In the morning the horse was healed.
They crossed a desolate plain where the heavy grey sky over their heads suddenly came alive with the cries of wild geese. The cries startled and then comforted them with the sense of living creatures in company with them in this wilderness. The geese passed on and their cries faded away and the air grew silent around again and the men slumped down a little in their cloaks and bowed their heads and rode on. The sky overhead was a darkening grey, a beaten iron shield, but along the horizon was a seam of silver light that seemed to seep in from an enchanted world beyond, as if they rode under a giant lid, claustrophobic, shut off from grace. Their fear grew continually, and their courage grew to meet it. All of them were quite prepared to die, and half expected it, this far from home and they so few in number. But they would go down fighting.
And then, standing alone and many days from its herd and from its native woodland, for no reason that they could discern, they saw an auroch: a massive white bull, one of the wild cattle that roamed freely in the birchwoods far to the north. The mountainous white beast stood like a statue, like a creature from heraldry, amid a pile of broken rocks, with an arrow buried deep in its withers. Again here was good meat for the taking, but the men knew that the uncanny creature was somehow removed from them and forbidden. They squinted and saw that the arrow was of no shape they recognised.
It would not be long now.
Chanat trotted nearer to the wounded animal, which turned and lowered its massive head towards him. He reined in at a safe distance, his right hand resting lightly on the shaft of the spear slung at his side. A full-grown auroch, wounded or not, could disembowel a horse with one swipe of its long, curved horns.
He turned sideways and squinted at the animal a little longer, then rode back.
‘Kutrigur Huns,’ he said. ‘The Budun-Boru.’
Attila looked sharply at him. ‘So far west?’
Chanat shuddered a little, as if shaking himself free of some infestation. ‘All the tribes are moving west, and have been for two generations. They say that the heart of the world and the high plains will never see rain again.’
Attila brooded.
‘Who is this arrow-master amongst us?’ sneered Little Bird. ‘And what does this rank old goat know of the arrows of the fearsome Budun-Boru?’
Chanat turned on him furiously. ‘You will know of the arrows of the Budun-Boru yourself soon enough, when they are stuck in your shivering hide and you are yelping like a spitted puppy!’
Little Bird laughed and rode out of Chanat’s range. ‘There is truth in the arrow’s sting, old Chanat, as much as in the song of a beautiful girl!’
Chanat growled wordlessly at the capering fool.
Attila ignored them both, looking at the unearthly animal across the plain.
On its broken cairn, taking its last stand dying and motionless, no blood staining its fine white pelt, the auroch stood bellowing with rage at the cold plains stretching endlessly away on every side, and then raised its great heavy head and bellowed at cold Heaven itself. Heaven echoed back its roar of pain and nothing changed.
Attila shook his head and said softly, ‘Leave it. It is its destiny.’ He flicked his reins and kicked his horse forward again. ‘It is not any more in nature.’
After the injured horse and the auroch, there was the eagle: a triad of animals or animal spirits both for good omen and for admonition. Do not despair, the spirits seemed to say: the horse was healed. Do not presume: the bull was not healed. And thirdly there came a spirit for ever untouched and unharmed, unattainable in his perfection in the tormented world of men.
The hail came out of nowhere, drumming the plains around them into invisibility. They rode on into it, but then a hailstone the size of a child’s fist smashed and broke over the muzzle of Orestes’ horse and slithered away in shards of ice to the ground. The horse shook its head and reared belatedly, teeth bared, screaming with pain and indignation. They dismounted and pulled their horses close and took shelter in that pitiful lee as best they could. The din of the hailstorm forbade speech.
A few minutes later the roiling angry clouds passed on and then vanished altogether to the east, and the sky returned blue and clean again. They rode on over the now sunlit plain scattered for miles with bright droplets clinging to the broken grass-stems. Reaching down from heaven to the horizon hung the multicoloured Bow of Tengri, the god of the sky. Away to the west they could see curling snakes of mist steaming off the sunbaked pan, and for many miles as they rode, cloudy and opaque hailstones nestled in the roots of the long grass and crunched under the hooves of their horses, and then brightened and melted in their wake like passing pearls.
The sun burned down on them again and their greased woollen cloaks and their horses steamed with a rich woolly stink, and beyond that the air was filled with the sweet scent of damp, beaten grass and their hearts lightened.
Attila suddenly seized his bow, nocked an arrow and fired it high into the blue sky overhead. Only then, looking up, did his men see the great deep golden shape of an eagle passing over them, and they flinched with horror at the blasphemy of what he had done. But of course the arrow curved and passed harmlessly in the air far below the eagle’s flight, many weary lengths short of killing a god. The eagle flew on unheeding, its amber eyes set on other distant things, on mountain ranges they would never live to see.
Their crazed king pushed himself up and twisted in his saddle to look back at the eagle, face full into the sun and aglow in that blazing light, his golden earrings dancing in reflection, his head back, laughing, teeth white and wolfish. He threw his arms wide and looked over his men.
‘The people who are born on a smoking shield!’ he cried. ‘The people who shoot arrows in search of the gods!’
And Astur his father passed away westwards, impervious and indestructible.
At evening they stopped and hobbled the horses. Attila set out watchmen with arrows already fitted to their bows, and they lit dung fires and cooked. The smoke rose in a slow column into the windless night. A lonesome wolf howled in a neighbouring valley, its howl like the voice of the desolate landscape itself. Two whooper swans passed overhead in the twilight, the soft beating of their wings heard over the crackle of the dung fires and the call of the lonely wolf the only sounds in that vast country.
Some of them thought good to make a low windbreak of saddles and horse-blankets, and then to heap up more saddles and blankets into a makeshift throne for their king to sit on at the fireside, a thing that they had never done before. But he chided them and kicked the saddles and blankets angrily away. He scuffed the dusty ground quite flat again with the soles of his battered deerksin boots, and sat crosslegged on the ground in the dust along with the rest of them. He drew his sheath knife, leaned forward and cut a strip of meat from the sizzling haunch on the iron spit.
Geukchu sat close as they ate, which was unusual as he was a man who liked to eat alone, wary, like a dog. When he had finished chewing he took a swig of koumiss and shucked his teeth and passed the flask on and said softly, ‘We are being followed.’
Attila nodded. ‘By outriders only. It is not the main force yet.’
‘How do you know?’
The king took a long draught of koumiss and smiled into the firelight. ‘If the main force were near, we would know it by now.’ He looked around at his chosen men, each of them with their eyes on him. Orestes sat a little way away whittling a stick, apparently not listening. But he always looked that way. He heard every word.
‘Keep your men prepared but do not panic them. In the imaginations of their hearts the Budun-Boru are demons and spirits, evil, beyond explanation, no more to be defeated that a river in full spate may be stopped with arrows – the People of the Wolf, who change into wolves in their very flesh and bone and devour their fellow men by moonlight. But they are men of mortal flesh like any other. Indeed, they are our distant kin, and they worship Astur, too, and bid each other “Sain bainu” when they meet, and “Bayartai” when they depart. And if you prick them, they bleed.’ He signalled for the flask of koumiss to come round again. ‘I know. I have had dealings with them before.’