Between the Woods and the Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand to hand instead of my anachronistic bottle. In defiance of language, by the time it was empty we were all in the grip of helpless laughter. Some kind of primitive exchange had cleared all hurdles and the drink and the boy’s infectious spirits must have done the rest. The fire was nearly out and the glade was beginning to change; the moon, which looked scarcely less full than the night before, was climbing behind the branches.
    There wasn’t much room in their stifling den and when they understood I wanted to sleep out they strewed brushwood in the lee of a rick. The old man put his hand on the grass and then laid it on mine with a commiserating look: it was wet with dew. He made gestures of rugging up and I put on everything I possessed, while they dossed down indoors.
    When we had said goodnight I lay gazing at the moon. The shadows of the trees lay like cut-out cloth across the clearing. Owls signalled to each other close by and there were sleepy grunts from the sties prompted by dreams, perhaps, or indigestion, and now and then a pig, roused in the small hours by night-starvation, munched in semi-liquid bliss.
    * * *
    It was still night when we got up, covered with damp as foretold, and while we ate bread and cheese Bálint, the elder, unlatched the sty. The pigs rushed out in a hysterical stampede then settled more temperately to a quiet day’s rooting among the acorns andbeech-nuts scattered deep under the branches. To put me on the right path Géza led me across the woods, whistling and twirling his long tomahawk and tossing it in the air and catching it as he loped through the bracken; when he left me I went on by myself for two hours by moonlight, and at daybreak I was in the ruins of a huge castle over-grown with trees. The forest dropped steeply for over a thousand feet, and down below, between its leaf-covered mountains, the Danube valley coiled upstream from the east. It turned south beyond the battlements and after a mile twisted westwards, still deep in shadow, and out of sight at last between further green shoulders of forest. The track, following a wall of fortification downhill through slants of beech and hazel, levelled out before a great tower on a knoll; and a final wet scramble brought me down into Visegrád. [1]
    I had been told about this castle.
    The Magyars first settled in Central Europe at the end of the ninth century as fierce pagan invaders. Four hundred years later, when they had been respectable for at least three, their country had become a great Christian kingdom and the Arpáds, who ruled over it, by now an ancient dynasty of warrior-kings, legislators, crusaders and saints, were allied to most of the great houses of Christendom; King Béla IV, brother of St. Elizabeth, was the ablest of them. He lived in turbulent times. In recent decades, Jenghiz Khan and his descendants had laid Asia waste from the China Sea to the Ukraine and in the spring of 1241 news of great danger reached Hungary: after burning Kiev, Jenghiz Khan’s grandson, Batu, was heading for the eastern passes. Béla tried to prepare defences but the Mongols’ onslaught through the Carpathians was so fast that they surprised and routed the sleepy Magyar nobles and then ranged over the Great Plain, emptying and burning the towns all through the summer. Promising thepeasants their lives if they brought in the harvest, they slaughtered them in the autumn when it was safely threshed; then, crossing the frozen river on Christmas Day, they set about the western regions. A few towns were saved by their walls or by the surrounding fens, but Esztergom was burnt and most of the others were soon in cinders and the inhabitants slain or driven off as slaves.
    Suddenly, there was a lull. Messengers had arrived in the Mongol camp with the news that five thousand miles away in Karakorum, Ogodai, the successor of Jenghiz Khan, had died; and all at once, on the marches of Siberia and beyond the Great Wall, in