Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Page 7

  Csaba and Aladar had dismounted and were tramping happily through the shallows, taking scalps. Plain iron helmets lay half drowned in the clouded water, and men curled up or strangely skewed on the mud with their heads sliced asunder, their foreheads fronded with blood, their faces covered and cauled with scarlet, their opened skulls releasing a pearl-grey curd upon the waters. Csaba sang a song of victory. Aladar threw back his head and laughed and held out his right arm weltered with blood to the shoulder. He shook out his fistful of scalps and drops of blood wheeled and arced in the glistening sunlight like some dark molten mineral spewed from the volcanic earth and then fell and dissolved into the waters below as if they had never been.

  They left the slain horses and the bodies and the severed limbs lying in the crimson foam at the water’s edge and rode on, hallooing with wild triumph. The two Byzantine merchants stirred and groaned, still bound and slung like baggage across the saddles of the captured horses. Csaba had a deep cut across his forehead which had nearly sliced into his eye and was bleeding heavily, but he seemed not to notice. Attila had a bad gash across his upper arm, a flap of skin hanging loose and blood flowing out and down over his forearm. The battle done and their wild victory gallop pulled to a halt, he stopped and tied it closed with a strip from one of the merchant’s robes. He ordered Csaba to do the same. Then he looked his men over.

  They gazed back at him with something like adoration. Their king. Their undefeated, indefatigable king. Their first blood, first victory. How they longed now for more. For the appetite for victory, as for fame or gold, is inexhaustible. The hunger grows with feeding.

  Attila smiled. ‘Homeward,’ he said.

  They spoke not another word all that hard day’s riding. But at night, beside the campfire as they ate, he addressed them.

  ‘Some men worship right and wrong, or make good and evil their gods and their goals,’ he said. ‘I believe in life and death. The question is not “Is it right?” but “Does it make me feel more alive?” This is at the heart of everything! This is the pattern and template by which the gods have made the earth. To be a birthingbed for life, and yet more life! Even the wheyfaced moralists in their pulpits or the conniving lawyers in their airless courts of law, busy censuring every man around them, do so because it makes them feel more alive. It augments their power over others. And so the herdlike many allow them to do so and believe in them.

  ‘Do not allow them. Only the weak and the slaves allow this.

  You are your own arbiter and none may judge your deeds but you yourself. Another may no more judge you than the clothes you stand up in. Have you lived? That is the deathbed question. That is the only question. Had you the courage to be yourself, to fulfil your desires? “Vengeance is wrong,” say the Christians. “Forgive, forgive,” they murmur amid their pale clouds of incense, guilt-stricken, their eyes raised in penitence to heaven, their white hands as soft as candlewax, their bodies bowed in reverence before their god, in their gloomy temples filled with the chants of eunuchs.

  ‘Forgive?’ he cried, his voice suddenly harsh. ‘What is that to the sweet joy of vengeance? There is life! To wreak bone-crushing vengeance on one’s ancient enemies is the sweetest, most life-giving joy. It fills you with sweet laughter, it bathes all the world in a golden light, it makes you glad to be alive. Everything we do should make us glad to be alive, make us rejoice in the life that is given us. Nor should you be anxious that your vengeance and your triumph is the ruined one’s defeat. Behold, I give you a mystery. It is his triumph, too. His dark triumph, his apotheosis, the fulfilment of his destiny, to be crushed by a superior, god-ordained might that he could no more oppose than he could oppose the black wings of the storm over the steppes. All men must die; and kings and slaves look brothers in the grave. He can do nothing to save himself from this punishment and this burning, this day of doom, so he goes to his destruction unflinching, a hero, shouting defiance into the face of the storm until the end, until he is cut down like a flower by the scythe, to be sung and hymned evermore for his broken nobility. Nothing so noble as broken nobility.

  ‘I remember my father, Mundzuk.’ He nodded and was silent a moment. ‘His face is before my face. I remember him - how he was cut down by the treachery of Ruga and the corroded gold of Rome. Was he a lesser man because that foul Ruga cut him down in his prime and his manhood? Was he defeated by this, was his life made null and void and his bloodline ever after a thing of contempt and a laughing stock? It was not! He was glorious in death, and in his broken nobility.

  ‘But is this not a mystery? And is the realisation of this not the most intoxicating liberation of thought and deed? Is it not eternal delight? When this truth breaks through the clouds, it melts all ice of sanctity, and a clean wind blows away all ashen penitence. Why, this could unchain the very shackles of sanity! To know how free we truly are, that there is nothing ... I shall go mad, by the gods, there is a such fire inside me!’

  He leaped to his feet and began to pace around, his fists clenched, the muscles in his arms bunched, beating the air in front of him.

  ‘Life gives life. Energy gives energy. If only all men had the courage to be truly alive! Then none would fail, and though there would be death there would be no loss. There would be only heroism, nobility, glory in the world that is, the world of dreams, for this is what the All-Father intended. He gave us life, that we should learn to live. You will not learn to live by bowing your head and your ears before the watery whey-thin words of those pallid preachers in those great stone coffins cold as the grave that they call their sacrosanct churches and place of worship. Those catafalques, those charnel-houses, full of blood-stained statues of gibbeted saints. They would drain away life itself from the world. Energy is eternal delight. Sooner murder an infant in the cradle than nurse unacted desires. Then you will be a beacon to other men and they will truly love you. It is not the whey-faced moralists whom men love. In their secret hearts men hate them and the way they guard their desires and keep censorious watch over the locked and bolted cellars of their dreams. It is those who radiate energy and life, who spread laughter, who enact desire, who break the chains and unbolt the cellars, who take the coarse stuff of the earth and twist it into coloured cloth all the colours under heaven. This is why the stories of the people are of love and battle and death. It is not tales of unacted desires that draw people, but energy, conflict, passion. Here is the fire of life. But the Christians talk only of the water and the bread of life, as insipid and cold as their own souls. I give you the meat and the wine of life! They do not understand, the Christians and the moralists and the paper tyrants in their offices and their courts of law. It must be a weak-spined slave with a backbone of straw who can be bowed or broken by the edicts of paper tyrants. Throw them off! They steal men’s very souls.

  ‘The Greeks before Christ understood, and their stories were sad and marvellous, tragical and true. They were a clever people. For a great people harbour the tales even of their own woe, even of the tragedies and desolations of their own people, their own family, their own seed. They nurse their griefs and treasure them in stories, and relay them at night by the campfire to the sorrow of their listeners. And the listeners feel more alive at hearing the sorrowful tale. Here is the mystery: they feel more alive, and they flock to hear yet more, sorrow and heroism, grief and laughter, wreckage and triumph, all commingled and twisted together as in the skein of life itself. And the teller, too, unlocking his word-horde and passing around the dully gleaming coin of his own sorrow, the tragedies that have befallen him from on high or from the world that is, he is magnified and made great and majestic in his superior tales of sorrow, and revered by his listeners as the greater man who has travelled further and endured the more. “Nulla maiestior quam magna maesta,” said the ancient Romans in the long-ago days when they still understood. “Nothing is more majestic than a great sorrow.”’

  Abruptly his words ceased and he turned and was gone away from them into the darkness of the steppes befor
e they were aware of his going. Gone with his tragical story and with his great sorrow.

  6

  THE SPIES

  When they arrived back at the Hun camp he was all authority and pragmatism again.

  He made it clear only now that he had led the raid upon Tanais in order to kidnap the two merchants, so that he could take them back to the camp and force them to teach some chosen men the languages of the empire, and then send those men out into the empire as spies. They were astonished at his brazen confidence.

  Such were the beginnings of Attila’s spy network, which in time was to stretch across almost all the known world, from the Christian kingdoms of Georgia in the east to the Gaulish shores of the cold Atlantic Ocean. Although his network never rivalled in sheer size and complexity that which reached out from the secretive courts of Constantinople and spread like probing, wavering tentacles into every important meeting-place and household in the empire, nevertheless for a barbarian king to have access to such a fund of information about his enemy was power indeed, and quite beyond the imagination of any other barbarian dreamer in his smoky tent.

  Attila ordered the bruised and beaten Byzantine merchants to be efficiently bandaged, fed and watered, and rested, as you would a valued pair of stolen horses. He admired, curtly, the labour and the craftsmanship that had built his magnificent wooden palace in just eight backbreaking days, and he took possession of it at the head of his five wives.

  Queen Checa walked alongside him and looped her arm through his as they ascended the steps and entered through the carved wooden doors of the palace. It was against all custom for a wife to walk beside her husband in such a way. But Queen Checa was no customary wife.

  The following morning Attila appointed an overseer for the spies he would send out. It was Geukchu. He had his cunning counsellor select twenty men and, to the surprise of many, twenty women of the tribe, and isolated each group in a separate tent on the edge of the camp, where they would be taught to speak, understand and even write Latin and Greek. To the fury of the men, the women performed far better than they did, and seemed to derive pleasure from learning the operations of the strange shapes and squiggles that their reluctant instructor, Zosimus, drew with chalk on slate.

  At unannounced times Attila himself visited the tents of the frightened pedagogues, and addressed the pupils sharply in either tongue. For he spoke both perfectly like a Roman, to the mystification and wonder of his people. They replied, stumbling at first, and then with increasing confidence as the weeks wore on.

  One day Attila found that Geukchu had brought the two groups together, the men and the women, and ordered them to communicate with each other in the learned tongues. He asked him why.

  ‘In his bitterness,’ said Geukchu, ‘perhaps one or other of the kidnapped merchants might have been teaching our people wrongly, so that they would be found out when they travelled into the empire. But this way we can be sure they have learned the same and correctly.’

  Attila smiled sardonically. ‘Wise Geukchu, to suspect every man of being as devious as himself.’

  Geukchu brushed aside the backhanded compliment. ‘But why, my lord, could you not simply teach our people the two imperial languages yourself, since you speak both so learnedly and fluently?’

  Attila eyed the flatterer. ‘I have other things to do.’

  It was midwinter and the steppes were hidden under six inches of snow now for four long, bitter months. In Scythia, they say, there are really only two seasons, one of fire and one of ice. For mild spring and autumn are both so brief in that land of extremes that they are hardly noticed. The people’s black felt tents were laden with snow, and at times showed no more against the endless snowbound plains than stoats in their ermine.

  One evening Attila called the twenty men and the twenty women to him in his fine new wooden palace, and gave them each a heavy purse of gold. But he ordered them otherwise to dress plainly. And then he sent them south, in the depths of winter, joking that they would appreciate the sunshine of the Mediterranean lands.

  The women and the men went some as husband and wife, or brother and sister, or some in seeming family groups, and the king took care that none should go alone. And he sent them out south and west to the great cities of the empire, some to Sirmium, and some to Constantinople, to Ravenna and Mediolanum and Rome itself, or far to the west, to Treverum and to Narbo, or far south into the heat and dust of Antioch and Alexandria - strange destinations for those horse-people of the steppes! He told them to find work as scribes or servants for wealthy and powerful men, insinuating themselves wherever they might into the households of senators, patricians, landowners, bishops, prefects; and to describe themselves only as ‘easterners’ if asked about race and homeland. When they had important information, insofar as they could judge, they were to quit their masters at night-time and in secret, and sail home for the steppelands, never trusting a written message to any third party - in fact, never committing anything to paper.

  From the distant ports of Massilia and Ravenna, Aquileia, Thessalonika, Alexandria and Antioch they would sail east again, through the Bosphorus and north to the shores of the Euxine Sea, stepping ashore at Tanais or Ophiusa or Chersonesus like the surviving Argonauts at Pagasae, bearing the Golden Fleece. And then upriver and finally by horseback to the camp of the Huns and the palace of Attila himself, where they would give him the treasure of their knowledge and he would bless them and bestow on them goblets and rings of gold beyond their dreams or imaginings.

  With mingled fear and excitement, the spies left on their long and arduous journey.

  As for the two Byzantine merchants, they had served their purpose. Attila never forgot or forgave their insolence to him on that dark night outside the gates of Tanais. They had learned now but alas, they had learned too late. On the morning of the spies’ departure, he ordered Yesukai and Aladar to take them down to the banks of the river. There they were ordered to kneel shivering in the long, frosted sedge, and the two warriors clubbed them to death, the most ignominious death for any man. Their bodies were rolled into the river, where they floated briefly amid the skim ice, the cracked eggs of their empty skulls trailing air bubbles, the grey roe of their brains floating in a greasy slick behind, steaming gently in the dawn in the freezing waters.

  All that winter Attila waited, and into spring, when the ice on the river slowly thinned and vanished, smoking under the rising sun, and the snow melted away from the boundless land and the steppes turned as brilliant green under the sun as a kingfisher’s wings.

  He waited in his solitude and his dreaming. Like the wolf, or the spider. Like the Iron River, the slow and steady and implacable Volga itself, for which, some say, he was named. But no man, I believe, will ever know the true meaning of his name.

  In the royal palace, the wooden walls echoed to the sound of not one but two newborn infants, both daughters of the king. And in the tent of the king’s concubines, another score or more new lives were made. Attila himself named the boys. The girls were named by their mothers. Such names those proud, flushed women gave them as Aygyzel, meaning Beautiful Moon, and Nesebeda, meaning Everlasting Happiness, and Sevgila, meaning Beloved.