‘Then find him. Find his body. He will be given full and honourable-’
‘No, Great Tanjou. He is gone. I saw him go.’
Attila’s scowl was ferocious. Two deep vertical grooves between his brows, his forehead furrowed deep and dark. Three ancient parallel scars just visible, fine and white. His traitor’s mark. His voice was soft and low, always the worst.
‘Not deserted,’ he said. ‘Not my Candac, not my Chosen Man. He would not desert me.’
‘I saw him ride, too, my master,’ said Little Bird, nodding furiously. ‘He rode away north and gone, all wordless into the wilderness.’
Attila’s bewilderment erupted into violence.
Little Bird yelped and scuttled to the darkest side of the tent, where he squatted down and wrapped his arms over his head like a monkey.
Orestes ducked under the wooden stool that the king was flailing wildly, smashing to splinters against the shuddering tentpost. He seized his arm. It was not seemly for a great man to show such passion. Attila froze and looked at Orestes as if unable to recognise him. His blazing eyes were filled with madness. Orestes returned his gaze steadily. Attila gradually grew calm again, dropped the remains of the stool at his feet and turned away.
‘Explain,’ he said eventually. His shoulders seemed to sag. ‘Explain to me the desertion of my Chosen Man, my beloved Candac.’
‘My lord,’ said Aladar gravely, ‘I cannot. Except that…’
‘I heard him speak,’ said Chanat.
Attila looked back.
The old warrior regarded his king gravely. ‘I saw him surveying the killing-field of Margus, and the mounds of dead bodies, and the deeds of the Kutrigur Huns, our brothers-in-arms: taking scalps, debauching the slain, having their usual enjoyments.’
The Kutrigur warrior, messenger of Bela’s death, remained impassive at the tent door.
‘Terror is a fine weapon,’ said Attila. ‘And very cheap.’
Chanat did not argue. ‘Our brothers-in-arms,’ he repeated boldly and bitterly. ‘Our comrades riding with us in the great and glorious conquest of this mighty Empire of Rome. I saw Candac standing among the flames, and I saw him drop his bow to the ground and not retrieve it. He watched them, the Kutrigurs, about their business, their exotic deeds and their violations, with the chieftain of the Kutrigurs, Sky-in-Tatters himself, among them. And I heard the Lord Candac say – I thought to me, though he did not turn his head – I heard him say, “This is not the treasure I fought for.”’
There was a moment of silence. Then, ‘Why did you not tell me this earlier?’
‘You would not have heard this earlier.’
Old Chanat.
‘Ach,’ murmured Attila. One soft, sad syllable. There was no more to be said.
After a while his warriors rose and retired from his tent. Even Orestes stepped after them, leaving him to his dreams.
Proud tempers breed sad sorrows for themselves.
Orestes searched for Little Bird but he was nowhere to be found. Like Candac, he had gone into the wilderness, though not for ever, only for a little while. He would never desert his master, come what may. He would always go with him through the storm and to the very gates of Hell, joking as he went.
In the hills to the south, looking out over the smouldering ashes of Margus, seated cross-legged upon an outcrop of pale moonlit limestone among the yellow rockroses, was an outlandish, beribboned creature. He wore a string decorated with tiny bird and animal skulls around his neck, and a torn goatskin shirt decorated with little black stick men.
A solitary girl fleeing south, a shepherdess, stumbled on him and gave a cry of terror but he never stirred, never even noticed. She fled onward.
For all his years he still had the face of a child, the colour high and hectic in his broad cheeks. A small fire of sticks burned at his feet and he threw strange seeds into it and leaned forwards to inhale the smoke.
His attention was fixed far beyond the ruined town. He saw turning stars and balefire and black night, and he felt afraid. He rocked back and forth and stirred his hands in the air. He saw his noble master, Lord Widow-Maker, Great Tanjou, Khan of Khans, drawing black night down over the world like a tent to cover and smother all. Not only the hated empire of Rome but the Hun people, too, would be caught in it, would suffocate and die under that dark sky heavy with hatred. He whimpered. The tent of the world twisted and became a monster made up of blood-red flame and black night, which would turn and devour them all.
6
Sabinus took a cup of wine after all. It wouldn’t make him slow on a night like this, only steady his nerves.
His palms sweated. He calmed his breathing.
Around the battlements he could see the white, strained faces of his men. Down below, the restless cavalry horses were tethered. The cavalrymen resting again, seated in the dust, helmets cradled in their laps. Little campfires burning. No one spoke.
They prayed that it would come soon.
Some already harboured fantasies of hearing the sound of distant hooves and drums, and the cry going up from the south towers overlooking the road east to Ratiaria and Marcianopolis, ‘They’re coming! The field army’s coming! ’
But no such cry came.
From the walls they could see fires in the hills: villages aflame. They could hear the high calls of nightbirds, the bark of a dog-fox. But a terrible feeling of aloneness. As if they were the only living men left on earth, surrounded by darkness and by the forces of darkness.
No one else even knew. The rest of the empire slept peaceful and oblivious tonight. Not one shepherd, not one wandering tinker refugee, had got through to Naissus of the Five Roads or to Ratiaria, with its vast weapons factories, to report the incursion, it seemed. No help was coming for this fight they faced against tens of thousands of savages, streaming down again from the valleys where they had lain hidden. Under Sabinus’ command, no more than two thousand at best, many of them rustic auxiliaries. Properly armoured, equipped and trained, he had all of five hundred men.
Wisps of cloud across the moon, a thickening mist on the river, a terrible unease. Only a few hours ago he’d been sitting doing the legionary accounts. That seemed a long time ago now.
A cry in the night. The legate started, strained his ears. Sounds were getting muffled by the rising mist. Screams still coming from Margus? No, that was impossible. Margus was ten miles distant. Only the cry of a bird, a night-heron over the darkening river.
He turned to speak to Tatullus by his side and then froze.
There came the sound of drums.
There was a stir among the men on the north-west tower. They were pushing forward to see something. Sabinus strode over.
The crossbowmen and artillerymen parted for him. Tatullus trod close behind. There was that hulking brute Knuckles again, both his great bearlike arms and huge fists tightly wrapped round with bull-hide strips studded with lethal bronze studs, and dragging a crude club, like some troglodyte Hercules.
‘Where’s your pike, man?’ demanded Sabinus.
‘Down below, sir. I got an eye on it, don’t you worry. But I lost me last club back on the bridge at Margus, so I been makin’ meself a new one. I like a club, sir, when it gets up close and personal, like. It don’t rust and get caught in your scabbard, it don’t break or get stuck in somebody’s guts, it never gives up on you. You keep a firm grip on it and it won’t let you down. I always swear by a club, sir, when the fightin’ gets messy.’
Knuckles’ club had a special adaptation. Stuck on the end was a great lump of lead solder which one of the smiths had done for him earlier. Most men would have had difficulty even lifting the thing.
‘Once, sir, I had to put a mare out of her misery and me good old club did a clean job of it in one go.’
Sabinus didn’t doubt it.