He rode a small bay mare. Battered and travelstained as the other, but lighter in his saddle, his eyes keen and darting, his head bare and his narrow, almost monkish skull balding on top, the fair hair cropped close at the sides. His stubbled cheeks and chin as well as his colouring said that he was no Hun, but he too carried a short Hunnish bow and two quivers on his back, cross-strapped. Even after all this time, Chanat thought he remembered him. The slave-boy, a Greek, one of those fair-skinned Greeks. His master’s faithful servant through all those exiled years of who knew what mysteries, horrors and griefs. The servant bowed his head to Chanat. Chanat nodded back.

‘Chanat,’ said the stone horseman. ‘Go to the camp. Bring us a spade.’

Chanat frowned. ‘A spade, Prince Attila?’

‘Attila Tanjou,’ he replied. ‘King Attila. King.’

Twice Chanat was questioned as he rode out of the camp carrying the spade across his saddle. Both times he ignored the questioners and rode on haughtily. In his heart, in his whole chest and throughout his stiff old frame, he felt the burn and surge of such excitement as he had not felt in years. His master had given him his orders. Nothing else mattered. A master who commanded respect with the crook of his little finger. Such a master as he had longed to serve all his life. Not that guzzling old degenerate back there in his royal tent, in his tunic of soft white Anatolian wool and his gifted purple robes of Byzantine silk. His ironbound chests full of Imperial solidi: massy gold coins stamped with the legends of alien religions and the heads of foreign kings. With wine stains in his beard, snoring with his head in some captive young girl’s lap, while the swords and spears hung rusting from the tent-posts. There atop the grave of Mundzuk sat a true commander of men, haughty and unhesitating in his pauper’s vestments of beaten peltry and dusty hide: a Tanjou. A King.