‘War broke out between them, and the Chinese brought down fierce warriors from Manchuria, and there were many years of war, and treachery undid them. In the end the thirty majestic cities were laid waste, and the proud towers and palaces of Noyan Uul were burned to the ground, and the few Khunu who had not gone to their deaths in battle were sent broken and starving out into the wilderness. Many are the peoples who have been ‘abolished’ by empires like China. They drifted westwards into the void of Central Asia and were lost for ever.’
He nodded slowly, still gazing into the fire. ‘And there we Khunu became a mythical, insubstantial people of the wastes, impoverished bands of wilderness wanderers, tent dwellers, cannibals, so it was said, preying upon settlers’ children like vagabond dogs. Scavengers in sandblown rags and tatters, the offspring of witches and demons of the wind. Well, let them believe it, if it serves to chill their bones.
‘They were our fathers.’
So Attila spoke, so the Hun mythology went, and who was to say that it was not the truth? He knew from his boyhood the tale of how the father of Rome, pious Aeneas, defeated by an ancient enemy, fled westwards from crumbling Troy, carrying old Anchises on his broad shoulders. Were not the parallels and echoes uncanny? You heard in those echoes the laughter of the gods.
Then there was Emperor Titus, who destroyed the temple of Jerusalem and drove the Jews out into the world to be a nationless and accursed tribe of wanderers for ever. Just so, like the Trojans or the Jews, the Huns’ forefathers had fled westwards from their crumbling cities, whose very names were now lost in the desert sands, but for towering and majestic Noyan Uul. And as the Greeks were the doom of the Trojans, and the Romans the doom of the Jews, so the Chinese were the doom of the wandering Huns. But it is hard to be a wanderer, and a nomad’s life is much bitterness and wordless endurance.
Once there was a tribe that appeared in the empire of Rome: the Ampsivarii, they were called, and they were nomads. Tacitus tells the entire story of that nation in two curt, typical sentences. ‘In their protracted wanderings, the exiles were treated first as guests, then as beggars, then as enemies. Finally their fighting-men were exterminated and the young and old distributed as booty.’ Of the Ampsivarii, we know not a jot more.
It was almost the same story with the Jews. Trajan considered exterminating that entire troublesome and bellicose tribe, stiff-necked and superior and proud in their own conceit as the ‘Chosen People’. But surely it would be madness to think you could exterminate a whole people? Then remember the Ampsivarii, now forgotten, along with their language, their customs, their gods. Or remember the Nasamones of the Libyan shore. No, you do not remember them, nor does History herself. They have vanished as if they never were. For once they rebelled against paying taxes to Domitian, and that cruel emperor promptly ordered them exterminated, man, woman and child. When it was done he declared simply, ‘I have stopped the Nasamones existing’ – as if he were a god! Which, of course, he was: a divine Caesar. So perhaps Trajan could have done the same to those irritating Jews after all. But now the recognised god of the world is a Jewish carpenter, and consubstantial with his heavenly father.
What twists and turns the Muse of History takes, and how the laughter of the gods echoes over our bowed heads.
3
In the morning in the first grey light before they rode out, he put them, as always, through lengthy drills and practices with horse and bow, galloping and wheeling in tight formation at his every command. Each troop of ten had its own recognised signal and moved independently. The hundred horsemen could split and gallop, reform and turn in the dust, appearing far greater in number than they really were. Their skill with the bow was already terrifying, their speed breathtaking, and their strength and endurance on that long journey unbreakable.
Likewise, each troop began to take on the character of its commander. The warriors under Yesukai were flamboyant and reckless, as were those under Csaba the Poet and handsome Aladar. They would do well in some wild headlong charge that would terrify the enemy with its fearlessness, and they would all die howling and happy. Those under the three burly brothers Juchi, Bela and Noyan were staunch and dogged, and would make a strong centre. Those under old Chanat were steady and wily, those under Candac similar. They would wait patiently on the wings until the order was given, and then swiftly cut into the flanks of the enemy, without noise or fuss, but with ruthless force and despatch, like the horns of a bull. Those under Geukchu might ride roundabout for miles, might ford some supposedly unfordable river way upstream with artful bladders made from goathides, floating over unseen in an evening mist, and fall on an enemy camp by night, cutting throats before their victims even awoke.
Tough as they were, each day they grew tougher, their minds as well as their muscles hardening like the plains under the unrelenting sun.
They rode in the louring, stone-coloured light of dawn, past huge grey boulders nestled in the grass, stained with lichen like melted coins. They passed a dead yak, grass growing tall from the eyesockets, flaps of sunbaked hide hanging from the vast bleached ribcage stranded like an upturned boat hurled far inland by unimaginable storms. Then the sun broke through the clouds on the eastern horizon, as if from a burning abyss glimpsed through fathomless deeps.
This was the great Asian steppeland, not hostile or scornful of the tiny, transient scrabblings of humanity, like the mountains with their ferocious blizzards, or the destroying, storm-riven sea. It was filled only with a vast, desolate, silent indifference. In springtime, leave a spear thrust in the ground overnight and the next day you couldn’t find it, the new grass had grown so high. The Plains of Kulundu: the Plains of Plenty.
So numerous were the antelope and the smaller, lighter cousins of the forest bison that they covered the plains in a carpet of a million chestnut hides. In summer they would come to the banks of a river and drink it dry. Those were the days, the years of God’s plenty. The city dwellers and the farmers would swallow up everything free that moves on the face of the earth, thought the warriors, gazing out over those sacred plains with a rapture that was kin to heartbreak – joyful heartbreak, because they loved so much and what they loved must pass. All things fall and cease, and nothing passes so quickly as a happy man’s life.
They hunted saiga across the limitless steppes, the vast herds of those strange trumpet-muzzled antelope which trotted faster than a man could run, and ran forty or fifty miles in an hour. Their heads held low, they snuffed up the freezing or the hot and dusty steppeland air equally through their long and tuberous noses.
As they rode along a low rise, one single antelope stood out from the herd, eyeing them. It had seen their cloaks fluttering out behind them in the wind and twitched its nose, snuffing the air strongly. Its large brown eyes looked curious but unafraid, and then it sprang forward and veered suddenly into the herd. The great herd and the small band of warriors broke into a gallop simultaneously, the horses swooping down off the rise and flying over the autumnal lion-coloured plains.
Naturally Attila had long before sent a few men, Geukchu’s troop, the long way round to lie in ambush for the panicked herd. Now they veered out from the hide of the long grass, whooping with glee, came alongside the vast panic-stricken herd and began to kill. The saiga ran faster than their horses but the hunters came in close and leaned from their saddles, their legs brushed and bumped by the fleeing animals, and fired down directly into their necks and withers. The arrows flew deep and entered their hearts. Saiga tumbled dead in the dust, front legs sprawling and snapping under their own dead weight, others skittering into them from behind, sometimes leaping free and rejoining the herd’s whirlwind flight, but sometimes tripping and cartwheeling at full gallop into the air, then crashing into the dust to lie stunned, trampled by their fellows or else quickly despatched by the horsemen.