woman’s voice, soft and low. He moved silently though the darkness and saw her sitting in the entrance of a humble tent, an infant asleep in her arms. Another child of two or three lay asleep on some blankets close by, and three or four other women sat behind and around her in a semicircle. She sang: ‘Though the grass will shoot from the land
He is not grass, he will not come to my calling,
Though the waters will rise from the hills,
He is not water, he will not come to my calling
Oh the jackal lies in your bed,
The raven broods in your sheepfold.
Only the wind plays the shepherd’s pipe,
Only the north wind sings your song,
Oh my husband…’
The woman’s voice faltered and stopped and her head fell in sorrow onto her breast and her infant looked up wide-eyed at her. One of the others close by reached out her hand and laid it on the singer’s shoulder.
‘Who is she?’ whispered Attila.
‘The woman of one of the two guards you killed in Ruga’s tent.’
Attila frowned. He had forgotten them.
He went up to the tent and stood silently. After a while the women looked up and some of them started. But not the widowed woman.
Attila gestured over his shoulder at Chanat.
‘Woman,’ he said, ‘here is your new husband. Be content.’
She stared up at him through tear-bright eyes. Then she slowly got to her feet, her infant still in her arms. She stepped in front of him and spat on the ground almost between his feet.
She said, ‘You slew my husband and burned his body to ashes without burial. You left me a widow and my children helpless orphans. My heart is broken like an old pot, it is in a hundred pieces on the hard ground. My tears have all cried out and dried and still my sorrow within me would cry out a river. Now you treat me as you would a cow, and give me to this ancient bull here with his old dog’s breath and his wrinkled ballbag. But I am not to be so easily given. Leave my tent and go back to your own bed, with your bloody sword for company through the cold night. And may the gods judge you harshly.’
Chanat stepped towards her, but Attila held his arm out across the warrior’s chest.
The woman stared a little longer at the king, contemptuous and unafraid. ‘How many more will you slay likewise, my lord widow-maker? I know minds and hearts such as yours, and they are no mystery to me. O great Tanjou! Khan of all the kingdoms under heaven! Great king of everything and nothing!’
She spat again, then turned swiftly and went back into the tent and pulled it closed behind her.
‘My lord!’ protested Chanat, but Attila shook his head.
‘Words, words, words,’ he said.
They walked on.
‘In the face of desert storms, the lion’s teeth, armies of tens of thousands,’ Attila said, ‘one may ride without fear. But in the face of a widow’s anger…’
‘Such a woman would be a good hot ride,’ said Chanat. ‘And a good mother of warriors. A pity her desire was not stirred by the thought of my wrinkled ballbag.’
‘A pity indeed,’ said Attila.
Passing another tent nearer the heart of the camp, they heard a young girl’s screams and an old man’s impotent bellowing. Then the girl herself almost fell out of the grubby, mean-looking tent at their feet. Her hair was torn out in clumps, her face beaten and bruised, and her tunic half ripped from her back. After her stumbled an old man, gasping with fury, his eyes bulging, and spittle in his skimpy beard. He stopped and pulled up when he saw the king.
‘How did you come by her?’ rasped Attila. ‘I gave her to Zabergan.’
‘Zabergan sold her to me,’ said the old man. ‘He is my cousin. I gave a good price.’
‘And now you beat her?’
The old man smiled conspiratorially. ‘The more it is beaten, the tenderer the meat.’
‘How do you beat her?’
‘With this,’ said the old man, brandishing a knobbly stick. He came closer to them, and his breath was hot and thick with koumiss and lust. ‘On her back,’ he said, almost whispering, ‘on her firm young buttocks, and on her soft young thighs-’
‘How? Like this?’ said Attila. And in a blink of an eye he had snatched the stick from the old man’s grasp and hurled him to the ground. Chanat thought he heard something old and brittle crack as he hit the hard ground. Then Attila was standing astride him and belabouring his skinny, bony back with all his might. Under the rain of blows the man could do nothing but curl up and whimper for mercy. Attila stood straight again, snapped the stick over his upraised thigh and dropped the two halves into the dust.
He pulled the girl to her feet and looked her over briefly. ‘Go to the Compound of the Women. Tell them I sent you. They will clean you up well enough. You are mine now.’
The girl stared at him, rabbit-eyed.
‘Go,’ he said, giving her a shove.
She went.
‘Sorting out my people’s domestic troubles!’ he growled, looking after her. ‘I had my mind on higher things when I dreamed of being king.’
Chanat guffawed. ‘You are kind to women.’
They walked on, leaving the old man in the dust.
‘Kind?’ Attila grunted. ‘Kindness has nothing to do with it. I want good warriors out of that one’s womb.’
In the morning, a widow in a tent at the edge of the camp near the corral of the horses, her face etched and exhausted with grief, came to her door to find the silent Greek on horseback, holding out a fine silver vase. She took it and looked inside. There were some ashes. She turned without a word and vanished back into her tent.
At dawn, Attila and his chosen men were already out on the plain for target practice.
‘You will learn how to shoot as well as your king shoots,’ he told them, ‘or your fingertips will bleed away in trying.’
He left them and rode on with Chanat and Orestes.
Orestes’ big hare eyes darted left and right across the steppes, as if expecting the shadow of the Erinyes themselves to come up over the horizon: those clotted avengers from Tartarus with blood spilling from their eyesockets and snakes twined in their hair, as they had come to another older Orestes. Come as before to avenge the murder of parent or uncle by the outraged prodigal child.
But then Orestes always looked guarded and uncertain. Or certain only of the uncertainty of the world. He had come back from his thirty years of wandering with his master through the unknown wastes like a man who trusts in the stability of nothing. Except of his own heart.
Finally Attila reined his horse in, and the three sat and gazed at the far horizon.
‘My father…’ he began.
‘Do not ask, I beg you,’ said Chanat. ‘Oh, do not.’
‘Ruga had no sons or daughters.’
Chanat looked away. ‘He was injured in his stones. When he was twenty summers or so.’
The grey sky of the steppes was paling and warming in the sun. From afar off came the high chatter of spotted susliks. Dust on the far horizon, perhaps a herd of saiga antelope. Perhaps only devils of the wind.
‘Before that, Ruga and my mother…’
‘Oh, do not ask, my king.’
The sky lightened from shield grey to pale and then to daylight blue. Like the fine blue silken robes that King Ruga had worn when he gasped and died.
Attila turned and nodded to Orestes. The Greek already knew his mind, as always. They did not even need to speak in a private language, these two, as old friends do. They barely needed to speak at all.
Orestes heeled his horse and rode on, veering southwards towards the settlements beyond the low hills.
