The Janissaries from the plain rushed in behind the Spahis, and the Spahis withdrew back through the ranks of infantry, their horses wheeling and neighing at the fire. The Janissaries forced themselves into the gap. Alexander and Béla and their men closed with them.
Rakóssy lit the fuse on the first keg and stood up. He threw the keg into the Janissaries, well behind their front lines. The keg hurtled out and down, spilling gunpowder through the hole, and vanished into the mass of tight-packed infantry. They shoved away from it, confused, and for a moment nothing happened. Rakóssy held his breath. The keg exploded. The scraps slashed out, whining in the air. The Janissaries howled in rage and pain. The scraps flayed down the men nearest. A man almost below Rakóssy went to his knees, his hand pressed to his side.
“La ilaha il-Allah!”
“Just made them more angry,’ Rakóssy said.
The fighting in the breach grew more intense. Alexander’s men stood shoulder to shoulder, solid as a rock, taller than the Turks and stock-still in the rubble, The Turks’ great numbers hampered them here, and the long pikes and halberds kept them from using their scimitars.
Rakóssy picked up the other keg, cut off the fuse almost even with the wood, lit it, and threw. The keg turned end over end. Gunpowder crackled and flashed around the fuse. The keg exploded over the Janissaries’ heads. Rakóssy heard men screaming. He swore to hear his own voice. {He swore to hear his own voice.} He turned back to the fighting in the breach.
“Magyar, Magyar.” He shinnied down the edge of the rubble from the rampart. He leapt onto a Janissary’s back and struck him down. “Die, Christian.” His own men roared his name.
Rakóssy stood with his back pressed to the uneven stone, and the Janissaries charged him, turning almost their whole weight from the other Magyars, flinging themselves against him. Their eyes shone over the cheek-pieces on their sleek helmets. A sword smashed against the stone beside his head. He struck back and the blood flew over his hands. He could not hold them off; they were smothering him.
Abruptly they rushed off, charging away, answering the different note in the drums. Their voices, hoarsely raised, grew fainter. The cool air rushed in around him.
“Alexander.”
It was Arpád, shouting from the stable roof.
“Alexander!”
Alexander, swaying, standing to his hips in rubble and dead men, drenched in blood, looked up, raised one hand in salute, and fell forward. Rakóssy started toward him, but Arpád was there immediately. He lifted Alexander gently and carried him into the courtyard. He put him down and bent over him.
Rakóssy went slowly toward him. He stood not far from Arpád and watched. He was still panting. The guns on the other side of the castle stilled. The silence sprang up all around him.
He looked up and saw Denis on the walls, half naked, his chest and face black with grime. Denis waved.
“Arpád,” Rakóssy said.
“He’s dead.”
Rakóssy got his breath. He put his sword back in the sheath. “Better this way, you know.”
Arpád looked up. Rakóssy almost reached out to touch him.
“I know,” Arpád said. “I know.”
Rakóssy went over and knelt beside Alexander. His big, ugly face looked no different. He felt an immense sadness that Alexander should have died.
“Don’t worry,” Arpád said. “He got the best of it.”
Rakóssy nodded and got up. His leg hurt. He put his hand against his thigh to hold his leg together and went inside.
“You see,” Mustafa said.
“I see. I will send a messenger to tell him that the southern fortress has been taken. It would be better if we had the brother.”
“Kamal searched the ruins from the pit to the height.” Mustafa poured chilled milk into a cup and put it on the little table beside the chair. “There was no sign of him. Either the brother was blown to pieces, or he escaped.”
“He is of no use to us either way. I cannot be held up here any longer. The King of Hungary has an army and he advances on us now. Twenty thousand men.”
“I think you will find better sport here.”
“Indeed. On the other hand, when the Chinese invented gunpowder they took the sport out of war. When I have attended to this King and his . . . plaything army, I shall march back and we will give proper attention to this Rakóssy. You are aware of my wishes in the matter, should Allah grant you a victory in my absence.”
“Yes.”
“I am moved by this defense. There is great craft here, and courage and a stubbornness I admire. Deal honorably with them. I have given orders to prepare all but ten thousand men for a march. I can give you no guns. I know that in your hands ten thousand are as a hundred thousand, and I offer you my blessing. Take your truce flag and tell him that the southern castle is in our hands.”
Mustafa bowed. He went out into the blazing sunlight and called to Kamal.
“Fetch me a flag of truce,” he said. “And my mare.”
Kamal bowed and called a slave. Mustafa stood arranging the cloth of his turban. He mounted the mare and took the lance with the white flag.
The ground between the Turk camp and Vrath was broken and scarred and stank. Mustafa guided the chestnut mare carefully around the uneven places. He saw the portcullis on the Main Gate rise and Rakóssy came through, limping slightly. Mustafa reined in, put the mare through some fancy trickwork, and stopped her.
“Greetings, Rakós’. We meet again, and it is yet another magnificent day.”
Rakóssy picked his way through the shattered earthworks. “So it is.”
Mustafa studied Rakóssy in detail. He sat back in his saddle and shook his head. “There is no justice in Heaven. You look well. One would think that Allah would smite you down, if only for dismissing the lovely days of war. Completely recovered, I see. A trifle dirty.” Mustafa sniffed. He folded the immaculate messaline of his sleeve.
“Hell’s made of filth,” Rakóssy said.
“Why, you spoke the words before I had them on my lips. And your wife? Well, I trust?”
“Very well.”
“And Arpád, my dear friend?”
“Very well.”
“And your brother?”
“In remarkable good health.”
“Hmmm.” Mustafa stroked his beard. His eyes traveled the walls of Vrath and fastened on one blond head. “So I see. Amazing, the resilience of the Rakóssys. Compliment him for me. It may amuse you to know that my master leaves tomorrow to seek out and destroy your King and his army, which numbers somewhat less than twenty thousand men.”
“I’m amused as hell.”
“Leaving me and my men as arbiters of your doom. Including some veterans of Cliff’s Eye. Rakós’, do you know the Koran?”
“Vaguely.”
“Then picture me as Israfel.” Mustafa lifted his reins. His eyes swooped to Rakóssy’s. “And I read what is written on your forehead, Rakós’.”
He turned and galloped off. He heard Rakóssy’s shouting laughter.
“A touch too dramatic,” Mustafa said to Kamal, reining in. “Just a touch.”
The Turks attacked once more, a half-hearted feint for the Main Gate and a brief plunge to the breach, beaten off almost before it was begun. Only one of Rakóssy’s men was hurt: Denis, who was knocked against a cannon and broke his arm. He fell from the rampart and landed in the middle of a bunch of men and was safely borne up, “like Christ,” he said, “if he had leapt when he was tempted.” He was carried in state to his room and tended there. Outside, the men cheered the departure of the Sultan. The ten thousand left behind seemed as few as the men in the castle.
Rakóssy had one hundred sixty-one men whole and slightly more wounded. The wounded were dying more than they were recovering. The little burial ground was full of dead Magyars.
Denis sat in bed reading. Rakóssy moved restlessly around the room.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Ovid. Love po
etry.”
“In Latin?”
“Yes. I wish we had Father’s library here. I’m homesick for Petrarch, and Malencz seems to have leaned heavily on moldy Hellenic poets.”
“Anything about how to win a war in that book?”
“That depends on the kind of war.” Denis put down the book. “You look tired, János. And thin.”
“I’m fine.”
“Do you think that the King might be able to beat them?”
“The King’s coming to meet them and he has about one third the men the Turks have.”
“Maybe Mustafa was lying.”
“Oh, no. He took far too much glee in telling me.”
Catharine came in with a tray of food. She drew up a little table and put the tray down. “Denis,” she said, “can you eat by yourself?”
“Thank you, yes.”
She arranged the food for the three of them. Rakóssy took a bite of the meat and a chunk of bread and said, “You eat it. I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Denis said. “You have to fight.”
“I’m not hungry. Eat it. Or save it, if you want.”
“Well,” Catharine said, “sit and talk to us while we eat.”
He sat and listened to them discuss Ovid. When Denis was finished, Catharine pulled the covers up over him and stood up. She called Mari to take the tray and the dishes down to the kitchen and went with Rakóssy to their room.
“János,” she said, “maybe now that the Sultan is gone we can figure out some way of beating them.”
“I’d rather we didn’t talk about that. Don’t worry about it. There’s no reason to.”
“It’s hard not to worry about dying.”
“I worry a lot more about being dead.”
“Look at how thin I’ve gotten. It’s frightening the way this dress hangs on me. I’ll have to take in everything I own.”
She went to the chest and took out another gown and held it up to her. “This will be hard,” she said.
“I should have sent you back to Austria,” he said. “When this whole thing started.”
“I don’t think I could have persuaded Charles to do anything else.”
In the little awkward pause she looked at him and saw that she had misunderstood him. She put the dress down. “You would have sent me away?”
“I don’t like what I’ve gotten you into.”
“Will you stop that? You’ll go mad that way. Stop it.” Her hands shook and she pressed them against her thighs. “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself.”
His eyes widened slightly, and he appeared to consider that. “All right,” he said. “Maybe between now and the time the Sultan comes back, I’ll think of something.”
“Do they know about me? The Turks.”
“Yes.”
“Good. They can make up a song about us and sing it around their fires.”
“I think,” he said, laughing, “that you should have been born about five hundred years ago. When those things were still possible.”
“They are possible now. Heroes, and heroines—”
“And poetry and romances and Crusades and wild charges and things like that.” He patted her head.
“I’ll make it possible.”
“You do that. I’m going down and see about the meat supply.”
“Let me do that. I don’t think there’s much left. We’ll have to start eating the horses.” She went over to the door and called Mari, and the two of them went off, talking steadily and laughing.
Rakóssy went into Malencz’s old study and got a cup of the best wine. The books ranked neatly around the room reminded him of his father. The room was musty. He opened up two of the windows and stood before one of them, breathing the warm air.
It was just evening, and the air was soft and fine. He could hear the last words of the call to prayer, out in the Turkish camp, and the voices of the men in the courtyard below him. It was almost like before. When his mother had been alive she and he had often gone out in the summer evenings and drifted around the hills, walking sometimes with their horses hobbled and grazing behind them. He wondered if it were true that souls could look down from Heaven and up from Hell to see what was happening on the earth, and, if it were, what she thought of him now.
He thought he was much different from the little boy he had been when she was alive. He wished there was someone he could talk to about her, but the only men alive now who had known her at all were Trig Columbo and Malencz. She had called him Lajos instead of Louis, which had infuriated him.
“That is an affectation, Jansci,” she had said. “As if you were named Jean or Giovanni instead of János.”
He wondered if she would have liked Catharine. She had never liked women much. My wife believes in heroes, Mother. Why in hell am I thinking about my mother?
“I must leave you, Jansci, my son Jansci.”
And the Gypsies and the deep forest where the sun doesn’t shine where you told me stories and swore that they were true.
He turned away from the window and poured himself another cup of wine. Naturally, Mother, I am going to think of some great bold stroke that will save us all the moment before the Sultan’s big ugly fist lands on top of us. All the horses will grow wings and we shall fly like Mohammed over the heads of the Mohammedans. I’m sure Catharine will wave to them.
He drank off the wine and put the cup back beside the keg. There was no use thinking about it. No sense in worrying about it. The Devil take it. He drew the shutters closed and locked them. János Hunyadi died one hundred years ago.
He went out of the study and down to the courtyard and helped some of the men repair the damage the Turks had done to the stable.
* * *
Sometimes Malencz heard thunder over the castle, although the walls were so thick that if he were asleep the storms would not wake him up. It was hard to visualize what was happening; it was getting harder and harder to understand and remember, to describe things to himself. He had not spoken aloud in so long that he came at words gingerly when they entered his head, stalking them like ferrets, unsure.
The words in the books he had were in Latin or in Greek, and it was odd that they should be; sometimes he was struck with amazement at it. They were much different than the words inside his head, the words he said to himself when he thought of something — two things related but not the same. The relationship he found increasingly difficult to recall. Certainly, some of the words on the pages meant much the same thing as the words in his head, so the difference wasn’t there.
He thought it had something to do with which was real, the word on the paper, which he could see, or the word in his mind. Once he thought that he understood, and jumped up in triumph, but the book slammed shut and he couldn’t find the proper word again, and the idea vanished. Later on he could sometimes feel it tickling the edges of his mind but he could never catch it.
That was puzzling and sad. He lingered often over particular words, savoring them, pronouncing them soundlessly in the original and in Magyar, but the meaning always eluded him.
He did not like the occasional sounds that penetrated here. They reminded him of something else, some other, terrible thing. He knew that the world was divided into circles, and that the words moved in their own circles, and that there was another circle like a fence around something else. He quested after it now and then but always felt the subtlest small voice telling him, Stop, no more, don’t look, not yet.
Not yet. That was it. That was why he was here, he had been confined to be purified, to be purged of base matter (once he had seen silver smelted and seen the scum of dross on the liquid in the crucible), to be made worthy of something. In the end, he would be told, he would be fashioned like the molten silver into something rich and proper, for uses unknown to other men. Not yet.
In that other circle, the one he wasn’t allowed to see, there was something to be dreaded and avoided, but when the time came it would be revealed, all of it. That other circle
held something dark and ferocious, alternately a pacing creature chained up and a sort of storm held in a box (perhaps like the storms he heard, now and then? His mind probed timidly at it, hopefully; was this part of the revelation, was it now?), something perhaps he would have to serve, or to destroy. He longed for it to be massive and awesome and forbidding, something mighty and great, and in one corner of his mind feared that it would a little weak thing like a sick rat.
The sentry outside this room occasionally looked in, and when he did Malencz composed his face and hunted up the proper words to say — soothing, tempting words. But the sentry never spoke. Whatever he did, Malencz must never betray that he had been given this trust. It was something so completely secret that he realized it must be fantastically dangerous, and he must hide it, always hide it, behind the proper words (if he must ever speak) and behind a mild and yielding manner, bearing the secret trust inside, guarded and tended until the day came when it would burst out in splendor, gathering him up and transforming him, glorious as the sun, to bear it forth with trumpets into the world.
Mustafa did not attack them. He sat in his camp out there on the plain, and they sat in Vrath, and it looked almost as if the two had nothing to do with each other. Rakóssy saw flocks of sheep driven into Mustafa’s camp and slaughtered, and on days when the wind blew right they could smell the roasting mutton. Mustafa knew what he was doing.
Two of Malencz’s old knights deserted over the wall in the back of the castle, obviously thinking that if Denis could come in that way, they could go out. The sentry found the ropes hanging over the edge of the wall the following morning and sent for Rakóssy. He and Arpád and the sentry stood on the rampart looking down at the river, dark and full of sand, and the ropes hanging down to the water’s surface.
“Who were they?” Rakóssy said.
“We’ll find out when the Turks throw their heads over,” Arpád said.
“He won’t. Get Béla up — No. Come on.”
Rakóssy went off along the rampart. Arpád said, “He won’t?”
Rakóssy Page 21
