A little further on they came to stouter stakes bearing the severed heads of the merchants’ camels, the ragged red flaps of their necks hanging down and dripping. The Kutrigur despised camels. The horses they had taken, and the plunder.
When they emerged from that smoky twilight valley and rode over scrubland, some of them broke into a mad gallop to shake off their uncleanness and disgust. Then, abruptly, they reined in and looked up.
On a low ridge of dusty chaparral to the north-east two Kutrigur tribesmen were sitting their ponies, spears held above their heads in defiance. Then they turned their ponies and vanished down the far side of the ridge.
Attila kicked his horse into an instant, furious gallop after them, scornful apparently of death or worse, and reared to a halt on the crest of the ridge and looked beyond. His men came up behind him, and surveyed the shallow valley that lay before them. The two horsemen had vanished over a farther ridge. Below, a huge ring-camp was burned into the dying grass. The Kutrigur Huns were gone.
A few miles further on they came upon further scenes of horror. A stunted thorn in a dry gully, a few last withered berries, deep red as ox-blood. Impaled on the long black thorns, were human hands, raggedly severed at the wrist. They stopped and stared, almost unable to comprehend this new atrocity. Eventually Attila spurred forward and examined the hands. Marmoreal white, unreal, a ragged ribbon of blood and skin around each wrist, they were small hands. Nearby, another thornbush was draped with intestines in grey and glistening coils.
‘They are afraid of us,’ said Chanat, trying to discern some good. ‘They are trying to frighten us off, as if they do not wish to fight us.’
‘They are not afraid of us,’ said Attila. ‘They are testing us to see whether we are afraid of them.’
He gave the signal and they rode on. Most now rode with bows and a few arrows clutched ready in their fists. They had felt a fierce joy when hunting the saiga, and a burning pride in being alive throughout this journey, even in the harshest landscapes. But now they were hunting men, and where men are, there is also the light of good and the shadow of evil, and their hearts were grave and solemn and dutiful.
4
The desert night is always cold, but now the desert days grew cold as well. The wax and wane of one more moon, and the days would be at their shortest, the nights long and cold, hospitable only to witchcraft and the demons of the night.
There was grey gravel desert, and then some dying greenery by the shores of a steel-grey lake. It would be snowing up in the Tien Shan mountains and on the peaks of the Tavan Bogd, the Five Kings. But here, after brief autumn rains and occasional hail, it was dry and forlorn and cold.
The Kutrigur had left other signs for them: dropped feathers, tufts of horsehair caught on thorns, a spatter of blood on a pale-grey rock, like unnatural rust-red lichen, haunting and inexplicable. A deer lay recently slain beside the trail, part butchered but left with fresh meat on its shoulders, a little ragged from the beaks of birds but substantial nevertheless.
‘Looks good to me,’ said young Yesukai.
Attila shook his head. ‘Our kinsmen in their black cloaks do not leave gifts for their enemies. Eat that and you’ll soon be as dead as the deer.’
‘Ah.’ Yesukai nodded, and they rode on.
They rode over desolate saltflats, setting off clouds of little pied birds pecking for shellfish. Stark and solitary greygreen thistles grew out of the crusted earth. Afar off, over the plains, they saw a single round white tent, a nomad ger, flaring like Greek fire against the dark sky. And so onward, eastward ever eastward, drawn deeper into the wasteland as some strong disillusioned men are drawn into self-destruction. They had long since forded the Amu Darya, the Oxus, and the Syr Darya, the Jaxartes, and passed through the low green Hills of Ulutau, and by Lake Tenghiz, and seen the snow-white Tien Shan rise to the south, and passed by the vast still waters of iron-grey Lake Balkhash where monsters lived. In those marshy plains their horses swishing through the long sodden grass set the plovers calling over the wetlands, and startled the coots in the reedbeds; they heard the heron’s harsh cry and saw its tufted head among the tufted grassheads. The sun went down in fire through the reeds where they camped, bars of molten copper on the river.
They were weakening with hunger, but each day they came upon those hungrier than they. They rode into the Desert Kingdom, over lifeless saltpans, and into the Kyzyl Kum, the Red Sands, a blistering sandscape spiked with lonely stands of coarse sandyellow grass. They saw occasional oases, gravel deserts, watercourses, herds of haggard horses. The riders bowed their heads in their hoods and remembered that drought is always the nomad’s greatest enemy. Why did they ride east into this world of desert and drought? So that they could increase their numbers, and then turn west for the green pastures and gentle woodlands of Europe. Let that day come soon.
In the furrows of the sand and its dunes carved by the hot wind, the sorrowing men read prophecies of long sleeps and sudden awakenings. The sand blinded their pawing horses, which whinnied mournfully, red sand thick in their manes and in their long eyelashes. Beneath the sands hereabouts, they said, lived a bloodworm that spat acid; headless, eyeless, lurking underground, a thing of horror.
They rode over a high, stony plateau, and in a wide hollow beside a dying lake four bony cows stood disconsolate with withered udders on the hard, cracked shores of sunbaked mud. Some bareboned villagers were sluicing grey water into a trough for a huddle of flyblown sheep with long, scrawny necks, the wool shedding in hanks from their heads and necks from disease. Some of the younger warriors prepared to take the sheep for meat, anyhow, putting arrows to their bows, but Attila stayed their hands.
The people stood and stared, the young naked, the old toothless, the children caked in mud, flies at their eyes and noses, passively awaiting some event from heaven over which they had not even the power of prayer. Their eyes followed these horsemen from another world but blankly and unblinking, as if they could not see them at all.
After being asked about the Kutrigur Huns, which questions they greeted with sullen silence, one or two of them began to speak brokenly, interrupting each other. Their language was strange but Attila understood it well enough.
They said they had been raided many times by the horsemen in black. Their winter stores had been dragged off, their best livestock slain. Some of those evil riders had tipped slain livestock down their wells. Why did they do this? They were not their enemies. Why such cruelty, even to strangers? Surely there was no justice under the sun.
An old woman came forward from amongst the wretched villagers, leaning heavily on a stout stick, her face cracked and fissured by sun and wind like the cracked mud by the lakeshore. She addressed Attila angrily, fearlessly, as if in argument with him already.