‘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 before they were aware of his going. Gone with his tragical story and with his great sorrow.
6
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.