‘Might I ask who, my lord?’
Attila gazed at him unblinkingly. ‘My family,’ he said.
In late afternoon two days later, after many miles of riding, Orestes came back into the camp, dusty and weary, with a strange procession of women and boys. The older boys, well into their second decade, rode horses of their own, but the younger, and the women, rode in a covered wagon, peering from the back at the unfolding camp.
The camp gazed back in curiosity and then in astonishment. There were arguments about how many there were, but general agreement was that there were six sons and as many daughters, and then again as many wives.
Attila commandeered two more fine tents in the heart of the camp, and into one trooped his six sons. Their ages ranged from seventeen or so down to four or five, and the youngest wept as he parted from one of the women. Attila sat his horse and watched them go. Into another tent trooped his women. In time, the people learnt that they comprised five wives and eight daughters, and they marvelled anew. For a king to have five wives was nothing. But for one who had been a vagrant in the wastes of Scythia for thirty years to have five wives, and to keep such a family together, defended from every brigand that passed by, was scarcely imaginable. What strength must have defended them. What ferocity…
As the stature of the sons and the beauty of the daughters well attested, the wives themselves were no cast-offs from some foul-smelling brigand’s harem. The older were as haughty as queens, and the younger were as young as his eldest daughter. Surely their new king was a great king.
At the head of the wives walked one who was perhaps as old as her husband. Her step was graceful and serene. Her eyes were large and dark, her hair loosely braided. Her gown was a simple brown woollen robe, and her only decorations were two modest gold earrings, and a fillet of fine gold round her brow. She was tall and slender as a queen, but her fine, handsome face told of long hardship and desert wanderings, and no soft years in a royal palace for her. She already had many delicate wrinkles around her beautiful eyes, her skin was drawn across her wide, high cheekbones, and her long dark hair was greying at her temples.
The king called out, a word that none understood. The woman stopped and looked across at her lord and master, and smiled with a smile of covert triumph. She walked over to him, and into his fine blue tent behind. The rest of the wives – younger, prettier, still of childbearing years – watched her go. And then they went on into the new tent of the king’s wives.
‘What is the first wife’s name?’ Chanat murmured to Orestes.
Orestes didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, with a small smile, ‘She is called Checa. Queen Checa.’
Long after dark she lay on her back beside her husband, her face streaked with perspiration, her hands folded, a smile on her lips as playful as a young girl’s.
‘Oh great tanjou,’ she whispered, looking across at him and widening her eyes beseechingly. ‘Oh my great lord, my strong lion, my ravisher, my fierce king and conqueror. Did you miss me these last few days?’
‘Hnh,’ grunted Attila, his eyes closed.
Checa laughed.
When she awoke an hour later he was gone.
For his blood was up and his time had come and the strength and surge of his blood knew no bounds and his hunger for the world was limitless. He strode out onto the plains alone and unarmed and held his arms wide under the stars and prayed to his father Astur, who made all and watched all. He asked for nothing in his prayer. He had all he wanted for now, and all else that he wanted he would soon have, too. He closed his eyes and smiled up into heaven and his only prayer was to feel the presence and power of his father Astur and be bathed in the silver starlight that God made even before he made the earth from a clot of blood.
He returned and went into the tent of the women and pulled them to him. Among them was the girl he had rescued from Ruga’s tent and given to Zabergan. Still bruised from the brute who had beaten her, she came to him shyly. And when dawn came up over the eastern steppes, five more concubines lay on their backs with their hands on their bellies and uncertain smiles on the lips, wondering if they might now be carrying a son of the new king.
The king was gone already. He had slept two hours that night and it was enough, more than enough. Sleep made him impatient. ‘Time enough to sleep in the grave,’ he growled, toeing Orestes grumblingly out of his blankets. Now, as dawn came up, they were already out on the plains, a dozen miles out from the camp and still at full and furious gallop, Attila yaa-ing and roaring, Orestes jolting in the saddle and laughing at the pitiless energy of his master, a fast-moving dustcloud of saiga ahead of them and the king with teeth bared like a wolf that was ready to devour the whole herd.
For he had waited thirty years to come into his kingdom. Riding the solitary grasslands and the dustlands and deserts farther east, shoulders hunched and head bowed against the scouring sands and the blistering loneliness. But one soul stayed with him through it all and would not leave his side, though at times he commanded him to and flung his loyalty back in his face with bitterness. Orestes stayed there by his side, no more to be cleaved away from him than his own shadow.
In some distant, hidden valley in the far White Mountains – so the story went among the fascinated and gossiping people who now called him their king – he had carved out a bandit kingdom, and drawn men to him. And wives. The wives had come with him, back west to his heartland in the pastures by the Euxine Sea. And the men – perhaps they still waited for him far to the east.
Now the three desert decades were over, and it was time for it to begin. He could not have returned earlier, all the tribe would have been against him. But he had served his traitor’s exile, cut off from his people, his shamans and his gods, and now it was time. Time to come into his kingdom, and ride out against the world that had so belittled and humiliated him. He had survived scorn and abuse, beatings, half-killings, silence and contempt, as must any tribeless man with none to defend him or fight with him. He had been a mere bandit leader, though the son and grandson of kings. For the world is not a just place; or it is just only to the powerful.
When he rode out into the wilderness, a broken-hearted boy all those years ago, none had believed him truly a traitor. But Ruga’s sentence that bright morning had expressed the will of the gods, and none might go against it. Had any in the tribe spoken with Attila or taken him in as their secret guest during years of his exile and ostracism, they would have been punished terribly. None would have so transgressed. Now he was back, an aura of miracle about him in that he had survived so long alone and tribeless in the wilderness, with only his silent, watchful, mistrustful foreign slave and his ragged, mysterious family for company. Surely the gods must have watched over him, for such survival would not have been possible otherwise.
There are many such tales among other peoples, of mad kings driven into the wilderness to live like animals: King Nebuchadnezzar of the Jews, who turned aside to eat grass like the oxen, and whose body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws. Or one-eyed King Goll of the Celts, who fled from the field of battle not from cowardice, but maddened by that blood-red rage which grips men amid carnage. I heard a fragment of the haunting Song of King Goll sung long ago by a brown-eyed Celtic boy: And now I wander in the woods
When summer gluts the golden bees,
Or in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-coloured trees;
Or when along the wintry strands
The cormorants shiver on their rocks;
I wander on, and wave my hands,
And sing, and shake my heavy locks.
The grey wolf knows me; by one ear
I lead along the woodland deer;
The hares run by me growing bold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.
Attila was no such sorrowful king nor idle folk tale. He was a living myth to his people, dressed in flesh and blood, back from the wilderness to dwell among them, and they beheld his glory.
World-bestriding conquerors are furious in their youth, and as impatient as youths even if they make old age. Alexander had conquered the world by twenty-nine. Hannibal faced and destroyed the flower of Rome in the field when he was but thirty, and Caesar chafed bitterly at not having brought the world to its knees before him by the
