whole grammar of gestures and winks and hand signals. Buyers slowly producing worn leather purses from inside their robes, and sellers biting coins to test their worth – plenty of bronze coins around that have been washed with arsenic to make them pass for silver. Fur merchants from the far north, from beyond the Roman Empire, selling bearskin and marten, beaver and sable. Bright-eyed songbirds whistling in their osier cages. Everywhere the savour of smoking fish and roasting meat, and girls selling slugs of wine straight from the barrel in wooden cups. More elaborate inns and taverns under canvas. Pickpockets, of course, preying on the drunk and unwary, and women looking for husbands or at least money, walking light-stepped and lazy-eyed, swaying their hips between the groups of men.
Further off, the warm ripe smell of livestock in wooden corrals. Cattle dealers and sheep sellers communicating in their secret language and occult numbers, with barely discernible nods and winks for deals. And the air everywhere filled with greetings and curses, jests and lewd remarks, the high piping cries of excited children, the cackle of geese, and a single screaming monkey in a cage. From the land of the Nubians, so the monkey-seller said, without any great conviction. The monkey reached out its paw and pulled the hair of unwary bystanders. And all this ripe human chaos under the supposed regulation of a handful of frontier troops from the towering legionary fortress of Viminacium, ten miles east.
There was a girl there, a gentle, dreamy girl with a hare-shot lip, because a hare had walked across her mother’s path when she was pregnant with her. So they said. She carried a yoke of wooden pails and sold goat’s milk by the cupful, but she was not in truth a bold or assertive seller and she made little money. She too frequently gave cupfuls of milk away to hungry-eyed, plaintive children pestering her. When she returned at the day’s end, her mother would scold her for not having sold enough, accusing her of daydreaming her days away. And scold her even more for not having found a husband to take her off her poor old mother’s hands.
She disliked jostling crowds, and was drawn to the edge of the fair where the gaudy tents and stalls gave way to open meadows, and then the low line of the hills to the west, and the jut of Mons Aureus, the mountain of gold, with its fabulous mines. The vaults of Viminacium were full of gold, so they said. When it was transported down the great imperial trunk road to the emperor in Constantinople, it went with an escort of a thousand men. And the emperor… the girl always imagined him as made of gold himself, seated on his high throne covered in gold leaf, like a statue, immobile, unapproachable. A living god.
Now she lingered shyly before an old woman’s canopy of grubby canvas supported on gnarled staves.
‘Come you in, girl, come you in. It’s a lover you’ll be wanting at your age!’
The old woman grinned and bobbed about among her strange wares, performing almost a little dance, her white hair in a tight bun, her ringed fingers fluttering. The old woman was no witch, no purveyor of instruments for cruelty, malice and revenge, but only a fortune-teller. A preacher had earlier that morning come out of the town to stand by her tent and preach on the text ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, but the people only scowled at him and passed on, leaving the preacher impotent and the old woman alone and unlynched.
The girl hesitantly set down her pails and the old woman took her hand and drew her in. Within the shadows of the tent there were animals’ feet and tails, and strangely shaped stones like seashells, long dyed feathers of heron and bustard, tufts of multicoloured rags tied round sticks topped with small brass bells, leather pouches of herbs, bottles of dubious liquor. Then something else caught the girl’s eye, something very beautiful, which she took at first for a mirror. A little vanity such as rich ladies use to admire themselves when they are carried to dinner in their gilded litters, through the grand wide streets of great cities. Jewelled ladies with their white-chalked faces and forearms and little flattering mirrors.
The old fortune-teller knew at once what she wanted and bobbed over and retrieved it. It was a strange box made from hinged coloured glass, held together with silver wires. It would be very costly and the girl had no money but for the few desultory coppers she had earned so far that morning. But the old woman brought the coloured glass box out into the sunshine anyway and passed it to her without mockery.
‘Look into it,’ she said. ‘Hold it up to the light. Some see the world as it is, though in many pretty colours. But some, who have the gift, see the world as it will be.’
The girl hesitated. She didn’t know that she believed in such things. Not really. Besides, who has the strength to see their own future? Especially a poor goat-girl with a scold of a mother and a hare-shot lip?
The woman nodded encouragingly. ‘Look, child. The future may yet be sweet, and you have the gift.’
Somewhere in the distance there was a boy crying out from the river, drawing up his boat. Yelling, screaming about something. Running towards the fair. It was all the excitement no doubt, nothing more.
So the girl held the little box of coloured glass up before her face and opened one of the delicate little hinges. It was the deep red glass that she held up to her eyes, and she looked through and shuddered. Because she saw the world as if covered in blood. The mountain of gold to the west was a mountain of blood. The screaming of the boy running up from the river grew louder, closer. She saw the straggling meadows leading away along the river bank, groups of people carrying their baskets, pushing their handbarrows, coming through the long grass towards the fair on this gentle summer day. And beyond that, the low line of hills still catching the morning sun, but all red, all clouded red. The future.
She felt the old woman tugging at her sleeve, heard her saying something, and was about to tear her eyes away from this ghastly vision, this world of a blood-red future, when a movement in the far distance caught her eye, and instead of lowering the evil box she continued to stare through its red haze.
Rising up over the crest of the low hills to the west, she saw a line of horsemen. Banners in the breeze and spears against the sky.
2
Never would the people – those few who survived, stumbling away through the blood-soaked grass to cry their story into horror-stricken ears – never would they forget that day, nor their first sight of the horsemen from the east.
They rode muscular little ponies with big, ungainly heads, brutish and monstrous, like the heads of bulls. Shaggy even at the fetlock, with deep chests and haunches betraying their massive strength and stamina. Hooves and manes were dyed blood-red with crushed insects or dried berries from last autumn, boiled up again in water and fat. The riders had long arms and barrel chests, short legs and narrow, slanting eyes of cunning and glittering cruelty. Some of them, disdaining to wear helmets as they rode down upon the near defenceless fair, seemed to have skulls deformed and domed by some evil practice in infancy. Others wore pointed Scythian caps of leather, kalpaks, fringed with grey wolf ’s fur. Wolves falling on the stricken townspeople not in lean winter but in fat high summer, driven not by the stark necessity of hunger but by the love of destruction for its own sake.
Some had the sides of their heads scarred with burns to kill the hair there, others were crudely shaven, and almost all had their cheeks and the sides of their heads cut and deep dyed with tattoos. The thin, sparse beards on their chins were further garlanded and beribboned, or twisted into little plaits, and in their ears they wore heavy hoops of gold. Some rode barefoot and some wore leather leggings, gripping the sides of their mounts so surely that they seemed one with their horses. They wore barbarian breeches but most rode naked to the waist but for jangling bone jerkins, their dark chests and backs tattooed with snakes and grotesque faces. Their wrists and sinewy arms were wrapped with iron bands, gold bracelets, cloths and strips of leather, and they wore beaded silver torcs and the teeth of wolves and jackals on thongs around their dirty muscular throats. They rode with their reins hung with the flensed skulls of slaughtered enemies, with human scalps or hanks of blood-dried hair.
Each warrior bristled with the tips and points of a multitude of weapons. Short stabbing spears, long steel knives, curved swords slung across squat, powerful backs, curved spiked hatchets, and, clutched in the right fist, the deadly recurved bow of the steppes, with a bunch of arrows clutched alongside. Arrows strung and shot and falling interminably onto the stricken fair.
The people turned and ran among the falling tents and the already blazing stalls, but there was no escape. Already a column of the murderous horde had ridden round and taken the hills to the south, and cut the people off from flight that way. To the north there was only the river. Some fugitives threw themselves in and tried to swim for it, and of these a few survived, carried downstream and crawling back onto the southern shore miles away like
