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In the boat on the river, Remi Fargo studied the display from the magnetometer on her laptop computer screen. “This is insane.”
Sam said, “What’s wrong? Not getting anything?”
“The opposite. I’m getting everything. The riverbed is full of metal. I’ve got images that look like sunken boats, anchor chains, cannons, ballast, junk, bundles of rebar encased in cement. I think I’ve picked up a couple of bicycles, an anchor, and what looks like an old stove in the past five minutes.”
Sam laughed. “I guess there’s enough to keep it interesting. If you spot anything that’s buried ten feet down and looks like an iron coffin, it might be worth a closer look.”
“I assume we’re going to dive the river no matter what we see.”
“The more we do what Bako and his people think is getting us closer to the underwater tomb, the more they’ll ignore Albrecht and the others.”
Tibor said, “We may have Bako all confused and frustrated now, but don’t let it make you too comfortable. He has enough men to do many bad things at once.”
They spent several days on their magnetometer survey of the lower river. Each evening, they went to see Albrecht and his team at the building in the city center that they had rented as a lab.
“It’s definitely a battlefield,” said Albrecht.
“How could it be anything else?” said Enikö Harsányi. “So far, we’ve found six hundred fifty-six adult male bodies, all armed, and all apparently killed together and then buried where they fell.”
Imre Polgár said, “Many of them—perhaps a majority—show signs of having serious wounds that had healed. We found impact fractures, stab and slash wounds that hit bone. These were career fighters. The term should probably be warriors rather than soldiers.”
“And who are they?” asked Remi.
“They’re Huns,” said Albrecht.
“Definitely Huns,” Enikö Harsányi agreed. “All of them so far.”
“How can you tell?” Sam asked. “DNA?”
Albrecht took them to a long row of steel tables, where skeletons lay in a double row. “There isn’t a DNA profile of a Hun. The core group in the first and second centuries were from Central Asia. As they came west, they made alliances with or fought, defeated, and absorbed each tribe or kingdom they met. So by the time they were here on the plains of Hungary, they still had many individuals with genes in common with Mongolians, but others who appeared to be Scythian, Thracian, or Germanic. What they shared wasn’t common ethnicity but common purpose. It’s like asking for the DNA profile of a seventeenth-century pirate.”
“So how do you identify them?”
“They were horsemen. They traveled, fought, ate, and sometimes slept on horseback. We can tell by certain skeletal changes that all of these men spent their lives on horses. But there’s much more conclusive evidence.”
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
“The Huns weren’t regular cav
alry, they were mounted archers. In Asia they developed this tactic with the help of an advance in the bow and arrow.”
He very carefully picked up a blackened piece of wood with irregular curves. “Here it is. It’s a compound bow, and the style is distinctive. See the ends where you nock the string? They’re called siyahs. They’re stiff, not flexible. The wood isn’t just a piece of wood. It’s layers of laths glued together. There are always seven siyahs, made of horn, and the grip is bone. It made for a very short bow that they could use on horseback and it gave much greater velocity to the arrow. This is probably as good a specimen of a Hun bow as exists today. So far, we’ve found over four hundred of them.”
“Huns against who?” asked Sam.
“That, I’m afraid, is a more difficult question. The victims were all over the field together. They were laid out with no separation for affiliation, simply covered with earth where they fell. They all had the sort of armament that a Hun would use, primarily the compound bow. They also carried a long, straight, double-edged sword in a scabbard that hung from the belt, and a short sword, or dagger, stuck horizontally in the belt. They wore goatskin trousers and a fabric or fur tunic. Some had leather vests.”
“There are still puzzles and mysteries,” said Dr. Polgár.
“I can see some right here,” Remi said. “Nobody looted the battlefield.”
“That’s one,” said Dr. Harsányi. “A well-made sword was a prized possession. A compound bow made of wood, bone, and horn took a very skilled craftsman much preparation, a week of labor, and months of drying and curing. It’s not the sort of thing one leaves on the field.”
Remi pointed at the nearest skeleton. “And the wounds are peculiar, aren’t they? They’re not random the way they usually are in a blade fight.”
“No,” said Albrecht. “The Huns were archers, and yet we haven’t found any arrow wounds—no arrowheads that stuck in a bone or pierced a skull. And we haven’t seen the sorts of injuries usual to the battles of the period. No arms lopped off, no leg wounds that must have bled out. Every wound is a big, fatal trauma—there are nearly four hundred beheadings and a very large number of what I believe to be throats so deeply cut that the blade hit the anterior side of the vertebrae.”
Sam said, “What it looks like to me is a mass execution. We don’t see a second faction because the killers buried the victims and walked away.”