*

The Lord be praised, we reached the village of Kos in the month of April in His Year of 1705. Five times in that year and in the year thereafter was the village laid waste, thrice by the Kurutz bands of the insurrectio Rákócziensis, twice by the Labantz troops of the Emperor. A third portion of the four-and-seventy houses burnt or fell to the ground, and another third were deserted by their tenants, who departed for more peaceful climes. Thus was the joyful tenor of life much diminished in this place; the lands lay fallow, the number of farm animals about the houses did likewise decline. As we prepared for our first night there, my grandson Kornél asked, in German: Would it not be better at home? These were words we would oft repeat thereafter.

Thus began Grandpa Czuczor's story in the canvas-bound folio he was given by his daughter Zsuzsánna. Excellent though his spoken knowledge was of German, Slovak, and Hungarian, he had so far written only in German. Having returned to the lands of the Magyar, he wanted to keep the story of their days in his mother tongue, perhaps because he wanted his grandson Kornél to read it when he grew up. The three of them had arrived by cart from Bavaria, whither Grandpa Czuczor and his brother had fled when the dust had settled over what was called, after its chief instigator, the Wesselényi conspiracy. Though the Czuczor brothers were strenuous in their denial of any involvement with the conspirators, some forgeries came to light which sealed their fate: their assets were confiscated and even worse might have followed had they not hastily fled. Over the border they soon acquired skills as typographers and compositors, and established a printing press, later making their mark as book-binders as well. In the guildhall of Thüningen their names were posted as the Gebrüder Czuczur.

Grandpa Czuczor never felt entirely at home in the windswept and rain-sodden lands of the beer-swilling Bavarians, whom in some obscure way he held responsible for the series of deaths that befell his family. Little wonder, then, that when he got wind of the Prince Primus's patent, he went running to the printing press, where his brother was working on the leads. "We can pack our bags!" he yelled from the steps of the workshop. He pointed excitedly to his crumpled copy of the Mercurius Hungaricus, where a Latin text announced that a return to the depopulated villages of Hungary was now permitted without penalty.

No words of mine could win over my brother to the idea of going home with us. He preferred the comforts of Thüningen, newly-acquired but at no small cost, where he wanted to pursue the crafts of printing and binding books. No news of him since that time. Zsuzsánna is troubled by the condition of little Kornél, her son, only in his fourth year of life, who in these straitened times suffers greatly from hunger, in want of meat and even eggs.

Returning by a circuitous route, they set up home in a house with a courtyard, put at their disposal at the edge of the village of Kos. Grandpa Czuczor immediately dug a hole at the bottom of the garden, by the rose-bushes, and buried his money there, taking particular care not to inform either his grandson or his daughter of its whereabouts. Only Wilhelm, the servant they brought with them from Thüningen, knew of it, as he had helped with the digging.

"Wilhelm, du must das nie erzählen, verstehst du mich?" he warned Wilhelm, with an unambiguous gesture: drawing the edge of his palm across the front of his neck.

"Jawohl!" yelped the startled lad, as he did at every request or order. All he could manage in Hungarian was a fractured Janapat, "Gadday!"

Kornél endured much taunting by the other boys for his thin, straw-coloured hair, his oversized, floppy ears, and for the odd German word he would suddenly come out with. He picked up Hungarian quickly, even though these were not peaceful times conducive to study. Indeed, there was ominous news from every quarter.

The scrawny little boy was always hungry, yet never joined the noisy band of village youngsters who, despite a strict parental curfew, spent their days criss-crossing the fields and the forests, stripping them of anything remotely edible. Kornél preferred the company of his grandfather and would sit for hours in the yard where Grandpa Czuczor kept the printing paraphernalia he had brought back home. Kornél would try to make himself useful, but this generally turned out badly, as neither as a child nor later in life was he particularly good with his hands. The blind leading the lame, thought Grandpa Czuczor, as his own ten little servants became ever more spindly and twisted, and acquired an ever more troubling tremor. He had let one of his thumbnails grow into a long, sharp implement that he used for prising type out of their storage boxes; nowadays, try as he might to take care, this nail would split lengthwise and would serve only to scratch his head.
"Off you go, play with your little friends!"
The boy did not move. "I'd rather you told me a story!"
Grandpa Czuczor gave a sigh but was not unhappy to launch into one of his stories. "Do you know how my dear late father, Szaniszló Czuczor of Felsőfenyves, was granted his patent of nobility by György Rákóczi I, for outstanding bravery in the Vienna campaign?" "I do! Tell me about Mother, when Mother was small! And about Mother's mother!"
Grandpa Czuczor shook his head. It still ached often. In Thüningen he had married a smart and houseproud German woman. Hard-working but undemonstrative, Gisella had borne him six children, of whom all but the last, Zsuzsánna, the Lord had been pleased to take back unto Himself soon after their birth. The births had taken their toll on Gisella and it was not long before she, too, succumbed and joined her five little ones by the side of the Lord. Grandpa Czuczor's hair turned white when she died, and every morning he would clutch the bony little body of the three-year-old Zsuzsánna desperately to his bosom: "May it please the Lord to let me keep you, my one and only!"
The girl would blink in surprise: "Was ist das, Vati?" She did not yet know Hungarian.
"Ach, du must mir bleiben, Liebchen!" he replied.

In a mere fifteen years or so, Zsuzsánna grew into tall and slim young woman, and in due course married Péter Csillag, the son of another family that had chosen to return. Péter Csillag was granted the joys of married life for less than six months: he was out hunting when he was thrown by his horse and fell so awkwardly that he hit his head on a tree-stump and never recovered consciousness. After two weeks hovering between life and death, he expired.
"Grandpa! Why won't you tell me a story?"
So he began to tell a very old story, which he had himself heard in his childhood. Kornél's great-great-grandfather, Boldizsár Czuczor, was a skilful painter, a portraitist without compare in his time. He had an amazing eye for faces and detail, and he never needed a model: it was enough for him to set eyes on someone once to paint their portrait from memory. His wife Katalin was so beautiful that her renown spread to the neighbouring lands, and though she frequently sat for her husband, she was no leading filly in the matrimonial fidelity stakes. Boldizsár once caught her in flagrante with an officer quartered in the town, but calmly closed the door on them with an unruffled "Do enjoy yourselves!" The couple were at a loss as to what to do and when they had recovered somewhat, decided to do as they had been bidden. In the morning Boldizsár had a generous breakfast sent to their room and then invited the officer to the baths. There, he covered him, from top to toe, in green paint. News of this spread like wildfire. As the officer was quite unable to scrub off the layer of green, he lay low in his quarters as long as he could. In the end he had to send for Boldizsár and humbly ask him how to remove the paint, as he could hardly spend the rest of his life as a laughing stock. Boldizsár replied "My dear sir, you have covered me in shame that can never be washed away; it is right that you should share my fate!"
"Last time he painted the woman as well!" said Kornél.
"Pardon?"
"Grandpa, you didn't tell it like this last time…and the painter did not say they should enjoy themselves!"
"What did he say, then?"
"He said," Kornél tried to lower his voice to a grandfatherly tone, "may you take pleasure in each other!"
Grandpa Czuczor scratched the back of his head. "Maybe I did, maybe I did…" This was not the first time his grandson had surprised him with the keenness of his mind. Only the other day the boy had been asking about numbers and remembered them up to a hundred on hearing them just the once, even drawing their shapes on the surface of his wax tablet. "You take after your great-great-grandfather!"
"Yes, like him I never forget something I've once seen."
"Indeed?" Grandpa Czuczor covered the boy's eyes with the palm of his left hand and asked him: "Then tell me what you saw today on my worktop!"
Kornél began to list the items on the regal, as his grandfather called the worktop, clearly and faultlessly, as though ticking them off in his head, in a voice as clear as a bell: "2 composing sticks, 4 balls of twine, one handdruck, one cutting machine, 2 paper planes, 2 awls, 30 metres of metal composing rule, two dozen spacers, three rack-cases for letters and spacing materials, 7 books, hundreds of printed sheets, one pair of spectacles, 2 magnifying glasses, 2 round paper pill-boxes with your medicines in them, which you have not yet taken today, the canvas-covered folio by the inkstand, 4 quills… and one fly!" He fell silent.
"How come you know what a composing stick is, or a composing rule, or a handdruck?"
"I've heard the words… and anyway you, dear Grandpa, have written them down in the folio!"
It took Grandpa Czuczor a moment or two to recall t
hat he had indeed made a list of his printing equipment before packing up in Thüningen. "Does that mean….that you can read?" "Indeed I can!" said Kornél and, picking up one of the printed sheets, he began slowly but surely to articulate the words, with complete accuracy. Grandpa Czuczor put on his spectacles and followed as Kornél read the rather special text:

By His Serene Highness Prince Ferenc Rákóczi of Felső-Vadász: On the unimaginable sufferings of our Nation and beloved Homeland under the tyrannical rule of the German Nation, and on the unworthy pains endured by his serene person.

A PUBLIC MANIFESTO, to be placed before the entire Christian world, concerning the innocent nature of the arms acquired by the Hungarians to liberate themselves from the oppression of the House of Austria. First published in the Latin tongue and now again in the Magyar language.

Grandpa Czuczor had picked up a tattered copy of the prince's manifesto in a beer-hall in Thüningen, from some visiting Hungarians. He was intending to reprint it himself at some point.

Suddenly he shook his head. Lord Almighty, this little lad is not yet four years of age and can read fluently! "Was it one of your friends that taught you to read?"
"No."
"Well, who then?"
"No one… I just worked it out for myself."
"No fibbing!"
"I'm not fibbing… I just kept looking at the pages until I could make out the different letters. Why do they put an f sometimes where there should be an s?"
"Only when there's an ess-zet ligature, for sz."
"I see. But what about Auftria?"
"Well, that should also be with sz in Hungarian…they've left out the z…" Grandpa Czuczor was almost lost for words; he had read this Declaration many times yet had never noticed this misprint. Kornél could make an outstanding proof-reader. He called out to his daughter: "Ho, come quickly Zsuzsánna, see what this little pipsqueak can do!"

Kornél started to read out the document again: "By His Serene Highness Prince Ferenc Rákóczi of Felső-Vadász… Grandpa why is there no accent on the E and the O?"
"What accent?" asked Zsuzsánna, leaning closer.
"It's not usual on a majuscule, perhaps on an A or an O," said Grandpa Czuczor.
"What does major school mean?" asked Zsuzsánna.
"Capital letter," said Grandpa Czuczor sternly. This much she might have been expected to pick up over all these years. Despite all her father's efforts, Zsuzsánna had never learnt to read or write. Fortunately, it was not Zsuzsánna's brains that little Kornél had inherited.

My grandson Kornél read out what I have written here and I forbore to reprove him, so wonderful was it that he had learnt to read. In general he is very skilful with words. Perhaps he may become a man of the cloth or a university professor? Were times not so hard I should gladly take him to the college at Enyed or Nagyszombat, to see what the professors there made of him. But it is dangerous even to leave the village, let alone travel any distance. They say that only a day's walk away the Kurutz and the Labantz are preparing to do battle. Whichever takes flight will likely pass this way. And a defeated army knows no mercy.

It was suddenly light in the middle of the night. Grandpa Czuczor leapt out of bed and ran into the garden, looking round to see if the neighbours were also awake and, still half asleep, forgetting that the neighbouring houses were deserted. Down in the valley there were fires, lighting up in the land in red almost as far as Varasd.
Zsuzsánna also came running out, the little boy whimpering on her shoulder and a satchel on her arm, ready with food, a change of underclothing, candles, and other necessities she had fortunately packed some days before. "Come on, Father!" she shouted. Grandpa Czuczor dashed back into the house, pulled on his kneeboots, snatched up his cape and hat, swept up his own satchel and the folio, and took a long last look at the house and his precious possessions. Will I ever see them intact again? He ran out onto the road that wound its way up Black Mountain.

The villagers were all heading that way, as in times of danger it was sensible to hide in the Old Cavern. This lay deep in the cliffs above Bull Meadow and its mouth could be blocked by a triangular boulder in such a way that no one who did not know his way around would ever guess what lay behind it. The Cavern, with a floor in the shape of a flattened pear, had been in use since prehistoric times; it was with this dark hollow that mothers in Kos would threaten their unruly children: "If you don't behave, I'll have you shut you up in the Old Cavern!"
By the time Grandpa Czuczor reached it with his daughter and grandson, the others had made themselves at home and they could barely squeeze in. The villagers still viewed the Czuczors with the suspicion that was normally the strangers' due. Zsuzsánna, like other widows, was the subject of salacious gossip, while of Grandpa Czuczor it was whispered that he consorted with the devil, the chief proof of this being the extraordinary length of his left thumbnail. Half-a-dozen candles glimmered in the Cavern, assisted by two oil-lamps; clouds of soot rose to its rust-coloured roof. Two of the hired hands heaved the triangular boulder into place and the din gradually subsided.
"Where is Wilhelm?" asked Kornél.
"Isn't he here? He's always skiving off…I wash my hands of him," said Zsuzsánna.
Kornél was soon overcome by sleep. He dreamt he was in a blinding white light, and saw an old man with talons like knife-blades on all ten fingers of his hands. He used them to carve animal shapes out of pieces of wood; these came to life and gambolled in the forest clearing. "It's Uncle God!" he thought.
Grandpa Czuczor fell into conversation with Gáspár Dobruk, the farrier, who had a gamy leg that ensured his exemption from army service. His information was that in Varasd it was neither the Kurucz nor the Labancz that were wreaking havoc, but the irregulars of Farkas Balassi. These freebooters respected neither man nor God, all they wanted was to loot and scavenge.

"Then perhaps we should give them what they want!" said Grandpa Czuczor. Gáspár Dobruk was aghast. "Are you out of your mind, that we should freely give them all that we have sweated for years to gain?" "They'll get it either way."
A blast sounded from somewhere a little closer. Zsuzsánna began to cry.
"Quiet!" said Grandpa Czuczor.
What remained of the population of Kos was now gathered in the Old Cavern, holding its breath, praying, seeking comfort in each other's presence. May the Lord be merciful unto us, prayed Grandpa Czuczor. Meanwhile the advance guard of Farkas Balassi's irregulars was already roaming the village high street, going from yard to yard to the accompaniment of the dogs' howling. The drovers led their horses by their bridle, and used their drawn swords to pry open the doors of deserted houses, incredulous that not a soul remained. Axes and cleavers hacked off locks and hasps: they had been given a free hand by Farkas Balassi. But little of value remained in the buildings and they cursed eloquently as they flung cheap pots and pans out of the windows. The straw roofs of the houses burst into flame at the torches' kiss and as the fire crackled along the housetops, the animals in the stables and pens howled and bleated, the dogs almost strangling themselves on their leads as they tried to flee. Even far away in the Cavern Kornél could pick out from the distant rumble the throaty bark of Burkus, his grandfather's bushy komondor dog.
Zsuzsánna whimpered. "Don't be afraid," she sniffled into her son's ear, "God will help us!"
"I'm not afraid," grunted Kornél.
After a quarter of an hour, the noise of fighting died away.
"Perhaps they have moved on," said Bálint Borzaváry Daróczy, the estate bailiff.
"I hardly think so," said Grandpa Czuczor. "They're hatching some plot."
"One of us should go out and look around."
"Later," said Grandpa Czuczor.
More and more lights went on in the depths of the Cavern. Grandpa Czuczor reached into his satchel, though he knew there was no point in looking for his writing implements - he had not brought them. He closed his eyes and tried to compose the lines he would have written had he brought pen and ink.

The First Day of April, the Year of our Lord 1706. The dogs of war are upon us and we know not if our homes still stand. We have supplies for three days, perhaps four if we are sparing. Zsuzsánna is tearful, but Kornél shows remarkable composure: further evidence of his mental capacity. If we live long enough, we shall be very proud of him. May the Lord on high guide his steps and give him the strength to take them.

Around midnight Bálint Borzaváry Daróczy and two of the lads left the Old Cavern to take a look at the village. They took lamps with them, but these proved unnecessary, as several of the houses were still alight. The charred timbers of the roof girders were all that stood, and the stench of dead flesh was everywhere. Hardly a house was left standing. The church steeple had fallen in. Two bodies lay dead in the street, Béla Vizvári and his wife, Boriska. They must have taken shelter in the little wine-press and been found by the bandits. It looked as if they had been bayoneted to death. The bodies, in their blood-soaked clothes, were already bloated.

"Sir, oh sir!" said one of the lads. "Best to just get ourselves out of here, anywhere, double quick!"
"Quiet!"
Where could one go, he thought; there was no escaping the dogs of war.

In front of the Czuczors' house they found another body, which they took to be Wilhelm's; the young man's limbs had been hacked off by the marauders. Scattered all around him in the dust were Grandpa Czuczor's types, the casting kettle, and the little type-case, shattered to bits. It looked as though Wilhelm had tried to save the type foundry. The bandits had not been interested in the type, and hoped there might be money or gold in the type-case. A little farther off lay Burkus the dog; he must have gone to the servant's aid. His side was slashed open, his guts spilled out where he lay.
As he listened to these tales from the village, tears welled up in Grandpa Czuczor's eyes. Poor Wilhelm: to come a distance of nine days' journey from his village, only to end his days in such horror. Once peace reigned again, his mother would have to be told. Grandpa Czuczor decided he would also send her some money and tried to decide how much it should be.

They thought Kornél was fast asleep, but the little fellow generally spent his nights half-awake. The scraps of sound that reached him contained no mention of Wilhelm or Burkus. He caught something about the fate of Béla Vizvári and his wife, though he was not yet aware of the meaning of death. He had seen, more than once, funeral cort?ges winding their way to the cemetery, and had stared at the pinewood coffins, sensing the darkness of such times, hearing whispers and whimpers about the late so-and-so, but he could not quite comprehend that what lay in the wooden box was the body of a man or a woman. His mother had often told him the story of his dear father's death, and Kornél could see before him the fatal fall from the horse and hear the gut-wrenching crack as the head hit the tree-stump - indeed, he would often drive his own skull into anything hard around. Having seen the tiny picture in his mother's locket, he always imagined his father as the very image of Grandpa Czuczor.

The men debated whether to return to their homes, or what was left of them, the following day. Bálint Borzaváry Daróczy was of the view that it was too early to return, as the marauding bands could return at any time, and it was even possible that their land would be the battleground for the Kurucz or the Labancz, or even both. Grandpa Czuczor was dismissive: "We can't sit around here in the mountains till doomsday… Great is the mercy of the Lord, let His will be done."

The debate dragged on. Grandpa Czuczor declared that he would go down into the village even if they all decided to stay where they were. At dawn he woke Zsuzsánna and Kornél: "Time to go!"
They gathered their bundles, but the boulder at the mouth of the Cavern proved impossible to move, until one of the lads woke and gave them a hand.

A biting wind stung their faces as they made their way downhill. Not till the last turning would the village hove into view; Grandpa Czuczor used the time to prepare his daughter and grandson for the sights to come. But the horror that met their eyes far surpassed his imagination. Zsuzsánna sobbed and sobbed, her face a sodden pillow, despite her father's admonitions that this would hardly help matters. Kornél surveyed in silence the destruction of the burnt-out houses, the dead and dying animals, the vultures circling high above the village. Nor did he cry when he saw the earthly remains of Burkus. He sensed that this was only the beginning of something, though he could not put into words what that something was. He would not let go of his grandfather's warm and reassuring paw, and went with him everywhere. Grandpa Czuczor's first port of call was not the house - of which only the kitchen and part of the yard still had a roof - but to the bottom of the garden and the rose bushes there. These had not been touched by the bandits. He nodded and proceeded to douse them with his own water. Kornél's eyes opened wide in astonishment as he saw his grandfather's member for the first time, both in length and breadth the size of a very decent sausage.

Their furniture was in smithereens, their clothes and everything else had either been taken or else torn and trampled into useless rags.
"What are we to do now?" asked Zsuzsánna.
Grandpa Czuczor did not reply but drew a stool that was more or less intact up to the composing frame, sat down, and began sharpening the quills. He poured ink into the inkwell and began to write in the folio.

Day of mourning. We have lost Wilhelm, as we have most of the res mobilis. My equipment is largely gone and as yet I lack the strength to scrape what remains out of the mud where it lies. Our lives, too, are in danger. We can do naught but trust in our God. Justus es Domine, et justa sunt judicia tua.

He glanced sideways and saw his grandson crouching under the composing frame and drawing with a lead pencil on a scrap of paper, while resolutely clutching his grandfathers' trousers with his right hand.
"What are you doing there, Kornél?"
"Grandfather dear, I am writing."
"Indeed?" Grandpa Czuczor gave a groan as he went down on his knees to take a closer look at the scrap of paper. To his great surprise the unsteady and imperfect letters formed themselves into more or less readable script. "Day of mourning," Kornél had written. "We lost Burkus and I'm going to bury him at the bottom of the garden, under the rose-…."
"Not there!" Grandpa Czuczor burst out.
The boy did not understand. "I beg your pardon, Grandpa?"
"No, not there…You have to bury him in…. dry soil. Let's do it together!" He led Kornél into the garden. "Tell me…where did you learn to write?"
"I watched you, Grandpa dear."
By the fallen fence they found a casket of rotting wood. In it they laid to rest the body of Wilhelm, placing it by the shed, where the previous owner had planted a small pine-tree. For Burkus they dug a hole in the ground and buried him in the purple tablecloth Zsuzsánna had made for the big dining table. They had found it in front of the house, torn and covered in puzzling brown stains. By the evening the other villagers had also sneaked back. The night was riven by sobs and cries, as each family reached their front door.

It was well into the night when the sound of slamming and of horses' hooves was heard.
Grandpa Czuczor swept up Kornél, still wrapped in his blanket, and headed out onto the road and up the mountain. Behind him came Zsuzsánna, her wooden clogs clattering as she ran. This second time round, only a third as many folk managed to reach the Old Cavern, mainly those who lived nearby. Bálint Borzaváry Daróczy was nowhere to be seen. Apart from Grandpa Czuczor, there were only two men, an old peasant and lame old Gáspár Dobruk, which suggested that even with his gamy leg he could run faster than most. The suddenness of their departure meant that this time they were short of food as well as of means of lighting, and only a single lamp sputtered in the Cavern.

"If we have to stay here beyond tomorrow, we shall all starve!" said Gáspár Dobruk.
"As long as we are alive, there is hope!" countered Grandpa Czuczor. "Let us share out everything, like a family, until the danger has passed."
They took stock. The only folk to express any unease were old Mrs Miszlivetz and her daughter, who had brought six round loaves, two skins of butter, a rib of salted pork, and several bottles of wine. Grandpa Czuczor rounded on them: "You have no lamp of your own, yet you benefit from the light we share….if you begrudge us these victuals, get you hence! But if you stay, accept your fate as Christians! And let us now remember those we have lost!"

At this, the women's wails rose up in chorus. The wife (or more likely now, the widow) of Bálint Borzaváry Daróczy let out such a high-pitched shriek that there was concern that it might be heard outside. She kept bashing her head into the cavern wall until Grandpa Czuczor and Gáspár Dobruk wrapped her in a horse-blanket and tied her up. Kornél watched all this almost with interest. He was still not afraid, although he suspected that the old world had come to a complete and definitive end, the world in which he had sat in the evenings, with a full belly and contented by the crackling fire, listening to the stories of his grandfather. He was sorry that they did not have with them paper, quills, and ink, so that he might practise his newly-acquired skills of writing with his hand.

His grandfather, too, was turning round in his head what he might have written in the folio by way of summing up the events of these chaotic days.

I understand not the purpose of our Lord in visiting these blows upon us; how great can be our sins that we deserve the destruction and loss of our homes and land? We must, none the less, we must believe in His almighty power, for we have sunk so low that hence the road cannot but lead upwards. Nemo ante mortem beatus.

 

*

Farkas Balassi had erred in assuming that the village was still the property of István Rigómezei Lukovits, who was thought to have made his fortune in Italy. Lukovits had in fact moved to Vienna months before, together with all his assets. It was the rumour of Italian treasure that led Farkas Balassi's freebooters to keep combing through the village of Kos; they would not make do with scraps and trash as loot.

At the fork at the top of the village, where the high road winds up the hill and the low road leads into the valley towards Varasd and beyond, to Szeben, a green kerchief of fine silk lay in a puddle. It was Jóska Telegdi, the quartermaster, who noticed it. Dismounting, he picked it up and sniffed it: a woman's fragrance tickled his nose. With some reluctance he trailed his hand in the muddy water in case there was anything else there. His fingers came upon a hard, egg-shaped object. He rubbed it clean. It was a decorated egg, made of some kind of metal. His initial joy dissipated when he bit into it and found it was not gold. He turned it round and round in his hands, tapping it here and pressing it there, until the top suddenly snapped open. It was a delicate timepiece which showed the day, month, and even the year. It had stopped. Perhaps water had seeped into it? Looking at it closely, he saw that it showed the ninth day of October and the year 1683, a little after twelve o'clock. His face darkened as the date sank in: it was that of the Battle of Párkány, where his father had lost his life. He tried winding up the mechanism, and shaking the metal egg, but it would not come to life. Could it have been lying here ever since 1683? Impossible - no trace of rust. But whoever had dropped it could have lost other items as well. So he cut off a couple of branches from the nearby bushes and, fashioning them into a rough broom, began splashing the water off the road's surface. He found nothing more.

On their second night in the Cavern, Zsuzsánna's skin broke out in blisters, and maggots began to plague her flesh. At one point, when the boulder was trundled aside to allow in some fresh air, she skipped out with a thick towel and a cake of soap. She went down to the stream intending to bathe and to wash her underclothes, thinking she would have plenty of time to return before the boulder was rolled back. Clouds crept over the heavens, neither moon nor stars illumined the sky. In the dark she grew afraid, since she could neither be seen, nor could she see much herself. Hardly had she removed her clothes when all the devils of hell pounced on her body; her limbs were seized by powerful hands which dragged her up to the grassy clearing, by which time she realized that these were vicious men, and she knew what they were after. Her mouth was sealed tight so that she could not cry out; indeed, it would have been of little use to do so. Searing pain rent her body as the first of the men pitched into her. The others then each took their turn. She bore it, limp and faint, her arms stretched like the arms of our Lord Christ nailed to the cross, reciting in her head such prayers as she could recall, in pain and waiting for her suffering to end. When they had all relieved themselves and let go her arms, something even more vicious struck her body, like a bolt of lightning, quite taking her breath away.

Only in the morning did Grandpa Czuczor notice that there was no trace of his daughter. He could not understand how she could have got out of the Old Cavern. It took two men all their strength to shift the boulder.
"She went in the night," said Kornél, "when Grandpa and the other one had rolled the boulder aside!"
"Has she taken leave of her senses? And why did you not say anything?"
"I thought you had seen her go, Grandpa!"

There was nothing for it, Grandpa Czuczor thought: "I shall have to find her!" He motioned to the old peasant to help him with the boulder. The old man demurred:
"Mr Czuczor, sir, it will be dangerous in daylight!"
"This is no time to be concerned with the safety of one's person…Come, push!" Soon Grandpa Czuczor stepped out into the light.
Turning round, he addressed the depths of the cavern: "Take good care of Kornél!" It was the last time Grandpa Czuczor would see him.

Jóska Telegdi had a dozen men stationed at various lookouts; first one, then another reported that someone was approaching on the mountain road. They saw the modestly dressed, elderly man in felt boots, armed with a sabre in the Turkish style, whose matted hair and bushy beard the wind kept blowing into shape of a turban. They waited till he came in earshot and then called out sharply, demanding his weapon. The old man was unwilling to obey and, drawing his sabre, fought his assailants valiantly until, bleeding profusely, he had to yield to superior force. Still, he managed to stumble unaided to the camp, where Farkas Balassi interrogated him.
Failing to secure the answers he wanted, Balassi ordered him to be tortured. This also failed, and the old man ended his life on the rack.

One of the sharp-eyed men keeping watch noted a thin but steady wisp of smoke rising from Black Mountain. He reported this to Jóska Telegdi, who realized at once that the cliff face must have a cavern in it. He ordered a small group to go up and carefully survey the terrain, looking for any cracks in the rock face. Those in the cavern could hear their voices and the sound of their feet and held their breath, sitting stock still.

His patience exhausted, Farkas Balassi wanted to move on. Jóska Telegdi begged permission for one last attempt. He had the smaller of their two cannon hauled over to the bend in the road and told the cannoneer to take aim at the rocks that capped the bald head of the mountain peak.
"Why in hell's name should we fire at rocks?" asked the cannoneer.
"Because I say so!" snapped Jóska Telegdi.
They bedded down the gun carriage, cleaned out the barrel, loaded up the shot and tamped it down. Then: "Fire!"
The first ball went over and past the target. The second fell just a little short, landing in the clearing before the Old Cavern's entrance.
"Lord help us!" screamed one of the servant girls in the Cavern, "it is not us they are aiming the ball of fire at, surely?"

The third scored a direct hit on the top of the mountain. The expanse of rock cracked in several places and crashed into the Cavern. The thunderous noise drowned out every other sound. Instinctively Kornél threw himself flat on the ground and could feel as he fell the roof of the cavern breaking up above his head, while the boulder at the cavern mouth imploded, blinding them all with light. Simultaneously everything went black.
Farkas Balassi's men soon climbed their way up to the Cavern, now looking like a tipped-up cauldron. Thick clouds of dust hung in the air. They clambered over the bodies of those who had died on the spot and past the little bundles of their stuff. Having examined the contents of a few of these these, Farkas Balassi rounded on Jóska Telegdi: "What a waste of decent gunpowder!"

Once the soldiers had gone, silence fell. In the afternoon, heavy rain began to fall, but the clouds of dust did not settle and from down below it looked as though the mountain was smoking a pipe. Now not only the village of Kos but its hinterland, too, was deserted; even the wild animals and birds had fled. The rain splashed on the rocks and stones, diluting the congealing blood to a shade of pink. A little later the advance guard of the Kurucz arrived. They could see the clouds of smoke and dust from afar and so suspected a Labancz camp on the mountain, until reconnaissance reported not a soul alive. The troops continued on their way to the west.

Kornél recovered consciousness on the third morning, feeling his body leaden and shattered in several places. He kept lapsing into unconsciousness. In due course, as the night-time dew fell, he sat up unsteadily. He could not move his legs, which were wedged under a heavy lump of rock. There was a starry sky above, but uncertain images flickered and faded in his mind. He could remember that something catastrophic had happened, but could not recall what it was. Where was everybody? First tentatively, then with a full-throated roar, he shouted for help. His words ricocheted off the cliffs. He tried to inch his legs out, but the stab of pain this caused in his lower body quite winded him. He spent the night shivering and sobbing helplessly. He suspected that something serious had happened to his mother and grandfather, otherwise they would have come for him. He prayed earnestly to God to accept his prayers and free his legs, but above all, to bring the blessing of His dawn very soon; he was very afraid in the dark.

By first light, he could hear people coming along the forest road. Kornél thought that, whoever they might be, it would better not to make any sound. Every portion of his body ached. He closed his eyes. In a while he was startled to feel something hot and slimy licking his face. A furry muzzle, huge teeth, a rust-coloured tongue…He gave a scream.

"Here, boy, here, Málé!" said a deep male voice. The beast obediently loped back to its master. It was a dog, one of those Hungarian ones with thick, matted fur. Kornél could see three men. One was picking up with his pike a few items of clothing that still remained, the other two were in conversation. Kornél could not make out what they were saying. After a while, he gave a groan. The men reached for their guns. Then they noticed him.

"There's a lad here that's still alive!" said one.
"Yes, but I'm stuck…." Kornél was moaning as he said this, and had to say it again to be understood.
"Zsiga, come over here!" they said, calling the third fellow over. It took the three of them to roll the rock off Kornél's legs.
"Holy Mother of God!" exclaimed the one called Zsiga, seeing what was left of the lad's legs. The poor soul would not live to see the day out. "Let's give him something to drink!" he said, squatting down beside him and, unscrewing his brown canvas-covered flask, placed it over Kornél's mouth. The slightly sour, watered-down wine dribbled down the boy's face.
"What's your name?"
"Kornél Csillag."
"Your parents?"
Kornél told them what he could. He asked if they had seen his mother or his grandfather. He described their appearance in great detail. The three men hummed and hawed.
"They'll…turn up," Zsiga lied, "don't you worry any, we'll look after you until they do. Now, would you be hungry at all?" Kornél nodded. The most solidly-built of the three, whom the others called Mikhál, took him carefully in his arms. Kornél gave a howl of pain. He only now realized that both legs were twisted the wrong way round and that the Turkish-cut pants his mother had put on him back home had been cut to ribbons which were now glued to his skin by his own congealed blood. Overcome by despair he began to sob, child-like, in spasms, repeatedly gulping for air. As the man carried him, he could see limbs dangling from under lumps of rock. The older of the peasants was lying at what had been the cavern entrance, his skull neatly bisected by a sharp splinter of rock, his brains spilling out.

Mikhál made a fire in the clearing, while the third fellow, Palkó, was plucking a grey bird the size of a small loaf, throwing its feathers into the fire; their burning smell irritated Kornél's nose. He dared not ask any questions. His fingers began gingerly to explore his thighs. He detected some hard, sharp object lodged above his right knee. As he yanked it out, the pain made his heart skip a beat and he fainted again. It was evening by the time he came to.
Zsiga again made him drink a little and then fed him some meat, a mouthful at a time. "Pigeon stew. You'll see, it'll build you up!" though he scarcely believed his own words. Kornél put all of his little soul's trust in this promise. When he had eaten himself full to bursting, he tried to get up, but Zsiga did not let him. "First we'll have to bind up your wounds. Palkó is our medical orderly, he'll sort you out." "And then we must talk about what we are going to do!" said Mikhál.

They had been cut off from their regiment for a day and a half when they had their horses shot from under them. They ran for dear life from the battle, down into the valley. As night fell, they took shelter in an old wine-press. That was where they acquired the stray dog that Palkó, thinking of their guard-dog back home, decided to call Málé. In the morning Zsiga set off to forage some food. He all but ran into Farkas Balassi's irregulars. He scampered back to the wine-press the back way, through the yards. "Don't know who this lot are, but if we're sharp about it, we can get ourselves some horses!"

They crept out as far as the edge of the gully and could see how undisciplined this crew was. This played into their hands and they waited until most of the band had gone past, hoping that there would be some stragglers bringing up the rear. Indeed, there were four such, whom they picked off one at a time, jumping on them from above and wrestling them off their saddles. They thus secured four horses, guns, clothing, and the contents of the saddle-bags. The most valuable item was a sword forged in Toledo, which went to Palkó. Mikhál asked for the cordovan leather topboots of the first soldier, who must have been of the nobility, for his pockets also yielded the egg-shaped timepiece that Zsiga took for himself. He thought it was silver. He did not manage to get the winder to work, but when he -- God willing -- got back home to Somogy, his brother, a jack-of-all-trades, was bound to be able to mend it. The timepiece recorded the day and the month, as well as the year: it showed a quarter past twelve on the ninth day of the tenth month of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and eighty-three.

In Palkó's view it was best to stay in this deserted village until they had word of how the fighting was going; there was little sense in running into the arms of the Kurucz, who were said to take no prisoners and gave those they captured the shortest of shrifts. With the various bands of freebooters their chances were even less. Mikhál on the other hand voted for leaving at once and trying to reach their own troops as quickly as possible, trusting themselves to the mercy of God. The longer they take to catch up, the easier it will be to accuse them of desertion. Zsiga sucked on his empty pipe, throwing hunks of meat to Málé. He did not consider either approach entirely free of risk. "Let us wait and see what the new day brings."
"We must do something with this lad, though."
"Goodness, is he still in the land of the living?"
Palkó had hacked the remains of his pants off Kornél and tore one of the shirts they had appropriated into strips to bandage up his shrivelled legs. "I'd be very much surprised if he ever ran again on those."

In his sleep, Kornél was pursued by shapes in billowing black capes, who in the end wedged him tightly in a well. Starting awake, he could feel both his legs stuck in that well. He touched them and as he felt the thick lawn wadding, it all came back to him. He tried flexing his muscles one by one, and for the first time it occurred to him that perhaps his legs would never be the same again. Of the three men, two were sleeping the sleep of the just by the embers of the fire, the third was stroking Málé the dog, murmuring to him as if he were a human being.

Kornél closed his eyes. "Grandpa, come back! Mother dear, you too! Come back to me! It is so hard without you!" he whimpered. His tears eased him into sleep once more, where again he was being pursued, this time even shot at. Just before dawn broke, a Labancz patrol appeared in the clearing, cut off like the three men from the main body of their troops. They would have struck camp had Zsiga and his fellows not started to fire at them at random. In the semi-darkness neither party knew who they were shooting at. As the newcomers were in the majority, they all jumped on their horses and chased Zsiga's little band down into the valley.

Kornél woke with the golden disc of the sun high in the sky. The three men were gone. They had taken the four horses but little else; even the dog had been left behind. For a while Kornél listened to the pounding of his own heart and then began to yell. If no one came, he was sure to starve. He felt desperately weak, life barely flickered in the darkness of his soul. Days passed like this, or was it only hours? At times, Málé's rough tongue would lick him awake, into the land of the living.

On his second day alone, he managed to cling to the clumps of Málé's fur coat and so straighten up, lying on his back like a tired rider. With the better of his two legs he managed to touch the ground and so was able to push himself gingerly along on top of the dog, and succeeded thus in covering much of the ground in the clearing. He undid the various bundles and bags left behind by the three men. He took a fancy to the egg-shaped timepiece and hung onto it. After a longish rest, he also raked over the floor of the former cavern. What he saw there he would never forget. The dead bodies had since been ravaged by carrion. There was no escaping the smell of decomposing bodies, even if he held his nose. Grandpa Czuczor's folio was nowhere to be found; perhaps it had ended up under a ton of rock.

The dog took him back to the clearing. On both sides of it the trees and bushes had donned their lushest and finest. Kornél was dizzy with hunger. One of the branches of an acacia reached almost to the ground and Kornél took its tip into his mouth. The tiny petals tickled a little but tasted amazingly sweet, and he chewed off as much as he could in the position in which he lay. Later he also found some myrtle berries, a little sour but still, edible.
As the evening dew fell, he shivered as he rolled on the grass, stripping the clothes off his body and picking clean items from what Zsiga and his companions had left behind. On his legs the dried blood had turned the bandages a rusty colour; these he did not dare touch.

On the third day he ventured even further afield, down the mountain road to the first wine-press, the one they had set on fire. Among the battered and broken flacons thrown into the garden he found two still intact, but could not manage to prise their stoppers out. He also found a few dried-up seed potatoes, which he ate up, raw, straight away. Eventually he managed to jam the neck of a bottle between two pieces of rock and thus break it at the neck. Though he lost some of the wine to the dry soil, most of it he was able to gulp down from the broken stem of the bottle. He was soon nodding off, no longer cold. Perhaps…somehow…it will be all right….in the end. Perhaps….somehow….

As he felt the strength returning to his legs, he was able to make longer excursions. From the ruined yards around he gathered up every scrap he thought could be eaten. Near the clearing the buildings were mostly wine-presses and Kornél soon acquired a taste for wine and spirits. At first they made him feel nauseous and often he would gag and vomit up the liquid, but it did not take him long to get used to it. The alcohol helped him through the cool nights. His hair grew and became as matted as the coat of Málé the dog. The better Kornél got, thought, the worse Málé became, as the creature could not find enough food to his liking. Reduced to lapping up the mountain's nectar, he would get unsteady on his feet and go cross-eyed, providing Kornél with no end of amusement. Then, at night, he would snore like Grandpa Czuczor, a sound that Kornél loved.

In company, Kornél's way with words had always struck everyone as suprisingly advanced for his age, but now, on his own, he had virtually stopped speaking. When he told Málé what to do, his words resembled the noises made by the dog more than those of his own language.
He learnt how to catch the silvery dace in the upper brook. He lay on his stomach dangling his arm in the icy water just where the fish used to come to bask in the sun. When one swam over his carefully-positioned open palm he would close his fingers around it gradually, imperceptibly slowly. Provided he managed to make this last an age he would suddenly feel the fish in his grasp. With a jerk he would throw it out on to the rocks, wait until the wet little body thrashed itself to exhaustion, and then crunched it down, spitting the fishbones back into the stream.

This is how he lived, his existence becoming hardly distinguishable from those of the small wild creatures of the forest. His leg, which had now healed up crooked, made it possible for him to take firmer, more complicated steps, and even to run, if necessary, though his loping gait recalled that of a scavenging dog with three legs.
Málé's nose would not stop bleeding; his teeth were loose, one or two had even fallen out. The skin under his coat had begun to fester and tiny parasites crawled around the wounds. Then one morning he could no longer get on his feet. Kornél called out to him gently: Woof-woof! Woof-woof!
The dog did not raise its head; it wanted to be left alone. Kornél could not understand this and kept stroking and shaking him by turns, barking at him with ever-greater tenderness.

The bushes and hedgerows in the village, which had perhaps never offered such a dense canopy to the fences, lost their flowers by the wayside. The air did not cool down even at night. Even without having to drink Kornél was managing not to feel cold. The noonday sun rose high in the sky and the hot cupola of the heavens hung over the landscape; only the sound of the church bells at noon was missing, and of course the sound of other people. Málé's tongue hung dry from his mangled jaw. As he watched the half-shut eyes of the dog Kornél was seized by an uncertain dread that a fate worse than anything that had happened up to then awaited him. His breathing came in spasms and he continued to bark obstinately, with a childlike belief that this would somehow stay the day of doom.

Though it was only noon, the sky unexpectedly turned dark. Kornél gave a roar like wounded animal. He could feel that this was the end, a blow more terrifying than any before would strike them and they would die like his mother, grandfather and every other creature. There was nowhere for the emaciated dog to flee, and he too had no future. He lay on his back, clasped his two dirt-stained little hands together in prayer, but the words that once he could say even in his sleep would not come, and all he could utter was: woof-woof….
In the sky that rapidly turned dark as the sun set, the sun became a ball of light, its corona darkening by degrees, as if another, black sun were thrusting itself across it, each lilac-blue flame a tiny javelin stabbing the little boy in the eyes, which he then shut, as did the dog. It was the end, they both thought. Under Kornél's eyelids were rings of fire, behind them shades of images from the past which he had never seen but which still seemed somehow familiar. Had he the time, he might be able to unravel their meaning, but thick and fast there came the throbbing of nothingness.

 

*

The doctor with the goatee washed his hands and proclaimed the verdict:
"The end is nigh!"
Mrs Sternovszky buried her face in her kerchief. "What will become of us if....?" She did not finish the sentence. Her sister embraced her tightly, as if afraid that she might crumble into small pieces.
She drew away. "Doctor, how much longer....".
"I cannot foretell the future, but.....not very long."
"But how long...Days?"
"Days or hours. Who knows? I'll be back at nightfall," he said, and left. His fee was handed to him in a buff envelope by the maid in the entrance hall where the flowers for the patient were arrayed in vases of various size, their fragrance lying heavy upon the air.

The dying man was gasping for air. His wound had not healed one jot, though the doctor had doused it thoroughly with some anti-inflammatory yellow powder. He could see no reason to apply a bandage, but he did so none the less, just to comfort the relatives. In any case, it was better if they did not see the wound itself. The blade had penetrated just above the ribcage and below the collar-bone, at an unfortunate angle, so that it pierced the lungs and very likely reached the pericardium. At this stage science can do no more, and decisions are in the hands of the heavenly powers.

Mrs Sternovszky returned to her husband's room and leaned over his bed. "My dear husband is thirsty perhaps? Some fresh lemon juice? Should I have the maid squeeze you some?"
He shook his head.
"A bite or two to eat? A light soup, perhaps?"
Another shake of the head.
"Does my dear husband have any other wish?"
A smile formed across the sunken cheeks: "Thank you, no." And he closed his eyes. If only they would leave him alone in the throes of his death, he thought. There is no hope. If his misfortune were not the result of his own stupidity, it would perhaps be easier to accept. What will happen to the glassworks once he offers up his soul to his Maker? Will his wife be able to look after it and make it prosper? He heard news that the smelting ovens were not working, and this distressed him. Just because I am dying there is no reason to let the fire go out! But the master glassmaker, Imre Farkas junior, who should have had charge of production in the glassworks, was then sitting in irons, in prison, because he had attacked the inspector. This Imre Farkas had been a difficult man from the start, too quick to anger and too quick to act.

A painful sigh rent his throat. His wife was once again trying to tempt him with food and drink and kind words. Once again he did not tell her to go. It is the right of one's wife to be there when...... yes. He tried to work out what day it was, the twentieth or the twenty-first of March, but he was confused about the time and the day. All his life he had been acutely sensitive of the year, the season, the week, even the day and the hour. He often amazed his wife and children by his accurate recall of - say -- the date of the colossal fall of snow in Felvincz: the nineteenth day of January in the year of our lord 1738, and he even knew they had been snowed in until the twenty-eighth.

The memorable days of his life he was wont to recall with particular pleasure in the bosom of his family and friends. His acquisitions, his marriage, the birth of his children, the setting up of the glassworks, his successful career and growing wealth, his election as town councillor - these were the tales he told most gladly. What preceded these glories, it were best to forget. But with the ability to forget he had not, alas, been blessed. He had once read an Italian canticle which said that at the boundary of the Lower World there flowed not only the waters of oblivion, the river Lethe, but also its twin, Eunoe, rising from the same source, the waters of good remembrance. As an infant it must have been of Eunoe that he had been given to drink, though this is the one thing that he cannot recall.

His strength continued to ebb away and soon he could no longer even sit up. Yet how gladly he would have entered in his folio all that went through his head in these dread days. It would have served to guide his wife and three children in the days ahead. In adulthood it had been rare indeed for him to end the day without writing copiously on the large pages of the thick album he had brought from Italy for this purpose. It was said to have been made in a famous bible scriptorium and originally intended to bear the Holy Writ. Kornél always wrote in this folio with due respect for its distinguished history. If his descendants desired to know how he had spent the time allotted to him on this earth, they could read all about it in there.
He had no means of giving account of the last few hours of his life. He could not write at the top of the page: Chapter the Last: My Decease. Fortunately he had made his last will and testament the previous year and in a leaden casket sealed with three seals it awaited the attention of the appropriate authorities. And he had copied the will into his folio.

Though he had gone over it in his head a hundred, a thousand times, still he was assailed by doubt. Was he right to leave the glassworks to Bálint? Perhaps the lad is not adult enough to manage twenty men, to meet the weekly, monthly totals, to haggle with the tradesmen, to tug his forelock at the nobles most likely to place substantial orders. But he was still young, he had time to grow up.
Bálint did not take after him. Kornél Sternovszky (Csillag) was of very small build, his limbs thinner and weaker than they should be. Though his legs had remained crooked, so skilled was he at using them that the untrained eye would not have detected that he was lame. No amount of meat and drink would give him a pot-belly, and his face had preserved to this day its pleasant, oval shape. Physically he was more or less hale, only the hair over his unusally arched brow had begun to thin, though still only tinged with grey. His moustache and beard had never thickened into a grown man's, and to his eternal regret resembled more the sprouting hairs of an adolescent.

How he would have loved to go on living! If only he could hear, just once more, the three smelting ovens bellowed up, the carefully-dried wooden logs catching fire with a sudden zizz; then the heat would start its work, the wondrous heat that produced the specially hard-wearing yet splendidly pellucid glassware. Even in the windows of his own house he had fitted lead-framed panes of glass produced in his own works, and would proudly point them out to visitors. Now he saw sadly how the light of the sun beat down through them. Born in the heat of the fire, they loyally continued in the service of warmth: during winter they sealed it in, but let it in during summer, all the while keeping the winds without.

Turning these thoughts over in his head, he did not notice that Bálint had entered the room and knelt down on the ground by the bed, his face radiant with pious concern. He, too, was aware that soon.... The eyes of the dying man filled with tears. God will surely provide. The image of Grandpa Czuczor came into his mind, the person whom outwardly Bálint most closely resembled: though still growing, he was already big and strong, a veritable colossus. The only respect in which his first-born son resembled him, his father, was his phenomenal powers of recall. Any text he heard or read, even casually, he was able to repeat exactly and without error, and never ever forgot. Yet the boy did not think this an unmixed blessing as had his father in his own younger days. Bálint revelled more in other talents he possessed, above all his ability to sing and dance like none among his school peers. All it needed was the sound of music and his muscular feet would set to tapping. What a splendid night it will be, the night of the wedding feast, when he would dance till dawn with his betrothed, holding her delicate body again and again to his brawny own. How infinitely sad that he, Kornél, would never see that girl, would never be her father-in-law. It could not be far off, a few years at most, as Bálint was a bare two months short of his seventeenth birthday.

My last will and testament.

I have done all that I was able to do; more or better I could not have done.

Let my wife Mrs Sternovszky, born Janka Windisch, take care to ensure that the glassworks, the Sternovszky lands and estates, including the horses, the town house in Felvincz, and the woodlands registered under my name remain together in the manner hereunder described. Let her take care that they not become run down and as far as possible let them be maintained and expanded, and let her look after my earthly assets as if I were still by her side.

My first-born, Bálint Sternovszky, will come into his inheritance when he reaches the age of one-and-twenty. He will take over the glassworks and those woodlands marked one to seven in the register. At this time also he will come into possession of my folio and sundry other writings.

My second-born, Zoltán Sternovszky, will at the age of one-and-twenty come into ownership of the family estates together with the horses, provided he undertakes to take good care of them and manage them.

Should he fail to undertake this, the ownership of the family estates will devolve upon my youngest son, Kálmán Sternovszky, who additionally inherits the woodlands marked eight to twelve in the register, as well as my share of the metal mine in Tordas.

In the event that the estates and the horses devolve upon Kálmán, however, the share of the metal mine and the woodlands marked eight to twelve in the register will become the property of his elder brother Zoltán.

The house in Felvincz and all chattels appertaining thereto, including its gold and silver plate, jewellery, and the sum of 12,000 florins, of the whereabouts of which she is fully cognizant, remain the sole and unconditional property of my wife.

Written while of sound mind, of my own free will, and in full possession of all my faculties.

I should have married younger, then I would have grandchildren around my deathbed.
His difficult and troubled childhood and youth prevented this. His childhood was a dance between life and death. Three times at the least only divine providence saved him from certain death. The third time he had cholera: given up for dead, he was carted out to the far end of the cemetery and thrown in the communal pit. It was midwinter and by dawn he was frozen stiff, but somehow the pulse of life began to pound again in his veins. He had to escape, to a place where they did not know that he had the plague; back home he would surely have been beaten to death.

He came from nothing and nowhere; until the age of fourteen his life was not worth the price of a bottle of wine. He was found by Gypsies, spent some time with them, then helped out men wandering the forest, or charcoal-burners, in return for food and lodging. In his heart of hearts he knew he was worth more than this and that the time would come when he would prove it. All this while he was lower than a footclout, his fate to endure humilitation and suffering. And, with his astonishing memory, he forgot not a whit of this when, later, with God's help, his fate took a turn for the better.

At one time he was working as a stable lad on the estate of General Onczay, where he found satisfaction in caring for the horses. The General began to pay more attention to the keen young man once it turned out that he was fluent in the German tongue. He tried him out first as groom and then as jockey, a position for which his weight and his crippled, bandy legs made him ideal. In the races organized by General Onczay, Kornél, riding Arabella, was without equal. He toured Austria and even England, countries where he would come in a respectable second or third. A number of foreign nobles made him tempting offers but he remained loyal to General Onczay, who on their return rewarded him with one of his three stud farms, the one on the Galócz plateau. This was called the Sternovszky puszta, after its first master of the horse.

Under Kornél the number and the value of the horses went up in leaps and bounds; no one had a surer eye than he when it came to weighing up a foal's potential after proper training. On the clayey soil he grew oats and alfalfa imported from England, selling on any surplus at a goodly price to the other studs. In time he took Sternovszky as his surname.

It was rumoured that General Onczay had betrayed the Prime Prince. Kornél would have none of it. Such a good man would certainly be incapable of such a thing. Now a patriarch with snow-white hair, the General to his dying day treated Kornél as in every respect his equal. When he reached the age of 22, he called him in for a word. They took wine on the first-floor terrace. The General did not beat about the bush: "Well now, my boy, have you given any thought to marriage?"
Kornél blushed. "So far I... I have not considered it timely."
"It is. You have land, you are held in high esteem, there is nothing to prevent you from starting a family. Years unmarried are years fallow. Time you wed."

Kornél lacked any experience in this field. He had all his life been ashamed of his crooked legs and would never, if he could help it, undress in the presence of another. Racked by temptations of the body, he often felt his sap rising, especially at the break of day, so that it were enough for him to lie on his stomach for it to spill forth. It happened to him on horseback, too. Yet he had not touched a woman. Just once, in England, after much wrestling with his conscience he had paid for a whore, only to change his mind after all and snatch back half his money as he chased the cursing and wailing wench from his rooms. He rarely sought out society -- not that on the Galócz plateau there was much society to be sought -- while in town he was still given the cold shoulder; behind his back, his rolled German r's were mocked unmercifully.

The next time they met the General suggested one of his nieces, who came with a decent dowry. Kornél did not feel that he could say no this offer, and in any event trusted his patron implicitly.
"Well then, when can I take you to inspect the young lady?"
"There is no need. She who pleases my good master needs must please me."
The wedding was held later in the year. General Onczay was best man.
Janka Windisch certainly pleased Kornél, her pale skin, especially, and the thick bunches of her flaxen hair. The Windisches were barons of Austrian stock, whose alliance with the Onczays, initially displeasing to both sides, now dated back a century. The notion of Kornél Sternovszky as groom met with hardly a murmur of opposition, in part because General Onczay's recommendation carried a good deal of weight.

The honeymoon was spent with the Windisches' kinsmen in Tergestum, the Adriatic Trieste. They spent some uncomfortable days jolting in the carriage and arrived exhausted at the manor house on the hillside, which from virtually every side offered a wide and wonderful panorama of the sea. Kornél was so spellbound by the endless body of water that he spent their first night in a deckchair on the canopied balcony. His newly-wed waited for him all night. The following night Janka took her husband by the hand and led him to the bedchamber's four-poster. Kornél stopped uncertainly, eyeing the fireplace ablaze with thick logs. Janka turned her back and removed one layer after another of her outer- and then underwear. Her naked back had an ivory sheen that glinted with the reflected light of the flames. She slipped under the Venetian lace sheets. "Husband mine, what is keeping you?"

Kornél stood stock still. Desire flared within him, yet he did not follow his bride into the bed. "First put out the light!" "You are ashamed in front of me?"
Kornél did not reply, but himself turned down the wick of the oil-lamp. The chief difficulty posed by his crooked legs was how to wriggle out of regular trousers, which is why for his everyday wear he chose the lawn pantaloons sported by the stable lads. He rolled over to Janka, the duvet cool to the touch. He was on fire, trembling. He had no idea how to proceed. No one would have thought him so wet behind the ears. General Onczay's parting words had been: "See you take care of the main thing!"

Janka had been vouchsafed a certain amount of information by her mother and her aunt, the gist of which had been that it was up to the man to take the first step, she had but to endure and to manouevre herself into the best position possible to alleviate the pain. So she waited, patiently. Quite some time passed. She could hear sharp intakes of breath from her husband. Summoning up her courage, she touched him on the shoulder. He responded in kind, and their hands began, slowly and hesitantly at first, an age-old dialogue of discovery, surprised at encountering this part of the body or that, as if one part said: 'Goodness, is that what that's like?' and the tenderly touched part responded: 'Indeed, come and get to know me better!'
The tinder within caught fire, veins and arteries began to pound, simmering streams of air commingled, astonished sounds split lips asunder. Kornél was almost beside himself. And then it happened.

Images, living dioramas. Scenes not unfamiliar, scenes he seemed to have seen somewhere before, a long time ago. The wedding night of some others. In the first tableau a lumbering figure nervously fingered the precious red stone inlay of his belt buckle and Kornél simply knew he was seeing his father, long dead, on his wedding night; the young woman with the masses of curly hair could be none but his mother, that crooked smile most likely the mother of his own. There followed a man with a deformed spine, jet-black eyes and hair: certainly his grandfather, only the furniture was different, the expression on the face and the hesitancy were exactly the same. Then his grandmother Gisella, hitherto glimpsed only in a locket as a young girl. It was her death that turned grandfather's hair white. And now it was his great-grandparents, in their hastily-built wooden cabin, high in the snow-covered hills, their troubled faces lit by the billowing flames of the open hearth. And so it went on, back through great-great-grandparents, and their parents, and theirs, back to unknown ancestors, back twelve generations. Kornél stared and stared, the images of the past burning themselves into his memory.

"Something wrong?" asked Janka.

Kornél's smile was reassuring: "Never in my life have I had such a moment of grace."

He was dimly aware that he had lived through such a deluge of images at some earlier time, but he could not remember when. In due course he committed what he had seen to the pages of the folio.

In the course of their married life Kornél gave his wife unsparingly of the joys of Venus, but that descent into the realms of the past was never to be repeated. Why was it on the second day of his honeymoon that this world was illuminated? It was a question to which he was never to find the answer.

Later, a young man and skilful, as he rode with his flintlock for the first time into the depths of the forest he had just inherited, he was equally unsure what made him announce in the middle of a clearing, with great solemnoty: "In this sacred place we shall set up a manufactory for glass." He repeated these words, changing only 'this' to 'that', when he reached home.
"Why?" asked Janka.
"So that we can trade in light,' he replied, his face trasfigured.

Neither his wife's sensible arguments nor his estate manager's facts and figures could dent his resolve; still less the fact than even tinted spectacles could not protect his weak eyes from the glassworks' incandescent furnace. He imported two master glassmakers from Saxony and within a year the first glass panes for wooden windowframes were in production. After these there came glass bottles, containers for shipping wine, wine decanters, and countless other glass products. The goods sold well, orders came in from all over the country. Janka asked him a hundred times: "How on earth did you know?"

He dared not admit that his knowledge was not on earth. Now, on his deathbed, when he could no longer communicate what he could see to his wife and three sons, the flow of images unexpectedly began anew. Finally he understood what it was that, at the age of thirty, and as a successful stud-farmer, had made him build a glassworks in the middle of the forest inherited from his wife's kinsmen. There unrolled before him in a series of drab tableaux the history of the clan of the Csillags. He could see his father Péter Csillag, and his father's father, Pál Csillag, who had ended up in Bavaria and made his living as a shoemaker, but had previously owned a prosperous glassworks in the Slovak Highlands destroyed by the Ottoman Turk. He saw his paternal great-grandfather János fleeing his home as a youth and then being killed in one of the Turkish campaigns of the legendary Miklós Zrínyi: a cannonball tore him apart as he was scraping the mud off his boots.

He could see himself, as a boy, clinging onto a starved dog with matted fur. Yes...then, a long time ago, there in the clearing he had a vision, until he lost consciousness, but he did not realise that he should have preveserved on paper these seemingly chaotic images. And now he saw Grandpa Czuczor, burying some kind of casket at the bottom of the garden, under the rosebushes.

"The treasure! Grandpa's treasure! The roses...," he wanted to cry out. No words issued from his lips.

His grieving relatives heard a rattle from his throat and thought Kornél Sternovszky was no longer for this world. Someone placed a damp dressing on his brow; the cool droplets ran down by his temples. Exhausted, he closed his eyes. He could hear his loved ones whispering, the swish of skirts and coats on the wooden floor; this troubled him. He thought again what a blessing it would be if they just let him be. He saw the dog Málé, then his sole companion, dying in his arms. Perhaps Málé, too, would have preferred to take leave of the world by himself.

He had been scared to death when the sky had darkened in the middle of the day, when the sun was swallowed up by blackness. Later he was told that there had been an eclipse. His eyes never recovered from that burning; thereafter they watered frequently and were always weak.

The final tally, then: in the course of my life I received from God the wondrous gift of the Vision no less than three times. It is no use sorrowing that the third came so late. Boundless is His power, inscrutable are His ways. Might I hope that that His kindness will extend to my children also?

He felt a leaden tiredness in his limbs. He arranged his arms across his chest as he had seen on sarcophagi. My time is done. I give myself into His hands. Fiat voluntas tua Domine.

Why did he have to throw that boiling tea in the master glassmaker's face? And why, to cap that, did he have to draw his sword on him? After all he, Kornél Sternovszky, was hardly a distinguished swordsman, whereas the brute of a glassmaster was said to be a veteran of a dozen duels. At the first clash of blades, he had wrenched the weapon from his hand, with the same downward movement stabbing him deep in the chest. He could feel distinctly the foam of blood spatter across his chest.

When he was four, he had been found by good people - travelling Gypsies - with barely a sign of life in his body. As he recovered, there were days when he could only howl and scowl, and it was weeks before he was speaking again. Now, as he is laid out, he can no longer make the smallest sound. Now there comes to cover him again the odious dankness of the dark.