Between the Woods and the Water
Page 6
As soon as they got the hang of it, each time I pointed at something with a questioning look, back came the Gypsy word. Most of them laughed but one or two looked worried, as though tribal secrets were being revealed. A finger pointing to Heaven, and “Isten?” (the Magyar word for God), at once evoked the cry of “Devel!,” which sounds odd at first; until one thinks of Deva in Hindi and its probable Sanskrit ancestor. An eager light had come into those swart faces. Lustrous hair, dark eyes, chestnut skin and, among the women, the sinuous walk and brittle flexibility of wrist and ankle—all these encouraged the notion that they could have changed hardly at all since they had left Baluchistan or Sinde or the banks of the Indus. I had recently read, or been told, two hostile legends connected with their skill as metal-workers: not only had they cast the Golden Calf for the Israelites, but a Gypsy smith is supposed to have forged the nails for the Crucifixion, in punishment for which a similar nail had been hammered into his behind by a turncoat demon.
* * *
Malek was grazing under the tree where I had left him, a dozen yards from the fire. The hobble seemed secure and comfortable and, with saddle and saddle-bag for pillow, I lay and smoked but couldn’t sleep for a long time. When I did, the well-being generated by those hasty swallows of wine and the cheerful session by the fire had worn off. How could I have been so insane as to bring a borrowed horse into such a den of hazards? Later, between waking and sleeping I had nightmare visions of the Gypsies making off with that beautiful Szapáry horse; then (as they were said to do) painting him a different colour before selling him to a cruel stranger; eating him outright, perhaps; or, even worse, getting him secretly turned into salami, the whispered fate of old donkeys, after the hasty despatch of both horse and rider. This last fate was the best solution: should the borrowed horse come to harm, better death than a lifetime of disgrace. When I woke from these dreadful fancies, the new moon had set; but there was Malek, lit by stars under the branches and he was still there when daybreak routed the phantoms of the night. The sun lifted itself out of the wilderness like a blood-red disc and the crowing of the Gypsies’ cock ran from one invisible farmyard to another until the whole plain was stirring.
I had brought plenty of sugar-lumps and after gratefully giving Malek a couple I fed him some solider stuff and wandered off to see what was going on. A reversal of last night’s shadows striped the plain; smoke was rising and fingers were already threading, plaiting and splicing among the heaped-up reeds. Apart from the dazzling frippery of the girls, I had been disappointed the night before by the tameness of this little company. Not a glimpse of a musical instrument, not a note or a twang; not even a dancing bear. But I was wrong. In the lee of a cart, a huge brown Carpathian beast, his cheek resting on folded paws, lay fast asleep; and even as I watched he began to stir. Sitting up, he yawned long and wide, rubbed his eyes, then dropped his paws in his lap and peered about with bleary goodwill, while his companion, blowing on embers, prepared breakfast for two. I rejoined Malek, and as we both munched, I noticed that our sheltering tree, tall as a medium-sized oak, belonged to a kind I had never seen. The bark was darker, oval leaves the colour of verdigris grew in symmetrical sprays and leathery pods dangled among them like dark runner-beans. It was a carob-tree. (Its blackish pods, with the faint, dull, haunting taste of fossil chocolate, are like teak to chew. A few years later I sometimes used to stem hunger with them on the southern rocks of Crete, unconsciously imitating the Prodigal Son: they are the husks which he and the swine did eat, and they are still fed to pigs. ‘Locust-beans’ is an alternative name and some rashly think it was these, with wild honey, that kept St. John the Baptist alive in the desert.)
I saddled Malek, and said goodbye. We headed east.
It was time, and perhaps it is again, to see where we were, and to glance at the past of this extraordinary region. Since the centuries of Rome’s frontier along the Danube, the logical way from Buda—Strigonium—to the Levant lay due south along the river to its confluence with the Sava, where the huge and crucial fortress of Belgrade was later to spring up: then through the Balkan passes, across the future kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria to Adrianople and over Thrace to the Imperial City, or to the Hellespont, where Asia began. This was the overland link between the Kings of Hungary and the Byzantine Emperors; it was the path of Barbarossa and his crusaders on the journey which ended with the Emperor’s death in the chill flow of the Calycadnus. But the last crusading army but one—the Hungarians of King Sigismund, with his French, German, Burgundian and Wallachian allies and even, some say, a thousand English—kept on recklessly downstream until Bajazet the Thunderbolt, striking at Nicopolis, utterly destroyed them. (More later of this.) A final Crusade in the next generation was smashed to bits on the Black Sea; then Constantinople itself was lost. The same route in reverse had carried the Turks by fatal stages into the heart of Europe. They had subjugated the Balkans in the late Middle Ages and by Tudor times they were advancing upstream. Suleiman the Magnificent defeated King Louis II,[4] then he captured and burnt Buda; but in 1529 he laid unsuccessful siege to Vienna, and when the second attempt on Vienna failed at the end of the next century, the Ottoman tide began to turn. Charles of Lorraine, and then Prince Eugene stemmed their advance and harried them downstream along the same watery thoroughfare; and the Austrian army, awfully arrayed, boldly, by battery, besieged Belgrade. The Stadt und Festung fell and the time-honoured path became the itinerary for all Western travellers; in particular, for Ambassadors travelling to the Sublime Porte. Strings of carriages with outriders and escorts of musketeers, or ribboned houseboats with many oarsmen wended majestically downstream. (One must imagine Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu during a halt, half-furred and half-flimsy in Turkish dress, reading Pope’s Homer under a poplar tree.)
Kinglake followed in the next century, but, infuriatingly, his narrative skips Hungary and only begins with the author mimicking the sound and the action of a steam-engine to edify the Pasha of Belgrade; for the coveted citadel was once again Turkish. The railway which eventually linked it to the West and to Constantinople has played a great part in novels of espionage and adventure.
(Years after the present journey, I followed in all these ancient footsteps. If the river before Esztergom had suggested a liquid Champs Elysées, the resemblance on this southward reach is more striking still. A wide ochre flood dwindles across Europe to infinity between symmetrical fringes of willows and poplars with nothing in sight but a heron rising from the flag-leaves or an occasional fisherman’s canoe suspended in the haze like a boat in a Chinese painting. I stayed the night in a bargeman’s tavern at Mohács in order to see the battlefield where Suleiman had overthrown King Lajos: one of history’s most dark and shattering landmarks: a defeat as fatal to Hungary as Kossovo to the Serbs and Constantinople to the Greeks.)
So much for the Danube way to the South, but it was not the one I had taken. Malek and I had abandoned it for the less trodden route across the Great Plain to Transylvania and were trotting south-east steadily further and further from the great river. Later, searching through travellers’ tales, I could find only a few who passed this way.
On the fringe of allegory, dimly perceived through legendary mist and the dust of chronicles, these strangers have an outsize quality about them; something of giants and something of ogres, Goyaesque beings towering like a Panic amid the swarms that follow one after the other across this wilderness and vanish. No historical detail can breathe much life into the Gepids, kinsmen of the Goths who had left the Baltic and settled the region in Roman times; and the Lombards only begin to seem real when they move into Italy. Otherwise, all assailants came from the East, with the Huns as their dread vanguard. Radiating from the Great Plain, sacking and enslaving half Europe, they made the whole Roman Empire tremble. Paris was saved by a miracle and they were only halted and headed backwards near the Marne. When Attila died in reckless bridebed after a heavy banquet somewhere close to the Tisza and perhaps not many miles from my present path, the Hu
ns galloped round and round his burial tent in a stampede of lamentation. The state fell to bits, and ploughmen still dream of turning up his hoard of jewels and ingots and gold-plated bows. The shadowy Gepids survived until the Avars scattered them and moved in themselves for nearly three centuries. Like most of these invaders, of Mongol stock and akin to the Turks (they were Turanians all), these hordes of long-plaited savages and their hectoring khans came close to carrying Byzantium by storm. A permanent nuisance to the West, their newly-invented stirrup made them more formidable still: a firm seat in the saddle ousted the bow as the horseman’s chief weapon and replaced it with the spear, and then the lance which in its turn led to the heavily armoured knights of the Middle Ages and, in dim barbaric fashion, foreshadowed the tank. When Charlemagne destroyed their enigmatic sevenfold rings of fortification and put an end to them, all Europe heaved a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, spreading like damp, the Slavs had been quietly expanding eastwards and southwards and into the Balkans, giving birth to the insubstantial Kingdom of Great Moravia on the way. Then the state of the newly-arrived Bulgars stretched a north-western wing into the void the Avars had left. (What figure could seem more remote than Swiatopluk, Kral of the brittle Moravian realm? And who could be further from heart’s desire than Krum, the early khan of the Bulgars? He and his boyars used to drink out of the skull of the captured Emperor Nicephorus, halved and lined with silver.)
At last the Magyars came. Fen and tundra people originally, they too were akin to earlier and later invaders, but they had strayed away from their Ugro-Finnic relations centuries earlier; they must have rubbed shoulders with the Persians on their wanderings; almost certainly loitered for a Turkic century or two on the Pontic Steppes to the north of the Caspian and the Black Sea, where lay the vast, mysterious and deeply interesting Empire of the Khazars... Leaving the Ural river behind them, and then the Volga and the Don and the Dnieper, they reached the delta of the Danube and halted just north of it in Bessarabia. The Byzantine Emperor, fiercely harassed by the Bulgars, persuaded the godsent Magyars to cross to the south of the Danube and attack them. To counter this, Simeon, the Bulgars’ leader (soon to be Tzar) called into play the terrible race of the Pechenegs. These, the fiercest, the cruellest and the most perfidious of all the steppe nomads, were already chafing in the halted queue of Asiatic invaders directly behind the Magyars. While the Magyars were busy assaulting the Bulgars, they moved forward and ravaged and then occupied the Magyars’ temporarily evacuated Bessarabian stamping ground.
A fateful chain of events was set in motion. Deprived of Bessarabia, the Magyars struck out towards the sunset; some of them went south-west along the Danube, through the Iron Gates, and then sharp right; but the main body headed north-west through the Carpathian passes, and then sharp left until all the tribes were congregated on the Great Plain, which became Hungary at last. They were already organised in a war-like hierarchy; Arpád had been hoisted on a shield by the other chieftains; and his subjects, expert horsemen, javelin-throwers and archers to a man, had saddles and stirrups that enabled them to twist like corkscrews and loose off in all directions at full gallop. The campaign gathered momentum. All rivals were subjugated or swept from the Plain; the whole of Slovakia was taken; Transylvania was occupied; the Great Moravian Kingdom was trampled in pieces and the Slavs of the North and the South were sundered for ever.
No wonder old chroniclers mixed up the Magyars and the Huns! Their origins and conquests and their behaviour in earlier decades were on exactly the same lines. Like them, they became the terror of Europe; they bargained with the Roman Emperor under the walls of Constantinople, rode roughshod through Italy as far as Otranto, crossed the Rhine and ravaged Lorraine and Burgundy until at last, near Augsburg, the Emperor Otto almost annihilated them; they straggled home chastened to their huge captured territory by the Danube. Then everything began to change. In a few more decades, as we have seen, Arpád’s descendant, Stephen, was king of a great Christian state; he died a saint; and the frontiers of Hungary, except for expanding later on to take in the kingdom of Croatia and then being fragmented for a century or two by the invading Turks, remained unchanged for nine hundred years. St. Stephen’s momentous coronation at Esztergom in AD 1000—like Charlemagne’s coronation in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day 800—is one of those lucky key-dates which help to give us our bearings in this chaos.
But the Nomad procession had still not dried up. We have seen what happened with the Mongols in 1241, and how King Béla’s kingdom was laid in ashes. To re-people the desert, he summoned yet another horde from the steppes, the Cumans,[5] and the Cumans were even worse than the Pechenegs. Vast numbers settled on the Plain; hoping to tame them, Béla married his son to a Cuman princess but the barbarians’ power increased until the country was on the point of relapsing into heathen barbarism; finally the brave and clever dynasty of the Arpáds began to fail. When the last one died in 1301, the Anjous of Naples, their legal heirs, succeeded, and an able line of Angevin kings, culminating in Louis, or Lajos, the Great, resurrected the country; rebuilding began, and for a while generations of house-martins could return to the same eaves each year, and storks to their chimneys, without finding everything in ruins. But offstage, the Turks were already fidgeting in the wings.
* * *
When I had unfolded my map under the carob tree, the Tisza river, flowing south-east to join the Danube, uncoiled straight ahead of my path; I was struck by the place-names scattered beyond the east bank: Kúncsorba, Kúnszentmartón, Kúnvegytöke, and so on. The first syllable, it seemed, meant ‘Cuman’ and the region was still known as Nagykunság or Great Cumania. On my side of the river, a slightly different profusion spread southwards: Kiskúnhalas, Kiskúnfélegyháza, Kiskúndorozsma. ‘Kis’ means ‘little’: they belonged to the region of Kiskunság or Little Cumania.
So this was where the Cumans had ended up! And, even closer to my route, lay a still more peculiar paper-chase of place-names. Jászboldogháza, for instance, only a few miles north; and a bit farther afield, Jászladány, Jászapáti, Jászalsószentgyörgy, and many more... Here the first syllable recalled a more unexpected and still hoarier race of settlers. In the third century BC, the Jazyges, an Iranian speaking branch of the Sarmatians mentioned by Herodotus, were first observed in Scythian regions near the Sea of Azov, and some of them made their way to the west. They were allies of Mithridates—Ovid speaks of them in his Black Sea exile—and, between the Danube and the Tisza, exactly where their descendants finally settled, the Romans had much trouble with them. We know just what these Jazyges looked like from the column of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna. The bas-relief warriors—and their horses, right down to their fetlocks—are sheathed in scale-armour like pangolins. Javelins lost, and shooting backwards in the famous Parthian style, they canter with bent bows up the spiral.
Had they left any other traces in the Plain? Any dim, unexplained custom, twist of feature, scrap of language, or lingering turn of phrase? A few sparse reminders of the Pechenegs and the Cumans still flicker about the Balkans; but this entire nation seems to have vanished like will o’ the wisps and only these place-names mark the points of their evaporation. There had been a time when they scattered the hemisphere all the way from the Danube’s banks to the fogs of the Oxus and the hushed Chorasmian waste.
* * *
It was several days before I heard of these wild people, but I can’t resist introducing them while we are in their haunts. I learnt, too, that Jászberény, an old town due north, and one of the possible sites for Attila’s capital, still contained an old ivory horn carved from a tusk. Although it is really Byzantine work, it was once revered as the oliphant of Lehel, chief of one of the earliest Magyar tribes; his horn is as famous in Hungary as Roland’s in the West. I already knew about Charlemagne’s conquest of the Avars and I realised rather sadly that these miles on horseback were the last stretch of my itinerary still linked with the great Emperor: he had seemed to preside over the whole of the journey so far. I
cursed the ignorance which had allowed me to pass Aachen without knowing it was Aix-la-Chapelle! A fully historical figure, with Alcuin of York and his court of scholars and his dates, wars, sayings and laws intact, including his strange names for the months—‘Hornung,’ ‘Ostarmonath’ and the rest—he has been touched and then transformed by a cloud of fable. Fireside mutterings, legends, centuries of bards and the lays of minnesingers have set him afloat somewhere between Alexander and King Arthur, where he looms, mural-crowned, enormous, voluminously bearded, overgrown with ivy and mistletoe, announced by eagles and ravens, dogged by wolf-hounds, accompanied by angels and oriflammes and escorted by a host of prelates and monks and paladins; confused with Odin, and, like Adonis, akin to the seasons, he is ushered on his way by earthquakes and eclipses of the sun and the moon and celebrated by falling stars and lightning; horns and harps waft him across the plains; they carry him through canyons and forests and up to steep mountain-tops until his halo is caught up in the seven stars of his Wain.