‘Matter of opinion. A complex tongue in many ways, utterly unlike the languages of the civilised world. Their compound words, for instance. You know they have a word meaning, “the noise a bear makes when walking through cranberry bushes”?’
‘How ridiculous.’
‘I thought you admired Herodotus? Yet you hardly have his candour and curiosity about other peoples and cultures.’
‘Hm.’ I trimmed my nib. ‘So. These barbaric words. “ Yaldizh djostyara ” et cetera. Might I be so bold as to ask what they mean?’
‘An ancient Hunnish proverb, which I learned in my boyhood – from the uncrowned King of the World himself.’ He smiled a wintry smile. ‘It means “Gold for my friends, iron for my enemies”.’ He stood up and went to the window, hands clasped behind his back. ‘So that Attila will know clearly who his enemies are.’
‘How will we find Attila?’
‘At the end of the trail of destruction,’ said Aetius, still with a smile not entirely comforting.
‘And who will run the errand?’
‘His own. Flushed from this palace like termites. Now listen to my instructions. The Hun word for fire is “ yankhin ”.’
In the silent middle of the night, numerous slaves erupted and ran about the palace, screaming the word at the tops of their voices. Naturally almost everybody, except perhaps those who were in bed with other men’s wives, quickly emerged, bewildered and blinking, into the shadowy courtyards of the great palace complex. But here and there, one or two dashed with buckets to the nearest wells and fountains, or even over towards the Baths of Xeuxippus. They were immediately seized and, to their astonishment, interrogated fluently in their own sacred tongue by this newly arrived western general. Torture was not necessary. They soon confessed all.
Aetius’ ruse had smoked out six termites in all: four men and two women, one of them a midwife. She might have secretly poisoned a new-born child of the imperial family, but apparently she had always worked diligently. Perhaps her woman’s tenderness had outweighed even her loyalty to the Lord Attila.
To these six, Aetius gave the task of taking back the remains of the traitor Pytheas, and the iron.
6
It was in the meadows outside the ruins of a once-great city that the six Huns expelled from the Byzantine Court found Attila’s camp. They looked about them with something approaching horror. The midwife gave a little cry of despair, strange to hear. The city should have been nothing to her. During her time in the Christian emperor’s palace, she had delivered children faithfully. Sometimes, like the others, she had sent back communications to her people about what she had discovered of palace life, defences, fortifications, but she had also begun to feel settled. Then one night her dreams had been disturbed by cries of ‘Fire!’ in her own tongue, and she had been exposed, along with the others, by running to the wells. Until then, her work was all of life new-born. Here, meanwhile, life was being destroyed.
A pall of black smoke hung over the burning city, and drifted ominously to shadow the camp of her own people. They who had once been her own people, she thought, with a sick lurch at her own treacherous thoughts. Under a black cloud of death, in his plain tent, the Lord Attila. Great Tanjou. She had made mothers in the palace with her strong hands. Meanwhile, her Great Lord had been making widows.
One of the men dropped the sack before Attila’s throne.
‘What have you brought me?’ asked the King, eyes glittering, chin resting in the cup of his hand.
‘The remains of the traitor Pytheas, the eunuch,’ the fellow replied.
‘Traitor? To whom?’
‘To the emperor, Theodosius,’ he stammered. ‘He was found out. As were we.’
‘If he was traitor to our enemy, he was our friend. No? He was a hero of the Hun people?’
The six hung their heads wretchedly. They had no refuge on earth now.
Attila delved in the sack and pulled out the potsherd. He read out the Hun proverb: ‘“Gold for my friends, iron for my enemies.” I know who sent this,’ he murmured. He looked up. ‘What was your judgement of Master-General Aetius? Did you meet him?’
They hesitated, then one said, ‘He is a man of forceful character, my lord.’
‘Is he? Is he?’
He pulled out something else: a putrid, blood-clotted hand.
A figure hovered near. It was Enkhtuya, the witch. Attila seemed to know, without looking, that she was there and what she wanted. Wordlessly he passed the foul object back to her. She hid it in her cloak and slipped away.
He looked back at the six. ‘They tried to kill me,’ he said. They were frozen with fear. They did not know what their Lord meant. ‘In my youth.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘The traitor Pytheas,’ he murmured. ‘Well, well.’ He surveyed them with glittering eyes. Then he decreed, ‘Negotiation is tiresome. Revenge is profitable. All shall pay.’ And with that he ordered the six to be taken outside and crucified, men and women both.
His guards bound the six and led them away.
As they passed by, a motley little figure in a tattered old buckskin shirt covered in little black stick men crouched beside the doomed procession, and held his arms over his head like a monkey sheltering from the rain, and cried out in a muffled though audible voice, ‘This funeral sky grows heavier by the hour!’
Towards evening an old warrior with fine grey moustaches and long white hair rode out and surveyed the six crude crosses bearing the six dead and dying fugitives. Their faces were blue-white masks of agony, their breathing like a tortured wind in a ravine. He rode back to his tent, found his long spear and returned and killed them all one by one. The last was a round-faced woman. She should have been someone’s wife. The agony left her face as the spear entered her heart, and her eyes closed in something like peace.
He got off his horse and cleaned his spear in the grass, then drove it into the ground and squatted down and looked away south over the low hills, his back to the bodies hanging like withered fruit on leafless trees.
After a time another man came and squatted not far off in the gathering dusk. For a long while they said nothing to each other.
Eventually Chanat murmured, ‘My dreams are becoming as crazed as yours, old shaman.’
Little Bird hummed and tore grass.
The old warrior cupped his big bony hands round his ringing skull. His skull was thin as a bird’s now. Old age was wearing him thin all over.
‘It is not as it was before,’ he said with quiet disgust. He gestured over his shoulder at the crucified cadavers and the smouldering town beyond. ‘Look at our work.’
‘He is Tashur-Astur, the Scourge of God,’ said the shaman in his sing-song voice. ‘A fool may argue with God, but God will not answer.’
‘This is God’s judgement on wicked people? Do you believe that, Little Bird?’
The shaman looked away. He never answered a direct question for, as he said, how could he? He did not exist.
‘I did not come here to scalp infants in arms,’ growled Chanat.
He remembered seeing Candac amid the smoking ruins of Margus, standing silent upon rubble and slaughter, staring, a look unfathomable on his strong round face. Looking about him perhaps in judgement before he chose to vanish.
Chanat gasped and clutched his side. A week ago, he had cursed the witch Enkhtuya to her face. The cramps in his bowels still hurt. Such pettiness they had come to. He thought he saw nobility itself ebbing away like the last of the sun on a winter’s day. The cold and brazen light across the steps occluded by black cloud from some burning town.
Little Bird and Chanat both shivered.
