Despite all these evident absurdities a deeper truth comes back to me, and a wiser, still older voice. Gamaliel, whom it has been my pleasure also to know, would say that anything whatsoever that men have anywhere believed may yet instruct us. For while tales of gold-hoarding griffins do not in truth tell us anything about the mysterious and uncharted wastes of Central Asia, they do tell us much about the beliefs and the hearts of men.
So Gamaliel would say, his eyes twinkling with mischief and delight. Those eyes that have seen so many wonders and horrors, yet still shining with the light of life. Those ancient, glittering eyes. Gamaliel, Fire-bringer, Sun-singer, last of the Hidden Kings – he has travelled so far and lived so long, yet would still express his faith in the mysterious words that he loved: Everything is God.
But I digress. There will be tales of Gamaliel later. And indeed, in time, I shall introduce into this history my own self, Priscus of Panium – not from vulgar immodesty but rather because, for a short time, I truly did take my place upon the stage of the world, and in the great and terrible drama of history. But that is not for many years yet. Our theme for now remains the boyhood of Attila, and how his turbulent, iron-willed, earth-shaking character was formed; and the dark, tumultuous years of the early fifth century since Christ. Dark years, which some said would pass; and others said would only lead to darker yet. But a few, a very few, wise ones, who could see further than either optimist or pessimist, foretold that the years to come would be both for better and for worse; for in the tangled skein of history, which is the work of the God Who Loves Stories, there is very often no telling the two apart.
I resume: as far as China, the tribes were stirring.
Across the vast and measureless grasslands of Central Asia, the rains had started to fail. The deserts of the south had started to creep north, and in the autumn the renewal of the parched grasslands before the coming rains grew later and later with each passing year. And the nomad peoples of those regions, finding only lifeless desert to the south, and the dark and impenetrable forests of Scythia to the north, and to the east only the great Empire of China and its implacable, impassable wall, were forced to turn in the one direction left to them: to the west, and the warm, fruitful and temperate lands of Europe. Towards the Mediterranean: the sea at the centre of the world, with all its ancient, lion-coloured promontories sleeping in the sun.
So began that great migration of peoples which lasted for centuries, and indeed is not abated yet. And among them came the most feared and savage tribe of alclass="underline" the Huns.
They came from the east with dust-parched throats, and wind-parched eyes set on the western horizon. They rode on small, tough ponies with big, ungainly heads, driving before them their flocks of sheep and their herds of lean and starving cattle.
They carried bows and arrows. Their arrows were no different from those of any other people. An arrow is no more than a feathered stick with a barbed iron tip. But their bows would change the world. Their bows were weapons of a range and terror such as no opposing army had ever faced before.
They were made of a number of materials rather than a simple length of wood, and at a glance were unimpressive in appearance: a mere three feet in length, and resembling something like a piece of polished animal horn. But to flex one in your hands and bend it against your thigh was to feel its extraordinary latent strength and power. How their bows were made was a closely guarded secret, passed down through the generations. The main elements were horn, wood, sinew, and glue boiled up from the tendons of animals, or from the parts of certain fish. The incomparable Hun bowyers had learnt, over the long generations of their people, that horn resists compression, snapping back into shape if it is bent, while sinews of a certain kind – the Achilles tendons of antelope, most powerfully – resist extension. The Hun bowyers, therefore, learnt to glue horn to the inside of their wooden bows, and lengths of antelope sinew to the outside. Such a task sounds simple, but it took years for a man to perfect his art. When it was done, the bow he had crafted was a thing of astonishing power.
It is said that every time a Hun warrior draws back his bowstring and lets fly an arrow, he exerts a force equivalent to pulling up one’s entire weight, from a tree-branch, say, by only one arm, and indeed by only three fingers. When you consider that, in battle, a Hun warrior might fire as many as fifteen arrows a minute, while riding at full gallop like a whirlwind past the ranks of the hapless enemy infantry, you will understand what toughness and hardihood these fierce people possessed. A toughness in every way a match for even the most hardened, grim-faced Roman legionary in his iron helmet, but with an additional speed and flamboyance. No wonder that every foreign tribe they encountered feared them as demons out of hell. Even the Goths, the mightiest and most lion-hearted of all the Germanic peoples, had a grudging respect for the Huns.
The bow used by the Romans could fire an arrow a respectable three hundred and fifty yards or so. A Hun bow could fire an arrow over nine hundred yards – an incredible half a mile. When this was first witnessed in battle, it simply wasn’t believed. Their enemies said the Huns could not be men, but must be the infernal offspring of sorcerers and witches of the desert. But they were men, after all, like any other.
The arrow flies from a Hun bow with a staggering force, so that at a range of two hundred yards, when many a Roman arrow is already falling from the air and dropping into the grass, the Hun arrow can still punch effortlessly through an inch-thick plank of wood. When riding out against the Huns, there is little point in wearing armour. Even tempered steel is just so much dead weight against those terrible, springing bows and those hurtling arrows.
The Hun warrior also exhibits a breathtaking skill in horsemanship. He can ride at full gallop while despatching one of those deadly missiles every four or five seconds. His speed makes him almost impossible to hit in return, and the strength and stamina of his sturdy little horse means that it can carry a man at a gallop for up to an hour. The refined Spanish or Cappadocian mounts of the empire, or the beautiful, headstrong horses of the Armenians and the Parthians, would be winded in a quarter of that time.
When riding close to the enemy, the Hun warrior can slip from his saddlecloth, and down the side of his horse, holding on only with the strength of his thighs, still galloping, still firing. He can even lean down so low as to fire underneath his horse’s neck, using the body of his mount for cover.
Is it any wonder that, all across Scythia, every tribe feared the Huns? Or that, in time, every empire in Europe and Asia came to fear them too?
These, then, were the people who came across the great plains in their skin-covered wagons, their women and children at their sides, every bit as tough as their menfolk. The wagons came in file, stretching back as far as the eye could see, spreading out over the waterless steppes, the dust in the reddening light of the setting sun raised by the turning wheels of the creaking wooden wagons. The fording of the great rivers of that country could take weeks: the songs of the nomad drovers rising above the bellowing of the cattle as they were driven deep into the water, the snorting of the horses, the splashing of the great wooden wheels through the fording-places, the shrieks of women and the yells of men and the excited laughter of children.