set the stars to burn in the heavens, who cut the moon from silver and the sun from gold, who crushed the life out of the dead places of the Kyzyl Kum with his fists – you know them well, my captains, those red sands and those desert places, I have shown you them all! Who forged the chains of the Tien Shan, who breathed fire on the deserts of the Takla Makan and burned the life out of them, who tore up the earth and rent canyons with his claws, who laughed to see the raging lion in the waste places, who rejoiced at the stampede of the saiga, at the thunder of their thousand thousand hooves. Who moulded the untold deeps of Lake Baikal, and made creatures to dwell there, huge and silent and glassy-eyed, which no man shall ever see or dream of even in his wildest dreams or nightmares. All, all is for the joy and delight of God, who is vaster than you dare to grasp in your petty imaginings. You think the Emperor of Rome, that pocky, whining whelp, is appointed by him and so should command our obedience! We are the sons of Astur the Father of All! It is blasphemy so to tremble before any mortal man with the god of our fathers at our side. Dare, dare… His delight is not in those who chain and punish and restrict, but in those who dare…
‘You have heard his voice in the beating of the shaman’s drum, you have seen him turn the steppes to ice with one cast of his hand, and with another bring them to life again and strew them with all the colours of spring. Out of his hands came the sun and the stars, the constellations in their courses, the night time and the bright day. Can the Emperor of Rome, howsoever decked in majesty and arrayed in the beauty of gold and rubies, send forth lightning by imperial decree? Can he number the sands of the shore? Does the eagle mount up at his command, and the hawk stretch out her wings towards the south? Can he bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? He is mere mortal flesh, and you dare to sit before me here and tell me that you fear him as if he were a god. Do you so fear man that you do not fear Astur? Do you condemn his ways, do you disannul his judgement?
‘Blasphemers!
‘He scorns the multitude of the city, and the range of the mountains is his pasture. The multitudes in the city know him not, because they have chosen to dwell in a little false world made by man. Who has given the warhorse strength, and clothed his neck with thunder? He scents the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, the shouting of the gleaming battle lines.
‘Where were you when he made the iron talons of the eagle, the curved yellow beak and the amber studs of his eyes, and breathed life into him and bid him go forth to be the terror of all birds under heaven? When he made the kicking hooves of the wild ass, the white teeth of the wolf, the claws of the bear, the tusks of the boar, the shoulders of the bison? Do you claim equality with their power? What folly, then, to claim equality with him who forged them in the furnaces of heaven before you were made! What were you then? You were less than a baby’s cry.
‘He made the tiger, the chief of the ways of god, with his bones of adamant and his sinews of steel. What can you compare to him? Will he make supplications to you? Will he speak soft words to you? And will he be a gentle plaything for your maiden daughters?’ Attila laughed and the sound carried far over the heads of his numberless listeners and was terrible. ‘Whatsoever is under the whole heaven is his. And he has given it to all men, equally and without distinction.
‘Bounds and laws, degrees and distinctions, toll-roads and customs-houses, exactions and imposts, the law’s
