Chanat rode out past the bored and curious watchmen, for all the world ready to thwack them across the skull with the flat of the spade if they should dare to try and stop him. They didn’t. The lean, grim-faced old warrior still commanded respect in this sleepy camp of the Huns.

He held the spade out to the King. His King. How many more offerings he would willingly make to him, not excluding the spilling of his thin and ancient blood.

‘Orestes,’ said the King.

The fair-skinned Greek took the spade from Chanat and slipped gracefully from his horse.

Attila rode down from the mound on the eastern side and looked back. ‘Dig there,’ he said, with a jerk of his capped head.

‘You are going to break open one of the mounds of-’

Under the King’s sudden, ferocious glare, even Chanat stumbled for a moment. But then he pressed on. This was a King who would not resent a man speaking his mind, if his mind was true.

‘One of the mounds of the Buried Kings?’

‘The mound of Mundzuk,’ said Attila. ‘The mound of my father.’

A shadow passed over Chanat’s face but he said nothing. They sat back and watched until Orestes had dug through to the heart of the mound, clearing the black chernozem earth from around the heaped burial stones. Attila himself dismounted and knelt beside the long cairn of stones, and removed them one by one with utmost delicacy. He paused for a long while before reaching in. Brushing aside the fallen earth within, he laid his warm palm flat on the cold bone forehead of his father and prayed for his forgiveness and understanding. He knelt a long while, then reached his other hand in, and seemed to be tugging at the forlorn and soiled skeleton itself. At last with a gasp he pulled free, got swiftly to his feet and vaulted back onto his horse. The two men, the tough Greek servant and the wiry old warrior, took it in turns to replace the stones and heap the earth back into the gaping wound that had been rent in that sacred earth and then laid back the turf. Finally, they tamped it down with the flat of the spade and all was as before.