The Tombs Page 9

  “I was just about to do that,” said Sam. “I’ll call you in a day or two.” He watched the cab pull away.

  While Tibor drove away from the hotel, he pulled out Sam’s check and handed it to János. “I can’t read it and drive too. What does it say?”

  “Pay to the order of Tibor Lazar one hundred thousand dollars. It sounds like a lot of forints.”

  “It is,” Tibor said, his eyes wide.

  Sam, Remi, and Albrecht Fischer stepped to the front door of the hotel, but Albrecht stopped Sam from opening the door so no one would overhear. “The man who kidnapped me, that madman Arpad Bako. He thinks that what we’re after is the tomb of Attila the Hun.”

  “It figures, I suppose. It’s one of the great treasures that has never turned up,” said Remi.

  “And probably never will,” said Albrecht.

  Sam shrugged. “At least we’re not getting kidnapped and shot at for pocket change.” He pulled the door open and ushered the others inside. But he turned and took one last look at the street outside, paying special attention to the dark and secret places where a man could hide.

  SZEGED, HUNGARY

  SAM, REMI, AND ALBRECHT SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM OF their new suite on the top floor of the hotel, all showered, wearing clean clothes and finishing their room service meal of fresh bread, soft körözött cheese, and kolbász sausages. They had a bottle of Balaton Barrique 1991 Hungarian merlot.

  “I lied, of course,” said Albrecht. “I wasn’t going to tell some glorified gangster about one of the most important discoveries in decades.” He shook his head. “To be honest, I haven’t figured out what it is I’ve found. I had no time to do much analysis or consult with colleagues before Bako’s thugs kidnapped me.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I had been looking for signs of the Roman occupation force in this district. I carried conviction because, wherever I go in Europe, I’m alert to signs of Roman garrisons. Wherever they camped, they always dug in, and the structure of the place is virtually the same from England to Syria. This was Pannonia, a Roman possession until the Huns arrived.”

  “And that satisfied him?” Remi asked.

  “He’s a madman and nothing satisfies madness. He wants Attila the Hun’s burial goods. The man thinks he’s an heir of Attila the Hun. If he’s not a literal descendant, he’s certainly a spiritual one, and what he’s searching for is a big thing here. In Hungary, people still name boys Attila. And here we are on the southern plain, where Attila made his stronghold.”

  Remi said, “I may not be remembering clearly, but isn’t the treasure supposed to be the coffins themselves?”

  “Yes, that’s part of it,” said Albrecht. “Supposedly there’s an iron casket, and inside it a silver one, and inside it one made of solid gold. But they were supposed to be filled with the jeweled crowns and weapons and ornaments that belonged to all the kings and nobles and bishops that Attila defeated. That would make quite a pile.”

  “The story sounds like quite a pile,” said Sam. “A pile of—”

  “Sam!” said Remi.

  “Sam’s probably right,” said Albrecht. “The only contemporary account we have of Attila’s death is from Priscus, the Eastern Roman Empire’s ambassador to the Huns. He describes the mourning and funeral, but mentions no treasure. The treasure is first described by Jordanes eighty years later. He was from one of the barbarian groups, possibly the Ostrogoths. People have searched for the treasure for fifteen hundred years and found nothing.”

  Albrecht sat in silence for a moment. “But Arpad Bako is not going to be put off or discouraged by odds or reason. He’s convinced he’s destined to find Attila’s tomb. And he’s obsessed with stopping anyone else from finding it.”

  “Let’s step back and look at this from his perspective,” said Remi. “Is there any chance at all that what you found might relate to the tomb in some way?”

  “I’ve just begun, but I doubt it,” said Albrecht. “It’s true that the carbon date of the remains is around 450 C.E. and Attila died in 453. And a battle here at the center of the Huns’ territory may well have had to do with his death. What happened after the death of Attila was chaos. His three sons all had their own factions, and Attila’s generals had their own kingdoms and armies. There could have been unrecorded battles among any of them.” He shrugged. “All I can say for sure so far is that these casualties were not Romans. They didn’t have the Romans’ superb armor, nor did they carry the gladius, the short, wide-bladed stabbing sword, or the scuta, the big shield that Roman soldiers put together to form a wall against an enemy charge.”

  “So the bodies at the site could be Huns and the fighting could have been related to the tomb.”

  “It’s too early to rule out very much, even that. And if anyone ever finds the tomb, this is probably the way it will happen—someone looking for something else will stumble on it.”

  Sam said, “Let’s deal with the discovery you already have. We need to give you a chance to complete your excavation safely.”

  “I don’t see how we can do that now. Some of Bako’s men were shot.”

  Sam smiled. “Would that have bothered Attila?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then it won’t bother Bako. He may even try to keep the incident quiet. He can’t tell the police somebody stole his kidnap victim. And for the moment, your excavation is his best chance of learning anything new. He’ll want you to get to work.”

  “He’s too dangerous. We can’t start excavating as long as he’s here.”

  “Maybe you can. Do you know any important Hungarian archaeologists?”

  “A few of them. Dr. Enikö Harsányi is a professor right here at Szeged University. So is Dr. Imre Polgár. I had planned to consult them before I was abducted. They know this area’s history better than I do.”

  “Then call them in now. What we need is not to hide this excavation. We need to make it as public as possible. We need to get lots of people involved, to be there on the site, and to help with the project. Three foreigners digging in a remote area are in danger. Fifty or a hundred local scholars digging are an expedition.”

  “Students and graduate students,” said Albrecht. “Of course.” He looked at the telephone. “I’ll call them right— I forgot. I don’t have my address book with their numbers. They can also help to guard the site.”

  Remi said, “Call Selma and tell her what you need.” She yawned, looking at her watch. “It’s still daytime there, and she’ll be up. I’m going to pick this bedroom over here for Sam and me and go break it in. You can have the other one, Albrecht. Good luck with the calls.”

  The next afternoon, Albrecht, Sam, Remi, Professor Enikö Harsányi, and Professor Imre Polgár were standing beside a tour bus with Tibor Lazar. They were watching a cadre of six graduate students, each supervising ten volunteer undergraduates, laying out the field in a grid with stakes connected by lengths of twine. A little farther along, three more professors from the Institute of Archaeology of the Hungarian Academy of Science were examining soil samples.

  “In European spodosol, the base rate of soil addition is fifty-three years for an inch,” said one. “We should expect about thirty inches of soil added here. But it’s flat land, and we have a river nearby that overflows its banks.”

  Another said, “That would add alluvium to the thirty inches.”

  “How often has the Tisza flooded this high since 450?”

  “I’d say every hundred to a hundred fifty years. Say ten times. And the most recent floods seem to have been worse than early ones. The one that destroyed the city of Szeged in 1879 was undoubtedly the worst. To be safe, we should expect remains to appear as deep as six feet or as shallow as thirty inches.”

  Sam saw Tibor get on the bus, so he left the others and followed him inside. As Tibor sat down
in one of the front seats and picked up a newspaper, Sam said, “Good morning, Tibor. How are we doing?”

  “I have two cousins on the road at that end and two down the road at the other end. They’re all heavily armed and have telephones to warn us. I have a van with six men a mile off who can come up behind either group—my wife’s brothers.”

  “That’s great,” Sam said. “We have to keep the diggers safe. Thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For letting me help take something from Bako for once. And because your check wasn’t a fake.”

  “Your help wasn’t fake. You saved Albrecht’s life.”

  “You saved Albrecht. I just said, ‘Do as I say or this crazy man will kill you.’”

  “You must have said it right.”

  Tibor studied him. “You’re planning something else. What is it?”

  Sam smiled. “They don’t need me to dig up this field. But I think I can do something that will fool Bako and keep his men busy so these people can do their work.”

  “Arpad Bako is a very big man. You saw just one of his businesses. He has money and power, and he has rich, powerful friends here and elsewhere. You have to be careful.”

  “He’s after the tomb of Attila the Hun, just as you thought.”

  Tibor laughed. “Not the Fountain of Youth? Not the Ladder to Heaven?”

  “I’m sure you know the stories. Attila was supposed to have been buried in secret with his treasure and then the Tisza River diverted to cover the grave.”

  “Ah, of course. We’re all told that as little children,” said Tibor. “Arpad Bako must be the only child who ever believed it. Besides, the Tisza is a thousand kilometers long, and it used to be even longer. Lots of it has been diverted, some parts cut off and left dry. All the swampy parts were drained.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, Tibor. Remi and I are not going to find the tomb. We’re just going to make Bako watch us look for it.”

  “I want to join you.”

  “Welcome aboard. Speaking of boats, do you have any relatives with boats?”

  “Not a relative, a friend. He would rent it for, say . . . nothing.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Well, you just risked your life to rescue a friend from a compound full of armed men and paid me a fortune for spending a day and a night helping you. It’s good business to be your friend.”

  The next morning, a thirty-foot fishing boat, Margit, puttered up the Tisza River at five to ten knots. Sometimes it would idle, barely holding against the lazy current of the river, and then begin to make diagonal crossings. The Margit was towing something, but it was impossible to tell from the shore what it was because it never rose above the surface.

  A sharp-eyed observer might have seen that there were five people aboard—a helmsman, two men who stood watch, a man who operated whatever was being towed, and a slender auburn-haired woman who watched the screen of a laptop computer on a shelf that was mounted just inside the cabin.

  After less than an hour of this, a truck with an enclosed cargo space moved slowly along the road above the river.

  In the cargo space were four men, sitting on a bench along one side. They used a camera with a telephoto lens, two marksman’s spotting scopes, and a video camera with a powerful zoom lens, all mounted through holes in the side of the truck. The leader of the group was a man named Gábor Székely. He was in the first position behind the driver so he could direct the actions of any of the others.

  His cell phone buzzed and he lifted it and said in Hungarian, “Yes?” He listened for a time and then said, “Thank you.” He put the phone away and announced to the others, “The man in the stern with the cable in his hands is Samuel Fargo. He had some equipment flown in overnight: a metal detector, some pairs of night vision goggles, and a Geometrics G-882 marine magnetometer, which detects small deviations in the earth’s magnetic field, especially those caused by pieces of iron.”

  “The iron coffin,” said the man beside him.

  Gábor didn’t see fit to acknowledge that. “The woman must be his wife, Remi Fargo. They have been staying at the City Center Hotel.”

  The third man said, “We’ve got rifles here with scopes. We could easily kill anyone on deck from this truck.”

  “We don’t want to do that just yet,” said Gábor Székely. “The Fargos are experienced treasure hunters. They’ve found important treasures in Asia and the Swiss Alps and elsewhere. They have the boat and the equipment for the search.”

  “We’re going to wait until after they find it?”

  “Yes. That’s what we’re going to do. When they find the outer casket of iron, we’ll move in before they can raise it to the surface. They’ll have a terrible accident and we’ll find the tomb. Mr. Bako will be a hero for finding a national treasure.”

  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.”