> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.battlefield-witness.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A story of the Mongol invasion of Hungary, 1241–1286 - URL: https://www.battlefield-witness.com/a-story-of-the-mongol-invasion-of-hungary-1241-1286/ - Published: 2026-10-12T13:00:59.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-12T13:04:01.000Z - Author: Anders Lawerny - Tags: The Mongol crossing of the Verecke Pass, the "Russian Gate", in March 1241, Taken from the record, historical, storywriting, research-driven, Hungary, Mongol, invasion, Master Roger, King Béla, Duke Kálmán, Archbishop Ugrin, Khan Köten, Batu, Subutai, Cegléd, Hungarians # The Bloody Sword ### --- > *When I heard this, my hair stood on end, my body trembled with fear, and my tongue faltered wretchedly.* > > Master Roger of Várad, *Carmen Miserabile* --- ## The People in This Story **Ilona**, a herdsman's wife in Halom, a village of fourteen houses on the edge of the marshes south-east of Cegléd, on the Great Plain. **Gergely**, her husband. **Benedek**, their son, six years old in 1241\. **Orsolya**, Gergely's mother. **Ayna**, fifteen, a Cuman girl in the household of Khan Köten, held at Pest. **Toghon**, an archer in an *arban*, a file of ten, in the army of Batu and Sübe'edei (the Hungarians call him Subutai). He comes from the Kerülen river, four thousand miles east. **Pál**, a deacon and clerk in the household of Ugrin Csák, Archbishop of Kalocsa. *Halom, Pál, Ilona, Ayna, Toghon and their families are invented. King Béla, Duke Kálmán, Archbishop Ugrin, Khan Köten, Batu, Subutai and Master Roger are not. A note on what is history and what is fiction follows the story.* --- ## I. The Sword *Halom, south-east of Cegléd. Mid-March 1241.* The dogs heard him first. Ilona was on her knees in the cowshed with her arm inside a heifer to the elbow, and the dogs went off all at once, the whole village of them, the way they did for wolves and never for neighbours. Then hooves on the frozen track. Then a man shouting a word she couldn't make out, over and over, as if he had shouted it so many times that day it had stopped being a word. She pulled her arm free. The calf could wait or it could die. She wiped herself on straw and went out into a wind that came straight off the plain with nothing in its way for thirty miles. The rider had stopped by the well. His horse was steaming like a pot. He was nobody she knew, a royal man by his cloak, but the cloak was filthy and his face under the hood was grey with tiredness, and in his right hand he held a sword upright with the point to the sky. The blade was smeared with blood from the hilt to the tip. Dried brown at the bottom, fresher at the top, where he must have dipped it again at the last village. It was not a man's blood. Everybody knew that. It was a sheep's, or a pig's. That made no difference to anyone's stomach. "By the king's command," the rider said. His voice was a rag. "Every man who can carry a weapon, to Pest. Every man. Whoever stays at home, it will be done to him as it was done to this sword." He did not explain. He did not have to. Her grandfather had told her about the bloody sword when she was smaller than Benedek, the way you tell a child about the bear that lives in the wood: it is real, but it will not come here. Gergely came round the side of the house with the axe still in his hand. He had been splitting willow. He looked at the sword, and at the rider, and then, oddly, at the sky, as though there might be something written there too. "Who is it?" he said. "Is it the Austrians?" "Tartars," the rider said. "They came through the Russian Gate four days ago. The Palatine's men are dead in the pass." He turned his horse. "You have till Sunday." And he was gone towards Cegléd, the sword held up in front of him like a candle in a procession. --- That evening Orsolya would not stop talking about the Cumans. "I said it. I said it when they came through with their tents and their filthy sheep. Forty thousand of them, and the king gives them the river, our river, and now the Tartars follow them like flies follow a cart of guts. You let in one dog with mange—" "Mother." "—and the whole—" "*Mother.*" Gergely was sitting on the bench by the hearth with his boots off, rubbing goose fat into the leather. He did it slowly. He had done everything slowly since the rider left: fed the beasts, checked the axe edge with his thumb, counted the arrows for his old hunting bow, which was a bow for hares and not for men, as everybody in the house knew and nobody said. Benedek sat in the corner with the baby asleep against his chest. He had been told to hold her and he was holding her as if she were made of eggshell, without moving, without blinking, his eyes going from his father to his grandmother and back. "How far is Pest?" Ilona said. "Two days. Three, with the ox-cart." Gergely put the boot down. "I won't take the cart. You'll need the cart." "For what?" He didn't answer that. Later, in the dark, under the sheepskin, she lay with her back against his chest and felt his heart going too quickly for a man lying still. Outside, the marsh made its winter noises. Ice creaking on the reed-beds. A heron complaining. The village dogs had settled at last. "If they come here," Gergely said into her hair. "If. You know where the island is." "Everyone knows where the island is." "Not the way through. The way through, only us and the Fazekas boys know." The heron, again. "You go before you see them. Not when you see them. Before. If the sky goes brown in the east, if you hear anything, if Kis-Péter's dog starts at night and won't stop. You take my mother if she'll come. If she won't come, you leave her." "Gergely." "You leave her, Ilona." She did not promise. He went to sleep anyway, the way men can. She lay awake and listened to his breathing and tried to remember what the rider's face had looked like, and found that all she could see was the blade, and the bright fresh blood at the very top of it, from the last village before theirs. He left on the Saturday with Kis-Péter and both Fazekas boys and the miller's nephew, five men walking north-west towards Pest with their bows and a sack of bread each. He turned once on the dyke to lift his hand. Benedek waved back with both arms until his father was a dot, and then he went on waving at the dot, and Ilona let him. --- ## II. Felt and Rope *Pest, on the left bank of the Danube. 17 March 1241.* They kept Köten in a stone house near the river, which was the Hungarian idea of honour. Ayna had been in Pest for nineteen days and she still could not get used to the walls. Everywhere you turned, a wall. The town was a basket of them, crooked timber and daub and a few of stone, so close you could not see where the sky started, and between them, mud. Not clean steppe mud, which was just earth and water and the dung of good animals, but mud with a smell. Old fish. Pig. Something rotting in every corner. The Hungarians did not seem to notice. They walked through it in their pointed shoes and looked at her as if *she* were the smell. Her father said they were afraid. Her father, Oltu, had been one of the men who rode beside Köten for twenty years, since before the Mongols ate the steppe from the Volga to the Dnieper, and he said fear made people stupid and you must be patient with stupid people the way you were patient with a horse that had been beaten. He said this in the evenings, in the yard behind the stone house where the Cuman men were allowed to sit, and he said it more often each evening, and each evening fewer of the men laughed. The khan himself she saw only through the doorway. An old man now, heavy, with grey braids and a Christian cross on a cord round his neck, the one the king's priests had hung there when he was baptised. He sat on a chest in the upper room and was very polite to the Hungarian lords who came to look at him. She watched once as one of them leaned close, so close their beards almost touched, and said something in their language that made the khan go perfectly still. "What did he say?" she asked her father afterwards. "That the Tartar letter names us. That the Tartar khan has written to their king, *the Cumans are my slaves, why do you hide my slaves*. That we are spies, every one, and Köten is the greatest spy." Oltu spat over the wall. "We ran from those dogs across the whole width of the world. Four years running. We left our dead unburied on the Don. And now we are their spies." "Do they believe it?" "Child," he said, "look at their faces." --- On the seventeenth morning she went down to the river with two of the khan's horses to water them, because the horses were the one thing in Pest that made sense to her. The Danube was high and brown with snowmelt, and on the far side, under the hill, she could see smoke from the houses at Buda and a boat crossing slowly with a man standing in the bow. The horses drank. She stood with her hand on the grey's neck and felt it swallow, the long muscles moving under the skin, and for a moment she was nowhere. She was on the Dnieper. She was nine. Then the noise started behind her. It came up from the town like weather. First a few voices, then many, then something that was not voices any more but a single animal with a thousand throats. She heard it reach the stone house. She heard the gate. She heard, quite clearly, over everything, her father's voice shouting in Cuman, "*Hold the stair! Hold the stair!*" She did not go back. She would think about that for the rest of her life, and in the end she would decide it was the only sensible thing she had ever done, and she would still wake in the night with her heart going like a drum because she had not gone back. She stood in the reeds with the two horses and their reins wrapped twice round her fist and watched the smoke start from the roof of the stone house. She watched the men come out into the square in front of it, Hungarian men, townsmen and soldiers and a few in good cloaks who stood back from the rest. She watched something being passed out of an upper window and thrown down into the crowd, round and dark and heavy, and the crowd opening around it with a shout and then closing. It was some time before she understood that she was watching heads. The grey horse pulled at its rein. She let it pull her. It wanted to go upriver, away from the shouting, and she went where it wanted, wading the shallows, mounting at last in a gravel cut below the town where no one was looking, and riding with the second horse on a lead until the walls of Pest were gone behind the willows. She did not cry. She thought, very clearly and calmly, *my father's head is in the square*, and she found the thought did not fit inside her and simply stayed outside, walking beside the horse, keeping pace. By evening she had found the camps. The news had gone faster than she had. Everywhere along the river the felt tents were coming down, women pulling the lattice walls apart, men catching horses, children driving sheep. There was no weeping. Not yet. There was a terrible efficient quiet, the quiet of people who had packed their whole lives in an hour before and knew how. A man she did not know took the grey horse's bridle and looked up at her. "You're Oltu's girl." She nodded. "Was it the king?" "I don't know," she said. "It was them." He held the bridle a moment longer. Then he let it go and turned and shouted to the camp, and his voice carried the way voices carry on open ground. Ayna did not hear what he said. She heard what the camp shouted back. They went south. Over the next days the bands joined, broke apart, joined again: forty thousand people moving like a herd moves, by consent and by fury. On the road to the Danube fords they met a Hungarian bishop marching north to join his king with his men, and there was no conversation. Ayna sat on her horse at the edge of it and watched, and when it was finished she felt nothing at all. They crossed into Srem and burned what they found there. Then the Danube again, and the mountains, and Bulgaria. Behind them, the king of Hungary lost his light horse. Every Cuman archer in the kingdom was riding the other way. Ayna did not think about that. She thought about the grey horse, which had gone lame on the stones of Srem, and about whether it would last to the mountains. It didn't. --- ## III. Eleven Days of Grass *From the Verecke Pass to the Sajó river. March–April 1241.* Toghon counted things. It was a habit and the other men in his arban teased him for it, but the arban-leader Bujir said a man who counted was worth two who prayed, and so they let him alone. He counted his horses every morning: five, the dun mare with the torn ear and four geldings, one he rode, four running loose in the herd behind. He counted his arrows: sixty, in two quivers, thirty light-headed for distance and thirty heavy for close, the heavy ones with the long narrow points that would go through mail at forty paces if you were not stupid about it. He counted the days since the pass: three days down out of the mountains, through forest so thick it was like riding inside a dark room, and then the plain opening in front of them like a held breath let out. Three days from the pass to the river they called the Danube, where the town was. Some of the forward hundreds had done it faster. A man who changed horses four times a day could cover a great deal of ground, and these Hungarians did not seem to understand that. They kept being surprised. He counted the dead, too, but only roughly, in tens, because after the pass the tens got very large. Now it was the eleventh day of fine grass. Since they had turned back east from the Danube, drawing the Hungarian king after them, letting him come, letting him think they were afraid, the horses had been eating well. Spring came early on this plain. Small green shoots between last year's dead stalks, enough to put flesh back on animals that had come over the mountains through snow. Toghon walked the dun at evening and felt her ribs under his palm and was satisfied. "You'll marry that horse," Bujir said. "She has better manners than your wife." That got a laugh from the fire. Bujir laughed too. He was a Jalayir from the north, older, with a burn scar over one eye that he said came from a Chinese fire-pot at a city whose name nobody could pronounce. He was the kind of leader who ate last, and the arban would have gone into a river for him, and in a sense that was what they were about to do. --- The river was called the Sajó. It was not a large river. In the Kerülen country it would hardly have had a name. But it ran fast and cold between steep banks, swollen with snow from the hills to the north, and there was only one bridge, and on the far side, on a heath of short grass and heather, the whole Hungarian army had made its camp. Toghon lay on his stomach on a low rise behind the willows at dusk on the tenth day of their April and looked at it. He had seen armies before. He had seen the cities on the Volga burn and the Russian princes' armies come out to meet them in their bright painted armour, and he had seen what was left afterwards. This was something different. The Hungarians had drawn their wagons into a ring, a huge ring, chained wheel to wheel, and inside it the tents stood so close that they seemed to be one tent, a white town of canvas and ropes. Smoke went up from it in hundreds of threads. He could hear it from here: a murmur like surf, the sound of a great many people talking, and above it, now and then, the bray of a mule or a horn or a man calling a name. "They've made themselves a sheepfold," Bujir said beside him. "It's strong." "A sheepfold is strong. It's strong against wolves that want to come in." Bujir chewed a grass stem. "Nobody ever thinks about the wolves that want them to come *out*." Toghon did not understand him then. He thought about it all night. --- The night was when the Ruthenian ran. Toghon heard about it the way the rank and file heard about everything, sideways and late. A man from one of the Russian hundreds, one of the Ruthenians who had been gathered into the army when their cities fell, had slipped out of the camp in the dark, waded the river, and gone over to the Hungarians. Gone to tell them what? That the army was here. That the bridge would be forced at night. That the main body was not where they thought. By the time Toghon's arban was told to mount, the Hungarians had already come across the bridge. He never saw it properly. It was black dark, no moon, and all he knew of the fight at the bridge was noise: horses screaming in the water, the drum of iron on iron, the dull smack of maces, men shouting in at least four languages. Arrows were useless in that dark at that range; you could not tell your own men from theirs. Bujir kept them back in the willows, mounted, waiting, the horses dancing and blowing. Toghon held the dun's reins short and felt her tremble under him, all through her, from her ears down to her hooves. Out of the dark came men on foot, Mongols, running, some of them without weapons. One was holding his own arm. One ran straight into the river and did not come out. "They're pushing us off the bridge," somebody said. "Shut your mouth." Afterwards they learned it had been the king's brother, the duke, and an archbishop. A priest. A priest in armour with a mace, at the head of his own knights, and some of the Christian warrior-monks in white with the red cross, who fought, men said, as though they were trying to get killed. They had come over the bridge at midnight and thrown the forward hundreds into the Sajó and then, having done it, they had gone back across the bridge to their sheepfold to sleep. Bujir, when he heard that last part, laughed until he had to hold his ribs. --- Before dawn, Toghon's hundred was moved south. They rode downstream in the dark along the near bank, away from the bridge, keeping off the skyline. The noyan Sübe'edei had gone that way in the night with the larger part of the army. Toghon had seen him once before, on the Volga, a heavy old man on a short horse who looked like a herdsman come to market, and who had lost an eye somewhere in the east and seemed not to have noticed. The men said he had been fighting since before Batu's father was born. The men said he had told Batu, the night before, *if you want to go home, go home, but I am crossing this river*. Downstream the river went wide and slow over gravel. In the half-light Toghon saw what the night had been for. Rafts. Timber rafts lashed with rope, dozens of them, grounded on the near shore, and beyond them a line of them laid end to end across the water, with planks across, making a road. Men were already riding over it, single file, their horses picking their way with their heads low and their ears flat. On the far bank more men were forming up in the grey light, quietly, in their hundreds, the way water fills a ditch. Toghon took his turn. The planks moved under the dun's hooves and she hated it and he talked to her the whole way across, nonsense, her name, his mother's name, the names of the hills at home, and then they were on the far bank, on the same heath as the Hungarian camp, south of it, behind it, and the sun came up red over the hills in the east, and from the north, a long way off, came a sound he knew. It was the throwing-engines at the bridge. Seven of them, men said later. He heard the thud of the arms, the long groaning creak, the pause, and then, faint and far, the crash of stone landing where the Hungarians had left their bridge guard. Over and over. And a high bright crackle under it that might have been fire. The sheepfold woke. --- ## IV. The Bridge *The royal camp on the heath of Muhi, west of the Sajó. Night of 10–11 April 1241.* Pál had been composing a letter in his head for three days and had not yet found the first sentence. *To the venerable lord abbot of* — no. *To my mother, the widow Erzsébet, in the town of Kalocsa, greeting in Christ* — but his mother could not read, so the letter would be read to her by Father Lőrinc, who would leave out anything he thought unsuitable, so there was no point writing anything true. He kept composing it anyway. It gave his head somewhere to go that was not here. Here was the archbishop's tent, where Pál slept on a rolled cloak between a chest of altar silver and a chest of documents, and outside it the camp. In daylight the camp was a fair without a market. Twenty thousand men, give or take, and nobody could tell him the number exactly, which offended him, since counting things was half of what clerks were for. Barons' pavilions with banners on poles. Ordinary tents so tightly pitched that their guy-ropes crossed and recrossed until the ground between them was a net, and every man who walked through the camp at night caught his foot and swore. Wagons chained in a ring around it all. Inside the ring, the smell of eight thousand horses and twenty thousand men who had been on the march for a week: dung, smoke, sweat, wet wool, the latrine trenches that had been dug in the wrong place, the sour reek of horse-piss soaked into heather. The archbishop had complained about the ropes. The archbishop complained about everything; he was a big man, red-faced, younger than people expected, with a voice built for preaching in a gale. He had complained to the king's face the day before about the ropes and the wagons and the guards and the way the king's barons sat in their tents playing at dice as if the Tartars were a hunting party that had gone home. Pál had been standing behind him holding the writing case and had wanted the ground to open. "Your Majesty sleeps," the archbishop had said, "while the kingdom burns." King Béla had said nothing. He was a narrow-faced man with tired eyes who listened a great deal and spoke very little, and he had looked at the archbishop for a long moment and then gone back to his map. Beside him the king's brother, Duke Kálmán, had smiled very slightly, the way a man smiles when someone else has said what he was thinking. --- That night Pál could not sleep. He went out with his cloak over his head and walked to the edge of the camp, to the wagon ring on the side that faced the river. From there you could see the Sajó as a darker line in the dark, and the bridge as a darker line across it, and on the far bank, dotted all along the hills, the fires of the Tartars. He tried to count them. He got to two hundred and stopped because the number was starting to frighten him. A man was sitting on the wagon shaft beside him, whittling by feel. "Can't sleep either, Father?" "I'm not a priest. Only a deacon." "You'll do." The man held up what he was making. Pál could just see it: a small horn, a cow's horn tip, hollowed. "Whistle. For my boy. He wanted one like the herd-boys have." The man blew into it softly. It made a thin breathy sound, not yet a note. "Not there yet. The hole's wrong." His name was Gergely. He came from somewhere south of Cegléd, a village Pál had never heard of, out on the plain between the Danube and the Tisza. He had walked here with four men from his village and a bow, which he showed Pál, a short bow of yew with a hare's-foot on the grip for luck. He talked about his cattle. He talked about the marsh. He talked about his wife, who was cleverer than him, and his son, Benedek, who was six and asked questions all day long until you wanted to drown him, and who had waved at him from the dyke until he couldn't be seen. "What did he ask you, last?" Pál said. Gergely thought. "Whether the Tartars have children." Pál did not know what to say to that, and Gergely did not seem to want him to say anything, and they sat a while longer in the dark with the river talking below them and the fires burning on the hills. Then Gergely went back to whittling, and Pál started his letter again. *To my mother. We are camped on a heath by a river. The men are cheerful.* --- It was near midnight when the runner came. Pál heard the shouting from the king's pavilion and then the horns, and then everything happened at once. The archbishop was roaring for his armour. A Ruthenian, a deserter, the word went through the camp like sparks through straw: the Tartars were crossing the bridge *tonight*. Men stumbled out of tents half-dressed and caught their feet in the ropes. Horses were being saddled by men who could not see the girths. And through it all came Archbishop Ugrin in his mail, with his mace in his hand and his face shining with something Pál could only call joy, and behind him Duke Kálmán, and behind them, quietly, in white mantles with the red cross, the Templars. They went out of the wagon ring at a trot. Pál ran after them as far as the gap in the wagons and no farther. He was not a fighting man. He was a clerk with a writing case and soft hands, and he stood in the gap with a lantern nobody had asked him to hold and listened. He could see almost nothing. Torches, bobbing, down at the river. Then the torches went onto the bridge and the noise reached him: not the clean clash of the songs, but a grinding, hammering, butcher's-yard noise, iron on iron, iron on wood, iron on bone. Horses screaming. Something big going into the water, and then another, and then many. Men shouting in Hungarian and in a language he did not know and in a third that might have been Russian. It went on for longer than he could believe and stopped quite suddenly. When they came back, the duke was bleeding from a cut over the eye and laughing. The archbishop's mace was clotted to the head with something that was not mud. Behind them came men carrying a few of their own, not many, and the Templars, who did not laugh, and a story that spread through the camp faster than they could tell it: the Tartars had been thrown into the Sajó, dozens of them, hundreds. The bridge was held. The heathens had been beaten back by the hand of God and the Archbishop of Kalocsa. Men cheered in the dark. Someone started a hymn. And then, because they had been awake half the night and were very tired and had won, they left a guard on the bridge and went back to bed. Pál lay on his cloak between the silver and the documents and listened to the camp go quiet around him. Somewhere a man was still singing, drunkenly, out of tune. The archbishop was snoring. Pál thought: we won. He tried to feel it. *To my mother. The Tartars have been driven back across the river.* He fell asleep in the middle of the sentence. --- ## V. The Wagon Fort *11 April 1241.* The first stone woke him. He did not know it was a stone. He knew a noise, a vast deep *crack* that came through the ground into his spine, and then a second, and a third, and men shouting, and a smell of smoke. He came out of the tent into a grey dawn full of running men. Down at the bridge, a mile away, something was happening that he could see quite clearly now in the growing light. On the far bank, where the Tartar fires had been, stood a row of tall frames, seven of them, like gallows. He watched the arm of one swing up and over and a dark speck rise from it, very slowly, hang in the air, and fall onto the Hungarian side of the bridge. A spout of earth. A man thrown sideways. Then the next. Between the stones came arrows, so many he could see them in the air as a kind of grey shimmer, like rain falling sideways. And smoke where something was burning, a fire that would not go out, that hissed and roared and crackled with a noise he had never heard before. The bridge guard broke. He watched them break. Little figures, running up the slope from the river, and behind them, onto the bridge, a dark mass that kept on coming, horsemen, hundreds, flowing over the bridge the way milk flows over the lip of a pail. "They're across," somebody said behind him, in an ordinary voice. "Look. They're across." --- The rest of the morning came to Pál in pieces, and he would never afterwards be able to put the pieces in order. The archbishop shouting at the king. That was early. Ugrin's face purple, his voice cracking: *I said it, I said it, and you slept.* The king's face grey and closed. The archbishop and the duke riding out again, with the Templars, through the wagon gap towards the bridge, a few hundred men against the dark mass. Pál stood in the gap and watched them hit it and stop and hit it again. They came back, fewer. They went out again. The second time, fewer still came back. The Templars did not come back at all. Word, from the south side of the camp, that there were Tartars behind them. *Behind them.* On this side of the river, coming up from the south, where there was no bridge. Men stared at each other. How? Nobody knew. Later he heard about the rafts, and the ford, and the old one-eyed general who had crossed in the night, but on the morning itself there was only the fact: they were in front and behind and on both sides, a ring around the ring. And then the arrows. It was not like rain, after all. Rain falls straight. These came from every side at once, from horsemen who rode in close at a gallop and loosed and turned and rode away and were replaced by others, round and round the wagon ring in a wheel that never stopped. They came over the wagons in volleys. They came between the wagon wheels. They thudded into tent canvas and stuck there quivering. They struck horses, and the horses screamed and reared and broke their tethers and ran mad through the camp, through the ropes, dragging tents down, trampling men, and that was the worst sound of the whole day, worse than the stones or the men, the screaming of the horses. Pál crawled under a wagon. There were already three men there. One was dead. One was praying in Slavonic. One was a boy of about fourteen who was holding his own shield over his head with both arms and shaking so hard the shield rattled against the axle. Pál found that he was holding the writing case. He had carried it out of the tent without thinking. He held it against his chest like a child and started to recite the psalm for the dead, because it was the one that came. *De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine.* Out of the depths I have cried unto thee. He got to the end and started it again. The boy with the shield was saying it with him in a whisper, though the boy could not have known any Latin, just making the shapes of the words. The fire arrows came about midday. The canvas caught. --- He never found out who saw the gap first. Afterwards everybody had a story. Some said it was the king's men; some said a baron's; one man swore to him years later that he had seen it with his own eyes and gone straight through it and never looked back, and that if he had looked back he'd have turned to salt, like Lot's wife. But the story was always the same. On the west side of the camp, the side towards Pest and home, the Tartars had drawn off. The ring had a hole in it. Through the hole you could see the heath going away to the west, empty, open, green, with the morning mist still lifting off it. The camp emptied through that hole like water from a broken jar. Pál went with it. He did not decide to. He was carried, out from under the wagon, through the burning tents, through a press of men and horses so tight his feet left the ground for long moments at a time. He lost a shoe. He kept the writing case. He saw a baron he knew by sight, a man with a gold chain, throwing the chain on the ground as he ran, and men behind him stooping for it and being trampled. He saw a priest on a mule beating the mule with a crucifix. He saw, or thought he saw, quite near, a man sitting on the shaft of an overturned wagon with a yew bow across his knees and a hare's-foot on the grip, looking at nothing, not moving, while the crowd went round him like a river round a stone. He called the name. "Gergely!" The man did not turn. Then the crowd took Pál and he lost him. Out on the heath the running men spread out, the way a crowd does when there is suddenly room. For a while it was almost quiet. There was the sound of breath, and feet, and somewhere a horse coughing. Pál ran with his writing case. He thought: we are out. He thought: *To my mother*. Then he looked back and saw them coming. They did not hurry. That was what he would remember. They came out of the smoke behind the running men at a trot, in no particular order, in twos and threes and tens, all over the heath, and as they came up behind each man they shot him, without stopping, almost lazily, the way a reaper takes a stalk, and rode on to the next. They were not chasing an army. They were harvesting it. The gap had been left on purpose. He understood that in a single cold moment, running, and the understanding was worse than the fear. There was a marsh to the left of the road. He went into it. --- The water came up to his chest and was so cold his heart stopped and then started again in a series of hard knocks. Reeds closed over his head. He pushed in deeper, feeling with his bare foot for the bottom, losing it, finding it, going down to his chin. Somewhere in the first rush he had let go of the writing case. He watched it float away from him through the reeds, the good leather case with the archbishop's arms stamped on the lid and his own pens inside, the swan quills he had cut and cured himself, the ink he had mixed, and it bobbed away into the brown water and turned slowly, once, and sank. He stayed in the marsh until dark. Horsemen rode along the edge of it twice. The second time they were close enough that he heard them talking, a quick guttural language, someone laughing, someone else telling a story; and he heard a horse step into the water, and stop, and step back out. He kept his face below the reeds with only his nose and his mouth above the surface. He prayed without words. His teeth would not stop chattering and he bit his own tongue to stop it and tasted blood. Across the marsh, the sound of the harvest went on until it was too dark to see. --- Later, much later, he learned the names. The Archbishop of Kalocsa, Ugrin Csák, killed on the heath. The Archbishop of Esztergom killed. The Bishops of Győr and Nyitra, the provost of Szeben, the Templars, nearly to the last man. Duke Kálmán carried wounded off the field and dead of it within the month. The king escaped, by a hair, by the speed of his horse and the bodies of the men who rode beside him, and fled west and kept on fleeing. Ten thousand dead, they said. He never could make himself believe a number like that. He could believe one man on a wagon shaft with a bow across his knees. He walked to Pest, barefoot, mostly at night: a hundred miles, near enough, the way he went. For two days of it the road was full of bodies. People who passed that way afterwards said it was like walking through a field after the reaping, when the sheaves have been left lying, only the sheaves were men. He reached Pest on the seventh day and was ferried over the Danube to the Buda side by a boatman who asked him for his cloak as the fare. He gave it. Three days later the Tartars came to Pest, and the people who had stayed shut themselves behind the ditch and stockade they had thrown up around the Dominican friary, and the Tartars broke in and burned it with them inside, and Pál watched the smoke of it from across the river with his bare feet in the mud. He never wrote the letter. His mother was dead by summer. --- Toghon was on the heath until dark, and then for the next day along the road to the west, and he lost count very early. He came back at evening to the place where the wagons had been. Most of the tents were ash. Dead horses lay in the ash with their legs straight up like table legs. His own dun mare had an arrow-graze along her flank, a long red line, Hungarian or Mongol he could not tell, and he cleaned it with spit and a handful of grass and she flinched under his hand. Bujir was sitting on a dead man, eating. "Well," Bujir said. "The sheep came out." Toghon sat down beside him. After a while he took the man's bow from the grass, a short yew bow with some kind of fur tied on the grip, and turned it over and drew it. Weak. A child's bow. A bow for hares. He tossed it back on the heap. Something else lay in the grass beside the dead man's hand, a small thing, a cow's horn tip, hollowed. He picked it up. He put it to his mouth and blew, the way his children blew grass-stems between their thumbs at home, and it made a thin breathy sound, not quite a note. "The hole's wrong," Bujir said, with his mouth full. Toghon dropped it in the ash. --- ## VI. Harvest *Halom and the marshes east of it. April 1241 to January 1242.* Kis-Péter came home on the eighteenth day after Easter, alone, with his left hand wrapped in a rag that had been a shirt. He came in at dusk across the dyke and the dogs did not bark at him, because they knew him, and so the first anyone knew of it was his wife's scream from the end of the village. Ilona ran with the rest. He was sitting on the ground outside his own door with his wife holding his head against her stomach and his eyes open and dry. "Where's Gergely?" He looked at her as though she had asked him the way to Rome. "Péter. Where's Gergely? Where are the Fazekas boys?" "There was a river," Kis-Péter said. "There was a camp. Then there was a hole." He held up his wrapped hand and looked at it. Two fingers were missing from it, she saw later, the first two, the bow fingers, taken off clean. "I went through the hole. I don't know where anybody went." That was all she ever got from him, then or afterwards. He was not a liar. He simply did not have anything else. In the years after, when men in the tavern at Cegléd told the story of the Sajó, how the king slept and the archbishop raged and the Tartars came across the river on a bridge of their own dead, Kis-Péter would get up and go outside. He lived another thirty years. He never drew a bow again. --- Ilona did what Gergely had told her. She went before she saw them. It was eleven nights after Kis-Péter came home. The sky had gone brown to the north-east two days running, a low smear along the edge of the world that was not cloud, and the wind brought a smell with it that made the cows lift their heads and stamp. Then, in the middle of the night, Kis-Péter's dog began to bark, and did not stop, and the other dogs took it up, and Benedek came and stood by her pallet in the dark, already dressed, with the baby in his arms. "The dog," he said. She did not light a lamp. She had packed the cart three days before: the iron pot, the axe, flour, two hams, the cheeses, salt, blankets, Gergely's spare knife, a sack of seed corn sewn into an old cloak. She harnessed the ox in the dark by touch, and put Benedek and the baby on top of the load, and went to the corner where Orsolya slept. "Mother. It's time." The old woman was sitting up. She had heard the dogs too. "I'm not going into the marsh," she said. "I'm seventy years old. I'll sit in the reeds with my feet in the water and die of a fever, and you'll have to carry me out and bury me in the mud like a drowned cat. No. I'll stay in my house." "They'll kill you." "They'll kill an old woman? What for? What have I got?" Orsolya lay back down and turned to the wall. "Go on. Go. You're letting the cold in." Ilona stood in the doorway a long time. Then she did what Gergely had told her. She left her. --- The island was not really an island. It was a hump of higher ground in the middle of the reed-beds east of the village, a long low back of sand and black earth with a stand of white willows and a few old oaks on it, that the floods went round and never over. There was no path to it. There was a way, which was not the same thing: a line of firmer ground under the water, twisting, that you had to know by the shape of the reeds and the colour of the water and certain stumps. Gergely had shown her when they were courting. The Fazekas boys' grandfather had shown it to Gergely. It had been used, people said, in the time of the pagans, and before that, and before that. There were nine of them on it by the morning, then twenty-three. Women mostly, and children, and two old men, and Kis-Péter with his ruined hand, and the cows, which they had driven through the water with sticks, lowing and slipping, and three of which they lost in the black mud on the way. They made shelters out of reeds and willow-poles. They did not light fires in daylight. From the top of the island, standing on the roots of the biggest oak, you could see Halom: the church tower, which was wood, and the line of roofs, and the dyke. On the third day Ilona was standing there with Benedek when the Tartars came. There were not many of them. Thirty, perhaps. Small men on small horses, more horses than men, a herd of loose horses coming behind. They came along the dyke at an easy trot and spread out among the houses and went into each house in turn, and came out again, and went into the next. It was very orderly. It looked like men doing a job. She could not hear anything at that distance except, once, faint and high, something that might have been a dog. Then the smoke. "Is Grandmother in the house?" Benedek said. "Grandmother went to Cegléd," Ilona said. "To your aunt's." He looked up at her. He was six years old and she watched him decide to believe her, and that was worse than if he had not. --- The strange thing, the thing nobody afterwards believed, was that in the summer the Tartars asked them to come back. They sent men out across the plain. Not to kill: to talk. A Hungarian, of all things, riding with them, a man from somewhere near Pest who had gone over to them or been made to, who shouted out to the reed-beds and the woods in their own language. *Come home. The khan has made peace. Come back to your villages and bring in the harvest. Nobody will be harmed. The khan has appointed headmen in every village. Come home, come home.* There was a meeting on the island. It went on most of a night. "It's a trick," said old Imre. "Everyone knows it's a trick." "Everyone knows nothing." That was Kis-Péter's wife. "Look at the children. Look at them." In the starlight, you could not look at anything; but they all knew what she meant. They had eaten the hams in the first weeks and the cheeses after and they had eaten two cows and the seed corn, God forgive them, all but the sack Ilona kept under her head at night, and now they were eating fish and frogs and the roots of bulrushes pounded into a grey paste, and the children's bellies had begun to swell. "If we don't bring the harvest in, we starve in the winter whether they kill us or not." "If we do bring it in, who eats it?" Nobody answered that. In the end some went and some didn't. Ilona went. She left Benedek and the baby on the island with Kis-Péter's mother and she walked back along the hidden way into Halom, and stood in the street of her village among the black stumps of the houses, and an old Tartar on a piebald pony looked down at her from the end of the street and made a mark on a stick with his knife. She brought the harvest in. It was the strangest summer of her life. The wheat stood high on the strips nobody had sown, gone wild from last year's spill, and the barley was thin, and there were not enough hands, but they did it: the women of three villages, a few men, children carrying sheaves. The Tartars watched. They were always there, a few of them, sitting their horses at the edges of the fields, or lying in the shade with their hats over their faces. They did not interfere. Sometimes one of them would ride along the line of reapers and look at them the way Gergely used to look at the cattle at market, with a quick practised eye, judging. Once one of them came close enough that she could smell him, horse and sour milk and old sweat and woodsmoke, and he leaned out of his saddle and took the sickle from her hand and looked at it, at the edge, and handed it back, and rode away. They took the grain. All of it, threshed and sacked, carted off to the north. They left the straw. She went back to the island in the autumn with a sack of gleanings tied under her skirt and knew she had been lucky to be allowed to keep that much. --- Then the cold came, and the Tartars came back to the villages, and this time they did not send a man to shout. She heard about it the way you heard about everything that winter, in pieces, from people who came through the marshes half dead. Cegléd. The villages towards the Tisza. The harvesters who had stayed in their houses after the harvest, believing in the headmen and the peace. They had been gathered together, men and women and children, in the churchyards and the fields, as you gather sheep for counting, and they had been counted. Years later, men digging a cellar on the edge of Cegléd turned up a great many small bones together in one pit. She did not see them. She heard about it and went to Mass and lit a candle, which was all there was to do. Orsolya's house, when Ilona went to look at last in the snow, was four burnt posts and a hearthstone. She found nothing else. She did not look very hard. --- ## VII. Ice *The east bank of the Danube, opposite Esztergom. January 1242.* All that autumn the river had stood between them and the rest of the country like a wall of moving water, and all that autumn the Hungarians on the far side had been safe behind it, and had known it, and had shouted at them across it sometimes from their boats. Then, in the week the Christians called Christmas, it froze. Toghon had never seen ice like it. Not on the Kerülen, which froze every winter thick enough to bear a camel, but which was a small river you could throw a stone across. This was a sea that had decided to stop. A white road half a mile wide, lumped and ridged where the floes had jammed together, groaning at night, cracking with a sound like the throwing-engines at the Sajó. They did not cross it at once. That was Sübe'edei, again, or Batu, or somebody up there in the high tents whose name Toghon would never know. They drove a herd of cattle down onto the near bank, a good herd, fat beasts taken from the villages, and they left them there. Left them unguarded, in plain sight of the far bank, and drew back out of sight behind the trees, and waited. For three days nothing happened. The cattle stood on the bank and bawled with hunger and the Mongols lay in the snow in the trees with their horses' muzzles tied and waited. Toghon counted the hours by the sun. He counted the cattle: one hundred and twelve. On the third night the Hungarians came across the ice to take them. Not many: thirty or forty men, on foot, carefully, testing the ice ahead of them with poles. They got to the cattle. They drove them back across the river, slow and lowing, the whole herd, and the ice groaned and held under all of it, every beast, every man. Bujir, lying beside him in the snow, let out a long breath. "Now we know," he said. They crossed two nights later, the whole army. The ice held them too. --- Toghon rode up the frozen river past the burning town of Esztergom in the grey light, past the walls where the Hungarians had piled their dead, past a great stone church on the hill above it with smoke coming out of its windows. The town fell. The church on the hill did not. There was a castle up there, round the church, of stone, and in it a Spaniard, men said, a knight from the far end of the world with crossbowmen, and they shot down from the walls at anything that came near and they did not stop. They threw stones at it. They threw fire. It stood there. Toghon sat on his dun mare at the foot of the hill and looked up at it, at the small dark figures moving behind the parapet, and felt a thing he did not have a word for, because he had not needed one before. It was not fear. It was nearer to what he felt when he looked at a mountain. The thing simply was there, and could not be ridden around, and did not care about him. "Leave it," the order came at last. "Leave it. There are other places." There were. There were always other places. But that night, in the cold, rolling himself into his felt beside the dun, he found himself counting the stones of that wall in his head, as far as he had been able to see them, and not being able to make the number come out. --- ## VIII. Bark Flour *The reed island. February to April 1242.* The baby died at Candlemas. There is nothing else to say about it. She did not cry much at the end; she had stopped crying a week before. Ilona held her inside her shift against her own skin through the last night, to give her the heat, and in the morning she was lighter, if anything, and quite cold. They could not dig, the ground was iron. Ilona and Benedek wrapped her in the blue cloth from the bottom of the sack that had held the seed corn and laid her in the hollow under the roots of the big oak and covered her with reeds and stones, and Ilona said the Our Father and the Hail Mary, and then could not think of anything else to say, so she said them again. Benedek put something in with her, under the cloth, before they covered it. She didn't see what. She didn't ask. --- Then it began to rain. It rained the way it had never rained in anybody's memory, old Imre said, and old Imre remembered the great flood of the year the king's father died. It rained through February and March without stopping, a cold slant rain driven by a wind from the north-west, and it did not freeze and it did not let up. The snow melted under it and the melt had nowhere to go. The marshes filled. The reed-beds became a lake and the lake spread over the plain until from the top of the island you could see nothing in any direction but grey water with reeds sticking out of it, and the black tops of drowned willows, and, far off, the ruins of the church tower of Halom standing up out of the flood like a stake. They had eaten everything by then. Ilona had learned things about eating that she would not tell her own son when he was grown. The best of it was the bark. You took the inner bark of the oak, the soft white layer under the hard brown, in long strips, and you dried it by the fire, and you pounded it on a stone with the back of the axe until it was a coarse brown meal. It tasted of nothing, or of wood. You mixed it with whatever flour there was, a handful, the last of the gleanings, half and half and then a quarter and then less, and made flat cakes on the hearthstone. They sat in the belly like gravel. They kept you alive. The second best was the garlic. It came up in April, when nothing else would, in the wet woods along the edge of the island where the oaks stood in water: broad flat leaves, bright green, so many of them that the ground under the trees turned green overnight, and a smell that went right through the cold air. Benedek found it. He came running back with his hands full and his face shining and for a moment, one moment, he looked his age. They ate it raw, by the handful, the children and the grown-ups alike, sitting in the wet under the trees, crying with the sting of it. It was the first green thing any of them had tasted since the autumn. There were worse things. In the next village, people said, a family had stopped coming out of their house, and when men went in at last they found what they found, and they burned the house with what was in it. Ilona did not ask which family. She did not want to know if she had known them. --- At the end of April the Tartars left. Ilona did not see them go. She saw the smoke, a long way off to the east, along the line of the Tisza, and then for several days a great many horses, far off, small, a long brown line of them like ants along the edge of the water. And then nothing. On the island they did not believe it. For a week nobody went out. Then Kis-Péter went, and came back, and said the plain was empty. Empty from here to Cegléd, he said. Empty to Pest, for all he knew. Not a Tartar. Not a horse. Not a dog. Not a single living soul. "They took everybody they hadn't killed," he said. "There was a camp on the road. I saw where it had been. I saw what they did with the ones they couldn't take." He did not say any more about that. --- Toghon left Hungary with two horses. The dun was not one of them. It was the rain. It had been raining for weeks, not the clean steppe rain that came in summer and was gone in an hour, but a cold grey endless drizzle that came out of the west and went on, and on, and turned the great plain where the horses had been fat in the spring into a bog. The grass drowned. The horses stood in water to their fetlocks and then to their knees and lost condition by the day. Their hooves softened and split. The loose herds behind the army thinned, every morning fewer, and every morning men went out with knives to the ones that had gone down in the night. The dun went down near the Tisza. She had not been right since the ice. He sat with her in the rain with her head in his lap and talked to her, the same nonsense he had talked crossing the rafts at the Sajó, and when she stopped trying to get up he cut her throat quickly and cleanly, the way you did, and drank the blood while it was still warm because there was nothing else to drink that was not river, and that night he ate her. Everybody ate their horses that spring. It was not a thing anyone talked about. They were going home. That was what Bujir said, anyway. The order had come from the high tents: turn east. The Great Khan was dead, men said, Ögedei, the son of the Conqueror, far away in Karakorum, and Batu must ride back to sit in the council and choose the next one. Others said no, it was the grass, it was the rain, it was that the steppe behind them was rising again, Kipchaks and Alans and all the rest, and they must go and put it down. Others said it was the stone castles that would not fall. Toghon did not know which was true. He thought perhaps all of them were, and that the men in the high tents did not know either, and would make up the reason afterwards, the way men do. On the last day before the Tisza crossing, his hundred rode along the edge of the great flooded marshes east of the ruined villages. A mist lay over the water. Somewhere out in it, a long way off, there was a dark hump of land with trees on it, and above the trees, very thin, so thin he almost did not see it, a thread of smoke. He reined in. Bujir reined in beside him. They looked at it together for a while. The water between them and the island was grey and flat and wide and you could not see the bottom of it, and the reeds stood up out of it in clumps, and there was no telling where the hard ground was or whether there was any. Toghon's new horse, a Hungarian gelding with a white blaze that had belonged to someone else before the winter, was standing with one hind hoof lifted, resting it. It had been lame since the morning. "Fish-eaters," Bujir said at last. Toghon said nothing. They rode on. He did not look back. He was a man who counted things, and he did not count that one; and afterwards, in the long years in the Volga country, when he was old, when his daughters were married and he had more sheep than he had ever thought a man could have, he would sometimes find himself trying to count it, and failing. A thread of smoke on an island. It was such a small thing. It would not come out to any number at all. --- ## IX. The Well *Halom. Late summer 1246.* The Cumans came back the way they had left: all at once, with everything they owned. Ilona heard them before she saw them, a long way off on a still afternoon, a sound she had not heard in five years and did not at first recognise. Sheep. A great many sheep. Then cattle, and the creak of wagons with solid wheels, and dogs, and over it all, high and clear, a woman's voice singing something in a language that was not Hungarian. There were three households in Halom now. Hers, Kis-Péter's, and a widow from somewhere towards the Tisza who had walked in one day in the second spring with two boys who were not hers and asked if she might have a house that nobody was living in. Nobody minded. There were nothing but houses nobody was living in. Most of them were not houses any more, but frames of black posts with nettles growing up inside them, and every year the nettles were taller and the posts fewer. The fields had gone back to grass. You could walk from Halom to Cegléd in a day and see four villages in all that way with smoke coming out of the roofs, and three of those were new, built by men the king had brought from somewhere and given land to. Now the Cumans. The king had brought them back too. He had written to them, people said, down in Bulgaria or wherever they had gone, and begged them, and given them the whole country between the rivers. *Their* country, now. Halom's fields. Halom's grass. That was the news Kis-Péter brought back from Cegléd in the spring, and he had said it the way a man says the hail has taken the barley, not angry, just tired. "What will they do?" "Graze it," he said. "What else? There's nothing else here." --- They put up their tents in a single afternoon on the long pasture west of the village, the pasture that had been the Fazekas family's, round white felt tents with smoke-holes at the top, thirty of them, forty. Their herds spread out across the plain behind them until the grass was moving with sheep as far as you could see. It was the most life Ilona had seen in one place since before the war. It frightened her more than the empty plain ever had. She went to the well the next morning as she always did. Benedek came with her. He was eleven now and tall for it, thin as a whip, with Gergely's way of standing with all his weight on one leg and his head on one side as if he were listening for something. He carried the second bucket. There was a girl at the well. She was older than Benedek, younger than Ilona, nineteen or twenty perhaps, a broad-faced girl with her black hair in two long braids and a baby tied on her back in a sling of red cloth. She wore a Cuman coat crossed over to the right and wide trousers under it, and boots, a woman in boots, and she had the well-rope in both hands and was looking down into the shaft with a frown. The well was old. The windlass had gone the first winter, burned for firewood, and now you let the bucket down hand over hand on the rope and hauled it up the same way, and there was a knack to it, because the shaft was not straight. Halfway down it bent, where Gergely's grandfather had hit a stone and dug round it rather than through it, and if you did not swing the bucket right as you let it down it caught on the lip of the bend and tipped and came up empty. The girl's bucket was coming up empty. She hauled it up and looked at it, and let it down again, and hauled it up, and it was empty again. She saw Ilona. She stopped. They looked at each other across the well for what seemed to Ilona like a very long time. She could not have said what she saw. A Cuman. One of the ones who had run off and left them before the Sajó, every archer in the kingdom riding the wrong way down the Danube, so the songs said. One of the ones the Tartars had come here hunting. One whose people had killed the bishop of Csanád on the road. She thought all of that. She thought it the way you see a thing all at once, a whole field in a lightning flash. The girl's face did not change. Ilona could not know what the girl was thinking, but she would remember afterwards that the girl's eyes went once, briefly, to Benedek, and stayed there a moment, and came back. The baby on the girl's back woke up and began to grizzle. Ilona put her bucket down. She walked round the well. She took the rope out of the girl's hands, not roughly, and the girl let her. She let the bucket down hand over hand, and at the bend she felt for it, the little drag, and swung her wrist the way you did, a small hard flick, and felt the bucket go on past the stone and down. She heard it hit the water. She let it fill. She brought it up hand over hand, full, slopping, and set it on the lip of the well. "So," she said. She did the flick again in the air, with an empty hand, slowly, so the girl could see. "Like that. At the stone." The girl looked at her hand, and then at her face. Then she nodded. She said something in her own language, one word, or two, short and flat. It might have been *thank you*. It might have been anything. She took her bucket and went back across the pasture towards the white tents, walking quickly, the baby jolting on her back, and she did not look round. "What did she say?" said Benedek. "I don't know." "Are they going to stay?" "I expect so." He thought about it, with his head on one side. "Do they have children?" Ilona looked at him then. He did not remember, she saw, that he had asked that question before, in another spring, on a dyke, to a man walking away from him towards Pest. He was asking it new. "You just saw one," she said, and let the bucket down into the well. --- ## X. Stone *A castle above the Hernád valley, in the north-east of the kingdom. Winter 1285–1286.* The grain was in the tower. Benedek liked to go up and smell it at night, when the lord's steward was asleep and only the watch was awake. He was fifty years old and he had been a castle man for twenty of them, and his knees creaked on the stair, and he went up anyway, carrying a rush-light, up past the storeroom where the salt pork hung, up past the room where the crossbows were racked, sixty of them, oiled and waiting, and the boxes of bolts beside them, to the top room under the roof where the grain was. He did not need to go in. He stood in the doorway and breathed it. Dry and dusty and sweet. The smell of bread before it is bread. Wheat from the valley, barley, millet, oats for the horses, sacks of it stacked to the roof-beams, enough, the steward said, for the whole valley till Whitsun if they were careful, and they would be careful. Below him, in the bailey, the whole valley was asleep. Three hundred people, four, packed into the space between the walls with their cattle and their pigs and their geese and their children. It stank. It was loud even at night. A baby crying. A cow coughing in the cold. Somebody snoring like a saw. And under it, if you listened, the sound he had come up here to listen for: nothing. Outside the walls, nothing. The wind going over the snow. They had done what the king's men said. As soon as word came down from the passes that the Tartars were through Verecke again, with the snow, in the dead of winter, as nobody had believed even Tartars would be mad enough to do, the lords had sent riders through every village. Not with a bloody sword this time. With an order. *Everything inside the walls. Everything. Grain, cattle, fodder, seed, people. What you cannot carry, burn. Leave them nothing.* They had left them nothing. Benedek had burned the last of his own hay himself, standing in the snow with a torch, watching it go up, and thought of his mother. --- The Tartars had come up the valley eight days ago. He had watched them from the wall. There were a great many of them, as many as you could see, black on the white snow, a column that went on round the shoulder of the hill and out of sight. But they came slowly. That was the thing he would tell his grandchildren, and they would not understand it, because the stories they had grown up with were all about how fast the Tartars were. These Tartars came at a walk. Their horses were thin. You could see the ribs from the wall. Many of the men were on foot, leading horses that were too weak to carry them, and some were on foot with no horses at all. They had ridden round the castle once, looking at it. Some of them had shot arrows up at the walls, without much interest. The crossbowmen had shot back, with more. Then the Tartars had made camp in the burned village below, in the snow, among the black posts, and lit fires with whatever they could find, and waited. For what, Benedek did not know. For the walls to fall down by themselves, perhaps. He watched them every day. He watched their fires get smaller. He watched them dig in the snow along the river, in the frozen fields, looking for anything, roots, last year's grain. He watched them kill horses. On the fourth day he watched two men fight over the carcass of one, rolling in the snow, until a third man came and hit one of them with something and the other one dragged the meat away. On the sixth day it snowed for twelve hours without stopping, and when it stopped, there were shapes in the snow around the camp that did not move again. He watched that, too. He did not feel what he had expected to feel. He had thought, all his life, that if he ever saw Tartars dying he would feel glad. He felt something, but it was not that. He thought about bark bread. He thought about the taste of it, which he had not thought about in years, the woody, nothing taste, and about the green leaves at the edge of the island that had smelt of garlic, and his mother's hands. --- On the ninth morning the lord's war-band came up the valley behind the Tartars. They were the men of the lord's lord, Benedek heard afterwards: the great Aba himself, or his men, out of the castles to the north. Knights in mail on big horses, the kind of horses nobody in Halom had ever owned, with lances, and behind them foot-soldiers with crossbows. They came down the valley in good order with the sun behind them and the Tartars in the burned village saw them coming and tried to mount, and many of them could not, because their horses would not get up. Benedek watched from the wall. It did not take long. Afterwards, when the gates were opened, he went down with the others to look. He was not sure why. The snow in the burned village was trodden and red, and there were dead men lying in it, and dead horses, and the ends of fires, and the bones of horses that had been eaten before the fight. He walked among them. They were small men, he saw, smaller than him, in padded coats gone stiff with the cold, with faces burned dark by the wind. Some of them were very young. One of them, quite near the river, was an old man, older than Benedek, with a thin white beard, lying on his back with his eyes open and a crossbow bolt through his chest, and his hand was closed tight round something. Benedek bent down. He did not know why he did it. He opened the old man's hand. There was nothing in it. A few knucklebones, sheep's knucklebones, the kind children played with, worn smooth and white with handling. Four of them. Benedek held them in his palm. Then he put them back in the dead man's hand and closed the fingers over them and stood up, and his knees creaked, and he went back up the hill to the castle with the snow squeaking under his boots. He did not know who the old man was. He never would. There is no reason to think the old man was anyone at all. --- That spring, when the Tartars had gone back over the mountains, the ones that were left, and the passes were open and the people had gone back down the valley to rebuild their houses, Benedek sat in the doorway of his own house in the sun with a knife and a cow's horn and made a whistle for his granddaughter. He was not good at it. He had never been good with his hands. He made the bore, and cut the window, and blew, and it made a thin breathy sound that was not a note. He looked at it. He tried to remember something, something about the hole, something someone had said or done once a long time ago in a yard on the plain with the dogs barking, and could not. He cut the window again, a little wider, and a little further down. He blew. It sang. His granddaughter came running across the yard with her hands out, and he gave it to her, and she ran off with it down towards the river, blowing it over and over, the same high note, until he could hardly hear it any more over the sound of men on the hill above the village, hammering, building the walls higher. --- --- ## Historical Note This is a work of fiction, but the ground under it is real, and as much of it as possible is taken from the record. **What is history.** The bloody sword carried through the country to summon the levy (Master Roger records it). The Mongol crossing of the Verecke Pass, the "Russian Gate", in March 1241 and the destruction of the Palatine's force there. The murder of Khan Köten and his household at Pest, the Cuman revolt that followed, the killing of the Bishop of Csanád's column on the road south, the plundering of Srem and the flight into Bulgaria, which cost King Béla his light cavalry on the eve of the decisive battle. Batu's letter demanding the return of the Cumans as his runaway slaves. At the Sajó on 10–11 April 1241: the Ruthenian deserter, the midnight attack across the bridge by Duke Kálmán and Archbishop Ugrin Csák, the Hungarians' return to camp to sleep, the seven siege engines that cleared the bridgehead at dawn, Subutai's crossing downstream on improvised timber, the wagon fort with its tents so closely pitched that their ropes trapped the men inside, the Templars fighting to the end, and the gap deliberately left in the Mongol ring through which the Hungarian army fled and was cut down over two days on the road to Pest. Ugrin Csák, the Archbishop of Esztergom and several bishops died; Kálmán died of his wounds weeks later; Béla escaped. The massacre at Pest. The Mongols' order to the peasantry of the Great Plain to come home and bring in the 1241 harvest, and the killings that followed. The freezing of the Danube at Christmas 1241, the cattle left on the bank as bait to test the ice, the fall of Esztergom town and the defence of its stone citadel by a Spanish knight and his crossbowmen. The wet, cold spring of 1242 that flooded the Plain and starved the Mongol horse herds; the competing explanations for the withdrawal (Ögedei's death, the weather, unrest in the steppe, the castles that would not fall), which historians still argue over. The famine of 1242, bread made from oak bark and survival on wild garlic (both from Roger's own account of his escape), and the reports of cannibalism. Mass graves of women and children excavated near Cegléd and at Bugac. Béla's recall of the Cumans to settle the empty land between the Danube and the Tisza. His rebuilding of the kingdom on stone. And the second invasion of 1285–1286, when Talabuga's column came through Verecke in winter, found the grain locked inside new stone castles, starved in the snow, ate its own horses, and was beaten by the local lords, among them Amadeus Aba. **What is invented.** Halom and its people; Pál; Ayna and her father Oltu; Toghon, Bujir and their arban; the castle above the Hernád. Their meetings across the story are the novelist's arrangement. The scale of the dying is not: between 300,000 and 500,000 people, perhaps a fifth of the kingdom, did not survive 1241–42, and on the central Plain, where Halom stands, whole districts were emptied. **Distances.** Pest to the Muhi heath is about 150 km (roughly 95 miles) in a straight line, a march of five to seven days for a medieval army and the same for a barefoot man walking mostly at night. Halom's position south-east of Cegléd puts it about 70 km from Pest, two to three days by ox-cart. The Mongol vanguard covered the 300-odd kilometres from the Verecke Pass to the Danube in about three days by changing to fresh horses through the day, which is why their arrival caught the kingdom unready. **Sources.** - Master Roger of Várad (Rogerius), *Carmen Miserabile super destructione regni Hungariae per Tartaros facta* (c. 1243–44). The eyewitness account of the invasion, Roger's capture and escape. - Thomas, Archdeacon of Split, *Historia Salonitana* (c. 1266). The other principal account of the Sajó battle and Béla's flight to Dalmatia. - *The Mongol Invasions of Hungary (1241–1286): Impact, Military Defeat, Reconstruction, and Long-Term Transformation* (historical report supplied with this project).